Black Bottle (22 page)

She ducked her head. “Your majesty…”

Caliph left her in the tent and headed for the walls, trying to ignore the scarlet mussels that ground themselves against several naked patients. He wanted to talk to his men.

Alani stood near the gates. He seemed to be muttering with his commanding officer in what, from a distance, looked to be an almost satirical pose, standing sagely with one hand on his hip, the other stroking his beard.

As Caliph arrived, satire vanished. Alani turned to him and said point-blank, “This whole thing is too big for us.”

“Where’s Sig?”

“He never came up. We moved him to the
Bulotecus
before we left.”

“Good. It’s safer down there.”

Alani took out his pipe, spun it and pointed it at Caliph’s chest. “I’d like to move you down there.”

Caliph started to scoff but Alani’s eyes stabbed him. “You think I’m joking? Your little priestess over there is getting cruestone-delivered messages from someone down below and I don’t have time to worry about it—”

“She’s harmless,” said Caliph. “Trust me.”

“Is she? We brought her with for a reason. Don’t let the Pandragonians turn this around on us.”

Caliph raised his palms. “I know I don’t make your job easy but—”

Alani interrupted. “Please—our escort’s designed for a three-day trip to a secured building for an uneventful conference. Currently, I barely have the manpower to secure the perimeter at this position. That means every man is working. That means none of them are sleeping. That means, even popping pills, in a little over thirty hours we’ll have lost our edge—completely. At that point everyone crashes and we’re defenseless.”

Caliph blew a thin stream of air and looked around. The howls from the other side of the gate were deafening. “Is there anything we can do to make it easier? Besides giving up?”

“If we move you inside the palace and leave a couple men with the hospital tents, I can start letting men sleep.”

“That’s not good politics.”

“Your choice,” said Alani. “Thirty hours and good politics or—”

Caliph threw his hands up. “Fine. Move us into the palace.”
What am I doing?

*   *   *

“Y
OU
should be asleep,” said Baufent.

Taelin stood at the edge of the tents, looking toward the gate. She could still see the High King arguing with his men but couldn’t hear anything they were saying. Baufent’s voice barely registered. Taelin kept staring at the king.

Baufent turned it into a joke. “You little spy!”

“Am not.” Taelin’s denial came out sounding surprisingly defensive. To offset it, she choked up a laugh.

“Come with me,” said Baufent.

“Where are we going?” She followed the doctor back into the tents where one of the patients was forcefully vomiting a kind of gray-purple chunder from between his or her exposed teeth. Sex became difficult to tell as the disease progressed.

“It looks like they’re going to waste away,” said Baufent. “And they might. But believe me, it can surprise you.”

Taelin held her shirt up in front of her face.

“Hurry,” said Baufent. “You’re not immune yet.”

“Where are we going?” Taelin asked again.

“Anselm, that ass, has thrown me out of the tent. Says I need sleep. Sleep! Do you hear that?” The crescendo of howls beyond the gate underscored her meaning. “Well, I can’t sleep and since you’re totally useless at the moment, you’re going to play cards with me.”

Taelin laid her crutches on the ground and sat down across from Baufent on a cot. She watched the physician shuffle a deck.

The bright suits of flower-wrapped bones and devils mixed with winged creatures and constellations as the cards slid across the small table between them for the next several hours.

Baufent won nearly all the hands.

Finally, Taelin noticed the light in the tent had changed. It had become more blue. And there was a small fingerprint of pink sunlight glowing on the fabric as dawn touched Sandren from the west.

“We’re supposed to go home today,” Taelin mentioned. “I’m out of clean clothes and I have a mission home that I need to take care of…”

“I read that,” said Baufent, “in the paper. St. Remora?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a big responsibility. Why do it up there? I mean, why not just open a mission in Pandragor—where you’re from?”

Taelin deliberated a moment over how much honesty to apply to her answer. Finally she said, “Turning on lights in dark rooms has a bigger impact … than turning them on in rooms that are already lit.”

“Oh.” Baufent sat back in her chair as if insulted. “Well, I suppose that
is
our reputation.”

