Black Bottle

was like walking on cake.

“Why are you here?” He tried to keep his voice level but detected the sound of pleading in it. He was unprepared for the truth.

“I’m not with Them, Caliph.” His heart swelled momentarily. “But I wanted you to open that door.” The metaphor she had used on the airship came back to him. “I wanted you to see these things behind it because you never believed me. You never listened to me about your uncle’s book. I just needed you to understand.”

From behind, Baufent called out to him, desperate, pleading. Her voice prompted a vague sense of responsibility that he ignored.

The room was some kind of empty septic tank and as he crossed it, it sank its cold moldy teeth into his chest. He detected a slope. Some cement structure meant to control the flow of sediment. Sena stood on top of it. She was only a few steps away now. She said something in the language Caliph couldn’t understand and the thing at the doorway moved away. Caliph heard other movements in the tank. Other vast shapes, which he had not even noticed, began to disperse, hauling their giant forms into equally sized culverts.

“You have to understand something,” she said as he approached. “It’s you and me. Just you and…” Her voice trailed off for several seconds, hinting at deeper meanings. “… me.”

“Is it?” A tatting of mold on one of the room’s pillars seemed to absorb the phosphorescent light coming from her back. “I don’t think it’s been you and me for a long time now.”

Little was clear to Caliph except that Sena was standing in this horrid tank, surrounded by miscreations.

The long chase had worn him down. He had made up his mind, finally. But the realization made him miserable and desolate. He felt sick. Sick and weak and exhausted. He reached out and grabbed her by her fashionable jacket, hands knotting into fists.

He shook her violently. He took her by the throat. She was light and her body jerked limply under the force, as if she was helpless. She winced. He threw her on the ground.

“What did you do!” he screamed at her. “What did you do!”

All the dead people poured out through his scream. He could feel them as if they were there. His responsibility. As if they were staring at him right now. Alani and Sig and all the rest.

Sena did not look up from where he had thrown her. Light trickled between her leather collar and the back of her neck. It lit her hair. He could see flecks of sewer mud. Glops of black gunk from a puddle near her arm had splashed up and spattered her shoulder.

Chest heaving with shame and anger and uncertainty he stood over her with one bizarre thought in his head: what now?

He certainly wasn’t going to sink down on his knees and touch her, help her up, clean her off. What he was thinking of doing was unspeakable.

“Drink it, Caliph.”

He couldn’t see her face. He swung his chin to one side and cocked his head. Incredulous. He wasn’t listening to her. He would never listen to her again.

But already he had reached inside his pocket and found the tiny metal flask. It was leaden in his hand.

“No,” he said. “I won’t. This is over. This madness. It stops here. You’re going to fix it.” He was embarrassed at how childish his words sounded. “Get up,” he told her.

A few huge shapes shifted in the black wings of the chamber. Apparently not all of her immense underlings had left. He sensed some of them might be drawing closer but he didn’t dare to look. Were they her bodyguards? Would one of them now reach out and break him in its mouth?

Baufent’s voice called again, thousands of miles away.

Sena’s whisper drowned the doctor out. She whispered to the flawless first, passing them some instruction. Then she whispered to him. “You know everything you need, do you? To make your decision? Is that it, Caliph? You know so much?”

“You’ve been dosing me with these tinctures. Who knows what—”

“Your third dose isn’t going to kill you. Drink it.” She rolled onto her side and looked up at him. There was an ugly smear of mud on her face.

“Fix it,” he said. “Fix what you did!”

“I will. You drink it and I’ll fix it. I’ll fix everything.”

“Fix it now!” He wanted to call her a murderer, but felt the hypocrisy of the thing. He wanted to blame all his frustrations on her, starting with her inattentiveness over the past year to everything from the plague and his dead friends right down to this moment standing in this deplorable room. But he couldn’t. No matter what holomorphy she had used, he had chosen this. He had arrived here under his own power.

“If you don’t drink it, I won’t stop you. You can strangle me if you want. It’s what you’re thinking. And I’ll let you do it. But what will happen next, Caliph? Think about that. What will happen next?”

Caliph did think about that. She was crazy. She had always been crazy. And that was why he was here. Because he had always gone along with it. But not anymore. This was it. This was the last time.

“I drink it and you fix everything? Can you can really do that?”

“I can really do that, Caliph.”

He hated her. He hated her more in that moment than he had ever hated anyone, because even now with her lying in the shit of civilization, at his feet, she was still somehow more powerful than he could understand.

“Gods-fucking-dammit!” He could smell the drug before he unscrewed the cap. The memory of it. Its taste and aroma were already burned into his brain. What was he going to do instead? Go back to Baufent and help her drag Taelin up to street level? And then what? Find food? Barricade against the creatures?

So maybe this was the easy way out. And he was a gutless shit-heel. He had always suspected himself a coward. And maybe this was the worst moment of his life. He hated the sense of inevitability. With the flask open, the sweet tea-and-mint smell sickening the air, he tipped it into his mouth.

CHAPTER

50

The Veyden messenger that had told the lie—that Sena was on her way to make peace—was dead. Autumn had taken him out behind the hotel as ordered. Shortly after her return, Miriam had noticed how things had changed: how everything had a wrongness to it.

As the Sisterhood’s attention had been pulled inward, diverted from the exterior of the hotel and focused on the mysterious Veyden messenger, the lights in the Grand Elesh’Ox had shifted color. They were not dimmer. But they had turned from yellow-orange to olive-green. Then slowly, ever so slowly, the ornate textured wallpaper began to peel.

When some of the furniture started floating, spare inches above the floor, Miriam knew what was happening.

The humidity doubled. Then it doubled again. It was like breathing water. The whole building felt like it had been scuttled. Miriam’s feet barely kept contact with the ground.

Outside, in the wide avenues, shapes were massing—orderless and green, shadowed by distance and atmospheric moisture, flickering with a hint of silvery, reflective skin.

The Willin Droul were coming.

From all quarters, from every building, street and drain, a huge circle of hungry variegated forms drew in around the grand hotel. It was clear to Miriam that the Sisterhood had been led into a trap.

Miriam blamed herself for this mistake.

From the Grand Elesh’Ox, the collective smell of the Sisterhood’s skin, warm and fragrant, bled out into the avenues. Her girls were leeches, dangling in the watery air, baiting in a great gathering of silvery schools.

The snuffling groans, the chirrups of titillation and ecstasy were audible as the hoard surrounded the building. Miriam watched hungry eyes gather in the streets, eager for the slaughter. Some eyes were visible. Many more were not. Mounds of rags stood and swayed. The Willin Droul clogged every alleyway; they filled every adjacent window.

Talons and fat lumpen heads scraped the brickwork around the hotel’s foundations. Tentacles wrangling from