Black Bottle (15 page)

Caliph could see past their pale faces to where, floating in green effulgence, three ghastly impossibilities threatened. Their exposed lungs swelled, withered and swelled again; their hearts twitched rhythmically.

Caliph could not think. A deep, canonical terror gripped him. One of the heads spoke in a cooing language. He imagined that Sena answered.

All he knew for certain was that her red jacket was snapping. He watched it, felt it crack with petulant regularity. Snap! Snap! A red, protective chant. Its texture, brightness and continual sound cordoned him from the shadowy things floating not quite twenty feet away. On this side of Sena, there were glowing lamps, a doorway and the pounding of his heart. But beyond Sena’s snapping coat, on the other side of her confident stance, there was madness.

Caliph realized he was kneeling on the deck, looking at his sword, which had fallen from his fingers. How had he dropped it? When he looked up, he could barely see his men, standing exactly as they had been before.

Caliph stared at Sena’s flapping jacket. He willed himself to reach for his weapon.
Do something!
An internal scream.

He tried to speak, to say Sena’s name, but couldn’t.

She didn’t move. He wondered if something was wrong with her in the exact way he might have wondered whether the concrete wall separating him from an inferno was sustaining damage. She was his shelter.

Mizraim, Emolus, Fuck!
He tried again to grab his weapon, to get up and power past Sena.

No.

He was still kneeling on the cold metal behind her. He could not move.

Her jacket flapped again and then the sound of something heavy clanged on the metal floor, unbelievably loud, bouncing once before the dark mass of flickering entrails.

He adjusted his focus enough to look, but found he couldn’t move his head. Sena’s jacket was a red blur while the deck resolved into clear patterns of grating. He could see the book she had tossed down in front of them. Was she giving it to them? Some kind of morbid joke bubbled up in his mind; that the heads had no hands nearly made him giggle. And he was giggling, deep inside his chest, nowhere near the surface. It felt like a worm struggling just under his heart, threshing violently. It was the only part of his body that he could feel anymore. Everything else had turned to stone and fear.

He heard Sena’s voice, husky and commanding. “Tekioo otou,” she said.

It had to be a ploy. Sena would never part with that book. Never.

One of the heads jerked, a tethered balloon plucked by the breeze. Its organs flopped against the rough deck. Caliph saw blood ooze over metal. Then the dark, obscured face was whispering, crooning, speaking in the Unknown Tongue.

And the book began to float.

9
Willin Droul is a cant term used only by the Shradnae Sisterhood for the Cabal of Wights. The Cabal of Wights is a legendary underworld organization consisting of human, partly-human and purportedly
nonhuman
operatives whose goals are a matter of conjecture.

10
A hit squad of three Shradnae Sisters, consisting of one cephal’matris and two ancillas.

11
The Shokyule witch queen, born 11,984 O.T.R., vanished 12,874 O.T.R.

CHAPTER

12

Taelin cartwheeled. Flopped. Rolling buttes spun by, rotten-apple black. The wind cut her ears. An endless procession of razors. She was on her back now, arms and legs flapping, staring up into the wet flood of stars, waiting for impact.

Through the crush of one-hundred-twenty-mile-an-hour winds, a soprano whisper returned. This, rather than her fall, gave Taelin strength to scream again.

“Taelin—”

The singsong voice threatened her. She heard other voices encircling her descent. “Taelin!”

“Lady Rae.”

She felt hands on her body, restraining her.

“Get off! Get off!” She was screaming. The air at her back pushed up hard. Too hard. Like a foam mattress. Like a hospital cot. She lurched forward, covered in sweat, into the bright light, the red shapes of physicians bending over her.

“I’m not falling!” She screamed and laughed.

She felt a deep twinge in the meat of her shoulder.

“Three units of amylobar.”

Such a clinical voice. Taelin laughed again, right before impact.

*   *   *

S
ENA
dismissed the assigned servants. She brought cream and a bowl of sugar. She brought rolls and biscuits from the kitchen. In an unusual display of domesticity, she brought blankets and pillows and coffee into the room that Caliph had chosen as his command center.

