by Anthony Huso
“But Caph—”
The knocking on the door intensified. Mr. Vhortghast’s meticulous voice came from without the room.
“No!” Caliph nearly shouted. “Look, Sig. Keep your job in the military. Be an engineer. I’m happy to have you, really I am. But I don’t want to hear another thing about solvitriol power. I’m already sick beyond words from the shit I’ve seen since I took this miserable crown. Let me tell you, the last thing this city needs is another sin on its slate.”
Sigmund, visibly angry and frustrated at not having been able to share his vision, glowered in silence as Caliph answered the knock.
Zane Vhortghast stood just outside the room, pressing his fingertips together, looking slightly winded as though he had mounted the considerable staircase in a hurry.
Caliph briefly wondered if he had been eavesdropping.
“Your majesty. I am afraid I have some terrible news.” He noticed Sigmund at once. “Perhaps you should be alone to hear this. Perhaps you should sit down.”
Caliph smiled quizzically. He tried to imagine what news Vhortghast could possibly know that would upset him more than he already was. Nothing came to mind.
“Mr. Vhortghast.” He gestured for the spymaster to enter the room. “Please. I’m sure it can’t be that bad. Sigmund is an old friend. It’s perfectly fine to tell me here and now. I don’t need to sit down.”
“But your majesty—”
Mr. Vhortghast’s clay-like face twisted into some rare facsimile of regret.
“I’m fine,” said Caliph. “What is it?”
“Your father. Your father has been . . . assassinated.”
Caliph drew back sharply, wincing. “What? How?”
The unpleasant and grisly details followed and rested in Caliph’s mind.
Sigmund, distracted from his reprimand, looked disconnectedly sorry for his friend. He sat quietly while Zane Vhortghast described how Jacob had been jumped the previous night, a sack thrown over his head and knocked unconscious with something like a brick. The assailants had thrown him in the river.
“Sig—”
Sigmund was already headed for the door.
“I’ll talk to you later, Caph. I’m sorry. Sorry . . .” He disappeared into the staircase, a fading, sinking mumble of apology and hurried footsteps.
Gone was the recent excitement and debate over solvitriol power. Gone the sweetness of the creamy breakfast pastries in Caliph’s mouth.
Outside, one of the zeppelins sounded a piercing low Klaxon, plowing south over Bilgeburg and the ships in the glittering sea. It was carrying factory parts or refrigerated canisters packed with meat or metholinate or coal. The sun had finally risen high enough to reach the bay. Morning crept like something wounded toward afternoon.
Vhortghast maintained a look of well-conceived empathy as the High King swallowed his anger and began calculating even before he mourned . . . calculating his response.
CHAPTER 12
Sena leaned at the window of a dark bedroom over Litten Street, her face tense and solicitous.
Beyond the casement, laughter and song echoed from taverns and all-night cafés. The voices were weird and thin, sounding like wind-tossed cans off Sandren’s reeling vertiginous streets.
Sena hadn’t been home yet, having hitched a ride with a farmer all the way from the Stones to the ghettos of Seatk’r. That had been yesterday. She’d taken the ancient lift up to the City in the Mountain and stayed the night with Clea. But tonight was different. Tonight, contingencies had forced her into a room at the Black Couch: a lavish and discretionary inn that catered to the one-night stands of the reckless wealthy.
The tang of homemade perfume ruffled through her room. Behind her, the darkness stirred with human irritation as another gust swirled over the bedclothes.
“Sounds like it’s picking up.” A man’s voice came from the bed.
Sena did not answer. Her gaze dipped with mild amusement to where a band of cup-shot youths twirled and swaggered beneath marcescent statues that threatened to topple. The city was splintered with deep fissures and the boys crossed Lôrc Rift on a bridge of antiquated stone.
Sena spun her tiny wineglass between her fingers and enjoyed the architecture. The Ghalla Peaks had been crammed and chiseled by another of the north’s prehistoric civilizations, one older and more sinister than the numinous mummified horrors that that had built the Highway of Kafree.
