The Wheel of Osheim Read online

  ‘I’d swear that’s a banker.’ I thought of dear old Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South. The man had taught me to trade in prospects. For a time I had enjoyed taking part in the mad speculation governing the flow of gold through the dozen largest Florentine banks. Banks that seemed sometimes to rule the world. I wondered if this could be him – if so, he hadn’t governed his own prospects too well. ‘It might even be one I’ve met.’

  ‘That, would be hard to tell.’ Sheik Malik prompted his camel forward.

  ‘True.’ A dozen or more crossbow bolts appeared to have passed through the banker’s head, leaving little of his face and making a ruin of the silver-steel skull behind it. Even so, I thought of Marco, whom I’d seen last with the necromancer Edris Dean. Marco with his inhuman stillness and his projects on marrying dead flesh to clockwork. When his superior, Davario, had first called him in I had thought it had been to show me the dead hand attached to a clockwork soldier. Perhaps the joke had been that the man leading that soldier in was himself a dead man wrapped around the altered frame of a Mechanists’ creation.

  The Ha’tari remained at the gate, singing their prayers for our souls, or for our righteous damnation, while the sheik’s entourage passed through. We left the ragged crowd of urchins that had followed us from the outskirts there too, only to have it replaced within yards by a throng of Hamadians of all stations, from street merchant to silk-clad prince, all clamouring for news. The sheik began to address them in the desert tongue, a rapid knife-edged language. I could see from their faces they knew that it wouldn’t be good news, but few of them would understand yet quite how bad it would be. Nobody from the gathering at the Oasis of Palms and Angels would ever pass through this gate again.

  I took the opportunity to slip from my camel and weave a path through the crowd. No one saw me go, bound as they were by Sheik Malik’s report.

  The city seemed almost empty. It always does. No one wishes to linger in the oven of the streets when there are cooler interiors offering shade. I passed the grand buildings, built by the wealth of caliphs past for the people of Hamada. For a place that had nothing but sand and water to its name Hamada had accumulated an awful lot of gold over the centuries.

  Walking over the sand-scattered flagstones with my shadow puddled dark around my feet I could imagine it a city of ghosts, djinn-haunted and waiting for the dune-tide to drown it.

  The sudden dip that reveals the lake is always a surprise. There before me lay a wide stretch of water taking the sky’s tired blue and making something azure and supple of it. The caliph’s palace sat across the lake from me, a vast central dome surrounded by minarets and a sprawl of interlinked buildings, dazzling white, galleried and cool.

  I skirted the lake, passing by the steps and pillars of an ancient amphitheatre built by the men of Roma back in the days before Christ found them. The Mathema Tower stood back from the water but with an uninterrupted view, reaching for the heavens and dwarfing all other towers in Hamada, even the caliph’s own. Advancing on it gave me uncomfortable recollections of the Frauds’ Tower in Umbertide, though the Mathema stands half as broad and three times as tall.

  ‘Welcome.’ One of the black-robed students resting in the tower’s shadow stood to intercept me. The others, maybe a dozen in all, scarcely looked up from their slates, busy scratching down their calculations.

  ‘Wa-alaykum salaam,’ I returned the greeting. You’d think after all the sand I’d swallowed I would have more of the desert tongue, but no.

  The exchange seemed to have exhausted both his words of Empire and mine of Araby and an awkward silence stretched between us. ‘This is new.’ I waved at the open entrance. There had been a black crystal door there, to be opened by solving some puzzle of shifting patterns, different each time. As a student it had never taken me less than two hours to open it, and on one occasion, two days. Having no door at all now made a pleasant if unexpected change, though I had rather been looking forward to poking Loki’s key at the bastard and seeing it swing open for me immediately.

