Something was wrong. He couldn’t see. Everything was black. His head felt funny. And then he was falling. There were rocks all around, hitting him in the face. He was falling in blackness. The rocks were falling up and he was falling down. The rocks hurt. He was crying.
The rocks hit him in the face. Slap, slap.
“Wake up, boy.”
Caliph could see the white ceiling again but it was fuzzy. His arm hurt and he was sweating, giant drops. His fingers tingled as if both arms had gone to sleep. The machine was turned off.
“Well I guess that has to be enough,” said Nathaniel. “I don’t want to kill my calf, do I?
“Do I, Caliph?”
The lab blacked out and Caliph snapped up straight. He heard Nathaniel’s voice again, but this was not a memory. This was something new.
CHAPTER
52
Taelin looked up into the face of Dr. Baufent. “Hi,” Taelin said. Baufent looked serious. Baufent always looked serious. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Baufent.
Taelin didn’t believe her. The doctor sat across from her on a bench in what looked to be a restaurant. There were copper fixtures and dark wood on the wall. When Taelin sat up she saw eyebrow windows above the booth, looking out at street level on an indistinct mass of shambling feet.
“You took a bump while we were carrying you,” said Baufent. The doctor seemed wholly uninterested in what was going on outside the window.
“How did we get here?” asked Taelin.
“Up some stairs, through several doors,” said Baufent. “The High King’s witch helped spirit you up.”
“We’re in a restaurant! Have we ordered? Where is everyone?”
“I don’t know,” said Baufent. “Sena said to wait here for you to wake up and that you’d know what to do.”
“Where’s the High King?”
“I don’t know. He abandoned us. It’s just you and me.” Baufent looked indescribably glum as she said this. Gray and tired and hopeless. She looked like she needed sleep. More than that, she looked utterly beaten, as if the thing that had been her had been pulled out and trampled and thrown away. There was no fight left in her face.
Taelin pulled out her necklace. She looked back out the window where a dismal dawn made droplets flicker like tiny white flames. She began to work the soft metal of the demonifuge in her hands. Squinting past the rain, into the gray breadth of Bablemum’s tropical avenues, she could see the Lua’groc massing. Ghouls with leaden skin crawled from sewers followed by taller, thinner men and women that moved like insects or crayfish. Squeezing from the ground came fatter forms, grotesque and slippery, bulging and toad-like, skinned in silver and gold and pink. “Don’t worry,” said Taelin. “Sena’s a goddess. Do you want to play cards?”
The things in the street seemed to be rejoicing.
They seemed to be eating.
“I’m going for a walk,” said Baufent suddenly. She stood up in a curt manner from the booth, put her hands in the deep pockets of her red coat and shuffled toward the door.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Taelin.
Baufent gave a humorless smile. “Good luck, girlie.” She opened the door, stepped outside and shut it behind her.
Taelin poked her nose over the window ledge again, looking out, trying to see what might happen, but there was too much commotion. Too much noise. Baufent’s entry to the street changed nothing. The celebration continued and Taelin slipped back down into the booth to continue working on her necklace.
* * *
SENA could hear snow falling around the eleven asymmetrical dials. Flakes toasted in orange light, glowed like bits of burning paper. As if there had been an explosion.
Though St. Remora still snuffled and coughed, the city of Isca, the last city to contain
All two million of the dead were coming after her, churning through the ether, wielded in the immaterial grip of Nathaniel Howl. The dead were his scepter, his stick of thunder, his trumpet blasting. Arrian’s head floated in the ocean and its eyes were missing.
Sena ran through the tincture dream, looking for Caliph. She still had her colligation, but if she exhausted it now, there would be nothing left for later.
She had meant to say good-bye, to show Caliph their daughter again. She had wanted them to be together, just one last time: all three of them. And the tincture could have provided that. It could have bent logic just enough to allow her to have, for a few seconds, that perfect family that she had never known.
But Nathaniel had found out. It could only be her fault: some stray unguarded thought. Or maybe the secret had leaked from Caliph’s head.
All she knew was that there was no time left to say good-bye and that she was in serious trouble.
* * *
CALIPH smelled his uncle, which was a musty blend of citrus and furniture dust mixed with a fume of urine and cold air, as if an elk had sprayed the bark of a tree, after first snow, high up in the mountain woods.
He rode the tincture without choice, tumbling down a thread of memories. He was alone, directionless, and it felt like his brain was on fire.
His uncle was here, choking him—not as a person chokes another person but as a fable, a sort of inescapable story that posited Caliph as its central character, which Caliph had no control over and which he felt, with the unaccountable clarity bestowed by nightmare, would end as fables generally did: gruesomely. The walls of his uncle’s house closed in on him like a black envelope, the same sort that contained the solvitriol accord. He was being crumpled, crushed …
And then Sena’s hand took hold of his and pulled.
* * *
SENA dragged him hard, out of the tincture dream and into black champagne, into an endless bubble where the universe swarmed. Gibbering sputtering shapes eclipsed the stars. She felt a tug. Some force pulled her backward. She was a swimmer experiencing a bite. Then the Yillo’tharnah let go. It was a warning. A reminder.
She held onto Caliph tightly, regained momentum and emerged.
Caliph was sweating profusely. Sena slapped his cheeks in an effort to bring him around. He would not survive this tincture journey. His brain was bleeding. She shaved some of her ambit to stanch his hemorrhaging— just enough to see him through to the end. She couldn’t afford to waste power now. Not with what was coming.