“Why don’t you shut it? It’s cold,” the man said.
He was not Tynan.
“I like it cold.” Sena took a sip and set the glass in the open window.
The man drew the sheets around him and turned to face her.
“What are you doing?”
Sena stepped out of the faint blue cast from the window. Her body stooped to gather soft dark shapes from the floor.
“Go to sleep,” she whispered. Parts of her were disappearing.
“I thought you were going to stay here for a while—” He sat up, trying to find her clothed body against the gloom.
“You need your rest. You must have been tired tonight—Robert.” She said his name as though hardly remembering it.
Robert growled but the door clicked and wind howled briefly through the bedroom, billowing up gusts of Sena’s perfumery. When the door clicked again, the wind had blown her out like a flame.
Sena walked briskly, adjusting the black britches and a studded watchman’s jacket. She had not gathered her own clothing from the floor.
It’s a good fit, she thought. Robert was a very small man—the reason she had picked him out of the crowd. His leather pants pulled tightly across her slender hips.
She smiled as she fancied him trying on her skirt in the morning. Around her index finger swung a heavy ring of city keys that slapped against her palm.
If all went well, Robert would never see her again, and never understand why she had stolen almost everything in his possession.
His cloak, stitched with the city insignia, displayed a winged silhouette against a pink sun.
The do’doc statues were Sandren’s most prominent skyline feature and one of several things that drew the tourists. They hunkered on all fours atop their spindles of stone, looking beyond the curvature of the planet with a unified expression of morbid, almost alien anticipation.
Sandren’s murky history was the reason she was here. Gimmon Mae had come late to the north. The city’s foundations had been laid by the Groull, creatures that flourished and fell long before human tribes discovered fire. Just like men, they had come here for the gold.
But something had forced them to abandon the mines before the ore ran out, a mystery to the archeological society that flourished here. Certainly an invasion was out of the question. Sandren’s position precluded siege.
Sena wished she had followed Megan’s recommendation to infiltrate the city’s archeological society. Her goal tonight certainly would have been easier to achieve.
Still, in the dark, no one would notice that her uniform pinched or sagged a bit in places that made it obviously masculine. Robert’s weapons moved against her hips with an easy sway.
She met the concierge of the Black Couch with a smile, mentioning that “the man upstairs” would take care of any residual fees. The concierge checked his register. He eyed her and made the hand sign for yes. Sena headed into the street.
Outside she could smell summer blooms like tender-loin girls: pink-petaled skirts ruffling in the wind. She walked southeast, listening to the creak of queelub cages swinging over Litten Street.
The wind in Sandren was always delicious. Sena could see west now down Windlymn Street and beyond the cliffs to the remote clouds over Tibin that had smeared like charcoal into night. She felt comfortable here. Not a tourist. Living in Tue had made her part of the city-state and she read tobacco signs and bistro names with ease in several different tongues.
She entered the Aerie: the most extravagant of the rich districts. It was where Tynan’s family lived. She had me
t him this morning at the Merchant’s Pillow just above Jdellan’s Fountain and told him a carefully abridged version of her disastrous spring.
His corresponding tale had revolved around his own panic at finding her cottage a mess. He had told the police, and a squad of officers had been dispatched. Sena gnashed her teeth until it was clear from Tynan’s story that they had found nothing of the secret cellar.
Sena had endured their hour together at the Merchant’s Pillow but she could not look him in the eye. The tenderness in his face was unbearable and she understood that for him it was like she had come back from the dead. His affection only reminded her of the deep secret between them, the thing they never spoke of, whose tiny bones lay in the ground at Desdae.
Sena had buckled the coins he gave her in her pack and swallowed hard, forcing a smile.
Later, alone over lunch, she had counted the wealth. He had given her southern scythes. They were worth twice as much on exchange for northern gryphs and Sandren’s system accepted both kinds of currency.
They would get her to Stonehold and back again if things unraveled with Caliph.
The dark streets of Sandren wound confusingly behind pubs and town houses. Rose-tinted light bled from deep-set alley windows onto cobbled walls where the smell of blossoms mixed with the sour stench of rotting fruit and garbage: refuse from the never-ending galas of the rich.
