by Anthony Huso
Caliph entered the house through one of many ruined windows. He skidded on tumbled blocks, coated with living green scum. Amid the ubiquitous growth everything looked the same.
He could see what had once been a doorway was now choked with a swollen tumor of roots.
Amid the creepers and moss and dismal predawn light, shapes were hard to separate. The room he had entered was open to the sky.
Caliph felt the ground shudder under him and glanced back through the ruined walls to where Sena stood quietly, faced away from him. He could see nothing beyond her but black trees tossing in the wind. Yet he sensed Nathaniel. And he sensed the wall separating him from his uncle. That wall was Sena. And she was beginning to break. Nathaniel’s might began leaking through the chinks in her defense.
What are you waiting for? Sena’s voice sounded in his head. This is why I brought you here. To be free of him.
Caliph looked across the room, fifteen feet at most, and suddenly he saw it. Dark brown and spongy. Glittering with intricate wires. Where the umber bone was not exposed, a skullcap of green carpeted it. The thing leaned into a pile of corruption that must have been Arkhyn Hiel’s forearms—as if his body had finally given out while resting his head on the desk. As Caliph approached it, he saw a sprinkle of bright pink spore caps quavering in a tiny cluster on the brow.
In that moment that Caliph viewed the skull of this stranger, all the books Sena had given him, all the passages she had marked, broke free from their association with her. They stopped representing her designs, her cryptic research, her plunge into something he could never understand. And instead, suddenly, whether by her design or not, they belonged to him. They were for him. Suddenly what had happened to him as a child had a context. He understood it in a broader theater. It was not his fault. It had never been his fault.
“I don’t want revenge,” said Caliph.
It isn’t revenge, Sena thought at him. It’s your moment to be free. Take it.
Caliph looked at the thing on the desk. Its face was a travesty.
Both sockets had been filled with heavy black jewels and on the upper row of teeth, a third gem replaced one of the incisors. The whole head was wrapped in a thin filigree of platinum wires, delicate as thread. Despite much of them being buried in moss, they reminded Caliph instantly of the lines on Sena’s skin.
Caliph heard Sena cry out with a mixture of surprise and pain.
He didn’t know whether crushing this head would somehow fix everything or whether this was about his own personal salvation but he picked up the skull.
The platinum wires crumpled. Some of the bone had been replaced by a soft, green film. His fingers crushed through this slimy membrane to a slippery jagged interior that swarmed with fat, segmented life. Tiny creatures poured out of every available orifice.
Caliph swore and dropped it.
It disintegrated on the floor into a shattered mess of black and green and wet-gleaming metal.
And then there was only cricket song again.
The sound in the wind lost cohesion and dissolved into something natural: a breeze blowing in from the sea.
He bent down and plucked one of the gems from where it sparkled on the floor. When he did, he felt an immediate chill, then Sena was standing beside him, looking frightened. She was holding out her hand.
* * *
TAELIN had trouble hearing. She could still make out amphibian chirps and barks wrapping around the restaurant’s brick-framed windows but she had also noticed that one of her ears was bleeding.
A few moments ago, she had heard Baufent say, “They’re going to find us.” But now the doctor wasn’t talking anymore. In fact she wasn’t even sitting across from her at the table. Baufent had disappeared.
It didn’t matter. Past and present didn’t matter, praise the Omnispecer. All that mattered was the future, which Taelin could see. The future was bright and golden.
Taelin did not fantasize about changing things. The past was the past.
Except maybe for Corwin.
She had that one clear memory of him, before he became High King of the Duchy of Stonehold and got her pregnant. A clear picture of his smiling face as the two of them sat on the cement steps of her grandmother’s house. He held a stick in one hand, that he had been using to play with those tiny red bugs. So simple back then. She couldn’t remember how the house had caught on fire. She supposed that was the one thing she would change. Because it wasn’t fair that she had sent him inside to rescue her box of colors—and the necklace.
She bent the demonifuge back and forth between her fingers, working the soft cool metal with a vengeance.
