Black Bottle Page 10

  Caliph steps back from the beautiful sprawl. Dizzy, glazed. But she cannot dehorn him.

  He is staring into her face. Staring at a blue sun. All that matters is his unity with the attractor inside her. He wants to dash himself against her and be utterly destroyed.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Since early spring, three Pandragonian bureaucrats have disappeared. One leaves a sprinkle of brown flecks, dried blood like half a dozen exterminated chinches on otherwise immaculate designer sheets. The second leaves a richly upholstered bariothermic car whispering at the side of the road. The third leaves nothing at all.

  The Sisterhood uses Miriam to orchestrate these minatory escalations of Shradnae diplomacy not because she is Pandragonian and therefore moves unnoticed through the south, but because the Eighth House trusts her completely.

  With the last bureaucrat’s disappearance, summer fades and the entire coven turns restless.

  Miriam returns from Pandragor on furlough and is admitted to the Sixth House. Bored, she takes a part-time post overseeing Parliament’s “nursery.” She wonders what is happening to the Sisterhood.

  In the nursery, she overhears girls in the Second House speaking furtively after lights-out about Sienae Iilool and the Willin Droul9: the Lua’groc … the terrifying Cabal of Wights. In Parliament’s vast east wing, they drape themselves over iron bed frames and thin mattresses. It is hot but the windows are open. Some sit cross-legged on the floor, letting the final sweet pantings of summer lap over them. Their white gowns ripple over willowy limbs and small breasts. They speak in Withil, practicing the cant so that if they are caught they can say they have been studying.

  Miriam does not bother them. She stands in the shadows and listens to the mythopoeic fertility of fourteen-year-old mouths.

  “She used to be one of us.”

  “Really? Stupid.”

  “I wonder if she’s stronger than the Eighth House.”

  “No one’s stronger than the Eighth House.”

  “She was stronger than Megan.”

  “Shh. What if someone hears?”

  “Without the book, she’s nothing. That’s what Haidee says.”

  “I hate Haidee.”

  “Haidee’s going to be Coven Mother, idiot.”

  “I still hate her.”

  “Why haven’t they already picked someone? To replace Megan?”

  “They should pick me!”

  Mocking laughter from all of them.

  “No. Me!”

  “Shut up. It’s not funny anymore.”

  “Maybe Giganalee’s lost her mind … she’s soooo old.”

  “I’m telling.”

  “You do and I’ll kill you.”

  “Bitch!”

  “Eat me.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  More laughter.

  “I bet they haven’t picked someone because they’re scared. What if Sena just kills whoever they pick? Just like Megan?”

  “They should pick you, then.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Maybe they’re waiting to get her book.”

  “They’re all afraid of her. I bet she’s stronger than Giganalee.”

  “No one’s stronger than Giganalee.”

  “I bet she is.”

  Miriam retreats from the childish, circular talk. Over the course of several weeks she answers the Eighth House’s pointless questions and fills the old woman’s hookah for her with herbal fruits. Maybe the ancient woman really is losing her mind. Maybe she’s just high. To Miriam, the Sisterhood feels different. She senses a change in the organization, a lack of businesslike ambition that it used to have when Megan was still alive. Instead of feeling awed and inspired, she feels ambivalent, despondent and unsure. Since Megan’s funeral, the Sisterhood has felt headless.

  Unofficial “representatives” from Pandragor claim the transumption hex was a failure. They say it did not dislodge Caliph Howl from the throne as promised and that they are not obligated to adhere to the bargain. They will not attempt to get the Sisterhood’s book.

  In retaliation, the Sixth House in particular has tried to send a message, but the Pandragonians are not afraid. They say that if any more of their bureaucrats turn up missing, Skellum (and Parliament) will be razed.

  Not that Pandragor, as a government, would ever admit to dealing with witches or that those dealings had gone sideways, but Miriam knows Emperor Junnu is quite capable of concocting other reasons for war.

  There are rumors that Pandragor has taken an interest in the Cisrym Ta. The emperor may be trying to secure it for himself.

  She wonders again what has happened to the Sisterhood. Bullied by governments, murdered by the Willin Droul, terrified of a girl with a legendary book.

