Black Bottle (44 page)

Miriam again opened the door.

“We’re under attack,” said Caliph.

“Yes. We’re working on it.”

“Great,” said Caliph. “Anything I can do? Open a vein or something?”

Sigmund grimaced. Miriam did not look amused.

“We’re doing our best,” said the witch. Her face was stretched with exhaustion. She looked far less pretty than he remembered her.

“I hope your best is good enough.”

Caliph turned and marched down the hall, around the corner to Mr. Wade’s room. On this door, he pounded. Mr. Veech answered. He was an intimidating man but he was also half the size of Sigmund Dulgensen. Caliph started to walk into the room. Mr. Veech put his hand on Caliph’s chest and Sigmund’s huge meaty arm reached out in response. He took hold of Mr. Veech by the collar.

Mr. Veech struggled. He appeared to try some unarmed training, to leverage himself against Sigmund’s great mass but the huge engineer was like a boulder. He could not be moved. Sigmund pushed Mr. Veech up against the wall and held him there, waiting for Caliph to tell him what to do.

Caliph walked into the room. “Where is he?”

“He went out to stretch his legs,” Veech said tersely. The skin on his face was rolled into a series of folds by Sigmund’s forearm.

“Well let’s go find him,” said Caliph.

*   *   *

T
AELIN
was down the hole, deep in the dark with the shuwt tincture leading her by the nose.

She kept trying to light a cigarette but her wrists were bound in white straps. They trailed back to either side of a bed. She couldn’t move her arms. Strangely, she was making love to Palmer—the homeless man from St. Remora—while Aviv (the man she had been going to marry) sat in a chair nearby, watching.

A woman in a red trench was there too, with a clipboard. So were her mother and father. Her father had fine powder on the side of his nose. All of them were hovering in the blurry light of a big white room.

“It’s fine,” said the physician. “She’ll be asleep soon.”

“Some drugs and a good fuck always put me to sleep,” said Taelin’s father. Everyone ignored him.

“It’s not that she’s lying,” said the physician. “Taelin believes what she sees is true. The delusions, the paranoia, even the promiscuity are all part of the disorder.”

Taelin looked over Palmer’s sweating shoulder at her mother, who harbored a sad, guilty look. “I’m sure her home life hasn’t helped.” Her mother started to cry. “This is all my fault.”

“No, Mom!” said Taelin. “It’s not your fault. It’s not.”

She pushed Palmer off the bed. He either vanished into white clouds or fell to the floor without a sound.

“I saw Nenuln, Mom! I saw her. She was beautiful! Like a cloud of light! And my baby is going to be a god!”

“She’s quite intelligent,” the physician interrupted. “If Taelin would stay on her medications, and I mean the correct medications, I think she could…”

The physician’s voice faded into the room’s white blur. Taelin had turned her head away to the dark man sitting beside her bed. It was Aviv. All Taelin could see was Aviv. Sweet, sweet Aviv.

Aviv stood up and gathered his black silks around him, scarves and silver beads dangling wildly. The circlet on his head flourished with four platinum uraei. “Thank you, doctor,” he said.

“Wait!” she screamed but the room was spinning. “Don’t take my baby! Don’t take my baby!”

Her mother’s face was close to her now. “Shh—Tae it’s
his
baby too. Aviv will take good care of him.”

“No, he’s not. He’s not Aviv’s! I never loved Aviv. He can’t be Aviv’s if I didn’t love him! That’s impossible! Babies are made of love. You can’t have a baby if you don’t love—”

And then she woke up.

She was holding hands with Sena on a street corner in Pandragor. “Relax,” said the High King’s witch. “We’re not out of this yet.”

Sena fished a cigarette out of her black coat. It was rolled from butterfly wings. She handed it to Taelin. Taelin put it between her lips and leaned forward. Sena whispered some minor holomorphic miracle and the tip of the cigarette smoldered to life.

Taelin sucked in. The smoke felt good. She set her bezeled derringer on top of a marnite retaining wall. She laughed. The tiers of the city rose above her in scalloped blocks of golden mineral and tarnished steel. Pandragor’s blue domes floated high above.

Bariothermic coils on the back of an angular sedan caught her eye as the vehicle’s ass incandesced and glided on magnetic blocks, vanishing down the park’s serene avenue.

