CHAPTER
42
A woman stood in the sky, surrounded by yellow-white chaos. Shrapnel, fumes and scalding steam cartwheeled through the air. Hulilyddic acid atomized from chemical cells in the Pplarian ship’s mythic compartments. The explosion had dispensed a sour perfume that floated in helices around her.
The woman seemed preoccupied. Her fingernails sorted through her curls, scraping the scalp just above her forehead. This was visible in minute detail through the Iycestokian gunsights.
“Sir, she just disappeared.”
“What?” The commanding officer leaned forward and peered into the sight. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “She’s right there.”
The gunner looked back.
It felt like a glitch but there she was, miraculous and dazzling, standing in the sky. The gunner was afraid.
The deep rigid fear that springs from the impossible had filled him and it had already spread man to woman to flight lieutenant to brigadier general up the chain of command, as each person in the armada took their turn at the scopes and stared.
The scopes told the truth about the thing that couldn’t be, but was: in casual defiance of their might.
* * *
SENA fears that Nathaniel might still undo her plans. She fears the future and the moment when she will have to look Caliph in the eye. What she does not fear, are the Iycestokians.
They have no way to cross her ambit.
She does not hate them. They have no idea what is coming or what has already passed. They are just following orders, just demonstrating their violent national pride.
What they believe is that the Duchy of Stonehold has a book, which they have been told to take by force. They do not understand the legend of the Sslia. Their guns have failed them and now they are confused, trapped within themselves, trusting to a shilly-shally episteme of vaccines and imperialism and all sorts of strategies divorced from what is real.
It is because they know so little that she decides to save them.
Returning from the Howl Estate she finds her airship flinderized, but this is a simple misunderstanding. The Iycestokians do not know what they want. They have made an error. She will give them what they need.
And she will do it out of kindness, out of sacrifice. She will take a piece of her ambit to work this miracle on their behalf. But they will not thank her.
She speaks and vanishes from the sky.
Nothing can stop her as she arrives in the capital of Iycestoke City, in Molbul Square where the three turfs of the ochlocracy meet. She uses raw math to quiet the quarters before her main argument goes off.
No terror-stricken cries lift from the silver crowds where disease has already taken its toll.
She is barely there an instant before she is back above the desert. But in that instant, her voice is in two places at once, sound waves still projecting.
In Iycestoke, an unnatural hush goes out over a six-mile radius of urban sprawl.
It begins with a watchman positioned at the entrance to Ninel’s tomb: Iycestoke’s sacred monument. But it does not end there. Next to him lies another man with a worn and haggard face. His collar flaps senselessly against his cheek. Beside him rests a pale silvery girl dressed carelessly in black wool. To her left is another body and to that body’s right three more.
The crowd crumples in the moment when Sena is there. It continues crumpling now that she has left. Across the enormous vapor-wrapped city, every breathing creature plummets. The starlings and pigeons have fallen from the sky like cruel hail. They plunge to the streets, thumping against cobble and brick.
People sleep in unseemly positions, faces pressed to stone. Some kiss animal excrement, gutter grates and garbage. A few fall into puddles face down where they are doomed to drown.
Iycestoke sleeps.
“Shh—” and twenty million people more or less join the dreamless oblivion from which their bodies begin to burst.
It begins with the watchman.
His terrible stain spreads out behind Sena in the same instant that she disappears. It forks bizarrely like a pair of bloody wings, as if a plastic bag full of red paint has been hurled at the pavement.
Iycestoke is red. Its citizens are spell-slaves in the purest sense. She gathers holojoules from ten million bodies and leaves the rest sleeping like wild cattle shot for sport to dream and die. Already she is back in the sky above the desert, with the holojoules in her mouth. The gunners on the Iycestokian ships have just seen her flicker in the sky.
Nathaniel is frantic. He does not know what she is about to do. He reaches out tentatively to St. Remora and his soul machine, ready to bring his power source to life.
But when he hears the numbers coming out of her mouth, he sneers.
She is a merciful god. The Iycestokians are blessed. They will not find themselves in a labyrinth when the Masters come.
Sena knows that this is a betrayal of the trust between her and the Yillo’tharnah she serves. But she smiles. It is payback for Their brazenness at Soth. They are angry with her now. She has stretched the limits of Their patience and now she pushes it to the absolute edge. The Yillo’tharnah are enraged. These souls will have a different fate. Unlike the rest of Adummim, the people of Iycestoke will not fall beneath a Yillo’tharnahic yoke.
Sena takes the holojoules of ten million people and turns the blood of Iycestoke’s civilians against their great armada.
It will not be true salvation, but it will be salvation’s shadow.
* * *
THE Iycestokian fleet fell out of the sky. All safety devices on all one hundred seventy-nine of the huge hooded monstrosities failed. Crews and admirals were caught by surprise.
The sound of their plummet was not loud. The sound of their impact was. A chorus of metallic groans and deep geologic shrieks sounded a thousand feet below. The crashes did not echo above the blue and whisky-colored sand.
