Black Bottle Page 27

  Vaguely, Caliph felt himself lying on his back; he could almost hear Dr. Baufent trying to rouse him. But that place was far away. His teeth were pestles, grinding on the fabric of the dream. They could not cut through. He could not wake up. He could not remember what Sena had done, for which he was supposed to be angry and repulsed.

  Sena’s cottage disappeared. She was calling to him but her words were quickly fading away. Replacing them was his uncle’s voice. It demanded that he show himself.

  “Stay with me,” said Sena.

  Caliph sat up. He was covered with ashes from lying in the fireplace. This was where he had played hide-and-seek with his imaginary friends. Uncle had raged at him for tracking ashes across the carpets. He knew he was supposed to come out when his uncle called, but he stayed where he was.

  The fireplace was galaxy-black. Caliph got to his feet, standing among the deep pornographic carvings that his uncle had commissioned from Niloran stonecutters. His blood bubbled, his face felt like it had been coated in hot honey. Inside him, there was thunder. He was angry at his uncle. It felt like his skeleton might shake apart.

  “Caliph!” his uncle called.

  But Caliph stayed hidden, ashamed that he wasn’t brave enough to come out. He had never been brave. When he played at dolls with the girls down the lane, the boys from the nearest farmhouse had called him names. They pushed him so hard into the road that he wound up with gravel in his hands. After the boys left, the girls kissed his scratches and gave him phantom tea and medicine, but eventually they forgot him, called away by parents that didn’t like them playing with the boy from Isca Hill. Caliph was ostracized because of his uncle.

  “Caliph!” Nathaniel’s voice had reached fury.

  He felt Sena’s hand tug gently on his fingers. Somehow she was in the fireplace with him. Small, just like him. “I’m not one of those girls,” she said. “I’m not going to leave you.”

  Caliph pushed her up against the carvings, smelling sweet mint. She laughed and held his wrists. “Shh—he’ll find us.”

  Caliph looked out into his bedroom. His uncle was standing right there in front of the hearth, eyes like spider bellies, staring right through him.

  It was impossible that Nathaniel couldn’t see them. But this was a dream.

  “If you say so,” she whispered.

  “What did you give me to drink?”

  Sena put his hands on the bones of her pelvis, the muscles of her lower back. She looked at him seriously.

  “Shuwt tincture,” she said. “So that you can follow me.”

  He wanted to follow her. He wanted to protect her … and the baby … from his uncle, from everything wrong with the world.

  He looked over his shoulder. The old man’s eyes were still on him. He decided he had to come out.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “Yes I do.”

  “You can’t tell him what I told you.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  He left her among the carvings and stepped out into the room. The instant he did, his uncle’s voice grew calmer.

  “Caliph. There you are. Don’t you listen to that little witch. She’s going to get you into trouble.”

  Caliph looked fearfully toward the fireplace but Sena was not there. He wondered where she had gone.

  Nathaniel reached out and took hold of Caliph. He lifted him off the floor. Caliph felt the heat of his uncle’s hands, as if there was fever in them. Nathaniel sat down next to the bed and put Caliph in his lap. The lights were low. Caliph felt himself ease into the soft warm pocket between his uncle’s arm and belly. Nathaniel rocked him with an oaken creak. The chair moved reassuringly, measuring the increments of minutes, a kind of grinding percussion to accompany the sadness of birds beyond the window.

  “When I was young,” Nathaniel’s voice began softly, entreating and persuasive, “my half-brother and I went hunting.”

  The bedtime story had begun. Nathaniel’s hands became finger-legs that trudged slowly over the landscape of Caliph’s lap. “One evening we stopped at the top of a hill,” his finger-legs stopped, “and watched the ducks rise out of the marsh.” The old man made quacking sounds. “We had bead guns. And we got them ready.” Noises of glassy ammunition clicking into chambers. “We aimed carefully. And then we fired!” Nathaniel made zipping sounds through his teeth and his two hands became both the ducks in flight and the glass beads speeding toward them.” One duck fell and landed in a shadow of Nathaniel’s robe. “Then,” he said, “we walked down into the marsh and looked for it. We walked up and down in the reeds, up and down in the grass, up and down. Up and down. But we never found it…”

  The mystery was too much for Caliph’s young head and he dared to ask, “Where did it go?”

