The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain

Author:Saad Z. Hossain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Chapter Ten: Garden of Ridiculous Demands

Melek Ahmar sat in a very uncomfortable chair. Gurung had procured it from somewhere. It had great arms and a sprawling ornate back and thick curling legs, a grotesque gilded runaway exercise in wood carving by some megalomaniac carpenter with delusions of grandeur. Throne. It was actually a throne. There were dragons and apes and rams carved into it. One of the ram horns was digging into his back. He had suggested they operate from the shadows like ReGi, but Gurung insisted they needed a spectacle.

“It’ll bring the punters faster, he said,” Melek Ahmar muttered. “I’ve got to look like a king, he said . . .”

The first ten customers, predictably, were there for ReGi’s magic THC-aligned organic weed, which grew by the bushel in her alternate garden, and they were slightly nonplussed at his glorious majesty. Still, as his voice thundered out gibberish, making their bones quake, and oversized bags of weed appeared in their hands, they were reasonably pleased. A few judicious pricks from Gurung’s kukri encouraged half-hearted bows and curtsies, until the rest of the line caught on; there was new management in town, and a bit of bowing and scraping was necessary.

The eleventh guy was different. He came in holding an urn and caused an immediate furor. Gurung, fielding the wish-makers in his laconic manner, looked up with a frown.

“He wants his wife’s ashes scattered on the Kanchenjunga.”

“Is she dead already? Or do we have to take care of that as well?”

Gurung gave him a weird look. “Yes, yes, she’s passed already.”

Melek Ahmar shrugged. Who knew, with Humes?

“Top of those mountains, right? So that’s not hard, is it? Why can’t he get up there?”

“It’s forbidden to climb, first of all, and secondly, there’s no microclime, he’d be dead half a day outside the city limits,” Gurung said. He shrugged. “You could get up there, but it would take you weeks. Seems like a hassle.”

“Weeks? That was when I was weak.” Melek Ahmar smiled. “Watch, Hume, what a King of the Djinn can do.”

He leapt off the chair, which had already murdered his spine, and sucked in a lungful of power. Ahhh. It felt good to flex everything. His distortion field thickened around him into a palpable black aura, and he could sense the Humes retching and writhing in its proximity, an unfortunate effect of the particle-twisting nature of distortion itself. He grabbed the hapless widower, tucked him under his arm, and launched himself into the air, a homing missile aimed at the clouds, his raw power streaking behind like the tail of a comet. Within seconds the city was dwindling beneath him, and the man under his arm was shrieking in fear. Ahhh. This was it. Air rushing at you, birds flapping away, a struggling Hume in his talons, what sport!

Melek Ahmar returned to the garden several hours later. He was slightly bedraggled, but that was to be expected, given he had been bouncing off mountains. A very large crowd had gathered, awaiting his return, the air abuzz with excitement and conjecture.

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