  The student, a narrow-featured youngster from far-Araby, his black hair slick to his skull, frowned as if remembering some calamity. ‘Jorg.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ I nodded, pretending to understand. ‘Now, I’m going up to see Qalasadi.’ I pushed past and followed the short corridor beyond to the stair that winds up just inside the outer wall. The sight of equations set into the wall and spiralling up with the stairs for hundreds of feet, just reminded me what a torture my year in Hamada had been. Not quite walking-the-deadlands level of torture, but mathematics can come pretty close on a hot day when you’re hung over. The equations followed me up as I climbed. A master mathmagician can calculate the future, seeing as much amid the scratched summations and complex integrations on their slates as the Silent Sister sees with her blind eye or the völvas extrapolate from the dropping of their runestones. Men are just variables to the mathmagicians of Liba, and just how far the mathmagicians see and what their aims might be are secrets known only to their order.

  I got about halfway up to Omega level at the top of the tower before, sweating freely, I paused to catch my breath. The four grandmasters of the order preside in turn throughout the year and I was hoping that the current incumbent would remember me, along with my connections to the Red March throne. Qalasadi was my best bet since he arranged my tuition during my stay. With any luck the mathmagicians would organize my safe passage home, perhaps even calculating me a risk-free path.

  ‘Jalan Kendeth.’ Not a question.

  I turned and Yusuf Malendra filled the staircase behind me, white robes swirling, a grin gleaming black against the mocha of his face. I’d seen him last in Umbertide waiting in the foyer of House Gold.

  ‘They say there are no coincidences with mathmagicians,’ I said, wiping my forehead. ‘Did you calculate the place and moment of our meeting? Or was it just the end of your business in Florence that brought you back here?’

  ‘The latter, my prince.’ He looked genuinely pleased to see me. ‘We do of course have coincidences and this is a most happy one.’ Behind him a student came puffing up the stairs.

  A sudden thought struck me, the image of a white body, black clad, broken and left hanging on the Gate of Peace in the desert sun. ‘Marco … that was Marco wasn’t it?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Jalan? Jalan Kendeth? I don’t believe it!’ A head poked around Yusuf’s shoulder, broad, dark, a grin so wide it seemed to hang between his ears.

  ‘Omar!’ As soon as I laid eyes on the grinning face of Omar Fayed, seventh son of the caliph, I knew my ordeal was over. Omar had been among the most faithful of my companions back in Vermillion, always up for hitting the town. Not a great drinker perhaps but with a love of gambling that eclipsed even my own, and pockets deeper than any young man I ever knew. ‘Now tell me that this was coincidence!’ I challenged Yusuf.

  The mathmagician spread his hands. ‘You didn’t know Prince Omar had returned to Hamada and his studies at the Mathema?’

  ‘Well…’ I had to concede that I had known.

  ‘They said you were dead!’ Omar squeezed past Yusuf and set a hand on my shoulder. Being short, he had to reach up, which made a change after all my time standing in Snorri’s shadow. ‘That fire … I never believed them. I’ve been trying to do the sums to prove it, but, well, they’re tricky.’

  ‘I’m glad to have saved you the effort.’ I found myself answering his grin. It felt good to be back with people who knew me. A friend who cared enough to try to find out what had happened to me. After … however long it had been, trekking in Hell, it all felt suddenly a bit overwhelming.

  ‘Come.’ Yusuf saved me the embarrassment of blubbing on the stairs in front of them by leading the way down half a dozen steps to the door onto the Lambda level and taking us into a small room off the main corridor.

  We sat down around a polished table, the room crowding around us, lined as it was with scrolls and fat tom
es bound with leather. Yusuf poured three tiny cups of very strong java from a silver jug standing in the window slit.

  ‘I need to get home,’ I said, wincing as I knocked back the java. No point in beating around any bushes.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Omar, a smile still splitting his face. ‘You came south after escaping the fire? Why south? Why pretend to be dead?’

  ‘I went north as it happens, in a hurry, but the point is that I’ve been … incommunicado … for a few … um. When is it?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Omar frowned, puzzled.

  ‘It’s the 98th year of Interregnum, the tenth month,’ Yusuf said, watching me closely.

  ‘For … uh…’ I’ll admit to a little shame, struggling with subtraction in front of a master mathmagician of the Mathema. ‘About, well, damn it! Months, nearly half a year!’ It hadn’t been half a year, had it? On the one hand it had felt about two lifetimes, but on the other, if I considered the things that actually happened it seemed you could easily fit them into a week.

