by Anthony Huso
The bizarre, daedal shape of the gut-encumbered head floated out into moonlight; the expression on its face grim.
Out of the sky, Taelin discerned other shapes: floating, flying, moving fast. She didn’t know how many. All that mattered was escape.
The dark jungle of cables proved impossible to navigate. A pink-gold solvitriol cell burned beneath the weapon’s cherry-wood stock. It powered tiny sprockets and implants that controlled the lab-grown life form’s neural system. Taelin used it as a dim torch to check her footing.
She skittered forward to the edge of the roof, deliberated then turned and fired again.
Two more gouts of white ooze exploded into the darkness. One coil hit the monstrosity and pulled it down. It glided awkwardly to rest on the deck, convulsing in the sticky mess.
Taelin pulled the trigger one more time but the weapon only burped, coughing up thin lines like an infant vomiting milk. Airborne shadows loomed over her like the heads of tropical trees.
Taelin tossed the gun down and jumped.
Not well-planned. What if the airship’s trajectory and speed …
The deck came up. The rail seemed to spin below her but she landed on the deck. White-hot pain exploded inside her knee. The gun had left her hands. It rested nearly where she had found it, next to its previous owner. She saw the oral parts bite into the woman’s shoulder, slicing through meat and bone, pulling out great plugs of flesh. Its metabolism was legendary. It spewed out a digestive sauce and lapped up the nutrients. The gun was reloading.
Taelin started to crawl toward it when the airship pitched. Her knee throbbed with agonizing fire. Unable to brace herself, she felt her body slide. She scrabbled at the floor but there was nothing to grasp. Frantically she searched for a handhold and saw the gun and the dead woman roll to port, slip through the railing and tumble into the dark.
The head that had been stuck in the gun’s filaments was also gone.
Taelin plastered herself to the deck, clothing snagging against textured metal, but it wasn’t enough. She felt herself go.
The rough cleat-like surface of the deck scraped her face and palms. She cast her hands wildly for a shining metal bar and seized it. A railing newel. Her feet flew out into space. Her hips went with them. But her torso, her arms, were folded tightly around the post.
“Please, please, please…” she prayed to Nenuln. Her knee was on fire, sapping her strength. Between her breasts, her grandfather’s golden artifact was slippery with sweat.
“Taelin.”
Taelin opened her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she had clenched them against the horror. The entire airship seemed to be listing, she dangled off the edge of the deck. Three of the gruesome faces floated around her in the cold.
As she screamed she sensed one of the faces, so close she could smell its breath. It was a beautiful face despite the cable grease that marred one cheek. Wild blond hair blew in profusion around scintillating eyes. Its stomach dragged over the deck as its mouth jerked closer.
During her scream, Taelin felt the face’s lips close over her mouth. She tried to spit, bite, thrash her head but her body had gone numb. She couldn’t move. Vaguely, she felt the girl’s tongue inside her mouth.
She heard dark glottal words gurgling from the other faces, then her sinuses loosened painfully and she smelled apples.
A great blob of mucus sealed off her breathing. She nearly choked. The beautiful girl’s tongue was there, stifling her. As the mass slid down the back of her throat she gagged. The lump rose into her mouth and the girl’s tongue slurped it out.
Taelin’s whole body relaxed. Her arms slipped. The fatty glob was gone, the horrible kiss had ended and Taelin realized that she was falling.
* * *
CALIPH looked up at the other two airships from his position on the Odalisque’s port deck, mystified why Sena had woken him. His body felt empty, as though she had beaten him with a club. The original orgasm, persisted even now, sending aftershocks up through his flesh, making his thoughts roll. It was an alien, unnatural sensation. The entire surface of his skin tingled.
“It’s there.” She pointed. Despite the pain, it was all he could do to concentrate on the end of her finger.
All he could see were what appeared to be black spiderwebs dragging from the other crafts’ bellies. The Bulotecus’s and the Iatromisia’s starboard lights sparkled half a mile out.
