Black Bottle

limp. “I am an ambassador, King Howl!”

“By your word, Iycestokian ships intercepted and confiscated our medical—”

“You’ve attacked every nation on the continent!” barked Mr. Wade.

“That wasn’t me,” said Caliph. “It’s your country that’s to blame for the fact that I’m locking you up.”

“You think it makes a difference? You think your country even exists without Iycestoke’s consent? You’re going to be marooned in the sand shortly. And then you won’t even be the king of Stonehold anymore. You can lock me up for a few minutes, Caliph Howl. Be my guest! But you’re the one in a cage here! You’re already dead!”

Sigmund punched Mr. Wade in the stomach. It was like a pipe wrench sinking into dough. The sound that escaped Isham’s mouth was like a death groan, all the wind going out of him at once. He collapsed, eyes huge and bulging, spittle dangling from his lips.

“Sig! Don’t!”

“Fuck him!” said Sigmund. He glared at Caliph. He dragged Isham Wade from the room and Caliph found himself unable to protest.

Hopefully Mr. Wade would soon be communicating everything that had transpired to his Iycestokian contacts. Hopefully the book bluff would work. Caliph was already formulating some vague plans. He went out onto the deck to see what the Iycestokian fleet was doing.

Returning to the deck brought pain. Caliph’s eyeballs gummed over in the hot wind. Sand was blowing but he could still see across the orange and blue dunes to where Sena’s white chrysalis tracked relentlessly south. In the other direction, behind them, loomed the armada. The Iycestokians were mostly to the north now, trailing them like the Hali, driving them like a giant hand.

The black ships were not aerodynamic. They reared up, cobra heads, black and glistening with purple lights.

Caliph went to the cockpit and asked Neville for maps. The copilot handed them over with a confused hopeless look that Caliph didn’t try to change. Instead he spread out the charts. “Where are we?”

Neville pointed to a spot two inches from the nearest letter in the phrase that meant Shifting Sands. Caliph stared at the empty yellow patch of paper. Behind them lay the ruins of Ueo Mrup at the easternmost tip of the withered fingers of the mountains. Ahead—far ahead on the other side of the desert—the names were equally strange: Umong, Mahn Loom’U and two vast lakes that he couldn’t pronounce. Not that any of those places mattered. They would never make it that far.

He went back out to the deck.

The Iycestokian airships boiled closer. Black with purple markings—the super power of the Tebesh Plateau. The self-proclaimed god’s hammer of the world. The ships seemed to have metal arms, tentacles almost. It was difficult to see.

He had expected them to fly faster, to have already caught up with him. But their craft did not look fast. They looked bulky and strange, as if they had been built backward or according to the physics of a different world.

He walked to the aft deck and stared back on the panoramic nightmare. Wind ruffled over the Bulotecus’s skin. The engines hummed. The propellers thudded dramatically. But in the distance the enemy floated sinister and silent.

Caliph turned his field glasses on them. He could see the guns, but he didn’t know what they fired. Certainly not the tiny rounds that had broken the window in his stateroom. He searched and found the Iycestokian engine cells, burning through an endless spectrum of shifting pastels: yellow and blue and purple. Solvitriol power. He could not make out propellers. What was driving them forward? The great hooded designs looked like sails, sails that should have stopped the vessels dead or driven them in the opposite direction. They did not look like they should have been capable of flight.

A movement in the western part of the formation caught Caliph’s eye. One of the ships broke and pulled out ahead of the rest. It moved with incredible speed. It closed the fifteen-mile gap between the rest of the armada and the Bulotecus in a span of seconds. As it came south it gave Caliph’s ship a wide berth and did not venture east. Rather than engaging, it now flew parallel, maintaining its perimeter.

Mother of Emolus, they can engage us at any time! They just don’t want to.

The Bulotecus was still losing buoyancy.

Caliph tried to put himself in his enemy’s position, as the commander of the whole Iycestokian fleet, presumably outfitted with the best weapons and armor on the planet. But what if word had come that a northern ship had destroyed the entire fleet of diplomatic vessels over Sandren? What if he had been tasked with engaging that ship?

They’re afraid, he realized.

They don’t know what happened—any more than I do. They think I might have a super weapon on the Bulotecus. And even if they don’t … they probably aren’t willing to risk destroying the book.

Caliph watched as more Iycestokian ships moved out along the circumference of the pursuit formation, every one of them outpacing the Bulotecus by factors of five or more. He scanned their decks with his field glasses, focusing on the soldiers there. How could they stand the wind resistance?

Their armor was like nothing Caliph had seen, black as the skins on their ships, bearing small purple insignia. They seemed rigid, more like machines than the movements of men. Their feet moved with deliberate articulated slowness.

The Iycestokian armada formed a half-ring now, a perfect crescent around the Bulotecus’s rear. Through the air, from directly behind, Caliph heard some kind of broadcast, a projection of sound. It was a voice with an Ilek accent, but it spoke clear understandable Hinter.

“Stonehavian Vessel. Maintain your current course.”

Sigmund came out onto the aft deck.

“You locked him up?” asked Caliph.

“Yeah. He’s fine.” The blue sky was bronzing with evening and light glistened off Sig’s large nose. He stared out at the half-ring of ships, colorful shirt flapping against his chest, chewing on the hair under his lower lip. “I think no matter what you do, we’re probably fucked here, Caph.”

“Thanks for that.”

“You don’t think they’re going to shoot at us back here? We make fuck-fat targets. Especially me. Actually just me. You’re pretty skinny.”

“No. They’re not going to shoot at us. They know we’re coming down sooner or later and with a few hundred perforations to the gasbags it’s probably sooner.”

“You wanna drink?”

“No.”

“You might need one. Have you seen what we’re headed for?”

Caliph followed Sig back through the cabins and upstairs to the cockpit where the captain was drenched in his own sweat and probably some of his tears as well. He did not greet Caliph.

Caliph looked forward through the great curved windshield. He saw something on the horizon that he couldn’t make sense of but the first question out of his mouth was, “How much longer can we stay afloat?”

The captain tapped an illuminated dial. “Probably no more than forty minutes.”

“What if we dump things?”

The captain grudgingly considered. “Well, sir … your majesty. I suppose it might buy us fifteen or twenty minutes if we tossed everything not nailed down.”

“Neville.” Caliph jerked his head toward the copilot. “Go get everyone out. Start tossing whatever you can.”

“Yes, your majesty.”

“I’ll go help,” said Sig.

Caliph had turned his attention to the thing in the distance. A tree, the biggest tree in the world, sprouted from the sand. But if that was true, it was a dead tree. It was white-green and the canopy was clearly not comprised of branches. It was one solid mass. An umbrella. More a mushroom than a tree, yet the stalk despite having one main column seemed to be entangled with other, more slender stems.

The entire thing hovered like a flattened thunderhead, enormous beyond comprehension. Worthy of some geographic name. It was side-lit in gold, but parts of it were slipping into sepia-pink shadow, hazy from the desert’s