Sena tugged her away from the street, onto the quartz terrace that overlooked the marshland. “You’re coming with me. As soon as you wake up.”

“Oh, shit,” said Taelin. “I forgot my gun.”

Taelin felt like this conversation had happened before, with someone else. It was as if Sena had taken the place of the other person, the other friend with whom she had this experience. Reliving the past, twisting it, was only one facet of a shuwt journey. Taelin tried to bend it, to get it back on track, to take away Sena’s influence.

“What about my baby?” asked Taelin. “Aviv bought his way out. I’m going to find him.”

“I thought you were going to go to Stonehold and start that church you’ve been talking about,” said Sena.

“Yeah. I probably will. Aviv would never marry me anyway. Not now.” She pulled the black chitinous derringer from the wall and slipped it into her pocket.

“I heard you were in the hospital—” said Sena.

“Oh. Yes. I had some complications. Everything’s fine now.” Taelin smiled. “My father wants me out of the house for good. He’s giving me a stack of money.”

“What will you do with it?” asked Sena.

Taelin laughed. “I want to help people. I want to keep the faces on the street corners bathed and warm and fed. I want to do something right for a change.”

“I know,” said Sena. She leaned forward and kissed Taelin who was sobbing. The witch’s lips burned against hers like battery terminals. Then Sena gave her a friendly hug.

“You’re going to do great things in the north,” Sena said.

“Thanks for believing in me.”

“You’re going to do incredible things. Things you never thought you would.”

When Taelin released from the hug, she found herself standing on a Pandragonian zeppelin. A cold wind struck her in the face. She was flying north. Every minute, it seemed, the temperature dropped.

The airship moored at West Gate, over Isca City. Taelin went down a rusting lift that squealed inside the fortress walls.

There, amid the steaming reek of sewer fumes and trash that tumbled out of Gunnymead Square, Taelin hailed a cab. When she got in, the driver greeted her in Trade. He offered her a tiny bottle of Pink Nymph Whisky. She’d never heard of the brand but she bought three because she had plenty of money and because she was nervous to be in a strange town.
Thank gods I’m rich.
She opened the first bottle and knocked it back. The driver was nice. She tipped him well.

Wait. That’s not true.

“Yes it is,” said Sena, who was sitting in the cab with her.

“No, it’s not. My driver. The chemiostatic car I rented got stuck in the mud. I had to walk. I had to fight through freezing rain…”

“No. You arrived in West Gate, warm and dry. You took a cab all the way to Lampfire Hills.”

“No! I walked in the
freezing rain
! I never rode an airship before in my life! I walked all the way from Pandragor! And my father loves me.
He
gave me that money! Not Aviv! Aviv raped me! That’s why I have the money. Because my father loves me.

“Aviv would have taken me to that horrible tiny island in the middle of nowhere and forced me to have his babies.”

Sena’s face looked like a ceiling. White and square like the shape above her hospital bed. The doctor was gone. The soft white straps around her wrists prevented her from wiping her eyes. She needed to wipe her eyes. Her whole face was wet.

“I’m not lying! It happened! It happened! I saw Nenuln. She talked to me in a cloud of light! She’s real! She’s real! She’s real! And I’ll prove she is. I’ll go to Stonehold where they
mak
e gods. They
make
gods in Stonehold. Haven’t you read the papers? And then you’ll see. I’ll make my own church. Just like you did. Just like Sena Iilool did. But I’ll help people. Not like you! Not like you who lock people up in rooms and tie them down!

“I’ll buy a bing-gun if I have to. I’ll come back here for you! I’ve had lovers who taught me how to shoot! I’m a deadeye!

“And then you know what? When I go north … I’m going be queen someday!”

*   *   *

T
AELIN
sat in her bed, in her stateroom, on the
Bulotecus.
The High King’s witch sat with her, on the edge of the mattress. She was finally, truly awake. Her head felt clearer.

Sena smelled delicious. In one hand the witch held a glass of water, in the other a lustrous purple-brown pill. Perfect, like a baby grape.

“I’m not taking it.” Taelin coughed.

“It’s your antipsychotic,” said Sena. “You haven’t been taking them. That’s the problem. You need to take it.”

Taelin wanted to die.

“You’re not a bad person.” Sena held out the pill.

“Yes I am.” Taelin tried not to think about anything.