“I’m not talking about you. Or Nanemen in general.” Taelin tried to smooth her reply. “It’s not racial or cultural. You didn’t choose your government.”

“Ah, so it’s our government, is it? Maybe you really were spying on the king—”

Taelin tried not to think about her father or the tiny bottle in her pocket as she contemplated Caliph Howl. “It’s strange,” she said. “He seems like a good man.”

“He’s arrogant,” said Baufent. “But I suppose you have to be arrogant if you want to rule Stonehold. If you weren’t, the burgomasters would eat you alive. I used to despise him but he grows on you.”

“I can see how he would.”

A commotion from outside made them forget their hands. They pushed aside the dew-covered flap and stepped out into air and sunlight, frosted as though a weather system gone missing from Stonehold had turned up here.

The cold bit Taelin’s throat. She expected to see one of the patients risen up, assaulting the doctors. But the silver- and black-freckled bodies lay still as fish at market: long, silent, and basking in the mountain’s air.

People were jogging toward the west walls, mounting the stairs, looking into the sunrise and pointing in horror.

From the sound and pitch of the disturbance, Taelin decided that the palace grounds had become the focus of some kind of assault. The postern had been closed and barred for the night but it sounded like a great mass of people had assembled just outside the walls. Knee throbbing, Taelin climbed the battlements to see.

Past the crenels there were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. She was no good judge of such large numbers.

She walked in a stupor, overcome by the sheer size of the horde. A soldier in blue goggles brushed past her. He seemed to be talking to himself. “They’re nothing but animals.” His voice couched more awe than contempt.

Taelin wanted to say that he was wrong. That those were still people down there. But she lacked the faith to actually get it out. It was a ghoulish scene. The plague-stricken were crying and hammering and shrieking against the walls. Many of them must have died under the crush of their fellows or by hurling themselves repeatedly against the stone enclosure. Bodies had been trampled into pink paste that glistened like cooking fat in the cracks between stones. It covered everything. Some crouched, feeding. Still the hoard yelped and chittered and persisted in their futile attack.

But none of this was what the physicians and soldiers were pointing at. Their arms stretched out above the chaos, beyond its sickening sights and sounds.

From the battlements Taelin and everyone else could see, casting long ruinous shadows, the wreckage of the
Iatromisia
: still tethered to the teagle platform.

No one was sure how they had pulled it down. Much of the conversation atop the parapet revolved around theories. One thing seemed certain. The zeppelin’s elevator had been left unlocked.

Whatever the truth, the
Iatromisia
was still in the process of being destroyed. Great holes had been ripped in her skin. The gasbags were deflating. The delicate duralumin frame had been crumpled under the weight of hundreds of hideous leaping bodies.

“We’re trapped.” It came out of someone’s mouth as a whisper.

“We’re not trapped. The
Odalisque
can ferry us down.”

“Funny that, eh?” said someone else. “He manages to save his luxury craft?”

Taelin left the battlements, nauseous, wondering what Caliph Howl planned to do. This was a disaster. It felt like the end of the world. She realized she was crying and she hardly knew why. She leaned heavily on her crutches, hanging her head in an effort to hide her emotion. She blamed the tears on lack of sleep; her notions of seeing any of her relatives had vanished along with illusions that the High King’s tiny clinic could nurture Sandren back to health.

“We’ll be fine.” Baufent’s firm voice startled her. The doctor squeezed her shoulders. “Don’t worry.”

But Baufent’s voice held little conviction and Taelin did worry. She wiped her tears and noticed for the first time that she was filthy.

“Shit,” said Baufent. “Now what?” The physician hustled toward a new commotion in the tents and Taelin followed her, catching glimpses of shouting people and limbs thrashing.

The patient causing the commotion had to be forcibly restrained. Its silvery arm struck a steel bowl full of medical devices. The bowl sang as it hurled to the ground and scattered its contents in the grass. Taelin crept forward to pick up the mess. She was unable to see clearly but the patient was certainly going through horrendous fits.

Baufent shouted for help and more physicians came running.

As Taelin watched the scarlet coats blot out the scene she felt helpless. The world provided her no place to go, nothing to do, no way to help. Her position in the grass, holding the steel bowl was useless.

