Black Bottle Page 25

  Did Sena serve the Pplar? Or was it the other way ’round?

  Miriam set these and many other questions aside. All that mattered for the moment was catching Sena. The puslet told her that Caliph Howl was intent on the same thing, that he didn’t want the world to end and that he was someone she could use.

  Miriam was forced to change her plan yet again. Had it been available, she would have used the tremendous amount of energy necessary for both qloins to cross lines onto Sena’s ship. Not only was crossing lines exponentially more dangerous than walking lines, but it required so many holojoules—three hundred sixty murdered people for both qloins—that even if she killed the High King’s entire entourage it wouldn’t have been half enough. She would have done it. She wished there were enough bodies to use.

  But it simply wasn’t going to happen. The only thing to do was use the Odalisque to chase Sena down.

  Miriam watched the chaos unfold below her while clinging to the airship’s belly with gooey holomorphic fingers. Her ancillas were nearby.

  The Cabal’s flawless had slunk up from Sandren’s fissures and the High King’s forces were now pinned beneath them, stretched like softened metal across the anvil of the Ghalla Peaks. It would be an unlikely partnership if she saved the High King.

  He was standing stupidly with his back to the flawless, completely exposed and staring at a tree on the edge of the cement.

  Miriam blamed the puslet. It was dirty.

  The only thing giving her pause was Caliph’s spymaster. She desperately wanted him torn in half by the flawless. Then it would be safer for her to intervene. She hesitated a moment more, knowing that her window of opportunity was closing.

  Finally, she gave the signal and popped the cork on a small capsule of blood. The grume of the battle was too far below for hemofurtum. She let go of the Odalisque and shouted. All six sisters glided out of the zeppelin’s shadow.

  The boundary between the Sisterhood and its ancient enemy passed behind her as Miriam skimmed the trees, eyes focused on the flawless, which were still wolfing down human-shaped bites.

  The flawless were not half-breeds. These eel-headed hulks had erupted from bygone cisterns like ancient gods. As bewildering as it was that these fables should reveal themselves here and now, Miriam’s time for idle thought ended as her feet touched the ground. Her momentum carried her into a run.

  On her left, marked out by their use of velvet guns, the last three of the spymaster’s handpicked agents were fighting alongside him. Fighting was inaccurate. What Alani and his agents were trying to do was slow the flawless down. It wasn’t working. The flawless moved unhindered, relentlessly eating their way through the last people standing. But they seemed distracted.

  Miriam tried to understand what they were looking at. Her eyes rolled up.

  It was the Odalisque.

  Some of them reached into the sky, twenty feet or more, pawing. One tried to jump. It was futile. The ship was far out of reach.

  Miriam looked away as she raced toward Caliph Howl. Combat was not the answer here. Her only goal was securing the High King. If he died, the chase for Sena would be over.

  Miriam motioned toward Caliph’s idle form at the edge of the cement. Her ancillas, like her, were already sprinting toward him. Then, across the expanse of cement, Miriam locked eyes with the spymaster. She saw him through the mutant limbs of one towering flawless. His knives gleamed in his hands. The next instant, he held only one.

  Miriam tried to steer her momentum but he had gauged his throw too well. The knife struck her like a brick. She went into a roll, tumbling over the slab. Clearly, he had seen her heading for the High King and misinterpreted her intent.

  Miriam blinked. She was on the ground. Her body ached from several more or less vague locations. The knife still stuck in her back, point embedded in her shoulder blade. Gravity tugged it. So did her movements. When her scapula slid beneath her skin, the blade cut her again.

  She reached back with her other hand and wrenched it out.

  Already he was coming for her. Or was he?

  She had never seen an old man move so fast, cutting a half-circle out from the tangle of enemies. Nearby, one of his remaining agents floated above the ground. Oozing bulbous tendrils around the monster’s upper jaw guided the agent to a quivering pink conclusion.

  Miriam saw another flawless reach for the spymaster. Its arm stretched several yards but Alani’s feet hiccupped, popping him into a jump that propelled him just out of reach.

