Free Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald Page A

ever knowing the secret it concealed: cool marble rooms and corridors behind a facade of orioles and turrets and intricately carved windows, courts and tanks and water-gardens open only to the sky and the birds. But then the Hijra Mahal had always been a building apart. In another age it had been the palace of the hijras, the eunuchs. The un-men, shunned yet essential to the ritual life of Rajput Jaipur, living in the very heart of the old city, yet apart.
         There were six of them: Sul, the janampatri seer, astrologer to celebs as far away as the movie boulevards of Mumbai; Dahin, the plastic surgeon, who worked on faces on the far side of the planet through remote machines accurate to the width of an atom; Leel, the ritual dancer, who performed the ancient Nautch traditions and festival dances; Janda, the writer, whom half of India knew as Queen Bitch of gupshup columnists; Suleyra, whose parries and events were the talk of society from Srinagar to Madurai; and Heer, once khidmutgar to the House of Jodhra. My six guardians bundled me from the car wrapped in a heavy chador like a Muslim woman and took me to a domed room of a hundred thousand mirror fragments. Their warm, dry hands gently held me on the divan—I was thrashing, raving, as the shock hit me—and Dahin the face surgeon deftly pressed an efuser to my arm. "Hush. Sleep now."
         I woke among the stars. For an instant I wondered if I was dead, stabbed in my sleep by the poison needle of an Azad assassin robot that had scaled the hundred windows of the Jodhra Mahal. Then I saw that they were the mirror shards of the ceiling, shattering the light of a single candle into a hundred thousand pieces. Heer sat cross-legged on a dhurrie by my low bedside.
         "How long . . ."
         "Two days, child."
         "Are they ..."
         "Dead. Yes. I cannot lie. Every one."
         But even as the House of Jodhra fell, it struck back like a cobra, its back broken by a stick. Homing missiles, concealed for years, clinging like bats under shop eaves and bus shelters, unfolded their wings and lit their engines and sought out the pheromone profiles of Azad vehicles. Armored Lexuses went up in fireballs in the middle of Jaipur's insane traffic as they hooted their way towards the safety of the airport. No safety even there: a Jodhra missile locked on to the company tilt-jet as it lifted off, hooked into the engine intake with its titanium claws until the aircraft reached an altitude at which no one could survive. The blast cast momentary shadows across the sundials of the Jantar Mantar, marking the moment of Jodhra revenge. Burning debris set fires all across the slums. "Are they ..."
         "Jahangir and the Begum Azad died in the tilt-jet attack and our missiles took out much of their board, but their countermeasures held off our attack on their headquarters."
         "Who survived?"
         "Their youngest son, Salim. The line is intact."
         I sat up in my low bed that smelled of sandalwood. The stars were jewels around my head.
         "It's up to me then." "Memsahb—"
         "Don't you remember what he said, Heer? My father? You are a weapon, never forget that. Now I know what I am a weapon for."
         "Memsahb . . . Padmini." The first time yt had ever spoken my name. "You are still shocked; you don't know what you're saying. Rest. You need rest. We'll talk in the morning." Yt touched yts forefinger to yts full lips, then left. When I could no longer hear soft footfalls on cool marble, I went to the door. Righteousness, rage, and revenge were one song inside me. Locked. I heaved, I beat, I screamed. The Hijra Mahal did not listen. I went to the balcony that hung over the alley. Even if I could have shattered the intricate stone jali, it was a ten-meter drop to street level where the late-night hum of phatphat autorickshaws and taxis was giving way to the delivery drays and cycle-vans of the spice merchants.