Black Bottle (39 page)

“You are in a trap,” the Pebella had told her. Yul and the rest had vigorously agreed. “It is better not to free Them. You will fail as every other Sslia has. Under Their power, your ambit will be broken, the Lua’groc will have their sacrament of flesh and the Abominations will entomb your soul.”

“But I have the Gringling’s notes,” Sena had said.

To which the Pebella had answered nothing but told her servants, “Give the Sslia what help she needs.”

The temple had been built, the colligation begun. Sena would not give up. She would not relent. She would fight until the end.

Yul had brought the nautrogienilus and the airship from the Pplar. The Pebella was not on board. Her presence had been a ruse, orchestrated to coincide with the gathering at Sandren.

The airship was not for Sena’s comfort. What it provided was something rational for Caliph to pursue. Caliph could not see Sena, therefore the vessel was now essentially the same as her. Caliph would follow it relentlessly, under the assumption that she was aboard. Even while she left and did other things, the Pplarian ship would draw the High King relentlessly into the south. This was part of her plan.

You’re taking him to Ooil-Uauth?
Nathaniel asked.
Why? It’s pointless. It’s extraneous to the fabrication of the ink. You don’t need the altar …

Her thoughts had slipped out. He had heard her. She scolded herself frantically but on the surface remained calm. “Extraneous, is it? Then why did
you
drive your servants through the jungle? Why did
you
tell them to build your house there? If I am going to do this, I am going to do it right. I am going to follow the steps. And if you don’t like it—”

Fine!
Nathaniel raged. He cursed her with ugly slurs.

As Sena lay in the bed of pink tentacles, Yul came into the room. Yul could not see the thing that haunted her but one of his eyebrows lifted slightly, a betrayal of his thoughts that despite his foreign preferences, Sena reminded him of an alien pinup, posing on a pink anemone.

The nautrogienilus’ foot supported her weight while its arms arched over her back. Its tentacles flexed, tips brushing her shoulder blades. Sena did not close her eyes as the first arm slipped into her skin.

“Do you need anything?” Yul asked.

“No.”

Yul lowered his hairless head and left the room.

The tentacles pierced her because she allowed it. She controlled it. All the arms moved in orchestra, slicing precisely. She could have done this herself but the creature provided her with the fortuity of conservation.

The beast needed few holojoules to guide.

Each microscopic mouth chewed with surgical skill. She did not bleed as the first corner came up, tugged gently by a single arm. The meat beneath her skin was paler than pink, it was nearly white and shining. Fine radiant filaments stretched between the integument and a deeper glow of tissue. There were several layers. She did not enjoy it. She set her teeth. But this was necessary. Nothing else would endure the trip. Her skin embodied perfection at an atomic level—just like Caliph’s blood. Therefore, like his blood, it would last.

The melon-colored blush of chewing organs took no notice of her thoughts. They moved rhythmically, until finally she shut her eyes.

*   *   *

T
HE
nautrogienilus finished its methodical work, having avulsed a perfect square. It held the thin slab of flesh aloft, dangling from tubiform arms.

Sena stood up. A field of light, evocative of the backswept membranes of a damselfly, streamed from the corresponding breach between her shoulder blades. The excised area was surreal in its perfection, as if drafted by an architect. Its upper edge ran level with her shoulders, its bottom chined the center of her back. She had directed the nautrogienilus to remove a quadrate from the only location on her body that would accommodate a flawless, unmarked sheet. It was the only part of her, of the necessary size, where the platinum designs never crossed. As if this span of skin had been prepared for exactly this purpose, planned in by the Entities who had gifted her with immortality.

The Pplarians said it was part of the deception, that she was following exactly where others had gone before.

To that, Sena had not argued but said simply, “I have to try.” She was different. This would be different. Her plan would see her through.

The skin taken from her back covered more or less thoracic vertebrae three through seven, representing seven inches top to bottom and a perfect tenth of her frame’s full height. There was a beauty to the numbers and the ratios.

The tiny mouths on the tips of the tentacles gobbled at the underside of her dermis but Sena whisked it away. As she held the slice of her back, seven inches by seven inches seemed an extraordinary span.