He didn’t sleep. It was after midnight. Once they had cleared the airspace over Skellum, personnel were ferried between the ships. Alani came aboard.

It was after midnight on the thirteenth of Tes and for the next several hours Caliph deliberated whether to turn back, cancel his talk at the conference and return with all three ships to Isca.

Alani’s quiet voice modified and calmed the tension in the air. Plans for retaliation against the government of Mirayhr, where the Witchocracy held sway, were quickly scuttled. The attack had been a secret. Caliph decided, and Alani agreed, that for the time being they would keep it that way. The last thing Stonehold needed was to appear weak or friendless to Pandragor.

The heads had left with the book. The skies were empty and quiet again. Six people had died. Night slipped away and light spilled with a suddenness through the portholes, into the airship’s makeshift conference room. It gave luster to the discarded cuff links, the clutter of cups and the several pairs of cast-aside shoes. With the dawn, Caliph decided to go ahead with the conference.

He would not turn back. He would not be distracted from his mission in Sandren. After his talk, after he hammered out his problems with the Pandragonians, he would he deal with the Witchocracy.

“We have a floating hospital and one patient,” said Caliph.

“At least she survived,” said Sena.

Caliph tapped his lip. “That would’ve been a diplomatic shit-storm. I think bringing her with was a bad idea.”

“She’ll recover.”

Caliph chuckled through his nose but did not smile. “She seems to have some medical know-how. Put the doctors in a snarl by telling them their diagnosis was wrong.” He looked up at her. “You think it’s the right choice? To go through with the conference?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe my physicians are doing the work of morticians—on day one no less.”

Sena struggled with guilt. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m fine.”

“It’s not your fault, you know?”

Caliph looked at her quizzically but she could read his embarrassment over the night before.

“When a qloin gives itself to the Eighth House, it ceases to be three sisters. They become fingers on her hand.”

“What are you talking about?” Caliph’s eyes went to Alani who made a motion for coffee before slipping out of the room. The spymaster thought, like many did, that Sena was crazy.

She pressed on. “The Eighth House is the reason none of your bodyguards could move.”

“I should have—”

Caliph started to blame himself but Sena snipped it off. “No.” She looked out through one of the oval windows. “You were under the power of the Eighth House.”

But privately she shouldered a sense of guilt. She hated to see him like this, a whisker-stippled shadow. And yet she had felt so piercingly lonely—all summer long—that she had done it anyway. She had been lonely and he had been full of anxiety over the flight. She had convinced herself that she could take away his fears.

Caliph looked at her with eyes bruised by lack of sleep. Under his clothing she saw the delicate skin fronting his hips, contused through his own struggle for unity, turned black and green. There were great dark suction marks on his chest: proof that the numbers were, quite literally, stacked against him.

He had been waylaid by math.

The proportions and ratios had piggybacked on light, entered through his eyes and been assigned a requisite level of awe. A greater than average chemical storm had swelled inside him. Her numbers were a spiral, a vortex. But they were not helping him.

Her ratios exceeded his capability to compartmentalize and, like the power of the Eighth House, it was unfair.

“Why didn’t the witches just kill me?” His voice sounded confused, dejected; it turned her stomach. She answered with a measure of asperity. “The Sisterhood doesn’t care about you anymore. They have the book.”

This worked and he hardened to her. “Then I don’t understand why you gave it to them. If it’s so important—”

“It is so important. Which is why I gave it to them. They’ll keep it safe, Caliph. In the meantime, I have errands in Sandren. Don’t worry. The Sisterhood can’t use it. Even if they open it … it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

She hung on his question. “To save the world,” she said.

This sent a hairline crack through the invisible wall between them. She watched it creep slowly, as Caliph puzzled over her words. Soon it would turn elaborate and ugly. Sena left the room and went to stand outside in the sunlight. Caliph followed her as though leashed.

She inhaled, let the cold air fill her, but did not feel cleansed. At her feet, sunlight scoured the metal, working to efface the terrible associations from the night before.

