Black Bottle (59 page)

“Yes. An impressive fabrication.”

You know the number is two, don’t you? I knew it when you came back from the Chamber. Who are you planning to take instead of me? After the ink is made, who will you take? Who?

“I’m taking you.”

Lie! Who?

“It’s
you
Nathan. Who else can I take? If I don’t want you to sabotage the glyphs? I have to choose you, don’t I? Isn’t that what you’d do?”

Metallic shrieking filled the lightless recesses of Sena’s head. She was genuinely worried that he might snap. This was the moment that would decide how the rest of the night played out. Nathaniel’s howls slowly dwindled into whimpers that faded across the world.

“You can’t get out without me,” she said, hoping he was still listening. “St. Remora can’t speak for you. St. Remora can’t manipulate a pen. It’s you and me…”

But he was gone. What was he doing? She looked across the intervening miles to St. Remora for a sign. Had she had a heart, it would have been pounding. She looked south toward his stone house in the jungles. Nothing. She looked everywhere but he was powerful in insubstantial ways. In the numbers of nonphysicality, he was expert from long meditation at the edge of the abyss. He hid from her with puissant ease.

St. Remora ticked.

The jungles blew in a damp wind off the sea.

Sena waited, more afraid than perhaps she had ever been.

Fine.

It was a dry hiss, desiccated and startling inside her ear.

But I know about you. I know what’s inside you …

Sena’s stomach turned on itself. Her entire body went cold. “Oh? What’s that?”

Guilt. You feel guilty about what you’re doing.

“You’d have no remorse—”

No. I wouldn’t. That’s the difference between us. That’s why They chose you I think. They’re great connoisseurs of pain.

Sena didn’t dare upset him with another question. She would let him say whatever he wanted. She would do whatever he asked her to do. Because she could taste the end from here. It was within her grasp. Yet if he found out, if he suspected—

I think you’ve waited to make the ink because you have feelings for my nephew. Tell me I’m wrong.

“You’re not wrong.”

You feel guilty, so you want him to know. You need to apologize.

Sena touched the corner of her eye with one fingertip. The strain was written in her neck, in her jaw.

So go apologize to him. You have the tincture. I will give you three hours to say your good-byes. But I warn you. If you set one foot inside my house at Khloht—

“I won’t.”

The shade seemed to incline its head just slightly. Then it was gone.

From the basement of the restaurant came a bang, the sound of a metal door swinging full back. The tramp of feet descended. A light slowly infused the cistern.

Two Veyden men arrived at the bottom of a set of crust-caked cement steps and swung their lanterns over Sena’s form. Despite their great size and the weapons they carried, they looked at her with pale green faces and glossy eyes.

“You don’t want a light down here?” one of them asked.

“No.” Her small form had materialized silently in the middle of the room when their lights had struck it. They were Willin Droul. They wore the Hilid Mark. But they were not Lua’groc, which meant they could still feel fear. It was fear they enjoyed. The awe of the cult kept them invigorated and honest in their efforts to serve it, and it was also their reward. Sena knew this.

“Have the flawless come up?” asked one of the Veydens.

“No. I’m going down to them,” said Sena.

Both men shifted uncomfortably. They were terrified and giddy to the point of euphoria. “The Shradnae Sisterhood has arrived in the eastern ruins—as you predicted,” one of them said.

“Make sure they find the Grand Elesh’Ox.”

“Is that where the sacrifice will take place?” the first Veyden asked.

“Just do it,” she said.

Both Veydens bowed.

“Tell Ku’h,” Sena said, “that I want him to bring Caliph Howl to the tanks.”

The Veydens wondered why. Why bring the king of Stonehold down to her council with the flawless? Would he be an offering? Would the flawless eat him? But neither man would ask this question. They were both too afraid.

*   *   *

A
FTER
talking to Baufent, Caliph took a shower. The stall was plated in mirrors and pierced by recessed lights. Creamy pearls of gold-brown soap ejected automatically into his hand from a liquid dispenser hidden in the wall. The tacky spore-filled stink of the jungle slid off him. Only after that, he imagined, did the desert grit embedded in his pores come up too.