Caliph turned up the collar on his thick coat. His fingers already ached. Sena stood beside him in a cropped jacket, apparently unaffected by the wind.
Across the sky, Caliph watched the dark threads materialize as if spat into existence by unseen arachnids. He couldn’t find their exact points of origin. They simply faded away.
Some of the threads bit and anchored into the airships’ undersides, others arced then fell in graceful useless hoops toward the pitchy smear below.
“What are they?” said Caliph.
“Holomorphic anchors,” said Sena. “They’re trying to slow the ships down.”
“Anchored to what?”
“Air.”
Alani and Sigmund were both on the Iatromisia. Caliph wondered what was happening. Then, “Mother of Mizraim!” Caliph gasped and pointed.
The Bulotecus, without signaling, had begun to turn away from the other ships.
“They’ve stuck her,” said Sena.
“Lady Rae’s on that ship!” Caliph could see the web of black threads trailing behind, converging toward an obscure origin. “The captain’ll have to kill the engines or he’ll rip her apart.”
Caliph wanted to ask why this was happening, who “they” were and a host of other questions but a horn sounded across the sky. An alarm from the Bulotecus. He left Sena at the railing and bolted for the bridge, running to inform the captain.
Matters, however, seemed to be already in hand and Caliph felt the deck tilt as the rudders cranked. They were turning east.
Other men had begun to hustle around the deck. Orders were shouted. Weapons were dispensed from lockers. Caliph didn’t have to direct them. He went back to his stateroom and rummaged in the closet. Servants had packed his bags. There. He found it behind the second duffle, his chemiostatic sword.
He strapped it on and marched back out to the deck.
But now the Odalisque was slowing. Some hesitation in the chain of command? Caliph could already guess that an argument had erupted on the bridge. One side would be arguing to help the other ships. The other side would be demanding an immediate retreat: concerned only with ferrying the High King to safety. I’m a liability, he thought. “Mother of Mizraim…”
He took off down the deck.
“Your majesty—”
Caliph ran by. He skipped steps and burst from the landing into the tiny bridge. The captain was an implausibly thin man with features at once gentle and fierce. He looked at Caliph as he entered the room. The copilot seemed to be struggling with the ship’s controls.
“Why are we slowing down?” shouted Caliph. “We have to reach the Bulotecus!”
The captain, determined but powerless, turned back to his controls. His voice was thin. “I don’t know.”
Caliph’s gut sank. He whirled, exited the bridge and leapt back down the stairs, but it was too late. Even as he envisioned the holomorphic threads of darkness entangling the Odalisque from below, the attack had already begun.
Something appalling floated up over the starboard side. It was black against the deck lights, bobbing and strange. Caliph could not decipher its shape. He heard his men scream.
Caliph gripped the pommel of his sword and began unscrewing the safety ring that guarded the chemiostatic switch. A moment later the surrounding metal registered with him: stairs, deck, railings. He didn’t know how a beryllium steered bolt would behave under such conditions. Thinking better, he left the sword uncharged, retightened the ring and drew it from its scabbard.
But now the deck was quiet. There were shouts, possibly from starboard or aft. He couldn’t te
ll. Three bodies littered a blazing white circle flung from overhead magnesium lamps.
Caliph felt terrorized by the impossible alacrity of their deaths.
He looked aft into the murk beyond the cone of light. Where was Sena? How could three men die in an instant without a sound?
Maybe they weren’t dead. He scanned for the floating shape and approached the bodies half-stooped, as if an additional six inches of clearance might offer some protection. The air, the wind, the sounds of the ship had become places of hiding, places that could disgorge improbable death.
Caliph glanced up repeatedly as he checked his men, willfully paranoid of sudden attack. After three hurried inspections he found no wounds and no pulses.
He listened.
The aft observation deck hung fifty feet behind the fore decks, sequestered from the rest of the ship. It projected behind the chemical cells: eight hundred square feet of elegance jutting into space. It was from this rear deck that Caliph thought he heard voices above the chug of the propellers.
