Black Bottle (56 page)

“Call me callous but I don’t think you really cared about her. I think there’s something you’re not telling me.” Sena looked across the desert, north and west, across the Great Cloud Rift and out to sea. Nathaniel wasn’t lying. Arrian’s head was there, bobbing like driftwood. Why had he gone searching for it? There had to be a reason beyond familial affection.

This wasn’t a game.

Nathaniel didn’t respond to her assessment. He had left the desert and gone out over the sea.

Sena stepped from the sky onto the deck of the Iycestokian ship. Taelin was there, naked and blackish-red from head to toe. By comparison, her eyes and teeth looked incandescent. Dr. Baufent stood in the doorway, watching over Taelin’s shoulder with a terror-riven expression. Her whole body stiffened at the sight of Sena.

Taelin rushed forward. She got down on her knees.

“Shh,” Sena whispered. “Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” She pulled Taelin off the floor. “Get up, Taelin. Get up. We need to get you washed. We need to get everything and everyone washed. And we need to move Caliph into a proper bed. And then we need to get this ship moving again. Are you with me, Taelin? Do you understand?”

Taelin smiled a grisly smile and nodded her hand up and down.

CHAPTER

43

Earlier in the day, the Sisterhood had swung Parliament’s countless metal grilles closed across each towering windowpane. The pins were secured. Doors were bolted. Blood was spilt and the entire ground floor warded and sealed.

Despite this, the windows had shattered within moments of the onslaught and winter had billowed in. A forest of arms still flailed between the bars at every casement. Snow drifted through the central hall. The statue of the Eighth House in the atrium had become part of a frozen wasteland. Nevertheless, the silver mob did not break through.

Miriam mused momentarily over the not-quite irony that Mirayhr’s citizens had always been careful to muffle their criticism of the Witchocracy. Only now—after they could no longer enjoy whatever freedom a victory might earn—had they found the courage for rebellion, for revolution.

But as she stood in an icy balcony off the west wing, overlooking the wild fingerlings of the Willin Droul, Miriam knew this had nothing to do with domestic unrest. All that had happened was that somehow, after hundreds of years of clandestine warfare, the Willin Droul had gotten the upper hand. They had moved their dominion out of slumbering lightless reservoirs and unleashed their disease on an unsuspecting world.

Days ago, when word of the plague had first reached Sandren, many of the lower Houses had struck out through the cold. They had gone while Miriam was away, before the citizenry had turned. Before it was clear what was happening, sisters of the Fourth House and below had gone to be with their relatives.

If Miriam had been here she might have stopped them. Megan certainly would have stopped them. Those sisters that had stayed behind now maintained their vigil from Parliament’s second floor.

Two hundred twenty-two women. Hardly a crowd. More like the number of tourists on a slow day, a scant sprinkling, nearly lost amid the frescoed empyreal chambers. They were all that was left to guard the seat of Shradnae power.

Naobi burned five nights from full, pure white above the milling yard, which gave Miriam a clearer view of the numbers they faced. A thousand at least. Hundreds had frozen to death, but others had arrived. Their cries filled Miriam like the white moon filled the ice on the balcony railing.

Miriam looked up and imagined a vast ghostly squirming in the abyss beyond Naboi’s vivid corona.

Polar lights?
she thought.

After crossing lines from the desert how could she think that? They had lost Anjie between the worlds. They had lost so many girls. They had lost their position of power here in Skellum and now, they had also lost the book—a secret she was trying to keep from the Sisterhood.

To Miriam, the faint ebbing tendrils in the sky were sinister. As if the Devourer had come back and turned its ravening on them. Was this it? Was she the last head of the mighty Shradnae witchocracy, destined to cope with the crumbling infrastructure Megan had left behind?

The sky swirled horribly above Parliament, black and hissing.

“Everyone’s assembled.”

Miriam felt ambushed. She had not heard Autumn approach. Now she could make out the ice crackling underfoot. It bothered her that Autumn had snuck up on her without even trying.

I’m a detriment,
Miriam thought.
A liability.
Her injury could, in the course of any engagement, prove disastrous. Autumn knew it but said nothing.

