Black Bottle (62 page)

The room was some kind of empty septic tank and as he crossed it, it sank its cold moldy teeth into his chest. He detected a slope. Some cement structure meant to control the flow of sediment. Sena stood on top of it. She was only a few steps away now. She said something in the language Caliph couldn’t understand and the thing at the doorway moved away. Caliph heard other movements in the tank. Other vast shapes, which he had not even noticed, began to disperse, hauling their giant forms into equally sized culverts.

“You have to understand something,” she said as he approached. “It’s you and me. Just you and…” Her voice trailed off for several seconds, hinting at deeper meanings. “… me.”

“Is it?” A tatting of mold on one of the room’s pillars seemed to absorb the phosphorescent light coming from her back. “I don’t think it’s been you and me for a long time now.”

Little was clear to Caliph except that Sena was standing in this horrid tank, surrounded by miscreations.

The long chase had worn him down. He had made up his mind, finally. But the realization made him miserable and desolate. He felt sick. Sick and weak and exhausted. He reached out and grabbed her by her fashionable jacket, hands knotting into fists.

He shook her violently. He took her by the throat. She was light and her body jerked limply under the force, as if she was helpless. She winced. He threw her on the ground.

“What did you do!” he screamed at her. “What did you do!”

All the dead people poured out through his scream. He could feel them as if they were there. His responsibility. As if they were staring at him right now. Alani and Sig and all the rest.

Sena did not look up from where he had thrown her. Light trickled between her leather collar and the back of her neck. It lit her hair. He could see flecks of sewer mud. Glops of black gunk from a puddle near her arm had splashed up and spattered her shoulder.

Chest heaving with shame and anger and uncertainty he stood over her with one bizarre thought in his head:
what now?

He certainly wasn’t going to sink down on his knees and touch her, help her up, clean her off. What he
was
thinking of doing was unspeakable.

“Drink it, Caliph.”

He couldn’t see her face. He swung his chin to one side and cocked his head. Incredulous. He wasn’t listening to her. He would never listen to her again.

But already he had reached inside his pocket and found the tiny metal flask. It was leaden in his hand.

“No,” he said. “I won’t. This is over. This madness. It stops here. You’re going to fix it.” He was embarrassed at how childish his words sounded. “Get up,” he told her.

A few huge shapes shifted in the black wings of the chamber. Apparently not all of her immense underlings had left. He sensed some of them might be drawing closer but he didn’t dare to look. Were they her bodyguards? Would one of them now reach out and break him in its mouth?

Baufent’s voice called again, thousands of miles away.

Sena’s whisper drowned the doctor out. She whispered to the flawless first, passing them some instruction. Then she whispered to him. “You know everything you need, do you? To make your decision? Is that it, Caliph? You know so much?”

“You’ve been dosing me with these tinctures. Who knows what—”

“Your third dose isn’t going to kill you. Drink it.” She rolled onto her side and looked up at him. There was an ugly smear of mud on her face.

“Fix it,” he said. “Fix what you did!”

“I will. You drink it and I’ll fix it. I’ll fix everything.”

“Fix it now!” He wanted to call her a murderer, but felt the hypocrisy of the thing. He wanted to blame all his frustrations on her, starting with her inattentiveness over the past year to everything from the plague and his dead friends right down to this moment standing in this deplorable room. But he couldn’t. No matter what holomorphy she had used, he had chosen this. He had arrived here under his own power.

“If you don’t drink it, I won’t stop you. You can strangle me if you want. It’s what you’re thinking. And I’ll let you do it. But what will happen next, Caliph? Think about that. What will happen next?”

Caliph did think about that. She was crazy. She had always been crazy. And that was why he was here. Because he had always gone along with it. But not anymore. This was it. This was the last time.

“I drink it and you fix everything? Can you can really do that?”

“I can really do that, Caliph.”

He hated her. He hated her more in that moment than he had ever hated anyone, because even now with her lying in the shit of civilization, at his feet, she was still somehow more powerful than he could understand.

“Gods-fucking-dammit!” He could smell the drug before he unscrewed the cap. The memory of it. Its taste and aroma were already burned into his brain. What was he going to do instead? Go back to Baufent and help her drag Taelin up to street level? And then what? Find food? Barricade against the creatures?