“What do you mean?” Caliph asked. “That it’s too late to save the world? You mean the Shradnae Sisterhood is trying to save the world? From what?”

Sena had turned her head to watch his mouth move as he asked this inevitable question. He wore a crooked premonition, gathered at one side of his face as if he sensed what was coming.

“From me,” she said. These two words tapped the wedge into place.

“I don’t get it.” But he
did
get it. She knew, in his guts, how the rimy dark angle of her words, worked shardlike between his ribs. He chuckled, trying to make light of it. Trying to transform the absurdity into a joke. “I thought the Sisterhood was always the, you know…” he popped his lips and twirled his finger, “the enemy.”

“They are,” she said softly.

“I don’t really understand what you’re saying, then.” He tried to smile. Failed. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Sena turned away from the sun, away from him. She saw herself through Caliph’s eyes, wanting to feel what he felt. He saw her irises flickering with tiny arcs as she turned. He saw her walk resolutely away, through the doorway, leaving him on the deck to believe finally and unequivocally that she had lost her mind.

And that was better. The fissure at least, between the two of them, would give Caliph some dignity, some space and time to claw his way back.

*   *   *

F
OR
several minutes, Caliph stood mystified. But then the deck boy arrived. Caliph preferred the
Bulotecus
to the
Odalisque.
On the
Bulotecus,
Specks would have handed him the message, floating and smiling.

The boy on the
Odalisque
said nothing as he gave Caliph the note.

Caliph took it and pulled it open. As he read, Sena’s delusions of grandeur melted into the background.

What it said, even in the shadow of last night’s attack, put a disquieting spin on Sena’s insistence that the
Iatromisia
be included in this ill-fated flight.

The city-state of Sandren had seen countries rise and fall. Its rich unattainable eye had long gazed over the Atlath Continent with a kind of supreme multifaceted neutrality. The city-state’s wealth was enormous. It had never been looted. It was, as it had always been, aloof to armies marching under and around it. Only one fool had ever attempted a siege.

Caliph tugged his lip, bewildered to read that during the last thirty-six hours, coinciding with a stay of warm sloppy weather, Sandren’s citizens lay dying.

Details were sparse. Some kind of sickness. Rumors chased their own tails.

As Caliph’s three airships neared the great jag of the Ghalla Peaks, he could see other zeppelins clustering.

A flock of balloons drifted together, enormous gasbags bearing crests and colors, each one from a different nation. The airships’ ponderous bodies were lanced and strafed by light; despite this, they looked small and powerless against the mountain’s cool gray backdrop.

Birds enmeshed the conflux in helices that twisted slow as summer gnats. Some of them carried messages between the ships. Information was spreading.

Caliph called for field glasses. He felt them arrive in his hand and looked southwest at the congregating vessels. There were craft from Waythloo’s Iron Throne, Wardale, even the Society of the Jaw. He made out one bizarre ship from the Theocracy of the Stargazers; another, pale as a cave beetle, from the Pplar. Fane, Dadelon, Iycestoke, Bablemum, Greymoor and Yorba. They were all here. A circus of colors. A sky full of political clout.

Behind the harlequin minnow-shaped bodies, where the sun could not yet reach, Caliph made out the black arms of Sandren’s famous teagle system. Great brackets of metal lunged from vertical clefts in the rock. Small only in perspective, the brackets trailed down the mountain’s sheer face, ending amid a smoky cluster of buildings that broke out into the sun and glinted like overturned trash.

Far above the conflux of zeppelins, the brackets led up, carrying their threads of cable toward the hidden city-state of Sandren.

If the Sandrenese were sick, Caliph was eager to hear the details, eager to see how he could help.

Some of the heavier airships had already docked at a great platform suspended halfway up the mountain: a half disk of grilled metal supported by cables and struts. The elevators could be summoned to this platform and the airships were moderately protected from the buffeting, generally east-blowing winds.

Not all craft could make the thirteen-thousand-foot ascent to the city.

Caliph handed his field glasses off and sent a message to the captain, requesting that he motor them in.