Miriam smiled at Autumn whose calm, sweet-timbred voice, rather than reassuring her, reminded Miriam of all they had been through—and where they were going.

“All right,” Miriam said. She kissed Autumn on the mouth, softly. Then she put her arms around her and held her close.

“It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. She could feel Autumn’s shoulders tremble inside the embrace. Thankfully there was no sound.

“We’re going to catch her,” said Miriam. “We’ll end this. I promise you. We’re going to be all right.”

*   *   *

M
IRIAM
left the balcony and the soft whickering cries of the ghouls and went into the yawning end of Parliament’s largest meeting hall. All that remained of the Sisterhood was here, gathered by firelight and colorful metholinate lamps. Perhaps there were still qloins in Yorba or Greymoor but birds had been sent and none had returned. So this was it. All of them.

The room stilled as she took her position.

Miriam took a sheet of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it. She held it loosely, in one hand.

“Here we are,” she began. Her voice cracked. She had never been comfortable in front of crowds.

“The questions you have are simple. ’How did this happen?’

“‘Where did this terror come from?’ And most importantly, ’What do we do now?’

“All of us have lost friends and loved ones. I share your grief. As you know, until this morning, I was in the south, tracking Sena. Over the past three days I have lost some of my best friends. I was forced to leave them: in Sandren. And in the desert.

“We know from what papers were able to publish before sickness stopped the presses that the Willin Droul’s disease is everywhere. It is in the north and the south, the east and the west.

“The people of other nations cannot understand the significance of this event. Sadly, it may be too late for many of them to ever learn. But
we
know. We know this sickness marks the end that our enemies have long threatened.

“We knew this would happen if the Willin Droul ever returned. The Sisterhood was founded on preparing for this war.

“I know some of you believe Sena has assumed the mantle of the Eighth House. That Giganalee passed it on to her before she died.

“Even if that is true … Sena must be stopped.

“How do we stop a myth? How do we stop a legend?

“We stop it with truth. We stop it with determination. We stop it because we must. And most importantly, we stop it
together.

“We cannot fear the future. For the enemy’s sickness we have wards. For the enemy’s lies we have truth. Against their desires for destruction and chaos, we will bring the hammer of order and hope. We will meet them with blade and tongue.

“We will turn them, we will win. And when we prevail, when their false hopes have been heaped in the street, we will have fulfilled the thing this Sisterhood was destined to fulfill.

“Prepare yourselves. Tonight, we fly. Together we go south. Our enemy will know fear.”

Miriam raised her slender fist.

A subdued cheer went up in the hall.

*   *   *

E
VEN
from under Parliament’s roof Miriam could sense the cold empty wave-like motion of the sky. It leaned on Parliament’s ancient steel trusses.

Dizzy and upset, she left the front of the room, barely acknowledging the applause.

Autumn would get the girls sorted.

Returning to Skellum had turned out to be critical. Another day without leadership and she might have found the whole of Parliament empty, the entire Sisterhood disbanded.

And that was the most demoralizing part of the Sisterhood’s situation. The flawless had not come to Skellum. In Skellum there were no primeval horrors. Here, there were only fingerlings. It was just the disease and the onset of the transformation.

The Willin Droul had not found it necessary to send a single cabalist to the Shradnae seat of power. No battles with ancient abominations here as there had been in Sandren. Miriam felt the hot embarrassment of that truth: that the Willin Droul no longer considered her organization a threat.

The Sisterhood could not stay in Skellum. Here they were trapped and useless.

In the Shifting Sands near Umong a pile of markers delimited the starline that the Sisterhood would follow. There in the wreckage, outside of Bablemum, the entire Sisterhood would arrive—perhaps irrevocably—in the deep south.

Miriam had used Megan’s scrying dish to find Caliph Howl, filling it with her own blood. The sacrifice had bought her fifteen minutes of insight; the numbers in the bowl had told her he had arrived over Bablemum.

This was frightening because it meant, most likely, that he was still chasing Sena and that Sena had indeed arrived in the oldest city on the Tebesh Plateau.