So maybe this
was
the easy way out. And he was a gutless shit-heel. He had always suspected himself a coward. And maybe this was the worst moment of his life. He hated the sense of inevitability. With the flask open, the sweet tea-and-mint smell sickening the air, he tipped it into his mouth.

CHAPTER

50

The Veyden messenger that had told the lie—that Sena was on her way to make peace—was dead. Autumn had taken him out behind the hotel as ordered. Shortly after her return, Miriam had noticed how things had changed: how everything had a wrongness to it.

As the Sisterhood’s attention had been pulled inward, diverted from the exterior of the hotel and focused on the mysterious Veyden messenger, the lights in the Grand Elesh’Ox had shifted color. They were not dimmer. But they had turned from yellow-orange to olive-green. Then slowly, ever so slowly, the ornate textured wallpaper began to peel.

When some of the furniture started floating, spare inches above the floor, Miriam knew what was happening.

The humidity doubled. Then it doubled again. It was like breathing water. The whole building felt like it had been scuttled. Miriam’s feet barely kept contact with the ground.

Outside, in the wide avenues, shapes were massing—orderless and green, shadowed by distance and atmospheric moisture, flickering with a hint of silvery, reflective skin.

The Willin Droul were coming.

From all quarters, from every building, street and drain, a huge circle of hungry variegated forms drew in around the grand hotel. It was clear to Miriam that the Sisterhood had been led into a trap.

Miriam blamed herself for this mistake.

From the Grand Elesh’Ox, the collective smell of the Sisterhood’s skin, warm and fragrant, bled out into the avenues. Her girls were leeches, dangling in the watery air, baiting in a great gathering of silvery schools.

The snuffling groans, the chirrups of titillation and ecstasy were audible as the hoard surrounded the building. Miriam watched hungry eyes gather in the streets, eager for the slaughter. Some eyes were visible. Many more were not. Mounds of rags stood and swayed. The Willin Droul clogged every alleyway; they filled every adjacent window.

Talons and fat lumpen heads scraped the brickwork around the hotel’s foundations. Tentacles wrangling from fishy jowls; they tasted over sashes and drip caps. The creatures had ringed the Elesh’Ox with wards. All exits were sealed from the outside, with fish-blood holomorphy; with puissant ancient skill.

“They’re everywhere,” said Autumn. “We have to get out.”

“They’ve sealed the corners,” said Miriam. Even with the Sisterhood’s own blood, which Miriam was not prepared to spill, moving in the absence of the starlines—as her qloin had done in the desert—was not possible. In order to attempt it, they would need to get out of the hotel, out of the streets, out of the damping holomorphy that the Willin Droul had draped over everything.

Miriam didn’t feel like she should have to explain all this—especially to Autumn—so all she said was, “Put a qloin above the delivery door.”

“Already done.”

“Good,” said Miriam. Even that single word had to be forced with great effort past her teeth. She wasn’t going to try and run. In some ways, she was grateful that the Willin Droul had sealed them in. The Sisterhood had already seen too much failure and death; too much running. Tonight would be different.

As the Willin Droul surrounded the building, Miriam took comfort in the idea that Sena might have orchestrated this ambush. That, at least, would be better than being outwitted by fish. She wondered if it had always been Sena’s aim to destroy the organization that had burned her mother.

If so, there was something to admire there in the ruthlessness of the planning. In light of what the Sslia was
supposed
to do, it struck Miriam as peculiarly meticulous that Sena would, on her way to whatever oblivion awaited her, arrange to destroy the organization that had given her so much. Given and admittedly taken away. Was this why she had flown an airship into the south instead of simply walking lines? To lure the Sisterhood to the Willin Droul’s ancient seat of power?

Huge bodies threw themselves against the hotel’s outer walls. Miriam heard windows breaking in the back.

As the clamor rose, there was no doubt that Sena would not show up for this finale. The Sslia had more important things to do. Giganalee had been right. Who else but Sienae Iilool could claim the mantle of the Eighth House? And the Eighth House did not use its hands. It used its minions to get things done.

