Black Bottle

The woman didn’t know. People milled near the doors; some glanced at him curiously.

“Did you see her come in?”

“Yes, I did. But I don’t know where’s she’s gone. Let’s get you dried off.”

Caliph took the towel but left her immediately. He headed for the library, reached it in under a minute and found it locked. He grabbled through his keys, dropped them twice. When he finally unlocked the door, the space beyond was dark and empty.

He headed for the kitchen, feeling strangely panicked. Sena wasn’t there. By the time he reached his bedroom—their bedroom—he was huffing. Two servants looked up at him, eyes turned saucer. They were folding down the sheets.

“Have you seen Sena?”

They shook their heads. Am I going crazy? He checked his choler. Was she doing this intentionally? Just then, a young butler Caliph knew appeared at the bedroom door and spoke with an irritatingly cheerful tone. “Pardon me, your majesty. The door was open. I hope…”

Caliph’s frustration slipped out. “It’s fine, Gilver. What is it?”

The butler continued smiling. “Her ladyship would like to meet you in the east parlor in half an hour. Can I tell her yes?”

Caliph felt stunned. What could be more important than seeing him after so many months? Where was she? What was she doing?

“No. Tell her I’ll meet her now.”

Gilver’s smile vanished and his cheeks went pink as if Caliph’s displeasure had seared him. The butler turned, trying to maintain decorum. He gave up. His stride broke into a stiff-legged run.

*   *   *

SENA disregarded the summons, which put Caliph at the table for forty minutes working his way through spinach leaves and creepberries and almond-crusted tenderloin—alone. When he was done, he stalked back to the great east parlor where a salver of ice cream and wine waited.

Sena liked ice cream regardless of the season.

He wound the thermal crank and flicked the lid on his chemiostatic watch. He was fuming. He plunked down and dished himself some dessert. She was uncontrollable. Unreliable. Unfathomable. And what was he going to do about it? Evict her?

After nearly two years on the throne, he had a grip on most aspects of his domain. He knew how to handle the burgomasters. Multinational relations were a work in progress. But Sena?

There was a steaming cup of milk and honey on the table, recently placed by one of the servants. He pushed it aside and opened the wine.

Partly because he didn’t want to think about her and partly because he couldn’t help it, he tried instead to focus on his country’s politics. He could already hear the journalists.

Have the Pandragonians given us any ultimatums, your majesty?

Is solvitriol research still going on at Glossok?

No and no.

But the problem of the solvitriol accord dragged him down onto the nearby chaise. He grabbed a pillow and lay back, staring up at the ceiling. No ultimatums yet, he would lie.

What would Nuj Ig’nos report once he arrived in Pandragor? Caliph had seen machinations like this before: the charade of diplomacy laying the groundwork for a bloody inevitability. He sat up and poured himself another glass of wine.

He had tried to assure the visiting diplomats that Stonehold’s solvitriol research had been abandoned; that the facility at Glossok had been shut down. But tours hadn’t satisfied his critics. Now they were demanding access to Stonehavian factories, warehouses, even the cellars of Isca Castle.

“I can’t do it,” he said aloud. “Letting them in is a no-win. We’ll wind up like an old circus beast, limping through hoops, extending our paw every time some ticket-holding monarch wants proof we’ve been declawed.” The second glass … or was it the third?… went down like the first (or the second). Too fast. It puckered his mouth.

No proof you give will be enough.

Caliph frowned. “No. It won’t.” He almost looked around for the speaker.

Solvitriol’s just a pretense. It was a breathy scratch inside his head more than a voice. Caliph looked at the bottle of wine and noticed it was over half gone. “Yore absolutely right. Alani and eye whir thinking the same thing. Why wood they come awl the whey up hear win they’ve got wore on they’re hands rite next door?”

The voice in his head was asexual and monotone. It reminded him, for blurry reasons, of his childhood. Its answer felt miraculous.

Caliph scowled.”What dew yew mean, ’the whiches told the south’?” he asked the invisible speaker.

He pictured his uncle’s book, the Cisrym Ta. For no reason that he could think of, its faded red and filthy hide rose up in his mind. The room had grown distant, it reached him only through a filter of gauzy impressions, one of which was that the presence he was talking with smiled like a sarchal hound.

My uncle’s book …

In his head, he heard the words: It’s mine!

Caliph didn’t find it strange. He almost laughed as he took another drink. It tasted like brine.

Caliph pawed his face with clumsy fists. “Why everyone care about an errant text ewe bot in Sandren four five scythes?”

You mean arrant?

Caliph laughed. A moment of clarity seized him. “Ewe told me its pages were pounced from stillborns! That’s fucking errant!”

He spoke as though the voice in his head belonged to Sena, though he knew with vague growing terror it did not.

“Why the Pandragor want that book?”

Iycestoke wants it too.

Caliph felt the words sink through the wine in his stomach and settle at the bottom. “Do they? Then why dun the Three Kings jush bye it? Ice-stoke can by anything. Ann if we’re don’t selling, they can shend there thieves two steel it … bam!” He clapped his hands.

He looked toward the voice but saw only his empty hand. He heard a padded thud. The glass was empty too, rolling on the rug.

Caliph eased back into the chaise, watching his hand flicker as twilight wobbled through the wet windows across from him.

He could feel the wine smoldering in his cheeks. The chaise was rotating on a slow teetering axis.

If I can just survive this year, he thought, don’t get assassinated at the conference on the fifteenth. Just make it through the year. He closed his eyes. The voice was gone. He heard the wind pick up and the rain turn flaky and cold. Make it through the year and I’ll walk away from all of this …

He envisioned snow creeping down into the courtyard where black trees stretched spidery vaults over a late milk-and-sugar sky. The door opened and the scent of southern perfume slunk over him while the world sank into huckleberry night.

“Caliph?” This time it was real. It was not the hissing in his head. This time it was Sena’s voice. He struggled against the darkness to find her. He had missed that voice. So much. “Caliph?”

But he was feeling warm and silly, head curled around the wine. He muttered something to the darkness as her cool fingers touched his burning cheek.

*   *   *

“PEW … smells like boy.”

Sena drew back from Caliph’s flushed skin.

But the stuffiness was different from the numbers and the presence that had been here. She stared through the wall at a residue of integers—which was something she could do.

This was her new life, her new eyes, just one year old, encapsulated, isolated and different from everyone else. This life beyond life had stranded her on an island that was both unapproachable and incomprehensible to the people that moved around it. People shrunk away from her. People feared her.