Black Bottle Page 9

  Caliph’s heart skipped. He turned the thing over and saw the familiar words carved into the piece’s base.

  “For Caliph.” The same that marked each of his other figurines.

  He felt elation and confusion at the same time as he pictured how Cameron’s hands must have aged, how whittling a hunk of wood must have grown more difficult with the years—

  “You saw him? You went to Nifol?” Caliph interrupted his own thoughts.

  Sena nodded.

  The dream man had left Stonehold just before the war, heading for the warm south. But this carving pulled him back across the miles. Caliph stroked the wood lovingly with his thumb. Upon closer inspection, the carving seemed to be of Caliph himself. He noticed how Cameron’s knife had picked out the smile of the girl on his shoulders with particular care.

  Sena had told him nothing about her trip. Ten months of mystery. The casket-shaped boxes unloaded from the Odalisque had carried books. They were stacked three deep, creating blockages in all the hallways adjacent to the library.

  Well, now he knew one more thing.

  Seneschal Vicunt knocked on the parlor door. Caliph recognized the two-stroke tap, light-handed and expressly unobtrusive. He slipped the wooden carving into the pocket of his long coat. Sena withdrew her arms from around his neck and walked slowly back to the glass coffee table where she retrieved her cup.

  “Pardon me,” said the seneschal as Caliph opened the door. “There’s a diplomatic package here, addressed to the lady of the castle. It’s from the Grand Arbiter that’s been holding rallies in Gas End.”

  Caliph glanced over his shoulder to where Sena stood, blowing across her cup, watching him.

  “It’s a bit heavy.” Vicunt’s voice communicated strain.

  Caliph opened the door and directed him to bring it in.

  The seneschal placed it on one end of the coffee table. It was a square wooden box, roughly two feet on a side and eight inches deep. The label bore the diplomatic seal and was clearly addressed to Sena.

  A strange aroma surrounded it. It smelled of ointments and spice.

  Caliph lifted a butter knife and offered it to Sena, gesturing for her to break the seal.

  She sipped her tea and did not respond.

  “You’re not going to open it?”

  “No. Take it out and bury it.”

  “Bury it?” Caliph smiled quizzically. “What’s in it?”

  “Nothing good,” she said.

  Caliph brandished the knife at the seal but Sena only shrugged. A pavid chill crawled across his back. It was addressed to her. He had no right to open it.

  “You know what’s in it?”

  “Take it out and put it in the ground,” she said again. “The Church of Kosti Vinish feels threatened by me. If you open it, it’ll be public knowledge … and it will derail our reason for going to the conference.”

  Caliph hesitated, still holding the knife. He could not fathom what the box might contain that would prevent him from going to the conference. He looked at Sena’s unreadable blue eyes, hovering an inch above her cup. Finally he put the knife down. “Drown?”

  “Yes, your majesty?”

  “No one opens it. Take it out to the bogs. Make sure it’s never found.”

  Drown bit his lip nervously. He approached the box with brand-new, highly-visible dread, picked it up in both arms and hauled it from the room.

  “See,” she said after he had left. Caliph scowled at her. “You do trust me…”

  CHAPTER

  10

  Suspicion nagged Taelin. Her invitation to accompany the High King’s entourage bore the stink of contrivance. Especially since the high-profile conference in Sandren was going to be the first real forum between the Tebesh Plateau and what was collectively known as the Hinterlands in over eighty years. Her father had instilled in her an awareness for what he called the wire-pullers: people who maneuvered other people in order to protect themselves from legal or political harm. Her presence on such a trip, amid the High King’s staff, would certainly classify.

  On the other hand, Taelin had come north with a keen understanding of her social status. Her whole goal in transforming St. Remora into a mission home was to gain the attention of the crown.

  In light of how her journey had unfolded thus far, it was only natural that the crown would seize the opportunity to pose her next to itself. And that was precisely where she wanted to be. Only from such a position of privilege would she have access to Sena Iilool, to the possibility of persuading her to denounce the groups that had elevated her to the status of a goddess, or in the case that Sena was insane …

  Taelin had not actually planned for such a contingency.