Under the lights, in the mirrors, Caliph looked at himself. Clean at last. He gleamed with uniform color save for a one-inch scar on his arm. He stared at it for a few moments.

Then he got out and toweled off.

He got dressed and went back to the room where Taelin and Baufent were waiting for him. He wanted to grill Taelin before Ku’h’s men returned, but she wasn’t talking. All she would say was that yes, Sena had talked to her, yes Sena had given her instructions, but that no she couldn’t talk about them.

This came as no surprise to Caliph. He expected this sort of nonsense.

“I don’t know whether you took advantage of her or not,” Baufent said as an aside. “But I think she’s suffering severe polymodal hallucinations. Multisensory. I’m not sure she can even tell what’s real anymore. She keeps claiming that you and she—”

“What?” Caliph came momentarily unglued. “Gods no!”

“I see. Well, she’s got a low-grade fever. I checked her, and her one arm is absolutely silver. She’s fighting it off thanks to the vaccine, I think she’ll make it, but … anyone she comes in contact with. Those Veydens for instance.”

“I’m not worried about the Veydens,” Caliph groused.

“Well, obviously they survived the plague here in Bablemum but … they might have stayed clear of physical contact. Taelin was all over that man—”

“I said I’m not worried about them.”

“
I’m
a doctor. It’s my job to worry about everyone.”

“If you knew what I knew, you’d feel the same. Trust me on that.”

“My stomach hurts,” said Taelin.

“Give her one of your tablets,” said Baufent.

Caliph rooted in a pocket for his bottle. What his fingers touched jarred him. He drew out a small cold steel flask, like a memento carried back from a dream. It did not belong here, in his hand.

Staring at it, Caliph forgot Dr. Baufent; he forgot what he had been digging for in his pocket. All he remembered was a little girl with cold fingers who smelled of sugar and glue and Sena smiling as if happy for the first time in her life.

He shook the flask but couldn’t tell if it was empty.

“What’s that?” asked Baufent.

He barely acknowledged her with a mumbled “Dunno. Some kind of tincture I guess.” He unscrewed the cap and peered inside. There was liquid, like dark tea, and a smell that made his mouth water.

He clenched his jaw and screwed the cap back on.
What is going on?
He slipped the flask back into his pocket.

“Everything all right?” asked Baufent.

“Fine.” But now, with all the things he’d read, he began to postulate, against his logical nature, what the dreams Sena had showed him might have meant.

He remembered the antacids and handed them to Baufent who took them with a growly look and gave one to Taelin. The priestess didn’t ask what it was. She munched it like candy.

A knock sounded from the door that led to the airship’s deck.

“Ku’h’s back,” said Baufent. Her voice held mild apprehension.

“You should be happy,” said Caliph. “We can go to dinner.”

CHAPTER

47

Umong was the name of a ruin that jutted like a rotten tooth fifty miles due north of Eh’Luhnah Usoh: Lake of the Sky. There were markers near the ruins—for the starline.

The starline had carried the Sisterhood, which was safer and less costly than the way Miriam had traveled from the desert. Still, whatever had taken Anjie remained between the worlds, and it pressed the starline. Miriam felt it as the Sisterhood went south. She arrived in the ruins with one hundred seventy girls.

It was a devastating blow. The witches had used the starlines with impunity for decades. They were the only ones that knew about them. How could they be attacked en route, while walking lines?

Despite the shock, the dismay and the confusion that every girl felt, Miriam forced them to regroup and get organized. And while they muttered that it didn’t make sense, Miriam thought,
What did?
What did make sense? Certainly not that the Sisterhood had fallen to pieces, that the Country of Mirayhr had been overrun with silver ghouls. That the Willin Droul had taken the entire world by surprise and that, last of all—and most ridiculous—that the Sisterhood’s only hope of survival was to put every resource they had on chasing down one orphan from the islands …

Going after Sena, thematically, didn’t make sense—mechanically it was the only thing Miriam had. The Sisterhood would serve out its purpose. She would see to that.

Miriam’s skin prickled despite the warmth.

Though initially she had seen people near the ruins—huge green-skinned Veydens, looking like businessmen that had been stranded on a tropical island with only fine clothes to wear—they melted into the jungle at the Sisterhood’s arrival.

