Published at 29th of December 2023 11:03 am

Chapter 36

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Five years earlier

Ibn Fayed had them set a throne of silver one step down from the summit of his dais and when I returned to court, clean and refreshed, dressed in silks and a heavy chain of gold, he bade me sit there.

‘These are sorry times when the ghosts of our ancestors reach out to take our lives.’ He spoke to me direct now, slow with his words as if fishing them from the dust of memory.

‘They are not agreed, those ghosts. A war, of sorts, rages among them, deep in their machines. But few if any of the Builders have good intentions for us. Even our saviours would make us slaves,’ I told him.

‘Then you will join me? Dig out and destroy what can be found of them? Start a new era free from the ghosts of the past?’ Ibn Fayed sounded curious rather than eager.

‘A wise man told me that history will not stop us repeating our mistakes, but will at least make us ashamed of doing so.’ I remembered Lundist’s smile when he said it, as much of sadness in it as amusement. ‘Will you argue your case at Congression, Ibn Fayed?’

‘It would seem foolish to attend. What better place for the ghosts to destroy us? Can we trust the Gilden Guard to keep all agents such as the banker from coming within several miles of the Gilden Gates?’

I steepled my fingers before my mouth to hide the laugh rising there. ‘Caliph, I would bet my life that the last emperor, all his fathers before him, and every Congression since the stewardship has sat above a device more powerful than the one Marco carried toward Hamada. The Builder-ghosts would want to know they could end the empire any time they chose. The fact that they have not done so just tells us that Michael’s faction do not yet hold command amongst their brothers nor have unfettered access to whatever controls such weapons.

If the ghosts ever unite to a degree sufficient to destroy Vyene then nowhere will be safe. Marco only failed here by poor luck and by the intervention of other ghosts.’ I felt sure now that Fexler had aimed me at the modern, or clockwork soldier, or whatever the hell Marco really was.

‘And when you go to Congression, Jorg, how will you cast your vote?’ Ibn Fayed asked, affording me the courtesy that one lone vote might matter.

‘For myself of course.’ I grinned, creasing the stiffness of scar tissue. ‘And you, Caliph?’

‘Orrin of Arrow is a good man,’ he said. ‘It might be time for such a man.’

‘Wouldn’t an emperor grate on you? Don’t you prefer to rule the desert with a free hand?’

Ibn Fayed shook his head, croaking a dry laugh. ‘I live on the very edge of the Holy Empire. To the south, as far away as Vyene, is another emperor, a Cerani emperor, and his domain reaches to my borders, as vast as our broken empire ever was at its heights. Soon enough, maybe not in my lifetime but surely before my grandson takes this chair, the Cerani and their allied tribes will come out of the desert and swallow Liba whole. That is unless someone is crowned at Vyene to remake our strength.’

I passed a month in the desert city. I learned what I could of their ways. For some weeks I studied in the mathema, even pieced together a little of their door. Qalasadi returned the view-ring to my keeping, on the understanding that it must never enter the palace and must leave Liba with me.

I sat one evening in the mathema tower, closeted alone in a windowless chamber on the floor behind the door marked ‘epsilon’. A simple earthenware oil lamp lit the book before me, equations and more equations. I have the head for mathematics but no love for it. I’ve seen a formula bring tears to Kalal’s eyes with its elegance and the sheer beauty of its symmetries. I grasped the formula, or thought I did, but it didn’t move me. Whatever poetry such things hold I am deaf to it.

On the table beside the book, the view-ring, a shiny and inert lump since the explosion, or since Qalasadi’s intervention, although he said they did nothing to it. I yawned and slammed the book hard enough to make the flame jerk and shudder, and to set the ring dancing like a spun coin at the very last of its rotations. But unlike a coin the ring kept its oscillations going. I watched it, hypnotized.

‘Jorg?’ and Fexler’s image rose above the ring, painted in whites as always, not quite opaque. If the Builders had set themselves the task of recreating ghosts from the stories told to children they could have done the job no better.

‘Who’s asking?’

He focused on me as I spoke, his image growing sharper. ‘Can’t you see me?’

‘I can see you.’

‘Then you recognize me. Fexler Brews.’

I laid my hand flat across the book. ‘It says here that a prediction will diverge from the truth. The further the prediction is carried, the larger the discrepancy. Wraps it all up in statistics and bounds of course. But the message is clear enough. You’re a prediction. I doubt you’re anything like the man I saw die any more.’

‘Untrue,’ Fexler said. ‘I have the original data. I don’t need to rely on fading memories. Fexler Brews is alive in me as true and clear as ever.’

I shook my head and watched him. The shadows danced everywhere but across him. On me, on the walls, the ceiling, only Fexler constant, lit by his own light.

‘You can’t grow if you’re constantly defined by this collection of frozen moments that you keep returning to. And if you can’t grow, you’re not alive. So either you’re Fexler, and like him you’re dead. Or you’re alive, but you’re someone else. Something else.’

‘Are you sure it’s me we’re talking about?’ Fexler raised a brow – very human.