“You’re just sick, Taelin.”

Taelin couldn’t tell if any of this was real. She didn’t care. She just wanted to sleep. She reached out and ate the pill without water and shook her finger at Sena. “You don’t know me. You think your book and your holomorphy let you know me. But you don’t know me.”

“I’m going to take you with me now,” said Sena. “While the tincture still has you loosened up.”

“Where?” Taelin still felt the drug in her head.

“We’re going to Soth,” said Sena. “We’ll be gone just a little while.”

Taelin blinked as Sena started talking. She felt so strange and cold and sticky. She heard voices. Thousands of voices. An icy electric buzz filled the air.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Sena. “I’m pulling holojoules down into our equation.”

“Holojoules?” Taelin watched the light from her stateroom window turn to molasses. “Don’t you need blood?”

“Yes. I drew blood. I’ve drawn plenty of blood.” Then Sena shifted back to the Unknown Tongue and a force reached in through Taelin’s mouth and yanked her breath out of her chest like a rag on the end of a hook.

Taelin gasped and fell forward. The impact with her mattress punched clean through, an explosion of white, and jettisoned her out of the zeppelin where she found herself unable to scream. The world came up at her, threatening to bury her at high velocity in an oval patch of blue sand. But the fabric of the world stretched like burlap, in every direction, opening coarse pores.

Taelin fell through.

Daylight vaporized. She found herself in darkness. A cold, damp, cracked surface pressed her hands. She inhaled, choked on dead air.

A woman’s voice spoke. It was not a language she was familiar with. The tone behind it sounded hard and cold, like the surface under her fingertips.

A hand gripped her by the elbow and pulled her to her feet.

P
ART
T
WO

If I were a god, I’d make myself believe.

—
Y
ACOB
S
KIE

CHAPTER

34

Taelin stood up. Behind the disembodied, flinty voice that came out of the darkness, she could hear the rattle of a metal buckle. Someone was fastening? Unfastening. Now they were rummaging in a sack.

I’m in Ihciva,
she thought,
to pay for my sins with Aviv and Caliph Howl, Palmer and—

A bit of brown smudged the darkness. It looked like a filtered glow seeping through fabric. Taelin began to reach for the demonifuge under her shirt when Sena’s voice interrupted.

“Here. Take this.”

Taelin tried to answer but the air was too thin. Thinner than in Sandren. She started wheezing, which led her to realize that she couldn’t be dead.

A small, tacky block pushed itself into her palm. She could feel Sena’s fingers behind the delivery but the connection didn’t register until half a second later, when Sena’s hand withdrew. Only then did Taelin panic. In the almighty darkness, losing her physical link to another person—even if that person was Sena Iilool—felt like desertion. Then the brown smudge disappeared.

Without its point of reference she lost her balance and sat back down.

She started to adjust to the thin, dead air. “Sena?”

“It’s all right,” said Sena. “Just don’t take out your necklace.”

The witch’s voice gathered numbers that roasted a cotton cord. Taelin could smell it. A sickly yellow flame touched off right in front of her face, wagging on the block-shaped candle Sena had pushed into her hand.

Sena was crouched a short distance away, blue eyes rolling with the flame. It unnerved Taelin that the witch was staring at her. Her guilt became too much to bear. “I’m sorry,” Taelin said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen—I didn’t mean for it to go so far … with Caliph.”

Sena was smiling like something that wanted to eat her.

Taelin moved the candle’s orange glow toward her butt in an effort to learn something about her surroundings. The ground she was sitting on seemed to be a hill of buckled or broken masonry. There were dripping noises all around but the ground here, at least, was dry.

“It’s all right, Taelin.”

“But I—”

Sena stood up and took a step in the direction of the flinty voice, which had spoken again.

Taelin felt too out of her depth to argue or even ask questions. All she could do was listen to the strange voice and the echoes of the underground space. She smelled mud. Not the normal gaminess of river mud but the putrefaction of salt-ooze ripened beneath the black bottom of the world. It was a stink suggestive of spoiled shrimp, sewage and gods knew what else.

Taelin buried her nose in the crook of her elbow while Sena talked to the voice in the dark. The language sounded difficult. Sena was stuttering. Or were those simply the phonics of an alphabet she had never heard? Taelin lifted her candle above her head, hoping for a glimpse of the other speaker.