  The spymaster wasn’t coming for her. He was running for Caliph Howl and her ancillas. His second knife had already left his hand. It was better aimed and took Medea in the back, through vital organs. She dropped instantly which pulled Anjie, Miriam’s second, up short.

  Miriam cursed. She could read the stunned look of fear in Anjie’s eyes as the girl registered what had just happened. Anjie found the source of the knife. She understood who was coming for her.

  Miriam’s diaglyphs calculated for her as she palmed the old assassin’s knife. The other qloin had touched down not far away and was trying to reach her from the direction of the palace. This was the agreed course of action, but when they met the flawless, the other qloin stopped dead.

  Miriam’s dash toward the king faltered as her legs spasmed. Her body tensed under the shrieking sound of hydraulics. It was very close to that sound. One of the flawless had barked. The blast of sound put her on her kneepads. She skidded to a stop, hands over her ears. Her cheek coursed with blood.

  She took two deep breaths but couldn’t hear a thing. Massive frog feet were moving toward her. The concrete cracked. In mundane dissociation with everything else, a colony of insects whose nest beneath the slab had been broken open, poured out like a spreading stain.

  The flawless’ great weight had broken through the stone. It mounted a slab of jutting cement and looked in her direction.

  Miriam got her legs moving. They carried her as if she clung to someone else’s back. In front of the pain there was fear and fear was the trigger for her training. Most of the hardwired responses—screaming, folding up in the fetal position—had been ripped out and replaced with other options. The one that served her best at the moment was run.

  She hit the ground as hard and fast as she could. Both feet pounding. She looked back to see a curtain of metallic-gray skin stretch between phalanges and thighs. The enormous candy-sucker eyes glared at her as she tore over the cement. The singular horn of the flawless’ right hand pulled it into a leap, using the sundered skyward slab of concrete for leverage.

  Airborne and impossible, like a dead tree in a cyclone, it hurled toward her.

  When it landed, it broke the cement again, lifting a new section out of the ground. Miriam catapulted off the end, an athlete hoping to clear a chasm, sailing over the grass, trajectory uncertain. She flew past the desperate battle between her ancilla and the spymaster, toward the oblivious High King.

  In an unintended excess of accuracy, she landed so close to Caliph Howl that she stumbled into him. The impact sent the sword in his hand dipping toward the ground. It made a dull, loud thump and steam or smoke rose from the sod.

  He spun on her with a confused look in his face, thumb flicking the end of his weapon. It popped, crackled almost, and began humming again. He lifted it menacingly.

  “King Howl, we have to—”

  And then the silence was back, deeper and more profound. Her head felt like it was underwater. She lifted a hand to the side of her face. She was bleeding from her left ear and the sun had gone behind a shadow, as if the Odalisque had moved in front of it.

  But it was not the Odalisque.

  The High King’s jaw was set as he powered his black sword into a swing aimed just right of Miriam’s head.

  Miriam dropped Alani’s knife and tried to get out of the way. What greeted her was the horn-like appendage of the flawless falling shy, spare inches, and lodging in the ground: incongruous as a giant stalactite taken from a cave and hur
led into the sod. Maybe it was intentional. Maybe it was another act of the ancient Lua’groc leveraging its enormous body.

  Maybe it had missed.

  On the other side of the horn and the arm it was attached to, Alani had just driven his long-knife up below the creature’s sternum, under its alien rib cage.

  The eel head gave no indication of pain. Its barbels flexed and Miriam felt her boots lift off the ground. The thing was levitating her into its mouth.

  She cried out but Anjie could not assist. She had refocused on the king, determined to follow through with the plan, determined to get him out of here alive. Ignoring Alani’s knife, which was still buried presumably in its soft organs, the flawless opened its mouth to receive Miriam and at that instant the High King’s sword hit bone.

  Miriam saw a flash of light. She went blind. Her eyebrows singed. Unable to see or hear, she lost all sense of balance. Her body promptly fell to the ground and slid down the slope. She smelled dirt and grass and felt loam pack itself under her nails.

