Black Bottle (43 page)

Mr. Wade’s black eyebrows lifted. “Is it?” he asked, “just a book? Because if it is, then I’m sure we can solve this quickly. We have machines in the south that can turn out copies. Everyone will be able to read it and decide for themselves.”

“I see.” Caliph didn’t know where to go from here. He certainly wasn’t going tell Wade that he didn’t have the book. Instead he opted for, “I’m sure we can come to an agreement on that. Printing a book is not that difficult. But don’t you think we have more important things to decide at the moment? I mean what happened in Sandren—”

“King Howl.” Wade’s tone took a mildly condescending edge. “What happened in Sandren is the point. You’re absolutely right. It was terrifying. It was wonderful. I don’t mean to be direct, but here it is: who gives a shit about Sandren? They were an elitist outpost that sold wine at inflated prices.

“They were a fucking city-state. Really.” He put his palms together in front of his lips. “What I care about is that that kind of power is harnessed correctly. Legitimately. And by the way, the sickness in Sandren, whatever it is, is spreading. It’s in Pandragor. It’s in Yorba. Most importantly, it’s in Iycestoke. We don’t know how. But if you were in my position, wouldn’t you find it a bit … fortuitous to know that the only people with a vaccine were the people with the book?

“Now listen. You’re in a sticky situation. All those zeppelins—vanishing without a trace? I’m not accusing you.” Wade raised a palm and patted the air in Caliph’s direction. His ring with the moving gears glittered; his eyebrows crawled to the top of his glasses as if genuinely apologetic. “But only ships from Stonehold were spared and again, only Stonehold has the book.”

Caliph had gone flaccid. Now he straightened. “I get it. What are you offering in exchange?”

“In exchange, we help you … hunt down the individual who misused the book’s power, blah blah some justice for the papers. We tell the press that the book has been destroyed or locked up for safekeeping or what. Meanwhile, you keep your copy. Iycestoke its copy. We of course form an alliance—if it turns out that the book is actually useful—and we prevent its dissemination, obviously, to people who want to cause our respective nations harm.”

“So, you’ll help me hunt down my ex…” Mother of Emolus, what did he call her? Even now, he felt like he was betraying her. “… mistress. And we’ll what? Put her to death?”

“Yes.”

“And then I fly home,” said Caliph.

“Yes.”

“But first, we have to make a copy of the
Cisrym Ta.
”

“Is that what it’s called?” Wade perked up in a way that Caliph found repugnant. “Kiss-ream-tah? What language is that? What does it mean?”

“Am I right?” asked Caliph.

“Yes,” said Mr. Wade. “That would be the arrangement.”

“Not quite. We forgot the clause about what happens if I say no. Not that I’m going to. I just want to have that out on the table—”

Mr. Wade laughed in high amusement and shook his finger. “I wish I had been ambassador to Stonehold instead of Pandragor these last couple years. Talking plainly? Right? Plain as we can? Iycestoke has the means to fly up over the mountains and take Stonehold in,” he stuck out his lower lip, “one? Two days? King Howl, your country exists because we’ve never had any reason to care about it. But now we do.”

Caliph squirmed. “And your forces, the ones coming to intercept me, are going to arrive when?” He glanced at Isham’s glittering ring. “How long do I have to make a decision?”

“How long do you need?”

“When are they arriving?”

“They’re already here.”

CHAPTER

33

Dr. Baufent was working like she had never worked before. Sweat glistened on her face.

“What’s wrong with him? What’s going on?” The captain of the
Bulotecus
was standing over her shoulder, looking distraught. Caliph had just left his meeting with Isham Wade and had discovered the scene on the port deck. He braced himself in the doorway and looked down on the desperate business at hand.

Specks wasn’t floating. His thin body had been carried from the hallway near the kitchen and laid out on the deck where there was more room to work. His shirt had been torn open. Some safety mechanism in the bracer had sensed a change in blood pressure and the tiny holomorphic engine that usually allowed him to levitate had shut itself off. The ticking that always announced Specks’ presence had stopped and Caliph felt the silence.

Specks had long needed a haircut. His dark hair tossed around his eyes in the wind but his eyelids did not flinch. His skin was paler than usual and his mouth was slack and open.

“What happened?” asked Caliph.