Why?

Because she had deviated from the dream. Didn’t that make sense? Nenuln had told her not to let the High King’s witch escape. But right now Taelin didn’t even know where Sena was or what she was doing. She had become sidetracked by the hospital tents, wanting to help. But as the sounds of a terrible birthing squealed up from the knot of doctors and something grotesque as a giant tadpole was dropped, sloshing and half-dead, into a bucket of bloody water, Taelin realized her error.

This was not what she had come here for.

Neither the patient nor its offspring survived and Taelin could hardly bear to think that this illness had spread south, beyond Sandren. She watched part of the autopsy; saw how the brain of the victim had suffered like its flesh. Several physicians gasped during the procedure. “I don’t know how he walked in here,” Baufent said. “See the decay? The cerebellum and basal ganglia are almost totally destroyed.”

“He?” asked Taelin.

Baufent looked up at her between the hunched shoulders of the other doctors around the table. Despite the birth, Baufent said, “Indeed.”

But the patient had walked. And so had others. Those that had not chewed off their tongues still whispered. The stories were garbled, about slippery creatures that had brought the plague to Sandren. Although they sounded preposterous, Dr. Baufent seemed to take them at face value. She assured Taelin that this had happened before.

“If you’re not going to bed, I could use your help.”

Taelin looked over her shoulder as if Sena might be there. She pondered going to bed. Then, reluctantly, she made the southern hand sign for yes and followed Baufent to the next gurney.

“Can you hand me that anesthesia inhaler?”

Taelin looked at the nearby tray. The funnel-shaped contraption was easy to sort out. She passed it to the doctor. As she did, the patient reached up and grabbed her wrist. Taelin cried out. Baufent jumped forward and tried to slap the hand away. But the patient looked up with deathly golden eyes and maintained its grip. “We came for you,” it said. Its eyes burned into Taelin’s face. “The flawless are coming.” Its other hand reached toward her chest. “Coming for you.”

Dr. Anselm appeared out of nowhere and wrestled with the patient’s hand. Finally its fingers loosened and Taelin felt her wrist come free.

“Get her out of here!” shouted Anselm. “She’s supposed to be under quarantine!”

Taelin stumbled backward as the scene cluttered with bodies. Baufent, coat covered with greasy salve and plague excretions and the sticky residue of her own sweat called out that it was her fault. She examined Taelin’s wrist. “It’s just a scratch.” But she doused Taelin’s entire arm with antiseptic. “You’ve had your shot. You’re going to be fine. Now get out of here.”

Heart still hammering, Taelin backed away, twisting at her necklace, bending the edges back and forth. Useless. She was in the wrong place.

For a while she stood in the darkness at the edge of the tent, watching the brilliant red smell-feasts suckle their meals. Scarlet oyster bodies with long tendrils wrapped the patients and undulated against them. Their sucking mouths worked against the toxins while Baufent supervised the operation.

I need to find Sena,
she thought.

She considered sneaking onto the
Odalisque,
or into the palace where she had heard the High King was now staying.

Finally, she went back to her cot. The unfinished game of cards seemed like it belonged to a different week. She tried to remember what day it was. Had it really only been yesterday morning that they had arrived in Sandren? It was hard to believe. She felt dizzy and lay down on her side. The thin blanket she had been given was too small to cover her feet.

She closed her eyes, listened to herself breathing. She hugged a tiny pillow to her chest for comfort and felt the demonifuge press against her breastbone. The place on her wrist, where the creature had grabbed her, itched. Taelin tried not to think about it. Nenuln would keep her safe.

CHAPTER

17

Dawn had barely broken on the fifteenth and Caliph knew that flying back to Isca was impossible. The batteries on the
Odalisque
were so depleted that even descending from the city-state would be treacherous. Unfortunately, the palace’s chemical pumps had been turned off, presumably as a precaution. Caliph imagined the lord mayor bravely locking things down, trying to ensure that the sickness would stay here, trapped in the mountains.

The valves, the pumps, all of it was a mystery to Caliph. Even Alani was helpless. Most of the instructions were printed in High Malk.