  She blinked, scrambling. On her feet again in an instant.

  The world was coming back in bleached panorama, faded tints and shapes that gradually made sense.

  She lurched back up the slope. Only a few feet. She hadn’t fallen far. The smoking body of the flawless had collapsed into a kind of massive tripod, bones and cooked flesh propped up somewhat by the weight of the limbs. The whole hideous shape seemed anchored by the creature’s horned hand: still stuck fast in the dirt.

  Caliph Howl was clicking the end of his weapon but the thing no longer hummed. Its battery was spent. He looked drugged and did not seem to notice that the same massive electrical burst that had fried the Lua’groc had also charred his spymaster, who had been caught weapon in hand, fully intersecting the creature.

  Alani Anjin, former grandmaster of the Long Nine, was dead.

  Miriam gripped the High King by his bicep and forced him into a bewildered jog toward the palace, motioning for Anjie and her other two remaining girls to protect their flank.

  Her eyes burned; she still couldn’t hear out of her left ear. The barks had done permanent damage. There were several flawless, standing more or less in the middle of the vast slab. One was looking up distractedly at the Odalisque while its fellows played with the bodies strewn at their feet.

  Miriam tugged the High King off the slab, down into a pit set with steps. She shoved him through a metal door into a machinery room, then turned and counted heads. Autumn had made it in, thank gods. So had Gina. Including Anjie and herself, four of the original six were accounted for.

  “What happened to the other two?”

  “They’re gone.”

  There wasn’t time to mourn. She told Autumn to watch Caliph before darting back up the stairs.

  When she got far enough up that her head peeked over the slab, she locked eyes with one of the flawless. The others were jumping on great legs, trying to reach the airship, cracking the cement further with each attempt. Her missing girls were nowhere in sight. The flawless chirped and its cohorts turned to look at her.

  Back! Down the steps. She could feel the vibrations as they pounded toward her. She banged the metal door and grabbled with the bolt. Snap! The metal bent in, creased by the tremendous impact. On the first blow, daylight luxuriated around the frame.

  Chirping noises followed, then two tentative taps on the door. Despite their massive frames, Miriam knew the flawless could fold themselves up. Their skin was slippery. They could certainly pass through this doorway.

  She was already moving through the machines, into dark, rough-cut spaces at the back of the room.

  She heard the High King mumble a vague complaint. He couldn’t see where he was going, but her compasses were shining. They told her what to do.

  She caught up with her ancillas and helped ferry the monarch of Stonehold down a second set of stairs. The steps transitioned from stone to metal and shuttled them through a passageway and onto a steel maintenance platform anchored beneath one of the enormous arms that supported Sandren’s teagle system. A blast of fresh air and a dizzy blue expanse pulled Miriam up short.

  The world reeled below her as if on the end of a chain. Thousands of feet separated her reality from the hovering mist-pale landscape that formed the foothills of the Ghalla Peaks. This place was meant for tethers and well-trained technicians. Its flooring was grated and when Miriam looked down she could see the cliffs.

  A control box sat nearby for summoning the elevator but Miriam knew they didn’t have time. Even here, buffeted by wind, she could smell the ichthyic stench gassing from the tunnel. She pulled a backup kyru from her other hip and nodded meaningfully to Autumn. Then, she stabbed the High King in the arm, right through his clothing, and began running the numbers. He made a surprised but quiet sound and didn’t fight back.

  Oh wait, she thought. I’m bleeding …

  She had forgotten her own injury. In her desperate quest for holojoules, she had cut him pointlessly. The realization caused an unexpected ache of sympathy and for a moment her attention turned to him. She noticed his solidity, the muscle packs of his chest and abdomen as she supported him at the brink of infinity. He did not feel like a politician in her arms (she had held several of them) and she pondered a moment over the fact that he had managed to single-handedly bring down two of the flawless despite the vitiated puslet in his brain.

  Maybe Sena’s choice in men was better than she thought.

