She heard the High King mumble a vague complaint. He couldn’t see where he was going, but her compasses were shining. They told her what to do.
She caught up with her ancillas and helped ferry the monarch of Stonehold down a second set of stairs. The steps transitioned from stone to metal and shuttled them through a passageway and onto a steel maintenance platform anchored beneath one of the enormous arms that supported Sandren’s teagle system. A blast of fresh air and a dizzy blue expanse pulled Miriam up short.
The world reeled below her as if on the end of a chain. Thousands of feet separated her reality from the hovering mist-pale landscape that formed the foothills of the Ghalla Peaks. This place was meant for tethers and well-trained technicians. Its flooring was grated and when Miriam looked down she could see the cliffs.
A control box sat nearby for summoning the elevator but Miriam knew they didn’t have time. Even here, buffeted by wind, she could smell the ichthyic stench gassing from the tunnel. She pulled a backup kyru from her other hip and nodded meaningfully to Autumn. Then, she stabbed the High King in the arm, right through his clothing, and began running the numbers. He made a surprised but quiet sound and didn’t fight back.
Oh wait, she thought. I’m bleeding …
She had forgotten her own injury. In her desperate quest for holojoules, she had cut him pointlessly. The realization caused an unexpected ache of sympathy and for a moment her attention turned to him. She noticed his solidity, the muscle packs of his chest and abdomen as she supported him at the brink of infinity. He did not feel like a politician in her arms (she had held several of them) and she pondered a moment over the fact that he had managed to single-handedly bring down two of the flawless despite the vitiated puslet in his brain.
Maybe Sena’s choice in men was better than she thought.
Behind her, a dull clangor echoed from the tunnel mouth, possibly the sound of a metal door being flung across a cinder block room. She maneuvered the High King into position, then pressed her weight into his back. She pulled her legs up, wrapped all her limbs around him and held on tight. He fell like an old tree trunk, pitching north off the platform. She clung to that resistance and they fell together, one dead weight, hurtling toward the pastel fields that spun three miles below.
CHAPTER
26
Like a grub turned out on a shovel’s blade from rich loam into the cold, the Pplarian ship is threshing vaguely in the wind. Sena walks toward it. Her jacket is a snapping crimson flag. She tries not to think about the people she has murdered but feels the act passing through her.
She cannot pull back from it.
It is part of her now. Not just a line crossed or a door opened. For lines and doors are things a person moves over and through. They are things a person swiftly leaves behind. She has passed over and through but she carries the act with her to the other side into a fuzzy, numb reality of death and violence and orchestrated mayhem. And in fact, even this is wrong.
Because what is really happening is that the act is carrying her, not the other way around. It is the murder that is keeping her on her feet, moving. Without it she would collapse. As if death itself is offering her a gift for working such a wondrous miracle in its name, the horror of the act is muted and only the empty sky, the silence of the space she has willed into existence, remains. The horrible euphoria of this moment is staggering.
The power of the murder has usurped the person she used to be. It has become her. In an instant. She has become the newest face of reckless, selfish death.
The holojoules snatched from the discreated airships swirl around her. They are the fruit of over seven thousand cuts20 of blood. Nathaniel is haunting her, touching her, marveling at her. And he is asking why.
Sena steels herself. She does not answer. With great effort she manages to twist her mouth into a pawky smile. She does it for Nathaniel. It is part of the show. And it works. He is patently bewildered.
Why did you do this? he asks. Why? It has something to do with what you found in the Chamber, doesn’t it? Tell me. What did you find? Nathaniel has sensed the change of direction in her thoughts. What did you discover there?
Two intact bottles. Her answer is a thought. But I found fragments of a third. You were right, Nathan. You were right. I believe we can get to three.
For a time, Nathaniel is quiet. You shouldn’t have gone. His thoughts telegraph a hiss. I could have lost you.
Her smile broadens but she worries whether he is playing along. While she carries on her mental conversation she must keep her other thoughts veiled. She erects transeunt walls within her mind, ephemeral but sufficient to hold him at bay. He must not uncover the secret she is hiding.
As they telepath back and forth, she slips a touch of malice into her lies. Any sweetness will grow his suspicion. But his assault is tireless. He asks the same question many, many times. In the hurricane of his black distrust she bows and trudges on, moving the dead kings’ holojoules through the air.
A vast capcitance wheels around her, pulled from the casualties of the dissolved fleet. It is a potent residue of the murder, a real power torn not only from kings and emperors but from flight crews, and bodyguards, cooks and cabinet aides. The crime is real. It can never be undone. She swallows hard and tells herself the thing she planned to tell herself before she crossed this line: they are her enemy—everyone in the sky was her enemy—just as everyone who stands between her and the end is her enemy now.
The world is no longer the world. It is a bin of jumbled variables she must sort through quickly if she is to make it to her goal. She did not ask for this. This was—
Why are you bringing him south? Nathaniel asks.
For the ink of course, she says. And to her unending sorrow this is not untrue.
You should have destroyed him by now. You’re far too sentimental.
“I’ll make ink soon enough. Why are you so eager? He’s your nephew. Was your nephew, once. I thought you might—”
Nathaniel snaps violently, Focus on what you’re good at! Please!
“And what’s that?”
Capturing his fluids! You might have moved on to blood by now and been done with this—but no … I wonder why. Why delay? Why bother giving him those books?
Sena ignores the horrible attack. “I see he means nothing to you.”
Don’t affix your weaknesses to me, Nathaniel thinks. Caliph Howl is hardly my nephew. He should mean nothing to you. He’s just another thing that you and I will pass on our way across the stars. Don’t forget that!
The words drive a powerful pain into her core because Nathaniel is right. Before the end, she will drain Caliph’s Hjolk-trull blood into the ink. That trace of immortality, passed down from the Gringlings to the Hjolk- trull make him intrinsic to her designs.
If her body was different, if it hadn’t been changed—but Sena no longer bleeds.
Caliph has been wrapped up in the myth of his conference, so certain of what is really important. Her destruction of the zeppelins has roused him. She has his full attention now.
The conference baited him out of Isca, it gave her time to inspect the Chamber. But now the ugly moment of the switch has come.
Caliph will do what she knows he will do. His sense of justice will carry him. After all, he is good man. But in order to capitalize on that goodness, she has had to do the unthinkable. She is the Omnispecer. This moment’s arrival was foreseen.
What amplifies her exquisite anguish is that only now does Caliph see her clearly, as she really is.
Sena drags the holojoules toward the Pplarian ship with the only kind of wound she lacks the