“I don’t know,” said the cook. “One minute he was fine. The next, he’d floated into a cabinet and banged his head.”

Caliph couldn’t see a mark. “Did he knock himself out?”

“He hit it pretty hard, but I don’t know if it was hard enough to—”

“He’s been poisoned,” barked Baufent. She was looking at his pupils. “Increased heart rate, cold and clammy. He’s drooling. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what he’s taken. I can’t fix this! Get the fucking witches!”

Caliph turned and ran. He plowed through the narrow hallway and banged on the witches’ door.

Miriam answered. “What is it?”

“Specks. The captain’s son. He’s been poisoned. We need you.”

Miriam glanced back into the room, then came straight into the hall.

Caliph opened the door for her.

“Come on.”

They hurried down to the hall. Caliph noticed her clenching her fist. She had already cut her palm in anticipation of holomorphy and was bleeding freely. She was whispering.

As she came onto the deck where Specks was laid out, Baufent looked at her solemnly.

“He’s gone,” said Baufent.

The captain of the
Bulotecus,
that great tall deep-chested man, had folded up on one of the deck chairs, hunched forward over his son and was sobbing brokenly. His face was in his lap, his arms covered the back of his head.

Miriam looked pale. She got down and examined Specks. Her hand bled across his tiny chest and the smear was vivid and dark across the whiteness of his ribs. She looked up at Caliph. He hadn’t expected a hardened Shradnae witch to react like this.

Her eyes were full of restrained emotion. “This was professional,” Miriam said. “I can smell it on him. It’s trixhidant.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a southern plant,” said Baufent.

Miriam made the hand sign for yes. “That’s right. He had to drink it or eat it.”

“He drank one of the glasses from the lunch tray,” said the cook.

Despite the lump in Caliph’s throat, he tried to analyze Miriam’s fear. The witches knew poison. Miriam had to know that they would be the obvious suspects. But Caliph didn’t believe, in his gut, that they were to blame.

“Your majesty—” The cook leaned in to whisper in Caliph’s ear. Caliph noticed Miriam cock her head and listen. “Lady Rae was in the kitchen just before the tray went out. She was acting … strange.”

“I can’t see her trying to poison anyone,” said Caliph.

Caliph tried not to think about Specks. His main goal was protecting anyone else from the murderer—whoever that was. He tried to remember what had happened after Specks brought the tray into the dining room. Could Isham Wade or Mr. Veech have reached across the table in some unaccounted-for moment and dissolved the poison in his drink? The only person who might have seen it happen was Specks.

Caliph heard the captain cry.

Baufent stood up, looking gray and beaten. Her shoulders slumped. She turned away and went to stand at the railing where the wind howled.

Caliph went over and touched the captain softly on the arm. “Vik? Viktor?” The captain’s breathing was a shudder. “We’re going to find out who did this.”

“Just let me be.”

*   *   *

A
FEW
minutes later, Sigmund stepped into Caliph’s stateroom with a mystified almost sheepish expression on his face. “Am I in trouble?” His eyes went first to the great circular window thrown open to the sky and then to the bureau where they seized on a ruffle of black satin previously invisible to Caliph.

The stretchy crumple of underwear registered strongly now and brought back embarrassing memories of Sena on the bar in the
Odalisque
’s stateroom. Caliph didn’t know how they had gotten here but he supposed she had, at some point, used the
Bulotecus
to change. He almost walked over and swept them into a drawer. Instead he gestured toward the only chair and said, “No. You’re not in trouble. Have a seat if you want.”

“I’ll stand.” Sigmund shifted from one foot to the other, gazing out through the window at the string of huge heads that the
Bulotecus
was passing. They were carved from black stone and tilted every direction, rising from the sand in wind-polished splendor.

“We’re in deep shit,” said Caliph.

“I heard the little guy didn’t pull through,” said Sig.

“No, he didn’t. So there’s an assassin on board.”

“Okay.” Sig scratched the side of this neck and kept listening.

“I’ve got you that I can trust,” said Caliph. “Dr. Baufent doesn’t really like me. The priestess—I don’t know what’s going on with her—she could be the one. The diplomats from Iycestoke? Right now, they’re my primary suspects.

“What about the witches?”