Sena swung between wheeled crates of waste and arrived at a narrow intersection sheltered from the wind and glutted with a humid veil of sewer steam.
She swung Robert’s ring of keys around her finger and snapped the heavy bouquet together with a clank. Then she fanned them and examined the teeth and relative length of each shaft, trying to gauge which ones might go to standard doors versus large metal gates. She would have only one chance to bluff her way through . . .
Distracted and nervous, she turned down Gullet, trying to ignore the howling in her head. As crazy as she imagined it might sound, she believed the book wanted to be opened.
Crossing over an archaic bridge, cloak billowing in a roaring updraft, Sena thought about Caliph and about opening the grimoire.
Thoughts of Caliph still flitted through her head as she moved into an unlit section of town, gliding through the blackened tapestries of laundry lines and orchid-clustered walls.
Another loud group of young nobles passed her on their way to a party. They saw her city insignia and hid their bottles discreetly behind backs or against thighs.
Sena turned down a narrow street stacked with hives of vented coils. Gauges glowed, tiny featherweight beads inside them tumbled with the flow of gas. She exited at a bright intersection where metholinate lamps flickered overhead, illuminating one of the do’doc statues: a fantastic long-clawed leering beast crumbling into air.
To the south stood a well-lit gate. Frosted bulbs enclosed white darts of flame on either side of the portal, a tall block affair comprised of lofty columns capped with pyramidal stones. The columns framed and anchored ornate grilles of iron that rose thirty feet or more above the level of the street.
Two men in studded watchman’s jackets identical to Robert’s stood talking about the bets they had placed on the fights in Northcliff Court. They glanced at her as she approached but kept talking. It was time for her to focus.
“Got a report of somebody making noise on the other side of the fence,” said Sena as though such an idea were preposterous.
The watchmen chuckled.
“Yeah right. Probably someone’s cat gettin’ laid.”
Sena fumbled through Robert’s keys, trying to guess which one fit.
“Hey, you’re new,” one of the men was saying. His eyes traveled her body. “You see police?”
“Maybe.” She winked at him. “What time you off?”
“Seventeen.”
“Palan damn these things.” She was genuinely frustrated. “I can’t keep them straight. Which one is it?”
The guard came over and flipped through the assortment, touching her fingers.
“That one.” She guessed it was his best seductive baritone. “GS-Four.”
Sena suddenly noticed the tiny digits engraved on the shaft. They probably stood for Great Steps Gate Four.
“Thanks.” Sena looked up with an expression that showed her (completely false) interest in him. “I’ll be back after I take a look around.”
“Hey,” said the other guard. “Where’s your lamp?”
Sena scowled as though he were being ridiculous. “I’m not going to need one. It’s probably nothing. I’ll just have a peek and write it up as a stray.”
“Suit yourself. Place gives me the creeps even from this side of the bars.”
The guard, who was hitting her like bait, offered to go with but Sena convinced him that leaving his post wasn’t worth the risk.
He grinned and shut the gate, stopping her one last time. “Take this just in case.” He handed a whistle through the bars.
“Thanks.” Sena draped it around her neck and turned her back on him.
She went south toward the black cascade of masonry stacked against the mountainside, monstrous and dark like the terraced ascent to some Veyden ziggurat. The city officially ended here. Eight broad terraces rose fifty feet like a giant staircase.
The steps were monumental. Wide and curved to embrace the contour of the mountain, as though the mountain itself had been set on a vast dais. At the back of the topmost terrace, burrowed into the mountainside, the Halls yawned.
Sena could already hear them. Miles of deep vaulted corridor honeycombed the Ghalla Peaks; few were unexplored but their depth precluded frequent visitations. Many now found use as wine cellars or crypts for the wealthy. The Halls were another leftover from the Groull.
Sena moved quickly and soundlessly, scrambling up each of the six-foot steps. Listening to the ominous breathing of the mountain.
