The Wheel of Osheim

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 tomes 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!’