He opened the deck’s aft door and slipped down the hallway, past his stateroom, past the parlors and out onto the duralumin rear patio that basked in the glow of the batteries.
Sena stood, cropped red jacket snapping in the wind, holding the book he loathed in one of her hands. She faced the back of the ship.
A body lay like a hump of laundry just a few feet in front of her and to her right four men clutched their weapons, symbols of paralysis. What was wrong with them? They represented his elite staff of bodyguards. They should be moving. Fighting. Doing something—
Caliph could see past their pale faces to where, floating in green effulgence, three ghastly impossibilities threatened. Their exposed lungs swelled, withered and swelled again; their hearts twitched rhythmically.
Caliph could not think. A deep, canonical terror gripped him. One of the heads spoke in a cooing language. He imagined that Sena answered.
All he knew for certain was that her red jacket was snapping. He watched it, felt it crack with petulant regularity. Snap! Snap! A red, protective chant. Its texture, brightness and continual sound cordoned him from the shadowy things floating not quite twenty feet away. On this side of Sena, there were glowing lamps, a doorway and the pounding of his heart. But beyond Sena’s snapping coat, on the other side of her confident stance, there was madness.
Caliph realized he was kneeling on the deck, looking at his sword, which had fallen from his fingers. How had he dropped it? When he looked up, he could barely see his men, standing exactly as they had been before.
Caliph stared at Sena’s flapping jacket. He willed himself to reach for his weapon. Do something! An internal scream.
He tried to speak, to say Sena’s name, but couldn’t.
She didn’t move. He wondered if something was wrong with her in the exact way he might have wondered whether the concrete wall separating him from an inferno was sustaining damage. She was his shelter.
Mizraim, Emolus, Fuck! He tried again to grab his weapon, to get up and power past Sena.
No.
He was still kneeling on the cold metal behind her. He could not move.
Her jacket flapped again and then the sound of something heavy clanged on the metal floor, unbelievably loud, bouncing once before the dark mass of flickering entrails.
He adjusted his focus enough to look, but found he couldn’t move his head. Sena’s jacket was a red blur while the deck resolved into clear patterns of grating. He could see the book she had tossed down in front of them. Was she giving it to them? Some kind of morbid joke bubbled up in his mind; that the heads had no hands nearly made him giggle. And he was giggling, deep inside his chest, nowhere near the surface. It felt like a worm struggling just under his heart, threshing violently. It was the only part of his body that he could feel anymore. Everything else had turned to stone and fear.
He heard Sena’s voice, husky and commanding. “Tekioo otou,” she said.
It had to be a ploy. Sena would never part with that book. Never.
One of the heads jerked, a tethered balloon plucked by the breeze. Its organs flopped against the rough deck. Caliph saw blood ooze over metal. Then the dark, obscured face was whispering, crooning, speaking in the Unknown Tongue.
And the book began to float.
9Willin Droul is a cant term used only by the Shradnae Sisterhood for the Cabal of Wights. The Cabal of Wights is a legendary underworld organization consisting of human, partly-human and purportedly nonhuman operatives whose goals are a matter of conjecture.
10A hit squad of three Shradnae Sisters, consisting of one cephal’matris and two ancillas.
11The Shokyule witch queen, born 11,984 O.T.R., vanished 12,874 O.T.R.
CHAPTER
12
Taelin cartwheeled. Flopped. Rolling buttes spun by, rotten-apple black. The wind cut her ears. An endless procession of razors. She was on her back now, arms and legs flapping, staring up into the wet flood of stars, waiting for impact.
Through the crush of one-hundred-twenty-mile-an-hour winds, a soprano whisper returned. This, rather than her fall, gave Taelin strength to scream again.
“Taelin—”
The singsong voice threatened her. She heard other voices encircling her descent. “Taelin!”
“Lady Rae.”
She felt hands on her body, restraining her.