  Perhaps all of it really is linked to the Cisrym Ta.

  The Eighth House babbles incessantly about it. Every day, Giganalee mutters paranoid expletives. She is convinced that Sena Iilool has opened the book.

  Miriam recalls the Sisterhood’s last encounter with Sena, on a weedy road in Stonehold, surrounded by singing insects and fabricated shadows. It is a chilling encounter that Miriam remembers clearly. She alone had been privy to it.

  But there have been no Shradnae operatives in Stonehold since then. Over a year now. Not even half-sisters. And even if there were, Sena has cut her eyes. She would recognize a Shradnae spy.

  The coven needs a window into Stonehold.

  Miriam spends her time thinking and waiting for opportunities.

  And then it happens. Late in the year, disillusioned with her family’s faith, the daughter of Avidan Mwyr comes sailing out of the south: heading for Stonehold. Her pedigree dictates that she will have access to Isca Castle.

  Taelin Rae is worth using a puslet.

  On the tenth of Oak, the clergywoman arrives in Newlym and disembarks for a bit of shopping at the town’s rustic stores. Miriam is there with a qloin10 and an iatromathematique to perform the procedure.

  That night, while Taelin sleeps, Shradnae witches descend on her stateroom. A thick silence settles over the deck, the halls and mooring lines.

  The window to Taelin’s chamber dehisces without sound. Miriam is one of the black figures that billow in. They encircle Taelin’s bed and drape her in inky cloth. The witches slit their palms and whisper in the Unknown Tongue. Taelin does not wake.

  In the south, machines are made of flesh. The Sisterhood has collected specimens and recipes. Their iatromathematique is capable of this.

  Miriam opens up the jar.

  The smell of apples pervades the room.

  From the nutrient-rich solution the iatromathematique draws out a slick fat blob. It is ugly and nuanced as a rotting wall and does not struggle in the forceps. Rugose folds of gelatin ripple through the puslet’s slippery white-blue mass. But there are other colors: obscure and myriad. Sometimes burgundy, sometimes gray and dun.

  It fits in the iatromathematique’s palm, a tablespoon of horrible pudding. She lets it slip from her fingertips to pool over Taelin’s sleeping eye.

  Taelin convulses. Her eyes open wide. But the witch is already inside it, moving its soulless flesh.

  She lurches the blob without bone or muscle, a pure rearrangement of fluid and cells; then forces it to burrow gob-like into Taelin’s face.

  The iatromathematique is from the Fifth House. And this is not a true qloin. But Miriam knows she is skilled. She helps support the woman’s weight while she is gone, guiding her new body over slippery conchae, up into the sinus, toward the ethmoid. From there, the puslet travels deep, insinuating itself through the sphenoid, up beneath Taelin’s brain.

  The witch positions herself carefully. The puslet’s lab-grown neurons vulture up against Taelin’s meninges but her memories will not be stolen. They will be duplicated. The puslet is a useful tumor and its connections begin instantly to siphon off copies of Taelin’s dreams.

  The iatromathematique withdraws, coming back to herself. The senseless yet ever-se
nsing puslet stays behind, less reactive than plant-life, gathering memory, doing only what its cells have been designed to do.

  Miriam snaps her wrist and pulls the drapery away. For Taelin, the puslet, her night at Newlym: all become paramnesias.

  It is almost exactly a month later when Taelin Rae gets her audience with Sena Iilool.

  Miriam listens to a symphysis in one of Parliament’s inner sanctums. The symphysis’ hideous amorphous bones have not been osteotomically extracted from any “thing.” They fit together in grotesque irregular ways: malleus, incus, hooded by a yellow tissue-thin shroud of membrane. The collective formation looks like a shattered mollusk, part chitinous ruin, part sun-stiffened mantle: a creature broken open by sea birds perhaps and left to bake in the sun.

  The entire grotesquery quivers in the dim light, bones vibrating, membrane singing like scraped catgut. The symphysis speaks.

  Or rather, it seems to speak, as its vibrations resonate with Miriam’s eardrum, conveying from across the miles the second-old memories recorded in the puslet’s spongiose cells.

  Miriam eavesdrops on Taelin’s audience with Sena.

