Don’t do it.
The inside-girl wouldn’t be quiet.
The smell of the dead city was in her mouth, her eyes, her hair.
The dry whisper of the old man was in her ears, urging her to stop working the soft metal of her necklace, to stop bending it back and forth, back and forth.
“Soon—soon,” Taelin whispered.
Taelin had lost her cigarette. She spun around in Caliph’s grip. Her whole body felt sticky with sweat. “Gods you have beautiful eyes,” she said directly into his face. “Cobra-brown.”
Then one of the Veydens hissed that they needed to be quiet. That someone was coming. She felt the familiar stab of a hypodermic. People were always giving her injections.
She was laughing again, because the color of death was pink.
CHAPTER
48
When Taelin went slack, Caliph nearly dropped her. Her eyes were hidden behind the dark red lenses of her goggles. He hoisted her limp body across his shoulders, holding a leg and an arm. He tried to gallop toward the Veyden escorts that were motioning to him, windmilling their long olive-colored arms, trying to encourage him through a kind of stone doorway that led into a small court.
The doorway was vaguely coffin-shaped and he bashed Taelin’s head unintentionally against the awkward frame.
“Fuck! Is she all right?”
“Bit of a bump is all,” whispered Baufent.
As soon as Caliph was through, the Veydens panned their hands. Clearly they wanted him to be quiet.
Caliph had no idea what might have spooked them but he decided the best course was to exercise a bit of trust.
On the walls of the court, Caliph could make out several posters of children in southern dress. Their faces were made adult with makeup and they struck strangely sexual poses as they marketed some diversion located at 2229 Led’Nhool N’god.
Sinewy feline shapes hissed from atop a pile of cryptic refuse—things partly organic and partly incomprehensible because they were intricate and foreign. The Veydens led them across the pavement.
Caliph could hear a hive of bariothermic coils. It buzzed against the foundations of the next city block. Initially the sound masked low gluttonous slurping sounds in the darkness. But as they neared the hive’s brain-like convolutions, Caliph drew up.
Icy white fog from the tubing mixed with holomorphic sparkles. The pale light revealed a ghoul hunched over the body of a dog. The sound of eating became clear and Caliph almost let go of Taelin.
Before he could set her down, one of the Veydens had driven his spear into the creature’s shoulder. The blade entered along the neck, behind the clavicle, following the creature’s spine into its chest cavity. The Veyden jerked the spear around, presumably slicing up internal organs before wrenching it free.
Just as the event seemed over and they began to move on, something grabbed Caliph and jerked him sideways against the wall. Again, he almost dropped Taelin. Bolts stuck mindlessly from the mortar where they might have once supported fire escapes. He had gotten snagged.
Baufent asked if he was all right. He nodded but felt his irritation dilate. He did not like his lack of direction or his lack of control.
Where are we going?
He couldn’t ask because the only word his guide seemed to know was come.
At the end of the barren court, an eight-foot wall blocked any possibility of progress. A ridge of cement topping the wall had been embedded with broken bottles and random shards of glass.
The Veydens drew up and Caliph wondered if they were lost. He turned to Baufent whose face was lacquered in wild color. A streetlamp beyond the wall threw its rays through the broken glass. Baufent’s face caught a reddish-purple triangle over one eye and a thin strip of green across her lips and chin.
She looked terrified.
Caliph listened to the bubbling sound of the streetlamp. He was just about to ask her opinion when one of the Veydens wrestled with a metal hatch set atop a short cement cylinder. The cylinder was twelve feet across but only four feet high and the Veyden knelt on it, fumbling with something.
With an objectionable grating sound he finally drew the hatch up. A mephitic burp rolled out of the city’s guts. Caliph peered in. Pestilential darkness sighed.
Why are we going down? thought Caliph. We’re supposed to be going to dinner …
“Come,” said the man.
“I don’t know about this.” Caliph directed his doubt at Baufent.
“I don’t know about it either.” She looked around, first at the serrated wall then back toward the stone doorway they had come through. “Do we really have a choice?”
“You always have a choice.”
The Veyden was getting impatient. He patted the top of the cement cylinder with the flat of his hand. “Come, come!” The other two had already gone inside.
Caliph thought of the Iycestokian ship, floating back at the edge of the city. It was the only place he knew that represented relative safety. But could he find his way back to it? What if he ran headlong into whatever had spooked his guides? Even if he did manage to reach the ship, carrying Taelin the entire way, he still didn’t know what to do from there.
And where would he—
“Come!” The man’s whisper resembled a shout.
Caliph glared at him. But the Veyden did not shrink. He beckoned, pulling with those great fingers, gesturing for Caliph to hand Taelin over.
Caliph looked at Baufent once more. She hesitated then nodded her assent.
“Okay,” said Caliph, after which he didn’t sigh or deliberate. He rolled Taelin off his aching shoulders and into the big man’s arms. Then he climbed atop the cement tube and looked down. The fumes smacked him in the face. He felt dizzy.
The man reached out and steadied him.
Of all possible realities, this had to be the most improbable. He found no humor in the bizarre fact that he was climbing into a foreign sewer. He gritted his teeth, clenched them until it felt like they might shatter. Then he helped Baufent up onto the access point and lowered her carefully onto the rungs.
“Thank you,” she said as she began feeling her way down into the dark. “I think.”
She was sturdy and powerful but he knew that she shouldn’t be doing this. None of them should be doing this.
* * *
THE walls of Bablemum’s sewer system sloughed like diseased flesh. Pale leprous hunks of masonry buckled and spluttered into residual pools. Everywhere, it seemed, vesical-pipes dropped into the vault. Hydriform.
But the inlets were quiet. Barely dribbling. They moaned with air currents, purposeless in the vacuum of the abandoned cityscape.
Squelchy walls led in every direction but Caliph stuck to one, following the Veydens sack of netting, which cradled three glass balls—analogous to the city’s lamppost globes. As with the streetlamps, these too were filled with an oily liquid that emitted a cadaverous luminosity.
They had been stored in separate niches at the bottom of the access point. The man had taken them out and slid each, clanking against the other, into the sack of netting. As he eased the last one in, some kind of proximal reaction had taken place and all three orbs began to bubble and glow.
Without the language barrier Caliph would have asked what they were and how they worked. Instead, he said nothing.
The sewer did not smell as bad anymore. The initial blast of fumes must have been lurking, trapped against the hatch. Down here, there was a breeze, cool and almost refreshing and Caliph realized that with such regular rain and no fresh waste being introduced, much of the sewage had already been flushed from Bablemum’s system.
“I don’t believe they’re taking us to dinner,” said Baufent.