Alif the Unseen (35 page)

A shelf nearby was stocked with bottles of liquid in an array of unnatural-looking colors. Alif was surprised to see a large flat-screen television affixed to the opposite wall, tuned to Al
Jazeera, and was struck by sudden recognition.

“Is this a
bar
?”

The man laughed.

“You could call it that. We come here to eat and drink and discuss things. Sit in the corner there—they’ll bring you something to fill your stomachs.” Before Alif could
protest, the man was off across the room, vanishing through the doorway. Sheikh Bilal and NewQuarter, looking profoundly out of place, sat down on a bench at the table the man had indicated. Alif
perched across from them. He opened his mouth to speak, intending to diffuse his embarrassment over the suggestive grate by making a joke, but a loud squeal interrupted him. At the table across the
room, the toadish creature had seized the candle flame by what Alif assumed was its throat, and with strength alarming for something so small, proceeded to throttle it violently. One of the
goat-headed women snatched a bottle from the shelf and, with a summary swing, broke it over the toad’s head. The toad went belly up on the table with a loud croak.

“This looks suspiciously like a den of vice,” the sheikh muttered.

“Does it?” NewQuarter made a nervous study of the room. “I can’t tell what it looks like. It might not look like anything. Who is this woman you’ve sent that guy to
find? How do you know these people?”

Alif rubbed his eyes. His body was making feeble complaints, demanding food and rest.

“I don’t know them,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s possible for people like us to know them. It’s only—there was a man who died helping me and my
friends, and he was one of them. He told me about this place. He took two girls I know here to hide them from State, and I’d like to find out what happened to them.”

NewQuarter broke out into a high, helpless laugh.

“Is this what it takes to escape State these days? Is there literally nowhere on earth that is safe, leaving Never Never Land the only logical place to flee? I’ve gone mad, Alif.
I’ve gone mad.”

“I’m sorry,” said Alif. It occurred to him that he had done more apologizing in the last few months than in all previous twenty-three years of his life put together. It seemed
absurd that in his attempt to put a few simple things right he should have made such astronomical miscalculations. A girl he loved had decided she did not love him—at least, not enough. How
was such a problem usually addressed? Surely not with the clandestine exchange of books and computer surveillance and recourse to the djinn. He struggled to fix on the exact moment when he had run
his life off the rails.

A shadow appeared carrying a platter of food and glasses filled with greenish liquid. It set these down on the table between Alif and his companions without a word, as NewQuarter stared in
silent horror. The sheikh touched the glass in front of him with a frown.

“Is this alcohol?” he asked, as though accustomed to speaking to wraiths.

No,
came a voice in Alif’s head.
Alcohol is not something we can make or consume. But it is certainly an intoxicant, if that’s what you meant to ask
.

“It was, thank you,” said the sheikh, pushing the glass away with two fingers. “Might I have some plain water?”

“Me, too,” said Alif.

If you wish
. The shadow moved away.

“I’ll stick with the intoxicant, by God,” said NewQuarter, clutching his glass. “After the day we’ve had I think I deserve it.”

“
Khumr
is
khumr,
” said Sheikh Bilal. He gave NewQuarter a severe look.

“
Khumr
is booze, Uncle,” said NewQuarter. “And that thing just said this isn’t booze.”

“Nonsense.
Khumr
is any substance that clouds the mind for recreational rather than medical reasons. This is clearly forbidden.”

“Well, I think our fiasco qualifies as a medical reason.” NewQuarter tipped his head back and took a long swallow of the phosphoric drink. Alif watched, fascinated in spite of
himself, as the younger man’s face went pale and broke out with sweat.

“Well? How does it taste?” he asked.

“Like Windex,” rasped NewQuarter. He coughed, and a thread of smoke issued from his lips. “Oh, God.”

Alif was reminded of his first and only experience with alcohol: Abdullah had been given a half-empty bottle of Scotch in exchange for a DVD-R drive and they had done shots together in the
storage closet at Radio Sheikh. It had taken all of Alif’s willpower not to vomit the burning liquid up again.

“You don’t drink!” he exclaimed, divining the source of NewQuarter’s bravado.