With broad angles of light still gushing from her, she placed the specimen on an oval tray. The room around her was an ooidal pocket punctured by blue-gazing duct-like portholes. Cool air slugged in. The walls, floor and ceiling all blended into one and moved in gentle ensemble. Most of the equipment in the room, the trays, racks and shelves, were living or once-living dentin.

A three-foot fibril sprouted from a workbench like the feeler of a white roach. It bent under the weight of a citrus-blue berry of light that quivered at its tip. Under the luminary, Sena carefully separated her skin, like layers in an onion. It did not resemble human flesh and came apart easily into three distinct strata, each identical in size and appearance. She placed each of the three squares in a separate tray and began pinning down their edges. While she worked, the room expanded and contracted around her, gently, almost imperceptibly, as if breathing.

Yul came back into the room. This time he ignored her unclothed body and offered a polite greeting in White Tongue having to do with the moon.

Though it was midafternoon, Naobi’s face cratered the sky through one of the pore-like windows.

“Moon’s greeting.” She smiled faintly.

The Pplarian wore a red kash. He approached and extended both of his usable hands. Sena paused what she was doing and allowed him to press his fingers and thumbs into her palms and wrists, a ceremonial two-handed exchange that she accepted without question.

“The temple has been closed,” he said. “The colligation is complete.”

She had already seen it with her eyes, the gates being pulled shut, the sign being installed, the chain taking its padlock in the dark and snowy cold.

Nevertheless she thanked him and her words were sincere. Knowing what the Pplarians had done for her only enhanced her sense of gratitude. The Pplarians owed her nothing, yet they had performed this service with strange munificence. Where they would go, what they would try to do on their own and whether they would succeed or be destroyed like the rest of the world was a mystery that remained beyond Sena’s knowledge. The Pebella of the Pplar was powerful and her ambit kept the fate of her people hidden.

Sena adjusted her skin over one of the trays’ thick wax bottoms. She placed an additional pin, then looked back at Yul. “Thank you for coming this far. I get lonely.”

Yul smacked his lips and craned his long neck to port like an albino tortoise without a shell. He peered through one of the windows at the
Odalisque
with his fuchsia eyes as if trying to see the High King. Finally he said, “I am sure your math is correct. Have you set the course?”

“Yes.” She looked through the intervening walls—unlike Yul—across the sky to where she could actually see Caliph talking with Taelin.

Yul inclined his head slightly in calm obeisance. He seemed calm. But she saw through the tight kash. His vestigial hands groped from caterpillar-sized arms and cupped his nipples. He pinched himself anxiously.

“You should go,” she told him.

He bowed, grinned brokenly and excused himself. As he neared the exit the muscular valve-like flap of the door opened and trembled around him. Yul squeezed his papillae fiercely and said, “The Pebella is never wrong.”

Sena offered him a thoughtful scowl and nodded her head. Then he was gone and the valve snicked shut behind him.

CHAPTER

30

“How did you know I was reading?” Caliph asked.

Taelin didn’t like the way his eyes scoured her face. Like he was searching for a lie.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I felt sick. And … I just knew. I know that sounds crazy but I feel like I’m inside your head. I want it to go away.”

The High King’s eyes panned nervously. “I uhm … are you sure you’re all right? Does Dr. Baufent know you’re up?”

“Of course,” Taelin lied.

Caliph smiled uncomfortably. “Okay. Well then, why don’t we go get something eat?”

She said yes with her hand.

Her father was dead. That was what kept going through her head as she followed Caliph Howl toward the starboard deck. He held the door for her, which made her angry for hard-to-pin-down reasons.

Walking through the doorway, out of the controlled atmosphere, was like walking into another world. A familiar, warm-scented world full of wormwood and spider flower and the smell of tea trees on the wind. Taelin realized that they had left Sandren far behind. She remembered raiding the medical chest but it was almost like a dream. Dreams were dreams. She didn’t bring it up.

