Black Bottle

“Your choice,” said Alani. “Thirty hours and good politics or—”

Caliph threw his hands up. “Fine. Move us into the palace.” What am I doing?

*   *   *

“YOU should be asleep,” said Baufent.

Taelin stood at the edge of the tents, looking toward the gate. She could still see the High King arguing with his men but couldn’t hear anything they were saying. Baufent’s voice barely registered. Taelin kept staring at the king.

Baufent turned it into a joke. “You little spy!”

“Am not.” Taelin’s denial came out sounding surprisingly defensive. To offset it, she choked up a laugh.

“Come with me,” said Baufent.

“Where are we going?” She followed the doctor back into the tents where one of the patients was forcefully vomiting a kind of gray-purple chunder from between his or her exposed teeth. Sex became difficult to tell as the disease progressed.

“It looks like they’re going to waste away,” said Baufent. “And they might. But believe me, it can surprise you.”

Taelin held her shirt up in front of her face.

“Hurry,” said Baufent. “You’re not immune yet.”

“Where are we going?” Taelin asked again.

“Anselm, that ass, has thrown me out of the tent. Says I need sleep. Sleep! Do you hear that?” The crescendo of howls beyond the gate underscored her meaning. “Well, I can’t sleep and since you’re totally useless at the moment, you’re going to play cards with me.”

Taelin laid her crutches on the ground and sat down across from Baufent on a cot. She watched the physician shuffle a deck.

The bright suits of flower-wrapped bones and devils mixed with winged creatures and constellations as the cards slid across the small table between them for the next several hours.

Baufent won nearly all the hands.

Finally, Taelin noticed the light in the tent had changed. It had become more blue. And there was a small fingerprint of pink sunlight glowing on the fabric as dawn touched Sandren from the west.

“We’re supposed to go home today,” Taelin mentioned. “I’m out of clean clothes and I have a mission home that I need to take care of…”

“I read that,” said Baufent, “in the paper. St. Remora?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a big responsibility. Why do it up there? I mean, why not just open a mission in Pandragor—where you’re from?”

Taelin deliberated a moment over how much honesty to apply to her answer. Finally she said, “Turning on lights in dark rooms has a bigger impact … than turning them on in rooms that are already lit.”

“Oh.” Baufent sat back in her chair as if insulted. “Well, I suppose that is our reputation.”

“I’m not talking about you. Or Nanemen in general.” Taelin tried to smooth her reply. “It’s not racial or cultural. You didn’t choose your government.”

“Ah, so it’s our government, is it? Maybe you really were spying on the king—”

Taelin tried not to think about her father or the tiny bottle in her pocket as she contemplated Caliph Howl. “It’s strange,” she said. “He seems like a good man.”

“He’s arrogant,” said Baufent. “But I suppose you have to be arrogant if you want to rule Stonehold. If you weren’t, the burgomasters would eat you alive. I used to despise him but he grows on you.”

“I can see how he would.”

A commotion from outside made them forget their hands. They pushed aside the dew-covered flap and stepped out into air and sunlight, frosted as though a weather system gone missing from Stonehold had turned up here.

The cold bit Taelin’s throat. She expected to see one of the patients risen up, assaulting the doctors. But the silver- and black-freckled bodies lay still as fish at market: long, silent, and basking in the mountain’s air.

People were jogging toward the west walls, mounting the stairs, looking into the sunrise and pointing in horror.

From the sound and pitch of the disturbance, Taelin decided that the palace grounds had become the focus of some kind of assault. The postern had been closed and barred for the night but it sounded like a great mass of people had assembled just outside the walls. Knee throbbing, Taelin climbed the battlements to see.

Past the crenels there were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. She was no good judge of such large numbers.

She walked in a stupor, overcome by the sheer size of the horde. A soldier in blue goggles brushed past her. He seemed to be talking to himself. “They’re nothing but animals.” His voice couched more awe than contempt.

Taelin wanted to say that he was wrong. That those were still people down there. But she lacked the faith to actually get it out. It was a ghoulish scene. The plague-stricken were crying and hammering and shrieking against the walls. Many of them must have died under the crush of their fellows or by hurling themselves repeatedly against the stone enclosure. Bodies had been trampled into pink paste that glistened like cooking fat in the cracks between stones. It covered everything. Some crouched, feeding. Still the hoard yelped and chittered and persisted in their futile attack.

But none of this was what the physicians and soldiers were pointing at. Their arms stretched out above the chaos, beyond its sickening sights and sounds.

From the battlements Taelin and everyone else could see, casting long ruinous shadows, the wreckage of the Iatromisia: still tethered to the teagle platform.

No one was sure how they had pulled it down. Much of the conversation atop the parapet revolved around theories. One thing seemed certain. The zeppelin’s elevator had been left unlocked.

Whatever the truth, the Iatromisia was still in the process of being destroyed. Great holes had been ripped in her skin. The gasbags were deflating. The delicate duralumin frame had been crumpled under the weight of hundreds of hideous leaping bodies.

“We’re trapped.” It came out of someone’s mouth as a whisper.

“We’re not trapped. The Odalisque can ferry us down.”

“Funny that, eh?” said someone else. “He manages to save his luxury craft?”

Taelin left the battlements, nauseous, wondering what Caliph Howl planned to do. This was a disaster. It felt like the end of the world. She realized she was crying and she hardly knew why. She leaned heavily on her crutches, hanging her head in an effort to hide her emotion. She blamed the tears on lack of sleep; her notions of seeing any of her relatives had vanished along with illusions that the High King’s tiny clinic could nurture Sandren back to health.

“We’ll be fine.” Baufent’s firm voice startled her. The doctor squeezed her shoulders. “Don’t worry.”

But Baufent’s voice held little conviction and Taelin did worry. She wiped her tears and noticed for the first time that she was filthy.

“Shit,” said Baufent. “Now what?” The physician hustled toward a new commotion in the tents and Taelin followed her, catching glimpses of shouting people and limbs thrashing.

The patient causing the commotion had to be forcibly restrained. Its silvery arm struck a steel bowl full of medical devices. The bowl sang as it hurled to the ground and scattered its contents in the grass. Taelin crept forward to pick up the mess. She was unable to see clearly but the patient was certainly going through horrendous fits.

Baufent shouted for help and more physicians came running.

As Taelin watched the scarlet coats blot out the scene she felt helpless. The world provided her no place to go, nothing to do, no way to help. Her position in the grass, holding the steel bowl was useless.

Why?

Because she had deviated from the dream. Didn’t that make sense? Nenuln had told her not to let the High King’s witch escape. But right now Taelin didn’t even know where Sena was or what she was doing. She had