  She is shocked when Sena mentions the smell of apples and then, to Taelin’s great confusion, lays out the itinerary for her trip:

  “… Passing over Mirayhr, over Skellum, near midnight on the twelfth of Tes. You will be unable to stop me there and I will proceed to Sandren. Send whomever you want. The Stairs will kill them.”

  Sena’s voice echoes in the ears of all the sisters in the sanctum. Their puslet has not gone unnoticed. She is speaking through Taelin, directly to the coven. And she is mocking them.

  Miriam is afraid.

  She is still afraid on the twelfth, when the three zeppelins pass directly over Parliament, headed for the south. She kneels on the roof, looking up, waiting for Giganalee to give the sign.

  What is about to happen has not happened in many years. But Miriam tries not to think about it. She has given herself over to the power of the Eighth House.

  Her eyes watch the old crone intently, fearing the signal.

  You can cast what you can cut.

  This rule is the origin of hemofurtum, of spell-slaves and the legends of vast colligations harvested at Twyrloch by Aglogoth11, countersunk three thousand years into the past. Attempts to exceed the power bottled in a human body.

  But Miriam’s mind has wandered. Giganalee is raising her arms now.

  Pulse thrumming, Miriam draws her kyru. She sets the crescent-shaped blade against her throat. It requires both hands, one in front, one in back: reaching around behind her head. Already she has cut herself—unintentionally—on the blade’s fabulous edge.

  Giganalee’s arms fall.

  It is time. Miriam almost waits to see if the others are brave enough to follow through before embarking on this plunge into madness. Instead, she pulls the blade’s handle through a complete three-hundred-sixty-degree orbit, slicing through the skin. As blood rolls down her back and chest and shoulders, Miriam speaks in the Unknown Tongue.

  She feels her stomach loosen.

  * * *

  EACH qloin contained a cephal’matris and two ancillas. Sena saw them, some of them newly cursed. The kneeling bodies slumped over, one at a time, arms limp, kyrus clattering from senseless fingers. They did not fall instantly. Some even seemed to levitate for a moment, knees coming off the roof. The only parts of them that scraped against the slate were the toes of their boots. Torsos lifted as the guts in their midsections slid up and bottlenecked; jammed in their throats. Not until the heads finally pulled loose did the knees drop and the decapitated, disemboweled carcasses land like sandbags before rolling to the side.

  The Eighth House released the flock of heads from the roof of Parliament like a flight of black balloons into the stinging sky. Space stared down, a mapach with a thousand eyes. There was no wind to speak of. Three times three—a knot of qloins—nine witches pulled free from Parliament’s roof: and flew.

  Sena watched them come, dragging kidneys, stomachs, lungs and yards of intestine below them: slick and tangled. Strange dark jellyfish. Luminaries bled from livers and arteries, leaving trails in the blue-black sky: organs twinkling like fireflies.

  The witches’ eyes glittered with carvings. Their heaving lungs steamed in the icy air.

  This was not minor. This was not a halfhearted attempt. A knot of qloins ascended and Sena felt the hairs on her arms bristle with a facsimile of fear.

  “Caliph,” she whispered. “It’s time to wake up.”

  * * *

  FAINT operatic sounds trailed through Taelin’s dreams, pessimal and loathsome. Dream-paint limned a soprano warbling through the upper reaches of terror while the repeated plunge of a knife deflated the sound; the residue was a ragged rhythm of gooey whispers, soft and sick-making.

  Heavy boots grumbled in the hall beyond her door. Finally, a guttural yelp propelled her up, through her incubus, and into a forward lurch, eyes wide, hands clenched in her sheets. Her ears were ringing. Had there been another sound? Some kind of thud? She stared at her lap in the dark, listened acutely. Through near-total silence she heard ticking.

  Where am I?

  But the smell of wood polish and the faint vibration of the propellers reminded her. Her sheets were dewy.

  She swung her legs over the side of the berth and dialed down the thermal crank. The ticking slowed. She reached for her bra, dangling on the back of a chair, pulled it off and wrapped it around her waist. Something interrupted the moonlight pouring through her room’s only porthole.

