Black Bottle

through the mutant limbs of one towering flawless. His knives gleamed in his hands. The next instant, he held only one.

Miriam tried to steer her momentum but he had gauged his throw too well. The knife struck her like a brick. She went into a roll, tumbling over the slab. Clearly, he had seen her heading for the High King and misinterpreted her intent.

Miriam blinked. She was on the ground. Her body ached from several more or less vague locations. The knife still stuck in her back, point embedded in her shoulder blade. Gravity tugged it. So did her movements. When her scapula slid beneath her skin, the blade cut her again.

She reached back with her other hand and wrenched it out.

Already he was coming for her. Or was he?

She had never seen an old man move so fast, cutting a half-circle out from the tangle of enemies. Nearby, one of his remaining agents floated above the ground. Oozing bulbous tendrils around the monster’s upper jaw guided the agent to a quivering pink conclusion.

Miriam saw another flawless reach for the spymaster. Its arm stretched several yards but Alani’s feet hiccupped, popping him into a jump that propelled him just out of reach.

The spymaster wasn’t coming for her. He was running for Caliph Howl and her ancillas. His second knife had already left his hand. It was better aimed and took Medea in the back, through vital organs. She dropped instantly which pulled Anjie, Miriam’s second, up short.

Miriam cursed. She could read the stunned look of fear in Anjie’s eyes as the girl registered what had just happened. Anjie found the source of the knife. She understood who was coming for her.

Miriam’s diaglyphs calculated for her as she palmed the old assassin’s knife. The other qloin had touched down not far away and was trying to reach her from the direction of the palace. This was the agreed course of action, but when they met the flawless, the other qloin stopped dead.

Miriam’s dash toward the king faltered as her legs spasmed. Her body tensed under the shrieking sound of hydraulics. It was very close to that sound. One of the flawless had barked. The blast of sound put her on her kneepads. She skidded to a stop, hands over her ears. Her cheek coursed with blood.

She took two deep breaths but couldn’t hear a thing. Massive frog feet were moving toward her. The concrete cracked. In mundane dissociation with everything else, a colony of insects whose nest beneath the slab had been broken open, poured out like a spreading stain.

The flawless’ great weight had broken through the stone. It mounted a slab of jutting cement and looked in her direction.

Miriam got her legs moving. They carried her as if she clung to someone else’s back. In front of the pain there was fear and fear was the trigger for her training. Most of the hardwired responses—screaming, folding up in the fetal position—had been ripped out and replaced with other options. The one that served her best at the moment was run.

She hit the ground as hard and fast as she could. Both feet pounding. She looked back to see a curtain of metallic-gray skin stretch between phalanges and thighs. The enormous candy-sucker eyes glared at her as she tore over the cement. The singular horn of the flawless’ right hand pulled it into a leap, using the sundered skyward slab of concrete for leverage.

Airborne and impossible, like a dead tree in a cyclone, it hurled toward her.

When it landed, it broke the cement again, lifting a new section out of the ground. Miriam catapulted off the end, an athlete hoping to clear a chasm, sailing over the grass, trajectory uncertain. She flew past the desperate battle between her ancilla and the spymaster, toward the oblivious High King.

In an unintended excess of accuracy, she landed so close to Caliph Howl that she stumbled into him. The impact sent the sword in his hand dipping toward the ground. It made a dull, loud thump and steam or smoke rose from the sod.

He spun on her with a confused look in his face, thumb flicking the end of his weapon. It popped, crackled almost, and began humming again. He lifted it menacingly.

“King Howl, we have to—”

And then the silence was back, deeper and more profound. Her head felt like it was underwater. She lifted a hand to the side of her face. She was bleeding from her left ear and the sun had gone behind a shadow, as if the Odalisque had moved in front of it.

But it was not the Odalisque.

The High King’s jaw was set as he powered his black sword into a swing aimed just right of Miriam’s head.

Miriam dropped Alani’s knife and tried to get out of the way. What greeted her was the horn-like appendage of the flawless falling shy, spare inches, and lodging in the ground: incongruous as a giant stalactite taken from a cave and hurled into the sod. Maybe it was intentional. Maybe it was another act of the ancient Lua’groc leveraging its enormous body.

Maybe it had missed.

On the other side of the horn and the arm it was attached to, Alani had just driven his long-knife up below the creature’s sternum, under its alien rib cage.

The eel head gave no indication of pain. Its barbels flexed and Miriam felt her boots lift off the ground. The thing was levitating her into its mouth.

She cried out but Anjie could not assist. She had refocused on the king, determined to follow through with the plan, determined to get him out of here alive. Ignoring Alani’s knife, which was still buried presumably in its soft organs, the flawless opened its mouth to receive Miriam and at that instant the High King’s sword hit bone.

Miriam saw a flash of light. She went blind. Her eyebrows singed. Unable to see or hear, she lost all sense of balance. Her body promptly fell to the ground and slid down the slope. She smelled dirt and grass and felt loam pack itself under her nails.

She blinked, scrambling. On her feet again in an instant.

The world was coming back in bleached panorama, faded tints and shapes that gradually made sense.

She lurched back up the slope. Only a few feet. She hadn’t fallen far. The smoking body of the flawless had collapsed into a kind of massive tripod, bones and cooked flesh propped up somewhat by the weight of the limbs. The whole hideous shape seemed anchored by the creature’s horned hand: still stuck fast in the dirt.

Caliph Howl was clicking the end of his weapon but the thing no longer hummed. Its battery was spent. He looked drugged and did not seem to notice that the same massive electrical burst that had fried the Lua’groc had also charred his spymaster, who had been caught weapon in hand, fully intersecting the creature.

Alani Anjin, former grandmaster of the Long Nine, was dead.

Miriam gripped the High King by his bicep and forced him into a bewildered jog toward the palace, motioning for Anjie and her other two remaining girls to protect their flank.

Her eyes burned; she still couldn’t hear out of her left ear. The barks had done permanent damage. There were several flawless, standing more or less in the middle of the vast slab. One was looking up distractedly at the Odalisque while its fellows played with the bodies strewn at their feet.

Miriam tugged the High King off the slab, down into a pit set with steps. She shoved him through a metal door into a machinery room, then turned and counted heads. Autumn had made it in, thank gods. So had Gina. Including Anjie and herself, four of the original six were accounted for.

“What happened to the other two?”

“They’re gone.”

There wasn’t time to mourn. She told Autumn to watch Caliph before darting back up the stairs.

When she got far enough up that her head peeked over the slab, she locked eyes with one of the flawless. The others were jumping on great legs, trying to reach the airship, cracking the cement further with each attempt. Her missing girls were nowhere in sight. The flawless chirped and its cohorts turned to look at her.

Back! Down the steps. She could feel the vibrations as they pounded toward her. She banged the metal door and grabbled with the bolt. Snap! The metal bent in, creased by the tremendous impact. On the first blow, daylight luxuriated around the frame.

Chirping noises followed, then two tentative taps on the door. Despite their massive frames, Miriam knew the flawless could fold themselves up. Their skin was slippery. They could certainly pass through this doorway.

She was already moving through the machines, into dark, rough-cut spaces at the back of the room.