When she reached the top she turned and glanced briefly out over the city. Its weltering rooftops and chimney pots formed an eerie black landscape of smoke and domes. Beyond them, through a deep cleft in the Ghalla Peaks, the smoky glimmer of Miryhr’s dusk-burnished lakes still smoldered under leagues of mist.
Sena watched the friendly red lights of taverns and inns flickering with drunken abandon. Behind her, the sheer face of the mountain rose skyward and the low moan of the Halls waited.
She turned and walked along them, unsure of her exact position. Beyond the huge openings, colossal columns jutted mightily from the walls, supporting far-flung ornate ceilings with inconceivable designs. The floors, though smooth for the most part, ran in almost imperceptible rises and slopes of limestone tile. Sena felt a steady gush of warm damp air as she stood near one of the many hundred openings that lined the top of the Great Steps.
Inside, the smallest sounds echoed. Water drops. Even wind. A black shape shifted in the darkness and her hand clutched instinctively at Robert’s sword.
“ ‘S’me lady.” A raised palm came out into the starlight as though from behind a curtain.
“Gavin?”
“Yes. ‘S’me.” The voice of the guide she had hired sounded ridiculous as it reverberated through the empty vault. He was Worian but even Trade Tongue exited rough and half-formed from his mouth. She wondered briefly how he had made his way past the guards.
“Show me quickly,” she whispered.
He stood up and brushed off his backside. He looked small and formless, as though a diaper bunched beneath his trousers.
“No light until we are far enough inside,” he said.
She followed his footsteps for several hundred feet. When the starlight vanished, the Halls grew unnaturally dark. The air felt pulpy and damp. Gavin produced a book of matches but had trouble getting them to strike. Each spluttering blue streak that snapped ineffectually along the book hiked Sena’s tension. Would the matches run out? What the fuck was he doing wrong? She counted six tries in the palpable blackness before the candle box finally fluttered to life.
Mutt
ering to himself, Gavin swung the light around and tromped off into the mountain without saying a word. Along the first leg of their journey, Sena noticed more recent stonework. Niches had been carved and then mortared shut, sealed off with marble slabs graven with dates, names and short serious poems.
Gavin guided her through immense passageways that turned back and forth, all of them generally sloping down. Fallen slabs of rock and ribbing lay like scattered bones and an occasional pilaster, loosened by shifts in the mountain and eons of seeping moisture lay sprawled out, having relinquished its lifelong marriage to the wall.
“This way,” Gavin whispered. Sena was timing their pace on her watch. She flipped it open again, chemiostatic fluid flaring like an emerald in her palm. She squinted at the chronometer. They had traveled nearly two and a half miles into the mountain.
Gavin’s breathing was loud and nasal as though he were growing excited or fearful. Sena followed the dirty yellow bob in his hand another thousand feet, judging a slow but steady descent the entire way.
Neither of them talked.
Finally, though the wide chilly tunnel ran on, Gavin stopped.
“It starts right around here, mostly on the far wall. I want my money before we go any farther.” He looked like a blind mole in the rake of light.
Sena tousled her hair. “A little pushy, aren’t you?”
“I brought you here. Now I want my money. Maybe I’ll leave you here in the dark.”
Reluctantly she unbuckled her pack, fished then tossed him a prepared pouch that clinked when he caught it.
Gavin opened it and scrutinized the contents.
“This way.” He swung the lantern around and stumped toward the far wall. The carvings materialized slowly, picked out by candlelight.
“No one knows they are here but me, maybe. Maybe some others too, I don’t know. No one can read them.”
Sena crouched and gazed at the ancient writing. Few can read them, she amended silently.
A week before the attack at her cottage, Sena had found a reference in the Holthic Scripture, supposedly a translation of a Gringling text made by Yacob Skie before he released his prophetic Roll of Years.11 One of the clues that originally began her search for the Csrym T, the Holthic Scripture also referenced “unholy vaults below the mountains at Nifol” as containing script regarding the “Red Book.” Sena hoped to find the script, if it existed, and learn more before attempting the books’s anathematic lock.
