Black Bottle

“I did,” said Caliph.

“I’m confused then, because Isham is recovering, enough to talk, and he said you showed him a yellow book. But I had heard that the book in question was red.”

“Well your information’s bad,” said Caliph as if barely concerned. “It’s always been yellow.”

“I see. We found half a yellow book, ripped through the spine, but it didn’t seem to be anything. Just a journal. It did, however … by Mr. Wade’s account, look like the book you showed him.”

“If you want me to cooperate, you’ll find my friend, Sigmund. Big man. Red shirt. He’s down in the wreckage somewhere.” Lost under the sand …

“We’ll do our best, Mr. Howl. But we can’t stay here … long.” The “long” was peculiar to Caliph.

“Why not? This is a solvitriol ship. It’s not like you’re going to run out of fuel.”

A scream filled the hall outside the room and the sound of running feet pounded away.

“Listen, I need that book!” said Siavush.

“Really? What’s the urgency?”

“Where is it?” Siavush shouted. He drew out his pocket watch and flipped it open. Pastel light ebbed over his panicked face.

Caliph wondered what the rush was. He hated the sight of the solvitriol timepiece. “How do you do that?” He pointed at Siavush’s watch. “Cope, I mean. With the fact that you’ve enslaved souls to run your machines in the south? How do you get to the point where you believe that’s okay?”

“We don’t have time for this, King Howl. I don’t believe in souls.”

“That seems a bit arbitrary in light of the blueprints—”

“Gods. You northerners really are—” Siavush stopped himself. “Solvitriol power runs on the residue … of some power … left over from the body. That’s all. It’s a trace. Some kind of energy that used to—do something in the body. We don’t know what it is. But it’s not a soul.” Siavush snorted. “No tests we’ve ever run indicate that it thinks. Or that it can communicate. It’s not a ghost, Mr. Howl. It’s just what’s left over. And we’re practical enough to recycle.” His finger, emerging from the bloody cuff, did a small circle in the air.

Caliph’s injuries ached. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “The north has always been a bit more … superstitious. Anyway, that’s a beautiful watch. Could I see it?”

“I need the book. Now!”

Caliph reached out and grabbed the pocket watch. He pulled it up, high overhead. It was not until the chain had been looped around Siavush’s neck that the Iycestokian understood what was really happening.

In small countries, like Stonehold, thought Caliph, men were still taught things forgotten in Iycestoke. Things that Siavush, in his slippers in the morning, would not understand … no matter how many pieces of northern journalism he might read over breakfast. In Stonehold, where the mountains could kill you. Where the wind and sea and sarchal hounds …

In Stonehold, where survival was a real struggle, men were taught how to survive. They did silly things. They wore swords.

But as Siavush’s hands groped ineptly, without the slightest notion of how to save himself, even against a man so badly wounded, Caliph felt some sick-making pride in coming from a long tradition of what the north called Stonehavian resolve and what the south had always labeled simply as brutality.

Caliph did not stop even after Siavush’s face was purple and his full weight pulled forward from the knees. His body was kneeling but it wanted to lie down.

After counting out a full minute, Caliph let the chain go. He dragged the body to the room’s tiny closet.

Not possible.

Caliph was sweating. He felt inexpert at this. He felt like he might throw up. He went to the window and looked out. In his current condition he doubted he could heft Siavush’s body through the window. Dropping it into the desert wasn’t very subtle anyway.

“Fuck.” This was ill-thought. But what else was he going to do? The alarm was still quacking its strange high-pitched song. It seemed strange that no one had come to check on him. It felt bizarre that there were not more sounds of running feet.

Where were the guards?

Caliph gave up on hiding the body and opened the door. The cramped hallway beyond was, perhaps because of the alarm, empty of people, but painted in blood. It looked like there had been a slaughter. The walls were coated. The floor was covered with a red half-congealed sauce.

Caliph felt his gorge rise. He started pulling off his bandages as he went, not wanting to stand out in case someone passed him in the hall.

Where is everyone? he thought.

Not knowing where to go or what to do, he followed the hallway to its end and met no one, headed away from the sound of the alarm in what he imagined was a good first step at getting his bearings.

He passed a room with an open door that looked in on the unmistakable resting form of Isham Wade. He was on a gurney of sorts in a cabin identical to Caliph’s. The main difference was that Isham Wade had been hooked up to a system of insectile-looking machines. He looked gray. Silver really. His skin was horribly changed and speckled with black spots.

Plague? But how would Isham Wade have caught the plague?

Caliph hesitated a moment at the doorway. He thought about pulling the plugs. No. There was nothing to do here. Nothing that would make Caliph feel better. He looked hard at Isham Wade, angry and repulsed.

The man had already contracted his punishment. Caliph would not interfere.

He moved on into the hall’s terminus, which was a wide space that surrounded an open locker full of weapons. Caliph stared at it while the alarm wailed. That sound might have explained why it had been left open, unattended. But it was not serendipity that made him stare. Rather it was uncertainty and fear, both over whether this was truly a weapons locker and whether finding it ajar had just saved him or put him into deeper peril.

He stared at the rack of sedate, dark, leathery things and questioned whether they were watching him. All he knew for certain was that they moved.

CHAPTER

40

The tantrum of shadows that whipped and splattered over walls, rooms and mechanisms had finally retreated. Nathaniel’s ghost had left the Pplarian ship and gone south in a rage, bent and billowing and thorny. It cursed Sena. It howled and ranted on the mountains: on K’rgas, on Bujait and Jag’Narod. It raged back and forth between Veydith and the Kallywarthing.

Sena could hear it in the thin, tropospheric miles that girdled the world. It drew over the jungles like a black squall, gathering in on itself, a clock spring tightening.

He had not foreseen this. That she might sentence Arrian to Taelin’s body had never entered his mind.

Sena felt a little swell of pride but the danger offset her euphoria. Would he unleash St. Remora?

Nathaniel had disappeared south, beyond the equator.

She hoped not. In the meantime she dug in the moist peat of a Tebeshian pot, beneath the alien stain of the flower’s shadows, and snapped off part of the pimplota’s root. Growing the pimplota from a twenty-thousand-year- old seed in the span of a few moments required only marginal holomorphic tampering.

The root came out of the peat, clean and waxy, like a mummified toe: purple, ghosted with hair-like tendrils and morsels of dirt. Juice coursed over her fingers. Nearly black.

She extracted the liquid with a small wooden herb press. It dribbled through a short spout into a shallow clay mixing vessel. Sena wiped her hands, willing her cells to repel the pigment. They came clean instantly. She sat down and drew out a silver vial. The same silver vial that she had taken to the Howl Mausoleum twenty-three months ago.

She would have used her own if she had any: Hjolk-trull blood. So incredibly rare, like those moths from the steppes, on the verge of extinction … the bacteria in their fur capable of miracles.

In one sense Caliph could be reduced to this vial, stoppered and preserved. Just an ingredient. Just a