The ruins consisted of a few scorched and green-carpeted walls that rose from an ancient pile of paint cans. Corrosion had made the cans thin. They resembled hollow cylinders of rust-colored paper, part of the metallic scrap dumped decades ago by the look of it, all shrinking slowly into a vine-solidified mound.

Miriam got the Sisterhood moving right away.

South of the scrubby savannah that spread north and west, tendrils of hungry green supplanted grassland. The city of Bablemum lay just inside the jungle. A seed of commerce and government bounded by ceontes and thousands upon thousands of miles of dense jade-colored rot.

The Sisterhood did not follow the road. Even though their arrival had been noticed, Miriam took them along the jungle’s edge, through waist-deep grass. The sounds of birds, insects and leaves refuted the idea that this was a civilized place. There was no commerce along the road to the north. No people anywhere to be seen.

In addition to scrying on Caliph Howl, the blood-filled dish back in Parliament had shown Miriam other cities. Ekron, Iternum, Nilora and Os. Dadelon, Norwytch, Loonal and Gath. She had glimpsed Horth Gar and Afran. Everywhere it was the same. Disease and madness.

With a mix of compassion and regret, Miriam noticed the contrite and haunted circles around Autumn’s eyes.

It took them the whole day to walk from Umong to the outskirts of the city, following the jungle’s edge. As they neared, pushing through fields of round-bladed grass, Miriam noticed a few Veydens standing on rooftops in the outskirts at a distance of a hundred yards. They must have used their own brand of holomorphy to evade her diaglyphs. Perhaps witch doctors protected them from disease.

Keen as she was to establish contact and gather information, the Veydens withdrew before the Sisterhood could advance. But Miriam didn’t have to follow them. They retreated in the direction of the Iycestokian ship, the place she had pinpointed as Caliph Howl’s location.

Despite her unfamiliarity with the region, Miriam had no need of a map. The bowl of blood had given her the High King’s position and her diaglyphs led the way.

She pushed out of the grassland, into the actual city, and found the metropolis quiet. As evening fell, she could tell her girls were exhausted.

They needed a place to make camp. A building. Power seemed to be cut almost everywhere. Small things worked. Signs burnt with bright colors, sucking their energy from golden wires that coiled into the air and ended miraculously like antennae. But there was one building with noticeably more juice, one that clearly had its own grid, like the localization of chemiostatic power in the north. It glowed, independent of the surrounding darkened streets.

Miriam sent scouts to determine if it was occupied.

Word came back that it was empty, powered on bariothermic coils near the back of the building, and that it seemed tactically sound.

“I don’t like it,” said Autumn.

“I don’t either. But we have more than fifty qloins here.” Miriam looked around. “I don’t want to search for another place with power, do you?”

Autumn waved a hand back and forth.

“No. So we’ll make camp here,” said Miriam. “Then we’ll get some food into the girls. And then we’ll head for the Iycestokian ship.”

It had been two days and one night without sleep. It had been a full day without food. Necessities were necessities.

Miriam led the Sisterhood into the building, which advertised an opulent set of suites. It was an old hotel where dignitaries had stayed, regal and impressive from the outside; posh on the inside. The foyer bore the taint of calamity: a vase of withered flowers, a discarded washrag twisted and hardened with dried blood. A cash register had been overturned and left empty on the carpeted floor. There were a few personal effects abandoned off the waiting area, in the west hall.

Ensuring wealthy guests didn’t have to suffer an outage explained the localized grid. Miriam wondered how long the bariothermic coils would last. Ten, fifteen years without repair?

She assessed the building’s lines of sight. Its position was good. It commanded a clear view of the avenue out front and looked down on all approaching streets. It was also only a few blocks from where the High King’s ship was moored. When she climbed the stairs to the hotel’s roof, she could actually see the airship, levitating amid the trees.

The kitchen had canned goods but no running water.

That made sense if the mayor had discovered where the disease was coming from. He would have depressurized all the mains just prior to Bablemum’s gruesome end.

Bottled juice and alcohol would not go far. Miriam would have to find water soon. What they had carried from Parliament would not last the night.