  Nathaniel’s fingers spread like those of a street magician who had just vanished a card. “I don’t know. We never found it. That’s what she’s going to do to you, Caliph. Pay attention. Or you’re going to disappear. You’re going to disappear and never be found.”

  The old man’s voice was positively chilling.

  “Now off to bed. You understand?” He set Caliph on the floor and patted his butt. “And remember. Don’t you listen to her. Don’t you follow her. Don’t look for her. Because you’ll wind up lost. Forever. Where no one can find you.”

  Caliph swallowed hard as he climbed into bed. When he laid down, he imagined himself cut open on a table with his uncle blowing into his lungs with a reed. “Useless,” said Nathaniel. Then his uncle thrust a steel probe down into Caliph’s chest. It went all the way through. Caliph could taste the metal, like the duralumin zeppelin beam that had killed him.

  He woke with a start, breathing strenuously.

  But the dream seemed never-ending. His bed swallowed him like a rumpled white ocean. Nathaniel was gone and the trees outside the huge warped window were barren and black and the sky was gold with morning. He looked at his hands in the light and they were small.

  I’ll build a kite this morning, he heard himself think—but it was not him. He was still a stowaway in his own skull. Eavesdropping. A kite big enough to carry me away from here.

  Then a hand touched him from behind. He jumped with surprise and fear but arms encircled him. He turned, and in turning was enveloped by the shadow of her neck, the sweet toasty smell of her lotus-pink hair. Her blue lips kissed him sexually, not as a woman kisses a child. And he wanted her. As a boy wants his first young schoolteacher. She tasted of candy floss. Warm and soft and splendid.

  It isn’t bad, uncle, he thought angrily. It isn’t bad if she makes me fall where I’m never found. This is it. He turned into her carnival of colors. I’ve found it, uncle. I’ve found it.

  The duck landed here.

  20Holomorphy measures its cost in cuts. According to holomorphic charts, the human body contains seven cuts.

  CHAPTER

  27

  The fall from Sandren had lasted over a minute. Then the four witches had leveled off and landed in the blue-green coils of a vast wind-shaken grassland north and east of Seatk’r, a mile beyond the point where the ghetto’s fingers of glittering trash flowed like artificial effluence down the foothills’ morning-shadowed ravines.

  This was the story Caliph heard. He remembered none of it. The Odalisque and the Bulotecus had both descended for the pick-up. Caliph had been unresponsive. As the flagship of the Iscan Crown, the Bulotecus maintained a tiny room packed with medical necessities. Caliph had been put on a stretcher and hauled on board. Taelin too, had been ferried over from the Odalisque for treatment. Even Miriam had been stitched up.

  Crews were shuffled. Dr. Baufent had come over to the Bulotecus. She attended to Caliph personally. She had administered first aid, but Caliph had come out of his daze under his own power. Even when Caliph pressed her, Baufent denied having given him any kind of tincture.

  “No, I did not,” she had said. “What do you mean a tincture?” Caliph’s insistent questions had put her on
the defensive. “I don’t even know what a tincture would be. I can assure you I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  He had asked about Sena.

  “No. Miss Iilool was certainly never here. I think she would have been arrested the moment she set one foot on this ship.

  “No she didn’t give me any tincture for you to drink. King Howl, look at me.” She had shined a chemiostatic light into his eyes.

  “You’re delirious. You’ve been hallucinating.”

  * * *

  ISHAM Wade and Mr. Veech looked at the four witches with deep skepticism while Anselm and Baufent held their opinions like clipboards, close to their chests.