  ‘Kelem!’ I blurted the name out before deciding if that were a wise thing to do or not. ‘Tell me about Kelem, and the banking clans.’

  ‘Kelem’s hold on the clans is broken.’ Yusuf’s hands moved on the table top, fingers twitching as if he were struggling not to write down the terms and balance the equations with new information. ‘Calculations indicate that he has lost his material form.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Yusuf’s left eyebrow suggested it didn’t believe me.

  I thought of Aslaug and Baraqel, remembering how Loki’s daughter raged against Kelem when I set her free, and the look of hurt in her black eyes as I let Kara drive her back into the darkness. ‘The Builders went into the spirit world…’

  ‘Some of them did,’ Yusuf said. ‘A small number. They used the changes they wrought in the world when they turned the Wheel. They escaped into other forms when their flesh betrayed them. Others were copied into the Builders’ machines and exist there now as echoes of men and women long since dead. The Builders who left their flesh were as gods for a while, but when men returned to the lands of the west their expectations became a subtle trap. The Builder spirits found themselves ensnared by myth, each tale growing around the spirits, reinforced by them, weaving them into a fabric of belief that both shaped and trapped them until they could scarcely remember a time when they were anything other than what men believed them to be.’

  ‘And Kelem?’ He was the one that worried me. ‘Can he come back? Will he remember … uh, what happened?’

  ‘It will take him time to gather himself. Kelem was rock-sworn. If he has not died properly then in time he will go into the earth. And yes, he will remember. It will be a long while before he’s snared into story. Perhaps never since he is aware of the danger.’

  I stared at the stone walls around us. ‘I need to—’

  Yusuf raised a hand. ‘The rock-sworn are slow to act. It will take time before Kelem shows his face to the world again, and time is what he doesn’t have, what none of us have. The world is cracking, Prince Jalan. The Wheel the Builders turned to change the world did not stop turning and as it runs free those changes will increase in size and speed until nothing that we know is left. We are a generation of blind men, walking toward a cliff. Kelem is not your worry.’

  ‘The Lady Blue … the Dead King.’ I didn’t want to say their names. I’d done a good job of keeping both out of my thoughts ever since escaping Hell. In fact if that damned djinn hadn’t sparked my memories then I might have managed never to think about the whole journey and poor Snorri ever again. ‘Those are the two I need to worry about?’

  ‘Even so.’ Yusuf nodded.

  Omar just looked more confused and mouthed ‘who?’ at me from across the table.

  ‘Well.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘That’s all beyond me. All I want to do is get home.’

  ‘It’s a war your grandmother cares about.’ Yusuf spoke the words softly but they carried an uncomfortable weight.

  ‘The Red Queen has her war and she can keep it,’ I said. ‘It’s not the kind of thing men like me can change one way or the other. I don’t want any part of it. I just want to go home and … relax.’

  ‘You say this, and yet you have been changing things at an astonishing rate, Prince Jalan. Defeating unborn in the northern wastes, dethroning Kelem in his mines, chasing the Dead King into Hell … and you hold the key, do you not?’

  I gave Yusuf an angry stare. He knew entirely too much. ‘I have a key, yes. And you’re not having it. It’s mine.’ I’d be hanging on to Loki’s key with everything I had until I got home. Then I’d hand it over to the old woman in a heartbeat and wait to be showered with praise, gold, and titles.

  Yusuf smiled at me and shrugged. ‘If you want no part of shaping the future, so be it. I will arrange passage back to Red March for you. It will take a few days. Relax here. Enjoy the city. I’m sure you know your way around.’

  When someone lets you off too easily there’s always that suspicion that they know something you do not. It’s an irritating thing, like sunburn, but I know a sure-fire way to ease it.

  ‘Let’s get a drink!’

  ‘Let’s go win some gold.’ Omar jerked his head toward the grand library: a quarter of a mile past it the largest of Hamada’s racetracks would be packed to bursting with Libans screaming at camels.

  ‘A drink first,’ I said.