“No,” said NewQuarter miserably, clearing his throat. “I don’t. But when you put something in front of me, I panic—you have no idea how many awful parties
I’ve been to, with princes and hired women getting wasted everywhere once the help is gone and the liquor cabinets are unlocked. They practically pour vodka down your throat. If I don’t
take at least one swallow and pretend I’m into it, my manhood is suddenly in question.”

Sheikh Bilal laughed—the first real, unguarded laugh Alif had heard him make since their escape.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “It’s
their
manhood that is at stake, and this is why they bully you. If you were to refuse, you would make them look weak. You
should be proud to abstain.”

NewQuarter belched, one hand over his stomach.

“Making a prince seem weak is a bad idea,” he said. “Especially if you’re another prince. It looks like competition. One of these days one of those bastards is going to
find out whose side I’m really on and then it will be you coming to rescue me from a prison in the desert.”

“Is that why you retired?” Alif asked.

“Yes,” said NewQuarter, wiping the sweat from his brow. “The thing was—when I figured out that the Hand must be someone in the aristocracy, I couldn’t shake the
feeling that I probably knew him. Had met him at a family lunch, Ramadan, Eid—hell, maybe he was one of the weekend vodka-swillers. It made me nervous.”

Alif hesitated, suddenly self-conscious.

“I’ve seen him,” he said in a quiet voice. A shudder ran down his back. He did not know how to speak about the Hand except with intimacy, drawing on the grotesque bond between
jailer and prisoner. “I know his name.”

NewQuarter leaned forward, setting his elbows on the scuffed wooden table, eyes bright.

“At last. Oh, this is a good day. Who is he?”

“Abbas Al Shehab.”

To Alif’s surprise, NewQuarter began to laugh.

“Impossible,” he said. “Not Abbas. I know the man—he’s my uncle-by-marriage’s third cousin, or maybe a second cousin once removed. One or the other. Anyway,
he doesn’t have it in him. He’s a geek, like us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him standing somewhere other than in a corner, trying and failing to make charming
conversation. I didn’t think you could be born Arab and not inherit that skill. He must have been swapped at birth with some dour mountain Turk or something. Unmarried, if you can believe it,
though he’s plenty rich. That’s how bad it is. No, Abbas couldn’t say
boo
to a dog if his life depended on it.”

Indignation and shame warred in Alif’s chest. He found he didn’t like to talk about the Hand now, though the man had once been a mainstay of his conversations with City
malcontents.

“I know what I know,” he said stiffly.

“I don’t doubt that you’ve—that in prison, you—I just wonder if you’ve got the name right, that’s all.” NewQuarter fiddled with a piece of bread
between erratic fingers. Alif ignored the younger man’s tipsy, earnest attempt to catch his eye.

“Anyway,” continued NewQuarter when the silence grew awkward. “Leaving aside the question of identity. I’m not the most durable person on earth—if the Hand had
gotten me in a room and so much as nicked my chin with a close shave, I’d have rolled over on everyone. You. Radio Sheikh. Gurkhab0ss. I couldn’t live with that constant reminder of my
own spinelessness, so I quit.”

Alif was touched in spite of himself. “You’re not spineless,” he said. “You came and boosted me from prison in the middle of the night. In a BMW.”

“I did do that, didn’t I.” NewQuarter brightened. “Good for me. Now I’m just as fucked as the rest of you. I’m not even scared. This green stuff must be
working.”

Sheikh Bilal nudged the offending glass away from NewQuarter’s hand. The shadow arrived again with three cups of water and set them down on the table.

Eat,
it said.
The food won’t hurt you. I’m not interested in having a trio of human corpses on my hands
. It floated back toward the other end of the room.

Alif turned his attention to the platter in front of him: it contained, or so he was fairly confident, stewed meat and saffron rice, along with a cooked green that might have been spinach. A
pile of warm flatbread sat beside the food on the edge of the tray. Tearing a loaf in half, he scooped up meat and rice and took an experimental bite. The flavors of cardamom and pepper and gamey
meat bloomed on his tongue.

“Goat,” he said. “Or at least, that’s my guess.”

“A relative of one of those ladies at the other table, maybe,” muttered NewQuarter.

