we stop it
“We cannot fear the future. For the enemy’s sickness we have wards. For the enemy’s lies we have truth. Against their desires for destruction and chaos, we will bring the hammer of order and hope. We will meet them with blade and tongue.
“We will turn them, we will win. And when we prevail, when their false hopes have been heaped in the street, we will have fulfilled the thing this Sisterhood was destined to fulfill.
“Prepare yourselves. Tonight, we fly. Together we go south. Our enemy will know fear.”
Miriam raised her slender fist.
A subdued cheer went up in the hall.
* * *
EVEN from under Parliament’s roof Miriam could sense the cold empty wave-like motion of the sky. It leaned on Parliament’s ancient steel trusses.
Dizzy and upset, she left the front of the room, barely acknowledging the applause.
Autumn would get the girls sorted.
Returning to Skellum had turned out to be critical. Another day without leadership and she might have found the whole of Parliament empty, the entire Sisterhood disbanded.
And that was the most demoralizing part of the Sisterhood’s situation. The flawless had not come to Skellum. In Skellum there were no primeval horrors. Here, there were only fingerlings. It was just the disease and the onset of the transformation.
The Willin Droul had not found it necessary to send a single cabalist to the Shradnae seat of power. No battles with ancient abominations here as there had been in Sandren. Miriam felt the hot embarrassment of that truth: that the Willin Droul no longer considered her organization a threat.
The Sisterhood could not stay in Skellum. Here they were trapped and useless.
In the Shifting Sands near Umong a pile of markers delimited the starline that the Sisterhood would follow. There in the wreckage, outside of Bablemum, the entire Sisterhood would arrive—perhaps irrevocably—in the deep south.
Miriam had used Megan’s scrying dish to find Caliph Howl, filling it with her own blood. The sacrifice had bought her fifteen minutes of insight; the numbers in the bowl had told her he had arrived over Bablemum.
This was frightening because it meant, most likely, that he was still chasing Sena and that Sena had indeed arrived in the oldest city on the Tebesh Plateau.
Bablemum was where the Bedrigan Aquifer bubbled up. So ancient that the locals took pride in their
Used to anyway.
The oldest city in the south had looked ominously silent through the blood in Miriam’s dish.
Why would Sena lead him to Ulung? That dark watery stronghold within the aquifer? Was Sena just a puppet of the Willin Droul? If so, could the Sisterhood face the flawless at Ulung with any hope of success?
Miriam thought about the aquifer, which connected through underground seas and rivers, to the east, west and north. Prehistoric cracks that led beneath the Ghalla Peaks had allowed the flawless to poison Sandren. They could reach Stonehold. They could reach anywhere.
There was no telling how many of them were down there, sliding through the dark, tainting the drinking water of a million cities with disease.
CHAPTER
44
Despite having woken from a terrible dream, Caliph breathed easily. His body tingled with pleasant, torpid warmth. The dusty rawness of the desert, which had made his throat sore and shunted blood through his sinuses, had been replaced with gauzy humidity. Air soft as cobwebs dragged over his skin; he could hear the outside world, ebbing on the draft. Based on sounds, someone had put him to bed with the window open.
His ears opened like sinkholes, funneling sound directly into his brain. He was curious where he was, but still too sleepy to open his eyes.
Big occasional droplets dinged on tin, thumped on wood. Intermittent. There were tree sounds as well, or maybe grass, behind which murmured a faintly unnatural urban stillness. Soft electrical purring mixed with the unmistakable sob of tree frogs.
Caliph lingered, enjoying the after-rain smell and the softness of his pillow.
Faint flickers and far-off thunder encouraged him to stir. His last memory was of Taelin bending over him. He swallowed hard. His throat itched and his eyes were puffy and hot. The air tingled with sweet black molds and mildew.
He squinted; sat up; dug the crust out of his tear ducts and realized that he didn’t feel nearly as well as he had thought. Though warm drugs still gloated in his capillaries, vague pains lingered.
He set his feet on the cool flooring and peered toward the window.
“Mizraim … Emolus—”
He got up and stumbled toward the astonishing view.
Beyond the window, the sky boiled with ultramarine storm clouds, immolated by Naobi.
He was still on the Iycestokian ship. He recognized the smell. But while he slept, it had moored at the edge of a city where great stupas, not of stone but of ornamental iron, enmeshed the clouds. Black cage-like shrouds surrounded and capped the city’s more compact structures.
Purple lights in cupolas and minarets bled wetly through the grilles. Copper wires and golden transformers traced the blackness with countercoiled designs. Signs glowed and bubbled in the empty streets. Tropical trees hissed as wind pushed through husk-like silken fronds.
He drank it in for several moments. Then he noticed a folded stack of papers, propped up, labeled with his name in Sena’s handwriting. He picked the papers up nervously. They were paper-clipped together. Their contents had been typed.
He read them by moonlight and scowled.
Session #2: Phismas, Sae 9
Stenographer: X. Fadish
Subject: [redacted]
How are you feeling?
[redacted]
Good. What would you like to talk about today?
[redacted]
I see.
That’s a lot.
Well let me try to respond to all of that. I’ll start by saying yes. The Veydens do say that visions without actions are only dreams.
[redacted]
No. No one really knows where the Veydens got their pseudosciences from. Some claim they deciphered old stones in the jungle.
[redacted]
Yeah, well the Pplarian-Gringling link is really just speculation. You’d be hard-pressed to get a group of scholars to believe—
[redacted]
Sure, but nowadays, Greeny
[redacted]