Poor, beautiful Corwin with his lovely brown skin and cobra eyes. She remembered him nearly making it out of the house as the door frame collapsed on top of him in a salvo of fire and heavy timber.
It had crushed him and simultaneously hurled him down the steps and into the backyard. Then her father had drunk the tincture and disappeared. She had picked the necklace up and noticed the tiny red bugs streaming down the foundation, hurrying from the flames for the safety of the grass.
If she could change anything, that would be it. She would bring her dead king back to life.
“Corwin … Corwin…”
Taelin stared into the demonifuge. Its color was like the inside of a fire barrel in the cold streets of Isca. Palmer stood beside her, looking in.
“Should I do it?” she asked.
Palmer passed her a beggary blunt and shrugged. “You gotta do the right thing,” he said.
“I know. I don’t really think she needs my help. But that’s the brilliant part of being a god I suppose: you give over the handling of things to other people … almost like a gift.”
Palmer looked at her like a devotee with those pure blue eyes.
Then Taelin heard the necklace snap.
The orange-yellow bliss in the fire barrel expanded dramatically.
Taelin stared into her hands at the broken setting. The cold golden light that was not a light swelled between her hands. Like the mouth of a bag opening, she thought. So lovely.
Albescent yellow sea foam glowing at dawn. Lovely cold mountains like radiant thunderheads ballooned through the stretching aperture. A bright batter. A birthing. It moved like lava underwater but did not dim, or crust over, or solidify. It swelled like a storm wall inside the restaurant. Mustard white. A juggernaut coming.
Taelin gave a little cry as her goddess enveloped her.
The magnificent body slobbered through the fully effaced hole. It dragged whimsical, ghastly improbabilities behind it. A necklace of alien placentas.
* * *
UNDER churning volcanic blackness, red meteorites plunk the ground. There are screaming people. Some crumple when they are struck. Others catch fire. Taelin can see a man with soft green eyes standing in front of her as the rain comes down. His face brims with regret. His hand reaches out to her …
* * *
SENA saw the necklace break.
She watched Nathaniel’s skull, his phylactery, shatter—not at her hands, but at Caliph’s. That had been important to her. That was why he was here. She wanted the victory over his uncle to belong to him. And it did. That part of the ordeal was over. The hurricane of souls devolved into the unfocused milling of the damned. All the dead of Isca floated aimlessly, confused ghosts in the jungles of the south.
There would come a time, as the twisted eons burnt down, that little by little, Taelin’s soul might escape—one particle at a time—over the course of millennia. One day she might reorganize somewhere in the deep cosmic black—along with Nathaniel.
The stars were full of ghosts.
But that time would not come soon.
As the necklace opened Sena heard a crackle in the sky. This was the place Nathaniel had found, at Ooil-Uauth, which had taken lifetimes to solve, to pinpoint the spot where the second door would open. Sena looked up at the two stars that still flanked the moon. So bright. Unconnected with this wor
ld’s constellations. This moment was Sena’s chance, but Nathaniel’s assault had interfered with her strict schedule. Naen was free. Naen was ravenous. And Naen was coming.
Huge ruffled pseudopodia uncurled, delicate and beguiling. Naen took no special notice of the souls she absorbed. Taelin had been drawn into the ever-swelling lung-like recesses of her extra-dimensional form. Buildings melted. Streets cratered. In Bablemum, paid with the Sisterhood’s blood to leave the jungles empty, to not be present in the ruins of Ooil-Uauth when the second door opened, the Lua’groc burned as the End of the World was finally born.
They had been unable to resist the blood of their ancient enemies and, as their god came at last, they died in joy to feed her.
Sena saw Naen fill Bablemum, balloon and then abruptly turn, lured by the huge number of souls Nathaniel had brought from the north. Millions of them. They were like a great bait ball in the sky.
But more than them, it was her: the Sslia, standing on the brink of escape. Naen moved toward her automatically, intent on her destruction.
Sena was afraid.