  Nevertheless, she equivocated only a few moments over Alani’s invitation. Though she initially had no one to entrust her shelter to, speaking with clergy from Hullmallow had quickly produced a solution. She dropped the keys to St. Remora off with Hazel Nantallium on her way to the Hold. The trip to Sandren would only be three days. She packed light.

  * * *

  THE three airships were leaving Isca late, under snowfall, far past noon. They had waited for her.

  The Bulotecus, the Odalisque and the Iatromisia were all relatively small. Taelin surrendered her flight bag to one of the handlers. He knocked a finger against his brow and smiled at her while chiding playfully that the daylight would leave without her if she didn’t hurry. Taelin boarded the Bulotecus, which was the High King’s vessel—though he was not on board.

  She had overheard from men on the platform that he would be on the Odalisque with Sena.

  Taelin glanced around the swank quarters, impressed with the décor. As the airship uprooted itself from the castle, she found a bar and poured herself a sherry, which she finished before leaving the glowing cabins for the observation deck. Her boots gripped the textured steel and her lungs filled with cold air. She reached for the icy railing to steady herself and gazed down.

  Gray towers, drifting with snow, fanned below her: a rolling parallax that accentuated the third dimension and made her stomach pitch. The sky, identical to tarnished silver, burped uneven flurries. The flakes swirled past her, vanishing into the fissures of Isca’s gaslit abyss.

  Taelin slid her crimson goggles down over her eyes, enjoying their power, then hugged herself and shivered from the beauty of the moment. As the craft ascended, the buildings became phantoms, the streetlamps: dreamlike phosphors. She felt the wind increase as the engines’ hum modulated toward crescendo. Then, all at once, Isca City disappeared, and the void swallowed Taelin whole, churning like a ghastly white stomach.

  “Hi!”

  Taelin spun around. The voice was high and bright as someone banging a toy cymbal. “I’m Specks.”

  A thin boy, pale as the snow, dark brown hair windswept to the side of his face, hovered spare inches above the Bulotecus’s deck. His legs hung useless as crumpled straws. “Do you like snow?” he asked.

  “I’m from the south. I’ve never seen snow before. But yes, I like it. You’re floating—”

  “Yeah,” he said, face beaming. “It’s ticky!”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seven.” He was small for seven. His thin right arm was shod in a heavy leather bracer that pulled that side of his body down, forcing an uneven slope to the hang of his shoulders. The bracer ticked and Taelin noticed a drop of blood under Specks’ feet.

  “Oh, gods … you’re bleeding.”

  “Yeah. It’s okay. I’m a holomorph.” He seemed proud to say so. “That’s what the doctors say.” His left hand held a small cup of something warm and steamy, which he lifted to his mouth and drank.

  Taelin crouched down in front of him. “Can I look at that?” she asked, gesturing to the bracer.

  “Sure.” He extended his arm with visible strain.

  The bracer was made of thick chrome-tanned leather. Adjustable straps with copper buckles ensured that it remained cinched tightly to his arm. There was a compact engine
stitched into the thing, also made of copper and steel, barely larger than a pocket watch. It gave off the whispery sounds of fine clockwork. A tiny chemiostatic cell powered it and outlined, in green, a spigot that jutted from the side of his wrist.

  From the spigot, a drop of blood beaded and fell.

  The purpose of the contraption was mysterious at first until Taelin listened carefully to the ticking. Like tapping codes for the blind, the little engine pinged out a stream of numbers, over and over, ringing off the duralumin railings of the zeppelin deck. The sound was subtle, thought Taelin. She supposed you could get used to it.

  At the end of the long series of precise pings and ticks, which Taelin now guessed was a complex but automated equation, the valve on Specks’ arm snicked open, then shut again, and another drop fell.

