Black Bottle

12

Taelin cartwheeled. Flopped. Rolling buttes spun by, rotten-apple black. The wind cut her ears. An endless procession of razors. She was on her back now, arms and legs flapping, staring up into the wet flood of stars, waiting for impact.

Through the crush of one-hundred-twenty-mile-an-hour winds, a soprano whisper returned. This, rather than her fall, gave Taelin strength to scream again.

“Taelin—”

The singsong voice threatened her. She heard other voices encircling her descent. “Taelin!”

“Lady Rae.”

She felt hands on her body, restraining her.

“Get off! Get off!” She was screaming. The air at her back pushed up hard. Too hard. Like a foam mattress. Like a hospital cot. She lurched forward, covered in sweat, into the bright light, the red shapes of physicians bending over her.

“I’m not falling!” She screamed and laughed.

She felt a deep twinge in the meat of her shoulder.

“Three units of amylobar.”

Such a clinical voice. Taelin laughed again, right before impact.

*   *   *

SENA dismissed the assigned servants. She brought cream and a bowl of sugar. She brought rolls and biscuits from the kitchen. In an unusual display of domesticity, she brought blankets and pillows and coffee into the room that Caliph had chosen as his command center.

He didn’t sleep. It was after midnight. Once they had cleared the airspace over Skellum, personnel were ferried between the ships. Alani came aboard.

It was after midnight on the thirteenth of Tes and for the next several hours Caliph deliberated whether to turn back, cancel his talk at the conference and return with all three ships to Isca.

Alani’s quiet voice modified and calmed the tension in the air. Plans for retaliation against the government of Mirayhr, where the Witchocracy held sway, were quickly scuttled. The attack had been a secret. Caliph decided, and Alani agreed, that for the time being they would keep it that way. The last thing Stonehold needed was to appear weak or friendless to Pandragor.

The heads had left with the book. The skies were empty and quiet again. Six people had died. Night slipped away and light spilled with a suddenness through the portholes, into the airship’s makeshift conference room. It gave luster to the discarded cuff links, the clutter of cups and the several pairs of cast-aside shoes. With the dawn, Caliph decided to go ahead with the conference.

He would not turn back. He would not be distracted from his mission in Sandren. After his talk, after he hammered out his problems with the Pandragonians, he would he deal with the Witchocracy.

“We have a floating hospital and one patient,” said Caliph.

“At least she survived,” said Sena.

Caliph tapped his lip. “That would’ve been a diplomatic shit-storm. I think bringing her with was a bad idea.”

“She’ll recover.”

Caliph chuckled through his nose but did not smile. “She seems to have some medical know-how. Put the doctors in a snarl by telling them their diagnosis was wrong.” He looked up at her. “You think it’s the right choice? To go through with the conference?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe my physicians are doing the work of morticians—on day one no less.”

Sena struggled with guilt. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m fine.”

“It’s not your fault, you know?”

Caliph looked at her quizzically but she could read his embarrassment over the night before.

“When a qloin gives itself to the Eighth House, it ceases to be three sisters. They become fingers on her hand.”

“What are you talking about?” Caliph’s eyes went to Alani who made a motion for coffee before slipping out of the room. The spymaster thought, like many did, that Sena was crazy.

She pressed on. “The Eighth House is the reason none of your bodyguards could move.”

“I should have—”

Caliph started to blame himself but Sena snipped it off. “No.” She looked out through one of the oval windows. “You were under the power of the Eighth House.”

But privately she shouldered a sense of guilt. She hated to see him like this, a whisker-stippled shadow. And yet she had felt so piercingly lonely—all summer long—that she had done it anyway. She had been lonely and he had been full of anxiety over the flight. She had convinced herself that she could take away his fears.

Caliph looked at her with eyes bruised by lack of sleep. Under his clothing she saw the delicate skin fronting his hips, contused through his own struggle for unity, turned black and green. There were great dark suction marks on his chest: proof that the numbers were, quite literally, stacked against him.

He had been waylaid by math.

The proportions and ratios had piggybacked on light, entered through his eyes and been assigned a requisite level of awe. A greater than average chemical storm had swelled inside him. Her numbers were a spiral, a vortex. But they were not helping him.

Her ratios exceeded his capability to compartmentalize and, like the power of the Eighth House, it was unfair.

“Why didn’t the witches just kill me?” His voice sounded confused, dejected; it turned her stomach. She answered with a measure of asperity. “The Sisterhood doesn’t care about you anymore. They have the book.”

This worked and he hardened to her. “Then I don’t understand why you gave it to them. If it’s so important —”

“It is so important. Which is why I gave it to them. They’ll keep it safe, Caliph. In the meantime, I have errands in Sandren. Don’t worry. The Sisterhood can’t use it. Even if they open it … it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

She hung on his question. “To save the world,” she said.

This sent a hairline crack through the invisible wall between them. She watched it creep slowly, as Caliph puzzled over her words. Soon it would turn elaborate and ugly. Sena left the room and went to stand outside in the sunlight. Caliph followed her as though leashed.

She inhaled, let the cold air fill her, but did not feel cleansed. At her feet, sunlight scoured the metal, working to efface the terrible associations from the night before.

“What do you mean?” Caliph asked. “That it’s too late to save the world? You mean the Shradnae Sisterhood is trying to save the world? From what?”

Sena had turned her head to watch his mouth move as he asked this inevitable question. He wore a crooked premonition, gathered at one side of his face as if he sensed what was coming.

“From me,” she said. These two words tapped the wedge into place.

“I don’t get it.” But he did get it. She knew, in his guts, how the rimy dark angle of her words, worked shardlike between his ribs. He chuckled, trying to make light of it. Trying to transform the absurdity into a joke. “I thought the Sisterhood was always the, you know…” he popped his lips and twirled his finger, “the enemy.”

“They are,” she said softly.

“I don’t really understand what you’re saying, then.” He tried to smile. Failed. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Sena turned away from the sun, away from him. She saw herself through Caliph’s eyes, wanting to feel what he felt. He saw her irises flickering with tiny arcs as she turned. He saw her walk resolutely away, through the doorway, leaving him on the deck to believe finally and unequivocally that she had lost her mind.

And that was better. The fissure at least, between the two of them, would give Caliph some dignity, some space and time to claw his way back.