Her eyes, which saw everywhere, witnessed the Chamber under Sandren where the golden holes had stretched and broken. They were dark now. The wet stone made of dreams had fallen away, great pieces dropping into Yoloch’s relentless surf.
Beneath her feet, Sena could feel the fringes of the continent collapsing, the world eaten at a harrowing rate, racing across the steppes, the desert, the jungle, coming toward her. And it made her sad. She felt Caliph’s sorrow, vicariously.
Because the number was only two.
CHAPTER
53
Caliph sees Sena drink from a small steel flask. He knows it is tincture by the smell. Then he sees her toss the flask aside, touch her stomach with one hand as she reaches for him with her other. She looks worried.
Her face is lit by the gray dawn and gathered into tense angles.
Caliph notices how time feels differently now. As if everything has already happened. Maybe it is part of the dream, part of the tincture. He can still feel the poison coursing through him as Sena pulls him along, down the escarpment. Wind is blowing.
“Come on Caliph—”
He cannot feel his feet against the ground. The boulders, the treacherous clefts and snarls of vegetation might as well be paved causeways. Everything is running smoothly now, just the way he likes it.
They enter a desolate quadrangle. The trees cradle the poisonous colors of a new set of ruins.
“It’s a necropolis,” says Sena.
He hears the leaves moan.
These new ruins, the necropolis of Ooil-Uauth, are so striking he knows he must still be dreaming. No real place could look like this. Far above his head, strange jungle foliage rumbles with air currents. Trees like kelp slosh against a dead blue sky.
He makes his way among huge cucullate structures, like beehives, mathematical and sharp, some tumbled down and broken, all organic and contradictorily vague.
For a moment he loses track of Sena and finds himself alone.
Only in dreams can you be so alone, he thinks.
Only in dreams can the entire universe be emptied of your species and leave you to haunt the cosmos, a solitary morsel of meat.
He looks up into heavens the color of paint mixed with ash.
The sky hates him.
He stumbles into the middle of the square, feeling catarrhine, barely capable of balancing without all four feet on the ground. He swaggers, hardly standing. For a moment the heat is incredible, then that whimsical-strong ocean breeze tongues the trees. Stray currents swirl into the square and goose bumps rake his skin.
The jungle moves. It unrolls and blooms and sways. It mouths the ruins and the beach, slobbering, drizzling nectar from millions of blossoms. Caliph appreciates the sticky mist coating the back of his neck, spattering against his cheeks, like strange rain, like bat urine. Sweet, aphrodisiacal and repugnant.
Jungles are not really black. But this one is: in perfect counterpoint to the variegated colors of masonry, blossoms and acid-pink water that laps at the beach.
Hurry, Caliph.
Ah. He has found her again.
Movement stirs at the north end of the square. Darkness pours from the undergrowth in tendrils and clouds. Black butterflies, big as his hand. Even the shimmery lunulae of their hind wings glister like fresh tar.
“So beautiful.”
He has found her. Through the wings and disembodied spirits. Eyes made of blue crystal. No. Black. Her eyes have turned black.
She stands at an altar or a lectern and beckons him. It, like the necropolis, is made of dreamt stone.
Its shape is long and threatening. It looks old. Like something that has existed from the beginning. Because of it, thinks Caliph, even if tourists crawled all over this place, ferried from some nearby village in solvitriol cabs, this would be a terrible—
“Are you all right, Caliph?”
He feels pressured into saying yes, because of the desperation in her voice. She sounds hurried.
And then, as if the idea is planted, he has a moment of clarity, which can be compared to only one or two other experiences in his life.
He starts talking without fully understanding what he is saying. But he can feel that he is onto something. “Did you read the papers last summer? When you were away?” he asks her while she is doing something frantically at the altar. “They were so full of the news about Bablemum?” He almost laughs. “The treaty? You know? How the city was going to go back to Pandragonian rule?
“I remember they published excerpts of letters sent from citizens of Bablemum to Emperor Junnu, begging him not to do it. They wrote to senators, diplomats, even foreign powers, asking them to intervene. Even I got one.