“I don’t think they did it. They’re after Sena. Why would they try to kill me? If I die, this ship turns around and goes back to Stonehold.”

“Sort of. We’d need to get fuel.”

“Whatever, you get my point.”

“Yeah.”

“But that’s not the worst part of the shit, Sig. The assassin isn’t our biggest problem. Look out there.” He pointed through the window, beyond the mysterious monumental heads. “We’ve got an Iycestokian armada.”

“Reeeeally?” Sig headed toward the window. He took two steps and then, for no apparent reason, the glass exploded. Nuggets bounced like ice cubes over the floor. Sig pulled up short.

Caliph scowled and went to the gaping casement, boots crunching on glass. The sky pulled across his hair and face like steel wool, making his eyes burn. Below, the dunes undulated with bright colors like the back of a poisonous grub. The sand, orange as flame, divorced itself from great blue spots and splatters of something else. From the air, it looked like industrial quantities of smalt had welled up from underneath. The sand refused to mix with it and instead poured around it with the wind, forming crisp blue-and-orange patterns.

Out in the sky a faint zip faded into a muffled whine.

“I think they’re shooting at us,” said Sig.

Caliph was incredulous. “Why would they do that? They have an ambassador on board!”

Sig craned his head out the window to stare at the shadow, a fume really, like the indiscernible smudge of far-off birds wheeling. An entire colony.

Another noise whizzed past the open window.

“Huh,” said Sig. “I do believe that’s what’s happening. They’re fucking shooting at us.”

Caliph took out his bottle of chewable tablets and popped two. They dissolved into lemon chalk-powder. The grit stayed between his teeth.

“I thought the witches,” Sigmund looked confused, “weren’t they doing some kind of, what did they call it? Glamour? Ain’t they supposed to try and hide us?”

Sig walked to the bar and pulled down a bottle of whisky. He glanced at the brand. “This stuff could carry me to town on its back.” His enormous hands rested around the neck but did not open it.

“Well,” said Caliph, “I guess the south has holomorphs.”

“Yeah but we’ve got Shradnae witches for fuck’s sake. I mean, I expected more.”

“I don’t know what they’re doing at the moment,” said Caliph. “Maybe I should find out.”

“Shot at by Iycestokian military…” Sigmund wrung the bottle’s neck. “It’s going to be a crazy story, huh? When we all get back.”

Caliph looked at his friend and saw the determined irony, the intentional black joke that served to harden the fear in Sigmund’s face. “Yeah. Yeah, it will be.”

“I assume, as my fearless leader, you won’t be having a drink?”

Caliph didn’t answer. He looked out the window one last time, against his better judgment, and stared at the dark shapes in the west.

Sig toyed with the bottle for a moment. Then he set it back in its socket on the shelf. “What are we gonna do, Caph?”

Caliph tugged his lip. “I’m going to go find the witches. And then I’m going to talk to Isham Wade about my broken window and about whether he knows anything about poisons.”

Sigmund looked toward the stateroom door from which there came a sudden and insistent knocking.

“Come in!” Caliph and Sigmund shouted in unison.

Neville, the copilot entered, pale and breathless. “We’re taking fire!”

“You don’t say.” Sig gestured to the shattered window with a sweep of his hand. “We were just coming to that conclusion ourselves.”

“The gasbags’ve sustained moderate damage,” Neville gasped. “Our gauges show slow leaks in the aft.”

“Can we stay aloft?” asked Caliph.

“Assuming we don’t continue to take fire,” said Neville. “But even then … we probably don’t have much time left.”

“Much time left before what?” asked Sig. “Before we land?”

“Before we crash,” said Caliph.

Neville ignored the grim assessment. “What should I tell the captain, your majesty?”

“As long as we’re still afloat, nothing changes,” said Caliph. “Follow the Pplarian ship.” Caliph thought of the captain, sitting at the controls while other people now took care of this son’s body.

Neville disappeared. He left the door open.

“What’s the logic there?” asked Sig. “Why are we still chasing her?”

Caliph rubbed his chin. “The logic is that there are more airships than I can count back there. And Sena’s going in the opposite direction.”

“Good plan.”

Caliph took a step toward the door. “You want to come with me?”

“Sure,” said Sig.

Caliph led him from the stateroom, down the hall to where he stopped and tapped on the witches’ quarters.