  Behind her, a dull clangor echoed from the tunnel mouth, possibly the sound of a metal door being flung across a cinder block room. She maneuvered the High King into position, then pressed her weight into his back. She pulled her legs up, wrapped all her limbs around him and held on tight. He fell like an old tree trunk, pitching north off the platform. She clung to that resistance and they fell together, one dead weight, hurtling toward the pastel fields that spun three miles below.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Like a grub turned out on a shovel’s blade from rich loam into the cold, the Pplarian ship is threshing vaguely in the wind. Sena walks toward it. Her jacket is a snapping crimson flag. She tries not to think about the people she has murdered but feels the act passing through her.

  She cannot pull back from it.

  It is part of her now. Not just a line crossed or a door opened. For lines and doors are things a person moves over and through. They are things a person swiftly leaves behind. She has passed over and through but she carries the act with her to the other side into a fuzzy, numb reality of death and violence and orchestrated mayhem. And in fact, even this is wrong.

  Because what is really happening is that the act is carrying her, not the other way around. It is the murder that is keeping her on her feet, moving. Without it she would collapse. As if death itself is offering her a gift for working such a wondrous miracle in its name, the horror of the act is muted and only the empty sky, the silence of the space she has willed into existence, remains. The horrible euphoria of this moment is staggering.

  The power of the murder has usurped the person she used to be. It has become her. In an instant. She has become the newest face of reckless, selfish death.

  The holojoules snatched from the discreated airships swirl around her. They are the fruit of over seven thousand cuts20 of blood. Nathaniel is haunting her, touching her, marveling at her. And he is asking why.

  Sena steels herself. She does not answer. With great effort she manages to twist her mouth into a pawky smile. She does it for Nathaniel. It is part of the show. And it works. He is patently bewildered.

  Why did you do this? he asks. Why? It has something to do with what you found in the Chamber, doesn’t it? Tell me. What did you find? Nathaniel has sensed the change of direction in her thoughts. What did you discover there?

  Two intact bottles. Her answer is a thought. But I found fragments of a third. You were right, Nathan. You were right. I believe we can get to three.

  For a time, Nathaniel is quiet. You shouldn
’t have gone. His thoughts telegraph a hiss. I could have lost you.

  Her smile broadens but she worries whether he is playing along. While she carries on her mental conversation she must keep her other thoughts veiled. She erects transeunt walls within her mind, ephemeral but sufficient to hold him at bay. He must not uncover the secret she is hiding.

  As they telepath back and forth, she slips a touch of malice into her lies. Any sweetness will grow his suspicion. But his assault is tireless. He asks the same question many, many times. In the hurricane of his black distrust she bows and trudges on, moving the dead kings’ holojoules through the air.

  A vast capcitance wheels around her, pulled from the casualties of the dissolved fleet. It is a potent residue of the murder, a real power torn not only from kings and emperors but from flight crews, and bodyguards, cooks and cabinet aides. The crime is real. It can never be undone. She swallows hard and tells herself the thing she planned to tell herself before she crossed this line: they are her enemy—everyone in the sky was her enemy—just as everyone who stands between her and the end is her enemy now.

  The world is no longer the world. It is a bin of jumbled variables she must sort through quickly if she is to make it to her goal. She did not ask for this. This was—

  Why are you bringing him south? Nathaniel asks.

  For the ink of course, she says. And to her unending sorrow this is not untrue.

  You should have destroyed him by now. You’re far too sentimental.

  “I’ll make ink soon enough. Why are you so eager? He’s your nephew. Was your nephew, once. I thought you might—”

  Nathaniel snaps violently, Focus on what you’re good at! Please!

  “And what’s that?”

  Capturing his fluids! You might have moved on to blood by now and been done with this—but no … I wonder why. Why delay? Why bother giving him those books?

  Sena ignores the horrible attack. “I see he means nothing to you.”

  Don’t affix your weaknesses to me, Nathaniel thinks. Caliph Howl is hardly my nephew. He should mean nothing to you. He’s just another thing that you and I will pass on our way across the stars. Don’t forget that!