  “You are a holomorph, aren’t you?” she whispered, genuinely amazed. “This thing keeps you floating?”

  “Yes, ma’am. My dad says my legs are in this arm.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “My dad works for the king and we don’t have a mom so I comed with.”

  “I see. What does your dad do?”

  Specks showed teeth, a sly smile that he seemed to have been saving up. “He’s the captain of this ship.”

  “And I see you’re quite proud of him.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Taelin looked around but they were alone, plowing through the snow in the empty clouds over Stonehold. “Who looks after you while your dad is flying?”

  Specks’ eyes got wide and serious. He nodded his head up and down as he spoke. “I know the rules. I stay safe. I don’t need no babysitter.”

  Taelin felt a smile creeping into her face but she didn’t want to belittle him. She brushed a whip of dark hair from his cheek and said, “No. Of course you don’t. But who’s this?”

  A plush toy peeked from a backpack over the top of Specks’ shoulder. It was dark brown and ferocious with black plastic eyes and felt teeth and Taelin shook it gently by the ear.

  “That’s Rot. He’s a sarchal hound. He’ll bite your hand off if you’re mean to me. But not really. And not you anyway. Cuz you’re not mean.”

  “He’s all the protection you need then.”

  “Yep.” Specks pointed at the bright glitter of Taelin’s necklace, which was eye-level as she stooped in front of him. “What’s that thing?”

  “That’s what protects me,” said Taelin.

  “It looks like a light,” said Specks. “But…” He had noticed how strange it was.

  “It’s a special necklace that my grandfather found.”

  “Ticky,” said Specks. “Do you want to come see the other animals what my dad gave me for my birthday?”

  Taelin smiled and took his hand as another drop of his blood hit the metal decking and turned to ice.

  * * *

  STOIC but afraid of what his speech to the assembly might mean for the future of the Duchy, Caliph scowled at himself in the stateroom’s beveled mirror. Dim hooded lamps to either side barely exuded a woody-orange luminescence.

  Behind him, Sena knelt on the bed, outlined by a vast circular window. Her arms moved gently around her head as if she was putting something on. “We could waste some time,” she said.

  Her words affected him instantly, like a spell.

  Up until this moment he had been looking past her, to where the night sky boiled and the Odalisque’s six water-cooled engines lit the ship’s chrome undercarriage like wet actinolite. Caliph’s skin grew clammy as he listened to the extension shafts spin, powering them toward Menin’s Pass. He tried not to think about last year’s war or the cold spar sliding under his heart.

  Startling him, diverting his fear, Sena’s voice hit the back of his neck. She was right behind him. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

  He felt her arms encircle him, which was more than a little unnerving. So he turned from the mirror and choked up a laugh. “Afraid? Why would I be afraid? Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Her finger tapped him on the chin. “No, it’s not.” His skin crawled.

  “I don’t want you to be afraid of me, Caliph.” It started to sink in that her words were too precise, too perfectly tuned to his thoughts. Caliph let go of her as if she had become a block of ice.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Caliph.” Her voice was careful. “Remember that night we slept downstairs? You went to the icebox, so thirsty … looking for a carton of milk.”

  Caliph took a step back.

  “It was dark,” she said. “You were tired. You wound up with the wrong container and when you lifted it to your mouth, the taste of citrus was so appalling that you dropped it on the floor.

  “The juice hadn’t gone bad. It was your expectation that soured it.”

  Caliph did remember that night. And she was right. The nectar—flown from Sandrenese vineyards—might as well have been vinegar.

  The memory was stunningly relevant to what he felt right now. It was as if her words had flipped a switch inside his head.

  She was not like him, despite her appearance. The perfection he saw in her—that everyone saw in her—had instilled in him the expectation that who she was, on the inside, should—

  Her words both interrupted and finished his thought, completing it more succinctly than he could have done himself.

  “The paragon of humanity is as alien as anything you can dream,” she whispered.