  Frightened, she poised mid-fasten. The back of her throat felt tacky and dry. She wanted a glass of water but pulled up her holster, thumbed its straps over her shoulders and sidled toward the window instead. An infinite indigo and silver-specked canopy sloshed around the moons.

  The soprano offered up another disquieting gurgle: crossing boundaries from the province of sleep. It was faint, high-pitched and filtered through the hum of the airship. Could it be night birds?

  Taelin buttoned up her blouse and tucked her thick cotton pants into her boots before unlocking her door and stepping into the rich paneled hallway, which felt abnormally cold.

  She passed a gaslight flickering in a henna sconce. Its red light quavered down the hall and landed on the body of a man. His shoulder and head propped open the door at the end of the passageway that led to one of the fore observation decks. A harsh, freezing wind whined in.

  For a moment Taelin stood staring at the slumped figure. A large shadow from the sconce moved horribly over his back like a feeding specter. She recognized it as an illusion conjured by the drafty hallway, but the flapping darkness made the body doubly terrifying. Taelin took a step back then, berating herself, scooted forward and crouched down to see if she could rouse him. He wasn’t breathing.

  With some difficulty, she rolled him onto his back. No visible injuries. She screamed for help then pumped his chest with her palms. The wind took the door and folded it back on its hinges. A blast of icy air tore through the hall. The light went out. For a second, she heard the gas continue to hiss, then the safety valve squeaked and Taelin was alone with the wind.

  The man’s body seemed to be cooling.

  She tried to pull him away from the door, gripping his ankles. He was two hundred pounds of nothing she could move. She screamed again for help.

  “Lady Rae?”

  Taelin turned around at the voice, instantly relieved. “Mother of Mizraim, thank gods—” But her vision was adjusting to the dark. When she saw the speaker, when she saw the nightmare form that filled the hallway, she lurched sideways over the man, eyes ringent. Her feet kicked at the floor. Taelin gagged and shrieked and pushed herself through the doorway, out onto the deck. Air currents poured over her as the ship barreled south.

  She scrambled to her feet.

  From the blackness inside the door frame, the man’s arm still extended across the threshold, gray and motionless. And above it, a woman’s
voice curdled, vowels strange and lilting: “Ooo fundou hiroo. Shioo osou hirioo!” The firefly twinkle of tiny lights oozed through the doorway.

  Taelin tried to block out the memory of the floating head, the octopus-jumble of sickly shapes beneath it: tendrils, lumpy masses and the filaments of veins, but she could not shake it.

  She turned to run and pulled up short, horrified by another body. This one lay on her side like a sleeper in a heavy leather jacket. The wind stirred her hair. Lying beside the woman was a velvet gun.

  Taelin scooped it up and ran.

  The weapon was heavy but it was also soft and silky, like the belly of a cat. It undulated in her grasp. She nearly dropped it, but moved her hands back from the living part to the wooden stock. It made a bubbling mucous sound.

  Taelin mounted a metal staircase that corkscrewed up from the deck and onto the roof of the cabins. She nuddled into the cramped cable-strung space that ran beneath the gasbags. Tools, boxes and weights were piled on the flat roof, instigating stumbles.

  She could smell the chemicals from the aft batteries and see the ebbing green patterns that bled from slender glass windows on the housings. The emerald radiance together with the gold-orange sidelights that studded the zeppelin’s port skin, bloomed intermittently through the jungle of cables, creating shapes and shadows that forced Taelin to aim the gun in a host of directions.

  “Hiroo.”

  Taelin screamed. She couldn’t help it. The terror that the voice provoked was intractable. Her finger brushed the trigger as she spun on the sound—so near! The gun’s deep wine-colored nap swelled like a ten-pound catfish at the trigger’s insistence, ballooning for possible ejaculation. Its fur dwindled near the front where fleshy red-purple antennae drooped and curled below half a dozen perfect black pearl-shaped eyes.

  Something floated in the shadows cast by the zeppelin’s starboard battery. It drooled a slow cascade of twinkling motes.

  Taelin, still screaming, fired.

  Thick jets of milk-colored slime squirted from the gun’s oral tubes. Impossible amounts. The viscous lines struck cables and walls then sagged like ropes gone slack from the front of the weapon.