Miles away, she could see the three lichen-colored hills, staggered in a perfect row. They formed the backdrop of her hometown of Kub Ish.

Was the plague there too?

She tried not to think about it and looked briefly at the silt flats: another unmistakable feature of the landscape, as if a giant pail full of mud had been thrown to the south.

Strangely, she didn’t feel like running elatedly to the railing for a better view. She wasn’t homesick.

“Do you want to sit down?” Caliph asked.

She smiled thinly and pulled up one of the deck chairs. It was warm wood, set bowed in a light metal frame, supported with springs that adjusted comfortably beneath her. It was the kind of chair she imagined she could sit in all night. She pulled her feet up off the floor.

Caliph Howl started with a resolved but quiet, almost apologetic tone. “Look. I know I already apologized back in Sandren for everything that’s happened. But then … even more things happened.

“I feel responsible for you because you’re the only one here that …
(damn right you’re responsible—my father is dead!)
and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way … but you’re the only one that doesn’t
belong
here.
(I hate you, King Howl. You are an evil deluded man at the head of an evil and deluded nation. I wish you were dead.)

“You belong somewhere other than entangled in the political mess of this ship.”
(Is that some kind of veiled insult?)

Taelin felt a hot-cool mixture of emotions as his words flowed around her.

“So you want to apologize?” she asked. “But you don’t want to tell me about what you were reading?” She smelled a freshly lit cigarette from the direction of the kitchen. When she glanced toward the source she saw Specks floating in the shadow of the door. For a moment it appalled her. She thought that Specks was smoking. Then she realized it was steam rising from a cup in his hand. The smell of smoke must have come from someone else. Specks’ eyes looked at her curiously, a kind of placid infatuation. He was not embarrassed that she had caught him staring.

“I was reading some books that Sena gave me,” Caliph said.

Taelin looked back at the High King. “So this is related to my grandfather—”

“Apparently yes. But please. Let’s talk about you for a minute.”

“You want to get rid of me?”

His eyes begged for understanding. “I’m not trying to get rid of you. I just don’t think you belong on this ship. So far I haven’t guessed a single thing right and I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. But if something bad happens to us, I don’t want you to be here.”

“I see.”

Caliph cleared his throat. “I have it from a reliable source that you’re from around here.” He swept his arm at the landscape beyond the railing. “I’d like to take you home. From there you can either return to your mission home in Isca or stay in the south and let Stonehold fix its own problems. What do you say?”

“I don’t want to go home.” She could feel the cool clammy possibilities of evening rain. Wild, colorful clouds smutched the sky like brushfire smoke. The smell from the kitchen had woken a hunger inside her. She wanted a cigarette.

Caliph scowled at her faintly. “Why don’t you want to go home?”

“My father is dead.” She felt her face flush but pushed back against it, trying to focus on the cool wind and the tinkling sounds above her head.

“You’re sure he was on the Pandragonian ship in Sandren?”

“Yes.” She was on the edge of sobbing.

“I’m sorry. I …
(You’re not sorry. I hate you. I hate you and you should die.)
If he was, I mean if he was on that ship, then your family’s going to need you.”

“No they’re not! They loathe me. I’m a
huge
disappointment!” Why she told him this truth was beyond her. It fell out of her mouth, an admission jarred loose by the emotional tremor going through her; it seemed to shatter on the floor.

The string of colored lights above the table lit up. While their soft tinkling was pleasant, she found their bright colors at odds with her mood. In a double punch, the food arrived, smelling delicious. Specks had gone into the kitchen for the tray. He served them with an ill-hidden smile of self-satisfaction. “I brought your dinner,” he said.

Taelin felt angry at the setting. Furious that the little lights and warm food could go on sparkling and steaming and celebrating in spite of her. But she also felt touched by Specks’ smile. He was clearly proud to be serving them their food. “Thank you, Specks,” Taelin said. His pale, slender face beamed.

“I doubt you’re a disappointment,” Caliph said. Then he looked at Specks and winced at the lights. He leaned forward and whispered in the child’s ear.

“They’re fine,” interjected Taelin. “We could use some cheer … don’t you think?”