Caliph was brokenhearted at the sight of his friend. It was true. At a word, the coop would open, his friend emerge, ready to be nurtured back to health. The bruises would fade, the swelling subside. All could be forgiven. All mended. A second chance seemed an easy thing to grant.
“Caph?”
“What did you do?” Caliph whispered without looking up.
“Caph.” David’s voice was pleading. “I . . . I don’t know. I messed up. I already told them everything. The jury said I’m . . .” An additional question, unarticulated but understood, issued through the bars.
Caliph couldn’t look at him.
“Gods Dave, look what you’ve done! Did you have it all planned? That first day? The day I met you and Sig in the castle?”
“Mizraim, Emolus, fuck no! I didn’t know. I didn’t have a clue. It’s like I told them, Caph. I’m a sleeper. I’m a crawler, a nobody. This tattoo doesn’t mean shit . . . most of the time.”
Caliph looked up and saw David pat his stomach. His eyes were red where they weren’t black. They gushed an unremitting effusion of sticky tears.
“Show it to me.”
David lifted his shirt. An ugly little curlicue of ink flared above his navel, utterly nigrescent in the poor lamplight. Caliph had not been told about this.
“What does it mean?”
“Mean? Caph. What it means is that I’m branded. I was branded when I was twelve. How could I possibly have made a choice like that when I was twelve? How could I have known then that it would come to this? I’m a sleeper. Expendable as toilet paper. One use and pull the chain! I don’t even know enough information to keep from being tortured.”
“Who did it to you?”
David’s voice filled with hope. “I don’t know his name. Some guy, tall, pale face, really messed-up teeth. Crazy as a shithouse rat. I think he broke my ribs, Caph.”
“I mean the tattoo. Who gave it to you?”
David slumped against the bars, crestfallen.
“Cabal of Wights. Only I’m not them anymore. They cut me loose like a sturgeon on a three-pound line.”
“Who are they? Some cult? Why in Emolus’ name would you join—?”
“Yeah, some cult! Some bad-ass, sacrifice you to the oyster-god cult! I don’t even know where they’re at. I’m the fringe on the lunatic fringe! We’re dry-bottom boys. They don’t tell us shit. I went for eight years not hearing a word, Caph. I swear. Then I meet a man in the street. I could tell right away he was one of the mucks. He was following me around King’s Road by the bistros. Tall, thin. Showed me his tattoo and said I was activated. But all he said to do was make sure the sewer grates in the east garden of Isca Castle were unlocked by noon on the twenty- fourth of Lume. I swear. I swear I didn’t think that people were going to get hurt.”
“Then you didn’t think,” snapped Caliph. “And you’re a bigger fool than I thought. I took you in! I gave you money, a job, a place to live!”
“I was twelve—”
“Fuck twelve! How old were you when you unlocked the grates?”
“They would have killed me!”
Caliph was shouting. “And I couldn’t have protected you? Inside the castle? You provided them their only way in!
“Forty-two dead! You! You killed them! And now I’m supposed to what? Bail you out? Throw clemency in the face of my judges, the jury, the families of the forty-two soldiers we buried middle of this week?”
David rested his forehead on the bars. He chuckled softly.
“Do you remember our freshman year? When we bunked with Roric Feldman?”
Caliph nodded.
“Roric used to say the damnedest things,” whispered David. “He used to say to us,
Caliph’s heart went limp and cold. He stood to go.
“Caph, wait. I know . . . I know you.” He bit back on more tears. “I know you can’t . . . save me. But don’t leave me here. I’ll do anything not to spend my last hours down here.”
Caliph sighed. When he looked at David, trembling, emaciated, holding his butchered hand, he wanted to shout at the guards, call them over with the key, tell them bathetically to let his friend go free. He believed David’s words were true, that he hadn’t thought about the consequences of unlocking the grates.
Still, the fact remained that after it was done, after it was over, David Thacker had not come bawling like a baby and thrown himself on Caliph’s mercy. No. He had relocked the gates to cover his ass. He had hidden the truth. He had lied.
“You’ve told Mr. Vhortghast all you know?”
“Yes.” David’s eyes shone pleadingly.
“Then I guess we’re done here.”
“Don’t leave me. Please . . .”
“Guards!” Caliph shouted.
“Please, Caph.”
The soldiers from Gate One came trotting.
David’s other hand reached out through the bars, catching Caliph’s fingers. The touch was warm and soft. A writer’s hand. Unused to heavy labor. “Please, Caph.”
Caliph didn’t look back.
The guards led him away.
As he recounted his experience Sena shivered. Cameron looked away across the black twist of city far below.
Four days later Caliph went to visit Sigmund Dulgensen.
Sigmund was appalled by David Thacker’s end, but not in the same way as Caliph. Sigmund didn’t have either the time or inclination to leave Ironside and talk about his loss. He and David Thacker had been proximal friends. Put any physical distance between the two of them and it was like they forgot one another existed.
A pot of coffee steadily lubricated the snarled calculations of solvitriol power. Sigmund was making headway. He assured Caliph that the lab’s security remained airtight. No one knew about the experiments. He looked giddy to plunge into a full account of his progress.
“I’m set up with a prototype, Caph.” Sigmund’s eyes were red but exuberant. “Take a peek at this.”
He pulled out a slender glass bulb haloed in iron, fitted with sockets or prongs at either end. He set it before the High King.
Caliph gazed at it for several moments, unable to speak. Like a chemiostatic cell the object glowed, but not green or citric yellow. It was not harsh or garish or easy to describe. Unusual pastel colors phosphoresced, crawling behind the glass. They rolled and ebbed along the iron bands, across the polished tabletop. They writhed, mucus pink or yellow ruffling into delicate shadows of lavender and powder blue. It was startling, mesmerizing to watch.
Caliph picked it up. It was cool, like a chilled wine bottle and tingled in his fingers like the back of a wooly caterpillar. He almost dropped it in surprise.
“What can it do?”
Sigmund was already chewing on his beard.
“Power a sword indefinitely. Power a fan, an ice maker, a conveyor belt—” He scratched the side of his face. “Whatever you want. Current generated is DC which means we can’t put it through a transformer like they have in the south or carry it very far, but you could hook it up to machines, wire it into a small string of streetlamps and guess what? They’ll never burn out.
“Enough kitties have gone whee to power a couple city blocks so far. I’ve got ’em stacked in racks down in the lab along with the adapters necessary to plug ’em in for electric lights and shit like that.”
