Black Bottle

Under the lights, in the mirrors, Caliph looked at himself. Clean at last. He gleamed with uniform color save for a one-inch scar on his arm. He stared at it for a few moments.

Then he got out and toweled off.

He got dressed and went back to the room where Taelin and Baufent were waiting for him. He wanted to grill Taelin before Ku’h’s men returned, but she wasn’t talking. All she would say was that yes, Sena had talked to her, yes Sena had given her instructions, but that no she couldn’t talk about them.

This came as no surprise to Caliph. He expected this sort of nonsense.

“I don’t know whether you took advantage of her or not,” Baufent said as an aside. “But I think she’s suffering severe polymodal hallucinations. Multisensory. I’m not sure she can even tell what’s real anymore. She keeps claiming that you and she—”

“What?” Caliph came momentarily unglued. “Gods no!”

“I see. Well, she’s got a low-grade fever. I checked her, and her one arm is absolutely silver. She’s fighting it off thanks to the vaccine, I think she’ll make it, but … anyone she comes in contact with. Those Veydens for instance.”

“I’m not worried about the Veydens,” Caliph groused.

“Well, obviously they survived the plague here in Bablemum but … they might have stayed clear of physical contact. Taelin was all over that man—”

“I said I’m not worried about them.”

“I’m a doctor. It’s my job to worry about everyone.”

“If you knew what I knew, you’d feel the same. Trust me on that.”

“My stomach hurts,” said Taelin.

“Give her one of your tablets,” said Baufent.

Caliph rooted in a pocket for his bottle. What his fingers touched jarred him. He drew out a small cold steel flask, like a memento carried back from a dream. It did not belong here, in his hand.

Staring at it, Caliph forgot Dr. Baufent; he forgot what he had been digging for in his pocket. All he remembered was a little girl with cold fingers who smelled of sugar and glue and Sena smiling as if happy for the first time in her life.

He shook the flask but couldn’t tell if it was empty.

“What’s that?” asked Baufent.

He barely acknowledged her with a mumbled “Dunno. Some kind of tincture I guess.” He unscrewed the cap and peered inside. There was liquid, like dark tea, and a smell that made his mouth water.

He clenched his jaw and screwed the cap back on. What is going on? He slipped the flask back into his pocket.

“Everything all right?” asked Baufent.

“Fine.” But now, with all the things he’d read, he began to postulate, against his logical nature, what the dreams Sena had showed him might have meant.

He remembered the antacids and handed them to Baufent who took them with a growly look and gave one to Taelin. The priestess didn’t ask what it was. She munched it like candy.

A knock sounded from the door that led to the airship’s deck.

“Ku’h’s back,” said Baufent. Her voice held mild apprehension.

“You should be happy,” said Caliph. “We can go to dinner.”

CHAPTER

47

Umong was the name of a ruin that jutted like a rotten tooth fifty miles due north of Eh’Luhnah Usoh: Lake of the Sky. There were markers near the ruins—for the starline.

The starline had carried the Sisterhood, which was safer and less costly than the way Miriam had traveled from the desert. Still, whatever had taken Anjie remained between the worlds, and it pressed the starline. Miriam felt it as the Sisterhood went south. She arrived in the ruins with one hundred seventy girls.

It was a devastating blow. The witches had used the starlines with impunity for decades. They were the only ones that knew about them. How could they be attacked en route, while walking lines?

Despite the shock, the dismay and the confusion that every girl felt, Miriam forced them to regroup and get organized. And while they muttered that it didn’t make sense, Miriam thought, What did? What did make sense? Certainly not that the Sisterhood had fallen to pieces, that the Country of Mirayhr had been overrun with silver ghouls. That the Willin Droul had taken the entire world by surprise and that, last of all—and most ridiculous—that the Sisterhood’s only hope of survival was to put every resource they had on chasing down one orphan from the islands …

Going after Sena, thematically, didn’t make sense—mechanically it was the only thing Miriam had. The Sisterhood would serve out its purpose. She would see to that.

Miriam’s skin prickled despite the warmth.

Though initially she had seen people near the ruins—huge green-skinned Veydens, looking like businessmen that had been stranded on a tropical island with only fine clothes to wear—they melted into the jungle at the Sisterhood’s arrival.

The ruins consisted of a few scorched and green-carpeted walls that rose from an ancient pile of paint cans. Corrosion had made the cans thin. They resembled hollow cylinders of rust-colored paper, part of the metallic scrap dumped decades ago by the look of it, all shrinking slowly into a vine-solidified mound.

Miriam got the Sisterhood moving right away.

South of the scrubby savannah that spread north and west, tendrils of hungry green supplanted grassland. The city of Bablemum lay just inside the jungle. A seed of commerce and government bounded by ceontes and thousands upon thousands of miles of dense jade-colored rot.

The Sisterhood did not follow the road. Even though their arrival had been noticed, Miriam took them along the jungle’s edge, through waist-deep grass. The sounds of birds, insects and leaves refuted the idea that this was a civilized place. There was no commerce along the road to the north. No people anywhere to be seen.

In addition to scrying on Caliph Howl, the blood-filled dish back in Parliament had shown Miriam other cities. Ekron, Iternum, Nilora and Os. Dadelon, Norwytch, Loonal and Gath. She had glimpsed Horth Gar and Afran. Everywhere it was the same. Disease and madness.

With a mix of compassion and regret, Miriam noticed the contrite and haunted circles around Autumn’s eyes.

It took them the whole day to walk from Umong to the outskirts of the city, following the jungle’s edge. As they neared, pushing through fields of round-bladed grass, Miriam noticed a few Veydens standing on rooftops in the outskirts at a distance of a hundred yards. They must have used their own brand of holomorphy to evade her diaglyphs. Perhaps witch doctors protected them from disease.

Keen as she was to establish contact and gather information, the Veydens withdrew before the Sisterhood could advance. But Miriam didn’t have to follow them. They retreated in the direction of the Iycestokian ship, the place she had pinpointed as Caliph Howl’s location.

Despite her unfamiliarity with the region, Miriam had no need of a map. The bowl of blood had given her the High King’s position and her diaglyphs led the way.

She pushed out of the grassland, into the actual city, and found the metropolis quiet. As evening fell, she could tell her girls were exhausted.

They needed a place to make camp. A building. Power seemed to be cut almost everywhere. Small things worked. Signs burnt with bright colors, sucking their energy from golden wires that coiled into the air and ended miraculously like antennae. But there was one building with noticeably more juice, one that clearly had its own grid, like the localization of chemiostatic power in the north. It glowed, independent of the surrounding darkened streets.

Miriam sent scouts to determine if it was occupied.

Word came back that it was empty, powered on bariothermic coils near the back of the building, and that it seemed tactically sound.