  Caliph’s head was still foggy but he clung to the moment as best he could, trying to pay sedulous attention. His head was still swimming with echoes of dreams, visions … hallucinations? He didn’t know what to call them.

  All the ranking members of the crew had been gathered on the Bulotecus’ rear deck. When they weren’t staring at the witches, they were staring at him.

  They think I’m losing it.

  Among the noteworthies were the physicians, the airship captain, Sig and the Iycestokians—Whom Caliph had not been able to justify keeping locked up. Lady Rae was asleep in one of the staterooms.

  The Bulotecus had moored in Seatk’r.

  That much Caliph knew for sure.

  “I really must demand a private audience,” Mr. Wade hissed in Caliph’s ear. Meanwhile the witches were explaining Alani’s death.

  “—so he died from wounds … sustained from the creature that was attacking King Howl,” Miriam summed up.

  The story attained a certain level of credence based mostly on the fact that Caliph was still alive. Caliph had little choice other than to believe the account. He could remember nothing about the actual event.

  Since the government of Seatk’r was being uncooperative, the Odalisque climbed back to Sandren. It scouted the area. The monsters in the city seemed to have slunk off. The Odalisque retrieved what bodies had not been eaten and returned to report. The Pplarian airship, it seemed, was still in Sandren, waiting for the High King.

  I don’t like it, Alani would have said. Caliph could almost hear the spymaster whisper in his ear. Baufent had yet to examine the body and confirm cause of death.

  The spymaster’s death was a great black anvil that crushed through all of Caliph’s other crises and sat dead center; immovable.

  It kept going through his head over and over, how can Alani be dead?

  “Your majesty. We need to talk,” whispered Mr. Wade.

  “Listen! I will meet with you when I am … when it is appropriate,” said Caliph. “And right now it is not appropriate.”

  The crowd hushed at his outburst.

  Mr. Wade’s meaty face was flushed, probably with anger. Caliph didn’t care.

  He turned to the witches and gestured curtly for them to continue. Miriam started talking but all Caliph could think was, What is wrong with my head?

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Mr. Veech, “but we arrived late. What were your names?”

  The witches reintroduced themselves.

  Each of them was improbably attractive and athletic, as if selected from a beauty pageant: Anjelique Breckenshire, Gina Dingo and Autumn Solburner. Miriam Yeats seemed to be their leader. All of them had thin scars around their necks as if they had survived an attack with piano wire.

  Caliph felt cold but Autumn’s voice interrupted his thoughts. She was an erogenic copper-headed saucebox with bizarre black accents dyed into her hair. “Of course you can trust us. We saved your king’s life.”

  Had someone asked a question? I need to focus! Caliph thought. Mother of Emolus my head hurts.

  “Here are the facts,” said Caliph, turning to the witches. “We were attacked on the twelfth by your organization, over Mirayhr. We lost good men and women that night.” Caliph saw a glance pass between Autumn and Miriam.

  Miriam looked at Caliph calmly. “Your ship was attacked in an effort to prevent the thing that happened this morning—from happening. All those people in all those zeppelins didn’t have to die. We’re after Sena Iilool, just like you are.”

  The words cut Caliph deeply because the witches’ actions seemed supportable. Was it true? Had he been on the wrong side? Had the attack on his airships by the Shradnae Sisterhood been justified?

  Everyone on the rear deck knew that the four women had leapt from Sandren, falling on some mathematical parachute of wind. They had risked themselves to save Caliph’s life.

  “You know it’s true,” said Miriam. “The only people you lost that night were the people that stood between Sena and our operatives. She lost the book that night.”

  Isham Wade perked up.

  “Yes,” said Caliph. “Thankfully it’s safe.” Caliph noticed how Mr. Wade’s eyes settled on him from behind his thick lenses.

  Miriam scowled. She seemed to wait a moment and gauge what game he was playing. After a moment she narrowed her eyes and said, “Yes. But now we need to stop her. I believe you feel the same way, don’t you King Howl?”

  “Yes. Yes I do.”

