Alif the Unseen (40 page)

The woman with black horns crossed her arms over her sylphlike chest.

“We’ve decided,” she said. “You’re on your own. The risk is too great. We are each willing to fulfill our debts to Vikram, but not this way—if you wanted to
procure something rare and precious, or needed escort to some unreachable place, that would be one thing. But we’re not willing to lay down our lives for this boy.”

The others murmured their assent.

“Wait,” said Alif. “What if I did something for you?”

Like what?
asked the
effrit
.

Alif made a few rapid calculations in his head.

“You know that for centuries there have been humans who tried to use
The Thousand Days
to gain power for themselves. They all failed. But the guy who’s after me is very
close to succeeding—close enough to make a huge mess, anyway. He won’t stop with the
Alf Yeom,
or with the Immovable Alley. Soon enough he’ll be here in the Empty
Quarter. On a computer, he’s as invisible to you as you are to the average, um,
beni adam
. But he isn’t invisible to me. And he’s started making mistakes. Which means I
have a chance to stop him. You take care of his invisible friends, and I’ll take care of him.”

“How exactly do you plan on doing that?” whispered NewQuarter from behind his shoulder. Alif elbowed him in the ribs. The horned woman turned back to her brethren and began speaking
in the same mutable language Alif had heard Vikram use with Azalel, and which Azalel had used in his dream. There were words he felt he should understand, but didn’t, and he strained to catch
anything familiar. Finally the woman turned back to look at him with measuring eyes.

“We’re willing to consider your plan,” she said.

Alif let out an explosive sigh.

“Thank God,” he said. “Okay. Let’s talk about how this would work.”

* * *

It was late—or at least it seemed late; the sky had turned from pink to violet, and Alif felt he could begin to detect subtle variations between night and day—when
the conclave of djinn finally left the
marid’s
courtyard. Alif watched them move silently through the gate, a column of uncanny foot soldiers, and prayed for the strength to carry
out what he had promised to do.

“Use this,” said the black-horned woman before she left, handing Alif a slim silver whistle. “Call us when it’s time.”

Alif looked at the whistle with skepticism.

“How does it work? Is it one of these things that emits a sound too high for humans to hear?”

“No.” The woman’s expression was not complimentary. “It doesn’t emit any sound at all. You just blow on it, and we come to you.”

Alif bit back a half dozen exasperated retorts.

“Oh,” he said.

The woman nodded briskly. Turning, she trotted off to rejoin the column of hidden folk leaving the
marid’s
courtyard, bowing to their ephemeral host on her way out. Alif took
several deep breaths. The air tasted of night-blooming flowers. It made him unaccountably sad, and he wondered whether he had seen his last ordinary sunset the day he and Dina fled Baqara
District.

“We may end up fairly dead trying to pull this off,” said NewQuarter, echoing his thoughts.

“I may. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. You’ve done a hell of a lot for me already.”

NewQuarter shrugged. “I burned my bridges when I drove off the road and into the Empty Quarter. I doubt I could simply go back to being a comfy royal scion now even if I wanted to. There
are probably State flunkies tossing my flat at this very moment. I just hope they don’t break all my hand-painted Persian tableware.”

“You’re a good man, Prince Abu Talib Al Mukhtar ibn Hamza.”

“My God, you remembered the whole thing.”

They walked toward the far edge of the courtyard, where Dina was laying out a trio of sleeping mats.

“I hope you don’t mind staying out here,” she said. “We ladies sleep inside. It’s usually quite warm at night, so you won’t freeze.”

“This is fine,” said Alif. He watched her move, her bare feet slim and dusty against the stone, a gold anklet flashing just below the hem of her robe. He wanted to ask her about the
accusation of hypocrisy that had so cut him, but lacked the courage to bring up the subject with NewQuarter lurking in the background.

“Where is Sheikh Bilal?” he asked instead.

“He went to the mosque earlier this afternoon,” said Dina. “He said he planned to stay until the night prayer. Which means he should be back any minute.”

