Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

Omar grasped the eunuch’s shoulder. ‘She’s suffocating inside there!’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said the eunuch, disdainfully removing Omar’s hand. ‘The gas is a nutrient bath. No producer can eat enough through her mouth to feed both herself and her load. The skin of her womb must absorb the food directly. That producer’s load is a mine worm. Not quite as large as a drak when it’s born, but large enough to need a gallon of food pumped into the producer’s tank every hour during her second trimester. Ours is not an easy vocation, it requires both precision and dedication.’

Omar watched the sled disappear down the rails with horror, imagining his mother’s face swollen and red, as she choked on the mustard-coloured fumes of her food. ‘What will happen after the birth?’

‘The mine worm will be taken to the mountains at Riyjhi — the Caliph Eternal’s prospectors have discovered many new veins of silver there.’

‘No,’ said Omar, ‘to her .’

‘The producer will be normalized and rested for a month,’ said the eunuch as if he was talking to a child. ‘You can’t keep them breeding constantly. Not unless you want to receive a whipping for a miscarriage.’ He pointed to the disappearing sled. ‘Lose an expensive load like that and you would be made to feel it. Two thousand tughra. And it will cost the caliph as much as that to raise your drak; remember the cost next time you choose to dive around the sky as if you are flying a five-coin hawk bought for you at the bazaar by your mother.’

What if that’s been done to Shadisa, what if that’s the life the bandits sold her into?

‘Be careful what you say,’ Boulous warned the eunuch, ‘and who you say it to.’

‘I know who the House of Barir is,’ sneered the eunuch, looking at Omar, ‘or who it was . Old money. A manta ray with a modified spleen system and gills that filter salt. Not so difficult. The witches that walk the dunes with the nomads no doubt consider salt-fish quite a feat of sorcery out in the borderlands. Here in the Jahan we are not impressed with such petty trickery.’

Omar and Boulous followed the eunuch down a passage lined with mesh-gated doors, each giving onto a 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.’