Jack Cloudie

lifting room that appeared to lead deeper into the catacombs beneath the palace. They passed by the doors to the lower levels, however, and the eunuch took out a punch card tied to the end of a chain from under his robes. Advancing with the card in his hand he inserted it into a small injection slot by the side of a door at the end of the passage. His key caused the door to retract upwards into the ceiling. Their shadows fell onto a long gantry, and stepping out, Omar saw that they were entering a cavernous space, the gantry emerging fifty feet up, carved out of stone as if a bridge. This was no natural cavern, though — its walls curving in and out like the surf of a sea frozen solid — the cavern floor and the gantry they were standing on the only flat surfaces to be seen. Down below in the blood-red light from wall plates, hundreds of womb mages sat dotted around circular tables, the copper-plated books they were reading from glinting under table lamps. Shelves had been carved out of the cavern’s undulating walls, filled with the same type of book Omar had helped destroy with acid in his father’s house at Haffa. There must have been hundreds of thousands of the mages’ spell books racked below, even the dozens of stone columns rising up to the cavern’s roof were carved with shelves and heavy with books. Standing on the stone gantry pushed out like a mooring into this sea of knowledge, Omar watched shelf stackers on rail-mounted harnesses being lowered and raised by slaves working winches to retrieve requested tomes. The vastness of the cavernous space echoed with a low humming as the seated womb mages repeated the letters of their spells, A, C, G, T, over and over again in seemingly random patterns. Committing to memory the structures of flesh that dark sorceries could create, their chanting interwoven with a gentle clicking from the turning copper pages.

‘So many books,’ whispered Omar in awe. It would take centuries to study them all.

‘This is the Caliph Eternal’s private library,’ said the eunuch, his chest puffing out with pride. ‘His private wealth. It is very old, but it pales in comparison to the size of the order’s own library in Mutantarjinn. There, just the indexing halls are larger than this library.’

Omar found that hard to believe, that this colossal space carved out under the palace hills had its equal, let alone its superior, in any of the other cities of the empire. Whatever he believed, its hold over him was disturbed by the throb of a familiar soul calling out to him. It couldn’t be her, not here. But it was. Omar was thrown into confusion by the sight of the female slave who emerged from an open-caged lifting room at the end of the stone gantry along with two servants girls as companions.

‘Shadisa!’ Why didn’t I feel her sooner, and her presence here is so faint? What have they done to her?

The look on her face turned from puzzlement to shock as she recognized the young man standing before her in the leather armour of a palace guardsman.

‘Shadisa, in the name of god, what are you doing here?’

‘I am in the service of Immed Zahharl,’ said Shadisa.

‘Thank the prophets! You survived the sack of Haffa.’

‘Obviously,’ said Shadisa, with no small degree of disdain in her voice. ‘We were brought to Bladetenbul and sold. Only the men in the town were executed by the troops loyal to the Sect of Razat. Well, most of them. Why are you wearing that ridiculous uniform?’

‘Quieten your tongue,’ said Boulous. ‘You speak to an enforcer of the Caliph Eternal’s law, and a slave that speaks with such disrespect will find herself with a finger or two less to do her master’s bidding.’

‘A slave I may be, now, but I am a slave in the service of Immed Zahharl,’ said Shadisa haughtily. ‘The grand vizier of the Caliph Eternal, high keeper of the Sect of Razat, grand master of the order of womb mages and keeper of the caliph’s spells. You would be well advised to ask his permission before you touch me, little jahani. He is a good master and you may lose more than a finger for violating his property.’ She nodded towards the eunuch as an indication of what the retainer could expect as payment for his effrontery.

Boulous snorted. ‘So you say.’

Shadisa looked at Omar. ‘You are the guardsman I have been sent to collect for the creation of a new drak?’

Omar nodded. She was every bit as beautiful as he remembered, but there was something different about her. Something had altered in her soul.

‘Well, how the world changes.’

The eunuch bowed and remained on the gantry, letting Shadisa and the servant girls escort Omar and Boulous into the lifting room, the fenced-in platform sinking towards the floor of the library.

‘Did you think I was dead?’ asked Omar.

‘Yes,’ said Shadisa, though with little of the joy that Omar had hoped she might display at finding herself proved wrong. ‘Most of the men died. The Sect of Razat’s followers burnt Haffa to the ground. We saw the flames as we were tied behind the bandits’ sandpedes and taken through the desert. As clouded as our minds were with those filthy drugs they injected us with to march across the desert, we watched the column of smoke hanging above the coast for two days.’

‘I tried to save you,’ said Omar. ‘I was coming for you, I saw bandits grab you in the kitchen.’

‘A fine job you made of it then,’ laughed Shadisa. ‘You protected me as well as you protected Gamila when her fiance’s servants were chasing her across the sands.’

‘I shall rescue you now, I will free you from this life,’ promised Omar, taking Shadisa’s hand. ‘You were not meant to be a slave — you were born the daughter of a freeman. I will buy out your papers of ownership.’

‘Was I free back in Haffa?’ said Shadisa, pulling away from him. ‘A couple of coins a week to work in the great master Barir’s kitchens? Buying food in the market, salting and smoking meats, cooking, washing dishes, serving the men of the house in the evening; up at five, not asleep before midnight. Do you know so little of what my life was really like?’

‘Back in the town, did your father …?’

‘He died too, I suppose,’ said Shadisa, sadly. ‘Unless he got out in one of the fishing boats. There were thousands of people in the harbour, fighting our own soldiers for the chance to escape. Begging, cursing, offering money to the boats that remained. Every man I knew is dead but you, Omar Barir. You have your damn father’s luck, alright. You could be thrown off a slave galley wearing only chains and you would wash up on some island with your shackles slid off, palm trees for your bed, dates to eat and a waterfall to bathe in.’

‘I have whittled my own luck with the tip of a scimitar, my great courage and my epic wits,’ said Omar. ‘And now my luck will be yours, too.’

‘Oh, your epic wits,’ laughed Shadisa, opening the gate to the lifting room as it shuddered to a halt. ‘Everyone in Haffa knew that the House of Barir had attached itself to a dying cause, that it was only a matter of time until the Sect of Razat replaced our own in the Holy Cent. Your father mistook stubbornness for honour, Omar, and our people paid the price with their blood as we always do. Recognizing you as his kin was just another selfish act, easing his conscience for his last few hours, and it should have seen you dead. We all knew our end was coming, but you, you and your epic wits, were lazing about on your water farm. You didn’t know and you couldn’t have cared less if you did.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Omar, stung by her words. ‘About my father and about me. I don’t know how he did it, but I know he saw me placed with the guardsmen. Now I have no house, I serve only the empire and the Caliph Eternal.’

‘Then we are alike,’ said Shadisa, leading them through the library. ‘For I serve a man who serves only the caliph too.’

‘I will set you free, Shadisa.’

‘Free to do what?’ asked the woman. ‘To be the wife of a common guardsman? To sit around on a hemp mat in a fortress cell and cook up a stew for the few days in a year when you’re not off with the army campaigning? I have seen another life here in the Jahan, Omar. A life of luxury; of water that flows out of a tap without an hour’s walk to a well head; of fine gardens and music and colour and splendour. Here,’ she tapped her long ornate tunic. ‘Silk, worth twenty times my slave price. Which of us apart from Marid Barir’s wives could afford to wear such silk back in Haffa?’

‘I would make you free,’ pleaded Omar.

‘A wife of a soldier, or a servant to the grand vizier,’ said Shadisa. ‘Which of those is more free?’

‘You ask the wrong question,’ said Boulous. ‘You should ask which of those is the right course under