Black Bottle

“You need more proof? Is that it?” she asked. “More proof than the fact that you are alive?” Her voice was not angry.

But Caliph’s was. He heard how his tone had risen and how it now hinged between hysteria and indignation. But his emotions pushed him on. “If you did it for me, you can do it for them!” He flung his arm again toward the window, aiming generally at the tent hospital. “Isn’t that reasonable? If I were you, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be out there. I’d bring every one of them back to life.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “Trust me. But I don’t blame you for being angry. What I did for you was selfish. I didn’t want to go the distance, you know?” She looked away. “Without you…”

“Angry? I’m not angry. I’m just confused. I’m just trying to make sense of what you’re saying. I don’t even know what you mean. Go what distance? You’ve been gone over half a year. Where? Why? What was more important than being with me?”

“I went to the Pplar, to the jungles. I wish I could tell you everything, Caliph.” She opened her mouth as if to say more but no sound came out. It was like she was afraid. Her eyes slid sideways in her head as if wary of someone or something listening.

“Why don’t you?” he pressed. “Tell me everything?”

“Because. You wouldn’t believe me.”

“That’s not for you to decide.”

“In this case it is, Caliph.”

“If you told me I would believe you.”

“I can’t.”

“And you won’t cure the Sandrenese? Are you saying that you can’t do that either?”

“What I’m saying is that there aren’t any gods coming to save us—or you. No one can save the Sandrenese. You have to save yourself, Caliph. It’s down to you. It’s down to your ambit.”

Caliph found her conviction chilling but her behavior was too bizarre. Gods or not, he believed she was wrong. He believed she was crazy.

Looking down at the tent hospital, all he knew was that the Sandrenese could not save themselves. People were bad at saving themselves, he thought. The world didn’t work that way. In the real world, people saved each other.

Sena looked at him with an expression of deeply fractured sorrow. He wondered if she could still read his mind, if she was always reading it.

His uncle’s book had changed her, hurt her, made her this way. He stood up. Compelled partly by his own self-righteousness to go down to the hospital.

“You’re right, Caliph.” The words sent a teeming pitter-patter of icy pincers up his back.

Right about what? he thought. There was a long pause during which he stood, patiently attuned to her.

“You’re right, Caliph, but when you can, will you read these?” In her hand she held two thin books, sandwiched together, one old—one not so much.

“I don’t have time to read!”

“You missed them,” she said, “the night you were in my library.”

His whole body congealed.

“They’re important,” she said.

And he believed her. He felt that if he didn’t believe her, in a spite-fueled way, he would be justified. But his gut told him that not believing would also be a terrible mistake. And besides, he had promised that he would believe her.

She seemed so childish in the face of what was going on: Stonehold was on the brink of sanctions if not war. This conference, which was of critical importance to protecting the duchy, had been derailed by plague. He was in very real danger of being assassinated. All he wanted to do was help, despite the odds. And she treated all of it like a diversion, a table-game between them that they were talking over, distracted from, potentially uninterested in finishing.

Caliph held out his hand for the books.

On entering his palm, their texture worried his fingertips. Their weight conveyed immediately an irrational sense of defeat that settled at his core: another burden he had allowed her to saddle him with.

CHAPTER

15

The day after the attack that had won the Sisterhood the book, Miriam stood in Parliament with her Sisters.

She imagined ice-cold air inflating her lungs as she stared into the marble surround. Great rectangles of black stone served as mirrors, framing the fiery hollow. The fireplace dwarfed her, its mantel entirely out of reach.

While pretending to stare at her reflection she traced the thin scar around her neck with her fingers, feeling the completeness of its circuit. She felt giddy and strange to have been part of something so mythic. Yet it troubled her. She also felt violated. As if she had agreed to a hypnotism without realizing she would have no recollection of the event.

Just the memory of cold air touching her insides.

Miriam stared past herself. She could see the women behind her. Deep in the black marble, a red dress wavered like a brushstroke as one of the women reached for another beer. The surround’s atrous polish subdued the colors and turned the entire scene glossy as a litho.

“Miriam, hon? Come get drunk with us. You earned it.”

She turned around. The brown ten-pound contraption on the floor was open, hissing with green lights and ice. It held a dozen black bottles with red and silver labels.

“Sure.” She walked over and took one, kissed its neck. It tasted of pungent southern soils.

The spoils of war rested on a low table, before the semicircle of women in large leather chairs: the legendary Cisrym Ta. Its cover, still red after more than twenty-thousand years, had faded and torn. Could it really be that old? The black thorny mark on it threatened her vaguely. Its latch was locked.

She took another drink.

Giganalee’s laugh gurgled up near Miriam’s elbow and terrorized her.

The Eighth House’s withered frame sat propped in a huge chair. Her face clung to her skull like crepe fabric.

Miriam noticed the old woman’s fingers, unrelated bones that had been tied together somewhere inside her lace sleeves. They poked out awkwardly, fiddling with her beer as she coughed and giggled without explanation.

Worried that she might choke, Miriam leaned forward and asked if she was all right.

But the Eighth House did not answer. Sisters had dressed her up in full ceremonial garb tonight for the celebration. Giganalee’s coal-black dress was cut from silk and trimmed with midnight-colored lace. Peeking from beneath, a white satin lining swaddled her throat and claws, conferring the elegance of a decorated corpse.

“Madam D’ver?” Haidee took the bottle out of Giganalee’s fingers and tried to calm her but Giganalee continued rocking in her chair, bubbling with laughter.

We are lost, thought Miriam.

An iatromathematique showed up with a sedative. She spoke in a soothing whisper into Giganalee’s ear as she rolled up the old woman’s sleeve. Her arm resembled suet. A quick injection put her into a torpor and several girls wearing white gowns maneuvered her frail body onto a wheelchair that they silently rolled away.

“What do we do now?” asked Duana.

Haidee straightened her crimson hem. “Whatever we want.”

Miriam found her conviction repugnant. “Really? How do we open it?”

“There’s a recipe,” said Haidee. She wagged her chin and scowled at Megan from under her eyebrows. “We have it.”

“A recipe none of us can follow,” said Miriam. “Unless one of us wants to admit to a little faron12 on the