“He went to a djinn mosque?”

“Yes, right down the street. You haven’t heard the call to prayer?”

Alif recalled hearing a kind of high, keening song at several points throughout the day, but it did not resemble any call to prayer he had ever heard and he had not listened closely.

“I heard something—but it sounded more like—like
singing
. I think I even heard harmonies.”

“That’s their way. They use different scales. It’s quite beautiful, once you get over the fact that it greatly resembles music.”

The dry, Egyptian mirth in her voice made him chuckle. He relaxed a little. The courtyard gate opened again and revealed Sheikh Bilal, walking straighter than he had since their escape, his face
brightened by inner repose.

“
As-salaamu alaykum,
” he said.

Alif murmured the response. “How are you, Uncle?” he asked anxiously.

The sheikh sat down on one of the three sleeping mats with a sigh.

“Praise be to God. It will be a long while until I shall call myself well. I think perhaps too long—longer than I have left to live. But for now, I feel a great deal better than I
did, and that is enough.”

“How was the mosque?”

“Astonishing. It reminded me of a dream I had once as a young man studying in Cairo at Al-Azhar—I dreamed I went to worship at a deserted mosque in a low, green place, somewhere I
had never seen, and while I was there I saw a congregation of djinn praying in just such a way as they do here. The imam was almost singing each verse he recited. Being young and pedantic, I
interrupted him quite rudely and told him he was reciting the Quran in an inappropriate way. The congregation all turned and gave me a very dirty look. Then I woke.

“I felt quite ashamed of myself, thinking it had been a true vision, and I had offered terrible insult to my brothers in religion in the unseen worlds. One forgets, you know, that the urge
to worship transcends our muddy understanding of the world we see. I always regretted that I was not invited back. And now I have been. You are young, so you may not understand what it feels like
to be offered a second chance at my age, especially after so . . . so difficult a time, when one has seen his own death and accepted it.”

“What do you mean by second chance?” asked Alif, conscious of an uncomfortable portent in the sheikh’s words.

“I mean that they have kindly offered me a place here, to study and to teach. I am considering accepting that offer.”

Alif and NewQuarter looked at one another in mute dismay.

“But you said you didn’t want to spend time among the djinn, like the convert and Dina have,” said Alif.

“I am exercising the prerogative of an old man and changing my mind.”

“But why?” He could not stomach the thought of leaving Sheikh Bilal behind.

The sheikh looked up at the sky with a small smile, violet light reflecting in his milky eyes.

“Because I would be going back to the wreckage of a life,” he said after a moment. “They will give custodianship of Al Basheera over to some State lackey trained at a
de-Islamization school, and if I am not rearrested or killed, I will at least spend the rest of my days looking over one shoulder. As will you, unless you have some sort of plan.”

“My plans are always ridiculous,” Alif blurted in a sudden thrall of self-doubt. “Look where they’ve gotten us. I don’t know why I can’t just solve things the
ordinary way like everyone else.”

“Perhaps you don’t have ordinary problems.”

“I was a computer geek with girl issues. That sounds pretty ordinary to me.”

NewQuarter snickered.

“Then perhaps we don’t live in ordinary times,” said the sheikh. “I know it’s common for old people to complain about the modern moment, and lament the passing of a
golden age when children were polite and you could buy a kilo of meat for pennies, but in our case, my boy, I think I am not mistaken when I say that something fundamental has changed about the
world in which we live. We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers. Nothing shocks one anymore. We are living in a
post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional pork a fictional character consumes in a video game, with
every gravity we would accord something quite real. You and I and the princeling can spend the night in the courtyard of a
marid
as calmly as we would in a hotel. It is all very strange
indeed.”

“I don’t think what you’re talking about is a modern issue,” said NewQuarter. “I think we’re going back to the way things used to be, before a bunch of
European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what’s rational and what’s not. I don’t think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.”