“As if—right? But they went door-to-door for signatures. They held rallies. ‘Don’t follow through with this treaty,’ they begged! Because it was going to, you know, modify a whole lot of lives. Change laws. People’s freedoms and families and everything were on the line.”
Caliph gasps as a blast of ocean wind takes him straight in the face. “But you know what? Nothing changed. The day arrived and the treaty went into effect as planned. Because you can’t fight inertia. Not even when you know it’s going to be a disaster. Not with all the reasoning in the world. Because the receipts win out. The money and time spent have too much weight. And people want what they paid for, even if it’s going to kill them. So the police moved into the streets. And no one could do a damned thing about it. People jumped off buildings that night rather than become Pandragonian.”
He looks at Sena closely. “That’s what happens when whole cultures are annexed. That’s what happens when the world loses its ability to steer. And you know, I guess I thought … that people were more sensible.”
“I’m just the sexton,” says Sena. “I dug the hole.” Her mouth is beautiful. Her teeth are an omegoid array of enamel shields standing in pink gums. Her tongue dances behind them.
He doesn’t know why he notices this.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he asks. “Why fill me up with drugs?”
“No matter what I did, I couldn’t get to three.” Sena looks more sincere and more bereft than she ever has before. “This is about transcendence. And you need permission. You have to forgive me for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for that.”
Caliph believes that there are interminable seasons bracketed by proterozoic soup and stars—wheeling over him.
“I wanted to tell you,” she says. “But I couldn’t. It was too dangerous. Your uncle could have—”
But Caliph barely hears her. The sky is not yet light but there are shapes in it. He watches them press and queue like the shadows of frenzied shoppers pressing against frosted glass. There is a red glow behind them as they bang for the clerk, demanding that the bolts be snapped back for their turn to enter, trample and consume. For some reason he imagines all the windows of his uncle’s house blowing out in prismatic splendor as the
Yillo’tharnah molt across the sky. They are black laughter, exultant and empty.
“Hold my hand,” Sena whispers.
Caliph laces fingers with her. She has done terrible things. But perhaps she is about to follow through on her promise—and fix everything.
Her hands feel cool. Cooler than the gooey air. The reflection of his face, in her black eyes, is serene and resolved. She guides his forearm over a bed of hollow tines.
The lectern-altar is a ghastly cackle of stone and ancient residue. When his arm is in position, she helps him press it down. The hollow slivers go through him effortlessly, popping from the skin in glistening pincushion-array. He gasps, sets his jaw, says nothing. Blood pours from him into the stone channels, down the drain and into the tubing of a pen.
He looks up, dazed by the creamy pink fume rising over the trees. He doesn’t know that his brain is bleeding.
* * *
SENA lifts the pen with the heavy tubing. A small bottle screwed into the hose mixes pimplota ink as it fills with his blood. When her quill touches the first page, the world shakes. When her pen lifts the tremor ceases.
She can tell that Caliph is disconcerted. He knows now that this is real. He remembers when his uncle did this to him as a boy. The quill’s nib is sharp and supple and drips with the ink of worlds.25
But she must focus all her attention on this act. She cannot search for power and she cannot afford to draw it from herself.
She reaches for the colligation. She pulls holojoules, endless incredible amounts of holojoules from her black amphorae still frozen in Isca. The temple atop the great frustum is empty. It floats, cold and desolate in its realm above Incense Street. But the gelid pots of blood are still there, preserved.
Sena uses all of them.
It hurts her to do this. She feels each pen stroke in her skeleton. The scrape of the quill against the paper is deafening. As sensual as satin or milk poured in morning light. She feels the stone lectern beneath the vellum, formed of Adummim’s geology through ancient dreams—set here as a traitor, for this purpose, to murder the continent.
But the lectern has changed its politics, aligned itself with the new power. The grain of its smooth rock surface kisses the underside of the sheet as she writes in cool defiance of the apocalypse around her.