  Omar was always willing to compromise, even though he kept to his faith’s prohibition on alcohol. ‘A little one.’ He patted his well-rounded form and beneath his robes coins clinked reassuringly against each other. ‘I’m buying.’

  ‘A little one,’ I lied. Never drink small if it’s at someone else’s expense. And besides, I had no intention of going to the races. In the past two days I’d seen more than enough of camels.

  The city of Hamada is officially dry, which is ironic since it’s the only place to be found with any water in hundreds of square miles of arid dunes. One may not purchase or drink alcohol in any form anywhere within the kingdom of Liba. A crying shame given how damnable hot the place is. However, the Mathema attracts rich students from across the Broken Empire and from the deepest interior of the continent of Afrique and they bring with them a thirst for more than just water or knowledge. And so there exist in Hamada, for those who know where to look, watering holes of a different kind, to which the imams and city guard turn a blind eye.

  ‘Mathema.’ Omar hissed it through the grille of iron strips defending the tiny window. The heavy door containing the window was set into the whitewashed wall of a narrow alley on the east side of the city. The wooden door was a giveaway in itself, wood being expensive in the desert. Most houses in this quarter had a screen of beads to dissuade the flies and relied on the threat of being publicly impaled to dissuade any thief. Though what horror ‘publicly’ adds to ‘impaled’ I’ve never been clear on.

  We followed the door-keeper, a skinny, ebony-hued man of uncertain years clad only in a loincloth, along a dark and sweltering corridor past the entrance to the cellar where a still bubbled dangerously to itself, cooking up grain alcohol of the roughest sort, and up three flights of stairs to the roof. Here a canopy of printed cloth, floating between a score of supports, covered the entire roof space, offering blessed shade.

  ‘Two whiskies,’ I told the man as Omar and I collapsed onto mounds of cushions.

  ‘Not for me.’ Omar wagged a finger. ‘Coconut water, with nutmeg.’

  ‘Two whiskies and what he said.’ I waved the man off and sank deeper into the cushions, not caring what it was that had stained them. ‘Christ, I need a drink.’

  ‘What happened at the opera?’ Omar asked.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t say a thing or move a muscle until five minutes had passed and a young boy in a white shirt had brought our drinks. I picked up my first ‘whisky’. Drained it. Made the gasping noise and reached for the next. ‘That. Is. Good.’ I
took the second in two gulps. ‘Three more whiskies!’ I hollered toward the stairs – the boy wouldn’t have reached the bottom yet. Then I rolled back. Then I told my story.

  ‘And that’s that.’ The sun had set and the boy had returned to light half a dozen lamps before my race through the highlights of my journey had reached all the way from the ill-fated opera house to the Gate of Peace in Hamada. ‘And he lived happily ever after.’ I tried to get up and found myself on all fours, considerably more drunk than I had imagined myself to be.

  ‘Incredible!’ Omar leaning forward, both fists beneath his chin. He could have been talking about my method for finally finding my feet, but I think it was my tale that had impressed him. Even without mention of anything that happened to me in Hell and with talk of the unborn and the Dead King cut to a minimum it really was an incredible tale. I might think another man was humouring me, but Omar had always taken me at my word on everything – which was foolish and a terrible trait in a chronic gambler, but there it was.

  For a long and pleasantly silent moment I sat back and savoured my drink. An unpleasant memory jerked me out of my reverie. I set my whisky down, hard.

  ‘What the hell happened in the desert then?’ As much as I like talking about myself I realized that in my eagerness to escape becoming part of Yusuf’s world-saving calculations I’d forgotten to ask why, apparently for only the second time in eight centuries, a Builders’ Sun had ignited, and why close enough to Hamada to shake the sand out of their beards?

  ‘My father has closed the Builders’ eyes in Hamada. I think perhaps they don’t like that.’ Omar put his palm across the mouth of his cup and rolled it about its rim.

  ‘What?’ I hadn’t felt drunk until I tried to make sense of what he said. ‘The Builders are dust.’

  ‘Master Yusuf just told you that they still echo in their machines. Copies of men, or at least they were copies long ago… They watch us. Father thinks they herd us, guide us like goats and sheep. So he has sought out their eyes and put them out.’