“Get off! Get off!” She was screaming. The air at her back pushed up hard. Too hard. Like a foam mattress. Like a hospital cot. She lurched forward, covered in sweat, into the bright light, the red shapes of physicians bending over her.
“I’m not falling!” She screamed and laughed.
She felt a deep twinge in the meat of her shoulder.
“Three units of amylobar.”
Such a clinical voice. Taelin laughed again, right before impact.
* * *
SENA dismissed the assigned servants. She brought cream and a bowl of sugar. She brought rolls and biscuits from the kitchen. In an unusual display of domesticity, she brought blankets and pillows and coffee into the room that Caliph had chosen as his command center.
He didn’t sleep. It was after midnight. Once they had cleared the airspace over Skellum, personnel were ferried between the ships. Alani came aboard.
It was after midnight on the thirteenth of Tes and for the next several hours Caliph deliberated whether to turn back, cancel his talk at the conference and return with all three ships to Isca.
Alani’s quiet voice modified and calmed the tension in the air. Plans for retaliation against the government of Mirayhr, where the Witchocracy held sway, were quickly scuttled. The attack had been a secret. Caliph decided, and Alani agreed, that for the time being they would keep it that way. The last thing Stonehold needed was to appear weak or friendless to Pandragor.
The heads had left with the book. The skies were empty and quiet again. Six people had died. Night slipped away and light spilled with a suddenness through the portholes, into the airship’s makeshift conference room. It gave luster to the discarded cuff links, the clutter of cups and the several pairs of cast-aside shoes. With the dawn, Caliph decided to go ahead with the conference.
He would not turn back. He would not be distracted from his mission in Sandren. After his talk, after he hammered out his problems with the Pandragonians, he would he deal with the Witchocracy.
“We have a floating hospital and one patient,” said Caliph.
“At least she survived,” said Sena.
Caliph tapped his lip. “That would’ve been a diplomatic shit-storm. I think bringing her with was a bad idea.”
“She’ll recover.”
Caliph chuckled through his nose but did not smile. “She seems to have some medical know-how. Put the doctors in a snarl by telling them their diagnosis was wrong.” He looked up at her. “You think it’s the right choice? To go through with the conference?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe my physicians are doing the work of m
orticians—on day one no less.”
Sena struggled with guilt. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m fine.”
“It’s not your fault, you know?”
Caliph looked at her quizzically but she could read his embarrassment over the night before.
“When a qloin gives itself to the Eighth House, it ceases to be three sisters. They become fingers on her hand.”
“What are you talking about?” Caliph’s eyes went to Alani who made a motion for coffee before slipping out of the room. The spymaster thought, like many did, that Sena was crazy.
She pressed on. “The Eighth House is the reason none of your bodyguards could move.”
“I should have—”
Caliph started to blame himself but Sena snipped it off. “No.” She looked out through one of the oval windows. “You were under the power of the Eighth House.”
But privately she shouldered a sense of guilt. She hated to see him like this, a whisker-stippled shadow. And yet she had felt so piercingly lonely—all summer long—that she had done it anyway. She had been lonely and he had been full of anxiety over the flight. She had convinced herself that she could take away his fears.
Caliph looked at her with eyes bruised by lack of sleep. Under his clothing she saw the delicate skin fronting his hips, contused through his own struggle for unity, turned black and green. There were great dark suction marks on his chest: proof that the numbers were, quite literally, stacked against him.
He had been waylaid by math.
The proportions and ratios had piggybacked on light, entered through his eyes and been assigned a requisite level of awe. A greater than average chemical storm had swelled inside him. Her numbers were a spiral, a vortex. But they were not helping him.
Her ratios exceeded his capability to compartmentalize and, like the power of the Eighth House, it was unfair.
“Why didn’t the witches just kill me?” His voice sounded confused, dejected; it turned her stomach. She answered with a measure of asperity. “The Sisterhood doesn’t care about you anymore. They have the book.”