  He did feel that way. But what he wanted more than anything was for Alani’s face to reappear, refrain from smiling as it always did and offer the essential wisdom he needed to navigate this truce with the Shradnae witches.

  The scars around their throats were circumstantial at best but he had his suspicions. Despite all that, like it or not, Miriam was right. Sena had to be stopped. And how was he supposed to do that without real holomorphic power on his side? He needed them.

  Caliph bounced his hand in the air to underscore his agreement. “We’ll go after her. Together.”

  He turned to the captain. “Any word from Seatk’r?”

  “None, your majesty.” The captain’s son hovered in his father’s shadow, listening intently to everything going on. Specks’ little armband ticked and a drop of blood hit the floor.

  Caliph turned his thoughts back to the patients and physicians that had vanished from the tent hospital.

  Many of them had managed to escape the flawless, as Miriam called the monsters. The surviving Stonehavians had fled down the teagle system into Seatk’r—an event that had gone unnoticed in the chaotic aftermath of what could only be termed the erasure of the conference.

  “I can’t believe they won’t let the Odalisque moor,” said Dr. Anselm.

  The government of Seatk’r wanted nothing to do with the Stonehavian airships, a fact that complicated the situation with the doctors and patients that had used the teagle system and were now stranded on the ground.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” said Caliph. “Tell the Odalisque to come in. It’s going pick up the remaining patients and ferry them back to Stonehold along with anyone who doesn’t need to go after Sena. I assume that will be most everyone.”

  “They’re not going to let us moor,” said the captain.

  “Oh, they will,” said Caliph. “Seatk’r’s run by little more than a robber baron. He won’t get in our way. Not today.”

  He turned to the captain and his few soldiers and gave them instructions. Then he, along with two bodyguards and Miriam Yeats took the lift down to the ground.

  The ride was tense. This was in strict violation of the local government’s orders. They were supposed to be leaving, not disembarking.

  As the cage opened Caliph was immediately accosted by six ragged-looking policemen from the ghetto’s ethically questionable municipality.

  “You not allowed to get off,” one of them barked. His Trade was rough.

  Caliph smiled broadly and walked up to the man, clearly the group’s leader based on the blue armband. “I understand. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “We have orders. We don’t harbor you here.”

  His use of harbor was chilling.

  Caliph imagined the news hitting Mirayhr first, then Pandragor. Information about what had happened would spread quickly t
o Wardale, Waythloo, Greymoor and Iycestoke. Airships were already coming. Caliph didn’t know from where. But he knew his vessels were the targets. It would happen soon.

  He kept smiling.

  “I know, I know.” He raised his palms. “But,” he tried to get a word in edgewise against the man’s complaints, “but just … can we please step over here? Yes, this way. Thank you. I just want a quick word. That’s all.”

  “We don’t harbor you,” the man said again. He was dirty. Poor. Clearly he took his responsibilities seriously.

  “I understand. But I have people that need medical attention. We just need to pick them up. Then we will go.”

  “No. You don’t moor here. You must go now.”

  “We want to go now. We just need to pick up our friends. They came down on the gondolas. They’re right across the street there.” He gestured to the motley crowd gathered in the grass-striped shade of a large tree whose bark was worn shiny and covered with paint, presumably from loitering gangs. Doctors and patients peered across the street at him, looking anxious. They had been corralled by other policemen. Some of the patients were still on wheeled beds. Desperation and fear glistened on their faces. That they had not been taken to a proper jail told volumes about the way Seatk’r functioned.

  “No. You don’t get off you ship.”

  “I’m already off my ship. Can I please go talk to them?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “All right, look, I have money.”

  “No, no, no, no, no…”

  “I can pay you.”

  “Get back on you ship. Now!” The nose of the policeman’s bing-gun rose slightly. Caliph was unarmed. “All right.” He lifted his hands slightly. “All right, look. Will you just look at them? They need help. They’re hurt.”

  “I don’t care. Get on you ship.”