‘Ah …’ It closed on me like steel jaws. The worst traps are the ones we lay for ourselves. All these years and it took a nothing, a web of numbers, to show me to myself. I could count on one hand the brief and personal passion plays that nailed me to my past. The carriage and the thorns. The hammer and Justice burning. The bishop. Father’s knife jutting from my chest. And at my hip, in a copper box, perhaps one more. ‘I liked you better before, Fexler. Why are you here?’

‘I came to learn your plans,’ he said.

‘You don’t watch me enough to know them?’

‘I have been … busy, elsewhere.’

‘Vyene is calling me,’ I said. ‘I mean to take ship to Mazeno and travel by road to the Gilden Gates. It will probably be a quicker return journey than the one that brought me here. And besides, I have a memory from a fever dream, a memory of you asking me to go there, something about the throne, and my view-ring, only you were calling it a different name. Control ring? Is that a true memory?’

‘It is a true memory, but I won’t speak of it now. It is probable others are listening. Go to Vyene: it will be a good education.’

I sat back, ran my eye across the books ranked along shelves from floor to ceiling, all that knowledge. ‘These mathmagicians, they’re the champions of that effort to recivilize us aren’t they, Fexler? The start of a new understanding, so we can repair what the Builders built.’

‘One of several such starts.’ He nodded.

‘I’ve looked at the scraps left from your time. Almost nothing was ever written down …’

‘It was written into machines, into memory. You just lack the means to read it.’ Fexler looked around at the books too, as if he needed to use his eyes to see them. One of many deceptions, no doubt.

‘I’ve looked at those scraps and nowhere does it speak of heaven and hell, of a life beyond death, of church or mosque or any place of worship.’

Fexler looked down at me, floating as he was a foot above the desk, his head near touching the ceiling. ‘Few among us concerned ourselves with religion. We had answers that didn’t require faith.’

‘But I’ve spoken with an angel.’ I frowned. ‘At least I think I have. And for damn sure I’ve reached into the deadlands chasing after pieces of men’s souls. How can you—’

‘For a clever boy you can be very stupid, Jorg.’ Something in his voice carried a faint echo of that angel, timeless, tolerant.

‘What?’ Spoken too loud. My anger is never more than a moment away. It makes a fool of me more times than I can say.

‘Our greatest work was to change the role of the observer. We put power into the hands of men, directly into their hands. Too much power as it turned out. If the raw strength of one man’s will, the right man’s will, can bring fire from nothing, part the waters, pulverize stone, command winds. What then of the unfocused desire and expectation of millions?’

‘You—’

‘Your afterlife is what you expect it to be, what the thousands, the millions around you expect, what legend builds, told, retold, refined, evolving. In this place, amongst the sands, they fashion themselves a different paradise and different paths to it, some dark, some light. All of it is fabrication, constructed over the reality my people lived in. Whatever waited for a man after his death in those times, it was not mentioned in our calculations. Our priests, when they could find anyone to listen, described something more subtle, more profound, and more wonderful than the mishmash of medieval superstition your kind have built upon.’

‘We made it?’ It didn’t seem possible. ‘We built heaven and hell?’

‘Oh yes. If your priests ever discover what power lies at their fingertips with the will of their flock behind them … well pray that they do not, or every word of fire and brimstone, of last judgments and devils with pitchforks, will become the gospel truth, rising up on all sides. Why do you think we have worked so hard to reinforce the church’s hatred of “magic” and its practice?’

The worst of it was that I believed him. It sounded like truth. Without pause, I took the book of calculus and set it down on the view-ring, hard. Fexler’s image vanished like a spot of light when you put your hand over the hole that casts it. There’s only so much truth I can listen to in one go.

Qalasadi and Yusuf came to the edge of Hamada to see me off into the desert. I had made my farewells to Ibn Fayed in the coolness of his throne room, accepting gifts of gold, diamonds, amber, and of clove-spice for the journey. ‘There is always pain,’ the caliph told me, closing my hand around the spice.

Omal waited with the camels, ten altogether, three tall, white ones – gifts to me from the caliph – good breeders and from fine bloodlines by all accounts. To me they were as ill-tempered, ungainly, and foul-smelling as the rest of them. Along with Omal we had three more drovers and a guard of five Ha’tari.

‘Safe journey, King Jorg.’ Qalasadi bowed, one hand folded across his stomach.

‘I’ve yet to have one of those, but let’s hope this will be it.’ I grinned and inclined my head a fraction.

‘Next time you will come to my house, meet my wife, see what I have to suffer,’ Yusuf said, a smile on him, eyes bright.

‘Next time I will.’ I turned to go, but paused. ‘And the Prince of Arrow? Don’t your predictions tell you to erase me so that he might have a clear run?’ For a cold moment I wondered if the nine men accompanying me had orders to bury my corpse in a dune.

Yusuf’s grin became a little fixed and he shot an embarrassed glance at Qalasadi. The older man laced his fingers and brought both hands to his chin.

‘Our projections show no significant probability of you impeding the Prince of Arrow, King Jorg. As such we are rescued from having to wrestle with the problems of the one over the many and the many over the one.’

‘If he comes to Renar, Jorg, don’t get in his way.’ An edge of pleading in Yusuf’s voice. ‘It would not be wise.’

‘Well.’ The revelation left me a little nonplussed despite saving me from conflict with the mathmagicians. ‘That’s good then.’ And I went to mount my camel.

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