The sheikh considered this for a moment.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy. Once upon a time, students of Islamic law were encouraged to give free rein to
their imaginations. For example, in the medieval era there was a great discussion about the point at which one is obligated to enter a state of ritual purity while traveling on the hajj. If you
were on foot, when? If you went by boat, when? If by camel, when? And then one student, having exhausted all earthly possibilities, posed this question: what if one were to fly? The proposition was
taken as a serious exercise in the adaptability of the law. As a result, we had rules governing air travel during hajj five hundred years before the invention of the commercial jet.”

Alif lay down on his sleeping mat.

“I’m not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse,” he said. His limbs were heavy with sleep. “I wish you would come back with us, Uncle.”

“I won’t be alone. The convert will stay also, you know, until after her child is born.”

“Wonder what that little prize will look like,” said NewQuarter, pulling a face. He slid off his sandals and flopped down on the mat next to Alif’s. “He’ll
probably have fur. Or fangs. Where will he live? How does one go about being half-hidden?”

“She,” said Alif.

“Sorry?”

“She, not he. The baby.”

“As you like.” NewQuarter shut his eyes, pillowing his head on his arms. Alif did likewise, listening to Sheikh Bilal hum as he removed his head cloth and shoes.

The air was warm and tonic, carrying with it the scent of date sugar. Alif heard Dina’s muffled laugh from inside the
marid’s
house, echoed by the convert’s voice,
raised in some lighthearted protest. He thought of the City and what returning to it might mean, and about his mother, alone with the maid in their little duplex, fearing him dead. It seemed
significant to him that during his time in prison he had only been able to look back at his life in Baqara District, and not forward to what it might be again. Even if he and NewQuarter succeeded,
even if the djinn were able to stave off the Hand’s demons, he might, like the sheikh, go back to the wreckage of a life.

“Alif,” said NewQuarter, voice slurred with fatigue. “Is this going to work?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Alif. “If we screw up, we won’t live long enough to have to deal with the consequences.”

“Good point,” said NewQuarter.

A bird—if there were birds in the Empty Quarter—called from somewhere overhead: a trilling, edge-of-night song, like a sparrow’s imitation of a nightingale. He felt his
thoughts go soft and was soon overtaken by sleep. He had not been out for long when a dream settled on him: he saw the
marid’s
courtyard, and Sheikh Bilal’s sleeping figure,
and NewQuarter, and himself, but the sky overhead was a dark, saturated, moonless blue, full of stars in constellations he had never seen. The sight arrested him and he hovered silently above his
sleeping body, staring upward.

His reverie was interrupted by the sound of a woman crying. Unsettled, he looked around for its source and saw a shadow in the doorway of the
marid’s
house: a golden,
late-afternoon shadow, at odds with the blue darkness. It was Azalel. She came across the courtyard on velvet feet, covering her unveiled face with her hands. Her black-and-orange hair fell in
disarray over her shoulders. The yellow robe she had worn the last time he had seen her was tattered and covered in dust, as though she had never removed it.

“Hello?” called Alif awkwardly, surprised by the sound of his own voice. Azalel looked up at him with eyes slitted like a cat’s. The grief there was so wild and potent that
Alif found himself afraid.

“Are you—why are you—” It was difficult to speak.

“I am here to see my brother’s child,” said Azalel in a low voice. “I like to watch her dream in her little womb.” She hugged herself. “I can’t tell
whether she can see me or not. There are so few half-djinn children born now. Half mud, half fire . . . she’s kept her mother and Dina and the old man from going mad, and that
is
something. So I like to think she sees.”

Alif looked around helplessly.

“Am I awake or asleep?” he asked.

“Asleep.” She padded toward him, rubbing the tears from her eyes.

“I miss Vikram, too,” said Alif in a kinder voice. “I should ask you to forgive me. If it weren’t for the trouble I’m in he might still be alive.”

Azalel shook her head.

“No. He chose the moment of his death. It had little to do with you.” She lay down and curled up on the warm stone, close to where Alif was sleeping. He noticed with regret that his
mouth was hanging open in an unattractive fashion.