Indelbed was woken up by a cripple. The first things he saw were two stumpy legs ending at the knee bone, bound by dirty rags. It did not faze him. There had been a beggar of similar proportions who had occupied the drain outside their gate in Wari. Indelbed had often given him food and scraps of clothing. The man had been remarkably philosophical. His legs had been broken by choice, as a sort of professional investiture. He had once confessed to Indelbed that he actually earned quite a bit of money and even had a retirement fund in the bank.
“Ah, you’re awake,” the cripple said.
“Water,” Indelbed said. His mouth was almost gummed shut. “Light.” This was more of an observation. There was a small light hovering near the cripple’s head, an amorphous blob of dirty yellow that floated above his hunched shoulder like a particularly seedy angel.
The cripple poured water into Indelbed’s mouth. The cup was a piece of hollowed-out bone, heavy and irregular. Indelbed saw that they were in a kind of circular nest that would have been cozy under different circumstances. The cripple must have dragged him from the main chamber. He wondered briefly whether he was about to be eaten. There were tools here, of bone and rock, which spoke of some long period of domestic effort.
“Water is plentiful,” the cripple said, proving somewhat omniscient. “Food, on the other hand, is a bit more problematic. Not to worry, boy, I still have a bit leftover from dinner. We will hunt when you are recovered.”
“What are you?” indelbed asked.
“I am the Ifrit Givaras.” The legless djinn tried to draw himself up. “Philanthropist, historian, anthropologist, biologist, at your service.”
“Are you thinking of eating me?” Indelbed thought it best to get this out of the way.
The djinn pretended to examine him minutely. Up close, Indelbed saw that he had a gaunt, mostly human face, marred only by two stubby horns sprouting from the top of his head, nothing sharp or threatening, just two studs worn with age into a deep rich colour.
“Hmm, not much to you, is there?” Givaras said. “I suppose I will have to pass. You won’t taste very good, I can tell. Stringy.”
“Where are we?” Indelbed asked. He had a list of questions he wanted answered and was determined to waste no time. Givaras looked like a nice guy, but his experience with adults had shown him that they were mercurial and prone to getting irritated when pressed for vital information.
“We are in a murder pit, dear boy,” Givaras said. “Somewhere underground in Sylhet, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Murder pit?”
“We djinns are very civilized,” Givaras said. “We don’t like to kill each other in public. Massive loss of auctoritas and all that. Goes against the lore, the Mos Maiorum, as the Romans coined it. They were great copiers, the Romans. This murder pit is our little game.”
“So someone put you in here?”
“Matteras,” Givaras said. “An ingenious pit, this one. I will congratulate him on it, if i ever get the chance. Yes, Matteras. He and I had a difference of opinion. I should be flattered, really, that he bothered, given the vast height of auctoritas separating us...”
“Well, did he put me in here?”
“He must have,” Givaras said. “This is, after all, his murder pit.”
“Why?”
“We will try to figure that out presently.”
“What was the snake thing outside?”
“Ah, the skeleton that so frightened you. That was the noted Ifrit historian Risal,” Givaras said. “You screamed, you know. I came to you as fast as I could.” He pointed at his stumps. “That scream saved your life.”
“The head looked eaten,” Indelbed said. “I saw little tooth marks.”
“Rock wyrms,” Givaras said. He looked glum. “Beauty of this murder pit, really. The rock wyrm is the larva of the earth serpent, or earth dragon, as they are sometimes known. Of course the dragons are so rare that they are almost mythical. The rock larvae are rare in themselves. They are the ones who have dug these tunnels in the rock. They are omnivorous – they eat each other at the drop of a hat. They are attracted to our distortion fields. Stronger the field, greater the attraction. Cunning plan, eh? The stronger the Ifrit Matteras stuffs in here, the quicker the rock wyrms will swarm.”
“These wyrms ate your friend?” Indelbed asked. “But why was she like a snake?”
“She was trying to change,” Givaras said. “We can do that, you know, although shifting shape takes a long time and a lot of effort. She was very powerful. I warned her, but she thought she could withstand the wyrms long enough to shift form. Was trying for a wyrm shape herself. In the end she only got halfway there. As I said, the rock wyrms eat distortion fields.”
“Why are you still alive then?” indelbed asked suspiciously.