  “You’re inside my head.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Caliph imagined a heady fume coiling off her skin in the darkness. The platinum lines glittered as she turned slightly. The sound of Caliph’s own breathing deafened him.

  What if she was right?

  What if she represented something closer to apotheosis than he wanted to admit? He was afraid to touch her. There were numbers in her. Ratios. The cunning spirals of her ears. The distance from eyes to chin. The precise width of her lips was overly perfect.

  “What happened to you?” he said. “What made you like this?”

  He hadn’t meant it as a cruel assessment but in response, the black cutout of her head turned down into the fan of her fingers. The uncanny seduction broke off. For a moment he thought she was only thinking. Then her shoulders convulsed.

  He couldn’t understand what had caused this. He reached out. The instant his hand touched her, the sound came out, wretched and plaintive. All his internalized fears and postulations shed away. He was left with the sound of her hushed blubbering, the humming of the airship and her strange patchy-warmth shuddering against his chest.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s not your fault,” she hissed. “It’s not your fault.”

  Feeling brutish, Caliph reached back into their past for anything that might shore up their embrace. “Hey.” He tugged her chin with his finger. “You and I belong to the stars, remember?”

  She laughed brokenly at that and said, “You don’t know what that means. You’ve never known what that means.” For a long time after, she was quiet.

  Caliph held her. He looked over her shoulder, through the eight-foot circular window, to where the ship’s starboard lights flashed and burned. Slowly, his anxiety began building again.

  Other ships signaled back. They were organizing for the single file journey through the Greencaps. The Odalisque revved her engines, preparing to accelerate to lead position.

  Caliph felt his skeleton shiver uncontrollably, as if connected to the zeppelin. The vibration centered around his heart with a curious tingle. Just as he was contemplating the strangeness of this, he felt Sena’s fingertips unbutton him, slide inside and crisscross over his chest.

  She pulled herself closer, soft and warm, except for those thin glittering lines of coldness. Her aberrations became toothsome. She smelled of hypnosis, of deep narcotic sweetness, sugary mint and water-flowers. Her body crept off the floor, one leg at a time, and wrapped itself around him. She
was kissing his lips. Caliph could no longer see. He felt his back bump against one of the stateroom’s paneled walls.

  Sena’s hands pushed them off and pivoted them like one creature toward the bar.

  He leaned her back amid the imported liquors. She smiled crookedly, tears gone—drunk up by his shirt. Sena reached behind her head for a bottle of hard black rum. The stopper popped into her palm and she tipped it, glugging softly over the front of her body, like a dark cascade over pale stone. It pooled in her navel and wet the jewel there.

  Caliph remembered a similar night in the geometry classroom, before he had stolen the clurichaun, her back pressed against the top of Professor Garavaso’s desk.

  “Is that where you want to go?” she whispered as if reading his mind. “Where do you want to go?”

  Where do you want to go?

  Caliph felt a tremor of fear but he closed his eyes and let himself slip into the device that made everything simpler, where Sena’s movement could be described with angular velocity. He felt the compression. Riding the infinite plane of her back. The foundation for the catapult. Waiting for the throw. And her—waiting for the zoetrope’s spinning.

  * * *

  ZEPPELIN light flickers on the delicate windowpanes while Sena’s lips make obscene requests. Her bodice has turned into a black belt trimmed with tiny scarlet feathers—wet with rum.

  Caliph has been wanting this for days. Desperate as a junkie for a hit. Unwilling to admit it even to himself.

  She is dark and strange like a crow on its back. It is different than anything he has had with her before. Though he wouldn’t have believed it possible, it is stronger than the night after the argument. She is cool and powerful beneath him, like a machine, like water rolling. Her coaxing is primal. He loses himself completely, not for an instant, but for several minutes … or more. His ability to gauge time has left him.

  All he hears is her scream like a creature announcing its territory. He feels his soul slip forward, pulled partly through his skin, drawn by the inexorable singularity of something he cannot name. A deep gravity inside of her. He is leaving his body. Nearly breaking against her. He is nearly dying.