“What if we jump?” asked Autumn. “We can go roof to roof. We can use their blood to fuel an escape.”

“You don’t think they’re on every rooftop for a quarter mile in every direction? Waiting for us? Have you counted them?”

Autumn licked her lips.

It was fitting, thought Miriam, that the girl from the isles, who had arrived out of Greenwick so long ago would have hands like these. The fingers of the Eighth House were silver, slippery and ichthyic.

“We have to try,” said Autumn. “We can’t give up.”

“All right.” Miriam made the southern hand sign for yes. “But I’m not going to run like I did in the desert. Tonight I’m going to stay here. Take half the cohort and tell them to try and escape across the roofs. The other half will lead a distraction—with me. We’ll try to hold them in the street. The rest of you are free to go.”

“I’m staying with you.” Autumn’s eyes told of disappointment. She wanted for Miriam and herself to be in the half that fled: that escaped.
Who will lead the Sisterhood?
was a question neither of them asked.

“All right,” said Miriam. “Go and get them sorted.”
But Autumn, baby … they’re not going to make it.

“Yes, Mother.”

Autumn did as she was told.

This was how the world would end, thought Miriam. Amid the gluttony and screams of those insensitive to the miracle that they were still alive. Amid the chaos of disease and universal pandemonium, those that represented the last vestige of intelligent life would squander their advantage in this avenue, on this city block.

She chuckled bitterly as she hustled down the hotel’s main staircase, conspicuously unafraid, incapable of changing what was going to happen.

The hotel was dark. Miriam had ordered all the lights put out. Witches covered its rooftop, crouched on dormer peaks, ledges and cornices like gargoyles. Their sweat unfurled from waxed cotton and drifted, tantalizing the crooning horde below. The horde began to hop and lurch excitedly, cracking paving stones with their collective mass.

Miriam waited for Autumn in the foyer. She peered out through a jalousie while the building’s foundations shook. The panes of glass rattled in their frames. She sensed the Sisterhood shift within the hotel, anxious. Sisters appeared in the stairwells.

Autumn squeezed her way through them, down the wood and tile steps. When she reached Miriam, she spoke in Withil. “We’re ready.”

“All right.”

Miriam ordered the doors thrown open.

At the front of the building, a wide porch cupped the curvature of the facade. From it, a flight of stairs ran directly to the street. Miriam walked out, kyru in hand. She stood at the head of the steps and gazed down hatefully into the multitude. Sickly fingerlings, thin and newly changed, mewled below her as if waiting for some sign.

Although their insatiable hunger had pulled them close to the Grand Elesh’Ox, Miriam decided there was no real order to the ranks. The flawless of Ulung stood shrouded in black canopies, surrounded by their spawn, paws like pink cake batter dripped from their sleeves.

Other flawless had also arrived. She recognized their diverse forms from Sandren, Iycestoke and the White Marshes of Pandragor. They did not represent a uniform horror. They took many different shapes. Similarity was sparse but a turgid opaline sheen marked them as one.

In the avenue, Bablemumish sculptures of black marble, pewter and beryllium found new uses. They allowed the Willin Droul to coil their limbs around sculpted legs and arms and thereby support their grotesque fatness. They had modified the air so that gills could breathe. They had changed gravity so that huge bodies could have some relief—but it was not complete and they were still heavy and this was not the same as swimming.

For a while, the Lua’groc held back, perhaps savoring the moment. Miriam noticed Autumn come out of the hotel and stand beside her. Her sweet ancilla. She did not regret the moments when they had been just that: cephal’matris and ancilla—when she had been forced to give orders, and Autumn had been obligated to carry them out. The hierarchy had never been an impediment for them. For them, the protocols had only ever allowed them additional ways to show each other respect. To love each other. She had never ordered Autumn around like a subordinate. Ever. There had always been that understanding between them, that they were partners. That they were a team.

Other sisters came out onto the porch, kyrus glittering.

Miriam was almost ready to give the command when Autumn smiled as if for an ambrotypist, modeling the perfect young athletic face of the north. The lean sweat-dappled cheeks and arms. Then she drew back and pitched her kyru into the horde.