“I am exceptionally weak for an Ifrit,” Givaras said. “I couldn’t even begin to shift into a rock wyrm, even if I wanted to. The best i could do were these horns. They are useful too; I can sense the vibrations in the ground with them.” He pointed at the smudge of light hovering over his shoulder. “This is my real discovery, however. The light, see? The wyrms hate it. They have eyes that are not fully functional yet. This wavelength of light really burns them. This is why your arrival is so fortuitous, actually.”
“What do you mean?” Indelbed had visions of Givaras trying to make a lamp out of him. The djinn did not look particularly threatening, but then, he didn’t look particularly sane either. If it weren’t for the dead snake thing outside, Indelbed wouldn’t have found any of this story credible.
“Survival is not really a one-man job here.” Givaras pointed at his legs. “The light has to be on all the time. Every time I fall asleep, the rock wyrms keep coming. I’ve lost both my legs to that...”
“They ate your legs?”
“It is rather tedious,” the djinn said. “It hurt a lot, and I was ever so weak afterward. I can probably grow them back, but I’m afraid that much distortion will call down a whole swarm of them.”
“I’m not a djinn,” Indelbed blurted out.
“Hmm?” Givaras looked puzzled. “You’re wrong, you know. Matteras wouldn’t make a mistake like this. No use throwing humans into a murder pit. Why bother? Mos Maiorum doesn’t forbid killing humans.”
“They said my mother was a djinn,” Indelbed said. “I never met her. She died giving birth. But I’ve always been human.” He said this last part to clarify any doubts this Ifrit might have. He didn’t seem to be the sharpest of djinns, despite his ingenious get-your-legs-bitten-off survival strategy. “I didn’t even believe in djinns till now.”
“You’re not fully human, you know, whatever you are. The air in here, not really suitable for your sort. You should be dead by now. Asphyxiation,” Givaras said. “Rather odd that Matteras stuffed you in here. A bit insulting to me, really.”
“They said my father was an emissary.”
Givaras tapped his head significantly. “Ah, politics then. Who was your father?”
“Kaikobad.”
“I don’t recall. What family is it?”
“Khan Rahmans,” Indelbed said. “We’re not the rich ones, however.” He always liked to clarify that at the onset, to avoid disappointing people.
“And your mother?”
“I don’t know her name. Father forbade any mention of her. I don’t even know what she looks like. I just found out she was a djinn two days ago.”
“I see.”
“I don’t see,” Indelbed said. “They said this djinn called a minor hunt on me. And then this emissary friend of my father’s came to help me, except he took me right to a place where the bad djinn was waiting. The bad djinn tried to eat me and I woke up in here.”
“Hmm, there are clues in your story, you know,” Givaras said. “Now i’ve been locked up here for a long time, so I’m not up to date with the exact politics. But I can deduce. The minor hunt is the first big clue. you see, djinn family units are not nuclear, like you humans. We are tied more along clan lines, or lines of patronage. Parents, siblings, et cetera, do not have any excessive feelings for one another. The minor hunt – a sort of culling of the younger members of a clan – was originally a practice used to remove the misshapen or aberrant djinn from the bloodlines. Djinn are long lived, you see, and even the hideously deformed ones can survive to pollute the gene pool.
“Since you’re a half-breed,” Givaras said, “your status is undecided. Whoever called the minor hunt on you was effectively making a statement about you – was in fact according you djinn status. It is possible they were trying to help you...”
“By calling on adult djinns to kill me?”
“it’s political. There have long been two lines of thought among the djinn. An argument of creationism versus evolution is one way to look at it. The exact nature of human-djinn offspring has long been a point of contention,” Givaras said. “I believe things are coming to a nodal point – a cycle of rapid change, if you will. We djinn have seen that societies tend to undergo rapid, exponential change in certain cycles. I myself have long wondered why Matteras dropped me in this splendid murder pit. His choice of other victims has confirmed certain suspicions. Your own arrival leads me to a theory that i will share with you–”
“Wait a minute,” Indelbed said. An awful thought had occurred to him. “How many others have been dropped here?”
“Not counting ourselves, there have been three victims,” Givaras said. “I shall take you to study their remains when you are better. I have saved their bones for a rainy day.”
“And they were all eaten by the wyrms?” He was still a bit scared that Givaras was a cannibal.
“Yes, they did not adopt the light trick,” Givaras said.
“How long have you been here, exactly?”
“Well, seventy years at least, by my count.” Givaras smiled. “I lost a bit of time in the middle, when i went mad. It was the endless chattering, you see. I’m so glad you’re here...”
Excerpted with permission from Djinn City, Saad Z Hossain, Aleph Book Company.