The jungle moves. It unrolls and blooms and sways. It mouths the ruins and the beach, slobbering, drizzling nectar from millions of blossoms. Caliph appreciates the sticky mist coating the back of his neck, spattering against his cheeks, like strange rain, like bat urine. Sweet, aphrodisiacal and repugnant.
Jungles are not really black. But this one is: in perfect counterpoint to the variegated colors of masonry, blossoms and acid-pink water that laps at the beach.
Hurry, Caliph.
Ah. He has found her again.
Movement stirs at the north end of the square. Darkness pours from the undergrowth in tendrils and clouds. Black butterflies, big as his hand. Even the shimmery lunulae of their hind wings glister like fresh tar.
“So beautiful.”
He has found her. Through the wings and disembodied spirits. Eyes made of blue crystal. No. Black. Her eyes have turned black.
She stands at an altar or a lectern and beckons him. It, like the necropolis, is made of dreamt stone.
Its shape is long and threatening. It looks old. Like something that has existed from the beginning. Because of it, thinks Caliph, even if tourists crawled all over this place, ferried from some nearby village in solvitriol cabs, this would be a terrible—
“Are you all right, Caliph?”
He feels pressured into saying yes, because of the desperation in her voice. She sounds hurried.
And then, as if the idea is planted, he has a moment of clarity, which can be compared to only one or two other experiences in his life.
He starts talking without fully understanding what he is saying. But he can feel that he is onto something. “Did you read the papers last summer? When you were away?” he asks her while she is doing something frantically at the altar. “They were so full of the news about Bablemum?” He almost laughs. “The treaty? You know? How the city was going to go back to Pandragonian rule?
“I remember they published excerpts of letters sent from citizens of Bablemum to Emperor Junnu, begging him not to do it. They wrote to senators, diplomats, even foreign powers, asking them to intervene. Even I got one.
“As if—right? But they went door-to-door for signatures. They held rallies. ‘Don’t follow through with this treaty,’ they begged! Because it was going to, you know, modify a whole lot of lives. Change laws. People’s freedoms and families and everything were on the line.”
Caliph gasps as a blast of ocean wind takes him straight in the face. “But you know what? Nothing changed. The day arrived and the treaty went into effect as planned. Because you can’t fight inertia. Not even when you know it’s going to be a disaster. Not with all the reasoning in the world. Because the receipts win out. The money and time spent have too much weight. And people want what they paid for, even if it’s going to kill them. So the police moved into the streets. And no one could do a damned thing about it. People jumped off buildings that night rather than become Pandragonian.”
He looks at Sena closely. “That’s what happens when whole cultures are annexed. That’s what happens when the world loses its ability to steer. And you know, I guess I thought … that people were more sensible.”
“I’m just the sexton,” says Sena. “I dug the hole.” Her mouth is beautiful. Her teeth are an omegoid array of enamel shields standing in pink gums. Her tongue dances behind them.
He doesn’t know why he notices this.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he asks. “Why fill me up with drugs?”
“No matter what I did, I couldn’t get to three.” Sena looks more sincere and more bereft than she ever has before. “This is about transcendence. And you need permission. You have to forgive me for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for that.”
Caliph believes that there are interminable seasons bracketed by proterozoic soup and stars— wheeling over him.
“I wanted to tell you,” she says. “But I couldn’t. It was too dangerous. Your uncle could have —”
But Caliph barely hears her. The sky is not yet light but there are shapes in it. He watches them press and queue like the shadows of frenzied shoppers pressing against frosted glass. There is a red glow behind them as they bang for the clerk, demanding that the bolts be snapped back for their turn to enter, trample and consume. For some reason he imagines all the windows of his uncle’s house blowing out in prismatic splendor as the Yillo’tharnah molt across the sky. They are black laughter, exultant and empty.
“Hold my hand,” Sena whispers.
Caliph laces fingers with her. She has done terrible things. But perhaps she is about to follow through on her promise—and fix everything.
Her hands feel cool. Cooler than the gooey air. The reflection of his face, in her black eyes, is serene and resolved. She guides his forearm over a bed of hollow tines.
The lectern-altar is a ghastly cackle of stone and ancient residue. When his arm is in position, she helps him press it down. The hollow slivers go through him effortlessly, popping from the skin in glistening pincushion-array. He gasps, sets his jaw, says nothing. Blood pours from him into the stone channels, down the drain and into the tubing of a pen.
He looks up, dazed by the creamy pink fume rising over the trees. He doesn’t know that his brain is bleeding.
* * *
SENA lifts the pen with the heavy tubing. A small bottle screwed into the hose mixes pimplota ink as it fills with his blood. When her quill touches the first page, the world shakes. When her pen lifts the tremor ceases.
She can tell that Caliph is disconcerted. He knows now that this is real. He remembers when his uncle did this to him as a boy. The quill’s nib is sharp and supple and drips with the ink of worlds.25
But she must focus all her attention on this act. She cannot search for power and she cannot afford to draw it from herself.
She reaches for the colligation. She pulls holojoules, endless incredible amounts of holojoules from her black amphorae still frozen in Isca. The temple atop the great frustum is empty. It floats, cold and desolate in its realm above Incense Street. But the gelid pots of blood are still there, preserved.
Sena uses all of them.
It hurts her to do this. She feels each pen stroke in her skeleton. The scrape of the quill against the paper is deafening. As sensual as satin or milk poured in morning light. She feels the stone lectern beneath the vellum, formed of Adummim’s geology through ancient dreams—set here as a traitor, for this purpose, to murder the continent.
But the lectern has changed its politics, aligned itself with the new power. The grain of its smooth rock surface kisses the underside of the sheet as she writes in cool defiance of the apocalypse around her.
* * *
NAEN fanned over the equator and pressed the ruins where Caliph was just beginning to feel the kind of unity with Sena that he had not felt for many months. He began to understand things, as if he was inside her, part of her. He began to love the sheet of vellum she was drawing on, profoundly, though he was unsure why. It was primal, like loving sunlight and fresh air. Ancient as his mortal need to be touched.
Sena set her teeth and concentrated. She finished the first glyph and pronounced it. She felt her stomach empty. Her sight dimmed. Her depth perception was gone. She began on the next.
Caliph tried to take a step forward but his forearm was still impaled in the bed of tines. He jerked up short. Sena held his hand. She paused to settle him like a curious child.