Sheikh Bilal pulled back his sleeve and tucked in without further prompting. NewQuarter leaned forward and sniffed before plucking a single piece of meat from the stew. Chewing it, he nodded his
approval. They ate in silence. At intervals, they smiled somewhat wryly at each other, enjoying the camaraderie of dislocation, like tourists stranded together at some nameless outpost. At the
table across the room, the toad was gathered up by the presiding shadow and deposited in a heap outside the door; his table companions continued their conversation without any appearance of either
sympathy or distress. Alif caught NewQuarter’s eye and made a face. NewQuarter snickered, ducking behind one hand when one of the goat women looked at him sharply.

After filling his belly—which did not take long, leading him to wonder if his stomach had shrunk during its prison hiatus—Alif was sleepy, warmed by the spices in the food. He leaned
back against the wall and let his eyes drift shut.

“I wonder if there’s such a thing as a bed in this pile,” he muttered. He heard fingers snap. NewQuarter called out to the shadow, demanding to know whether it could provide
them with a place to sleep. Alif smiled without opening his eyes, hoping the return of NewQuarter’s imperiousness meant he was feeling better. A hand shook his shoulder: he rubbed his eyes,
rising, and shuffled after Sheikh Bilal and the shadow toward a staircase at the back of the room. At the top of the stairs was a hallway lined with doors painted the same range of colors as the
sky outside: dusky rose, dark blue, lavender. Set in the milky quartz wall, the effect was like looking through nothing, into the sky itself; Alif had to blink several times to make the scene
resolve itself into something he could fathom.

You may take the blue room,
said the shadow, bowing them through the midnight-colored door. Inside was a small room with an oil lamp in the window and a few sleeping mats against the
wall. The ceiling was painted to look like an arm of the Milky Way, silver-painted stars popping and fading in the lamplight.

The shadow wished them good night. Alif barely heard it, his mind already thick with sleep. He kicked off his sandals and lay down on the nearest mat, pulling down his head cloth and wrapping it
around himself like a blanket. NewQuarter yawned conspicuously. Alif heard the low murmur of Sheikh Bilal’s voice in prayer and the scrape of the man’s feet as he knelt in supplication.
The familiar words comforted him. He was asleep before the sheikh saluted the angels to his right and left.

* * *

“Alif? Is that really you?”

There was a scent like jasmine and, beneath it, something more bestial. Alif rolled on to his back and blinked sleep-encrusted eyes: a tawny, feline figure hovered over him, looking concerned.
He propped himself up on his elbows. It was Sakina, her dark braids looped atop her head, gold dangling from her ears. She set a cloth bag on the floor beside her.

“You look half-dead,” she observed. “What happened?”

“Prison,” he said, at a loss for some more elegant way to put it.

Her sympathy and alarm were so obvious that Alif found his throat closing and began to suspect there were parts of his mind and his body that were truly unwell. The glory of his rescue felt as
profound as ever but beneath it lay the damage of the dark and all that had kept him company there. A small, frightened sound escaped his throat.

“No, please don’t get upset—I’m sorry. Here.” She rummaged in her bag and produced a vial of thick purplish substance, pressing it into his hand. “Take a sip
of that.”

Obediently, Alif uncorked the vial and tipped it back between his lips. The viscous liquid tasted of honey and dark fruit, leaving behind an herbal tang. A pleasant sensation, like the
anticipation of a holiday, put distance between his waking mind and the residue of his three-month night.

“That’s nice,” he said. “What is it?”

“An elixir against heartache,” said Sakina, showing a row of delicately pointed teeth. “Keep it.” She crossed her legs beneath her and sat. Alif felt his cheer increasing
as he looked at her; she was proof that he was not without resources, even now.

“You know that Vikram is dead,” she said in a lower voice.

The effect of the elixir faltered for a moment.

“Yes,” said Alif. “He knew he was dying when I left him—he’s the only reason the convert and Dina didn’t end up in jail, like me. He saved them.”

Sakina’s smile was melancholy. “Poor Vikram,” she said. “He could be quite unpredictable and dangerous—you didn’t know how dangerous, or you’d never
have traveled with him. But when he felt like it, he was capable of noble things.”

Alif remembered the fatal wound in Vikram’s side and touched his own, feeling a twinge of imagined pain.

“He lived a long life. A very long life—as long as an age of the earth, it seemed. I imagine that by helping you he was hoping for a chance to die on his own terms. He knew the
history of that manuscript you’d gotten your hands on. The people who come into contact with it do not tend to die in contented old age.”