Bablemum was where the Bedrigan Aquifer bubbled up. So ancient that the locals took pride in their
fossil water,
as if some antediluvian vitality imbued what came up through pipes and wells. A local company bottled it and shipped it all over the Tebesh Plateau at exorbitant prices.

Used to anyway.

The oldest city in the south had looked ominously silent through the blood in Miriam’s dish.

Why would Sena lead him to Ulung? That dark watery stronghold within the aquifer? Was Sena just a puppet of the Willin Droul? If so, could the Sisterhood face the flawless at Ulung with any hope of success?

Miriam thought about the aquifer, which connected through underground seas and rivers, to the east, west and north. Prehistoric cracks that led beneath the Ghalla Peaks had allowed the flawless to poison Sandren. They could reach Stonehold. They could reach anywhere.

There was no telling how many of them were down there, sliding through the dark, tainting the drinking water of a million cities with disease.

CHAPTER

44

Despite having woken from a terrible dream, Caliph breathed easily. His body tingled with pleasant, torpid warmth. The dusty rawness of the desert, which had made his throat sore and shunted blood through his sinuses, had been replaced with gauzy humidity. Air soft as cobwebs dragged over his skin; he could hear the outside world, ebbing on the draft. Based on sounds, someone had put him to bed with the window open.

His ears opened like sinkholes, funneling sound directly into his brain. He was curious where he was, but still too sleepy to open his eyes.

Big occasional droplets dinged on tin, thumped on wood. Intermittent. There were tree sounds as well, or maybe grass, behind which murmured a faintly unnatural urban stillness. Soft electrical purring mixed with the unmistakable sob of tree frogs.

Caliph lingered, enjoying the after-rain smell and the softness of his pillow.

Faint flickers and far-off thunder encouraged him to stir. His last memory was of Taelin bending over him. He swallowed hard. His throat itched and his eyes were puffy and hot. The air tingled with sweet black molds and mildew.

He squinted; sat up; dug the crust out of his tear ducts and realized that he didn’t feel nearly as well as he had thought. Though warm drugs still gloated in his capillaries, vague pains lingered.

He set his feet on the cool flooring and peered toward the window.

“Mizraim … Emolus—”

He got up and stumbled toward the astonishing view.

Beyond the window, the sky boiled with ultramarine storm clouds, immolated by Naobi.

He was still on the Iycestokian ship. He recognized the smell. But while he slept, it had moored at the edge of a city where great stupas, not of stone but of ornamental iron, enmeshed the clouds. Black cage-like shrouds surrounded and capped the city’s more compact structures.

Purple lights in cupolas and minarets bled wetly through the grilles. Copper wires and golden transformers traced the blackness with countercoiled designs. Signs glowed and bubbled in the empty streets. Tropical trees hissed as wind pushed through husk-like silken fronds.

He drank it in for several moments. Then he noticed a folded stack of papers, propped up, labeled with his name in Sena’s handwriting. He picked the papers up nervously. They were paper-clipped together. Their contents had been typed.

He read them by moonlight and scowled.

Session #2: Phismas, Sae 9
Stenographer: X. Fadish
Subject: [redacted]

How are you feeling?

[redacted]

Good. What would you like to talk about today?

[redacted]

I see.

That’s a lot.

Well let me try to respond to all of that. I’ll start by saying yes. The Veydens do say that visions without actions are only dreams.

[redacted]

No. No one really knows where the Veydens got their pseudosciences from. Some claim they deciphered old stones in the jungle.

[redacted]

Yeah, well the Pplarian-Gringling link is really just speculation. You’d be hard-pressed to get a group of scholars to believe—

[redacted]

Sure, but nowadays, Greeny
culture
is practically invisible. We’re like birds in the market. We’ve been skinned and chopped into anonymous pieces. Our origins have been sterilized.

[redacted]

I’m entitled to use it. It doesn’t offend me at all. I like to remember that we’re green. I like the stigma: of wealth and cunning, smelling like turpentine and expensive smoke.

[redacted]

No, it’s
not
what we used to be about. We didn’t used to sell our secrets to the companies. But now look at us: in posh apartments on the avenues, living above Ilek and Pandragon and Despche alike.