The formula does not last long, but the moment of silence that follows feels eternal. One guest looks to the next, anxiety smoking between their lips. Arrian’s eyes meet Corwin’s and she sees a ghost of apprehension, a sailor’s instinct, perhaps. His body shifts in that infinite moment of doubt as he begins his first step toward her.
The old obsidian-crusted mountain seems to shiver with the sudden chill. Then the world shakes itself like a wet dog. Stars become slits of light that streak two directions at once. The great horned mountain of Soth cracks open like a jungle flame. Rocks three times the size of Jorgill Deep tumble down into the fissure where the fortress stands.
Arrian’s eyes sweep the yard in desperation. Amid the roar, she sees her father unscrew a metal capsule. He tips it into his mouth.
Then the clouds of ash sweep in. The Ublisi stands in a halo of soot and rose-colored fire. Shards of granite and molten flowers of glowing rock rain down in every direction. The heavy hail stones the guests to death then prudently piles them under rocky graves.
Arrian is knocked into an alcove where great falling boulders have already formed a cave of sorts. Someone has pushed her. She turns to see Corwin’s eyes. They are large and wet and desperate to help. A great jagged stone comes down. He disappears into ashy blackness. All of them are crushed like sweet-figs in a pie, buried in the courtyard in a great round of clay.
Arrian’s eyes soak up the blood and broken bones, the fallen rock and glowing embers. Beyond the horror of their death, she sees the most terrifying thing of all. The Ublisi formula is still unwinding. The knot of stone has come undone, the whorl of colored rock, where one of the chambers left its mark, has opened, stretched itself into a hideous hole, as if the world is giving birth. Then, in grotesqueness too ripe to describe, abortive things haul themselves out. Great, translucent, protean limbs, eely monstrosities wrangle from the void and ooze and lurch and burble. The sweet stink of their decay fills the air. The gardens and the glowing moths wilt beneath rocks and huge putrid carcasses that cannot walk, but hump and slither across the liquefied land.
My daughter must have used up every lamp and candle. And when the final wick burnt low, she must have screamed and clenched her teeth as she entered a darkness that would last twenty thousand years.
She is a Gringling. An Eater of Time. Her blessing and her curse: to outlast the darkness.
All of us were burnt and crushed but her—minor inconveniences you might say. What killed us was despair. We despaired in the face of those Abominations and gave up our immortality willingly on that hideous fiery night. We had no means of escape and did not wish to suffer the endless blackness of a living tomb. But she, my daughter, in that miraculous niche of canted stone, she alone refused to go. She held onto her Gringling skin and in so doing condemned herself to the bottom of the Loor as Soth sank beneath the waves.
She went mad, of course, cursed with immortality that the rest of us had cast off, while she waited in the dark.
On the night it rained fire, I did not expect her to stay; so I left on the sweet toxins of a final draft of shuwt tincture and found my way permanently into another form—one lacking the perfection of my Gringling corpse. But one day I will go back. I will find my little girl. I will pull her from the darkness and return to the shining lands of Ahvelle.
For all its wild fantasy, Caliph found the account compelling. He blinked and rubbed crust from his eyes. Light was coming through the room’s single window and his duties as ruler of the duchy swung back on him like a punching bag.
Nuj Ig’nos and the other diplomats were scheduled to leave today. Sena would be returning—late. And he had a ceremony to attend in conjunction with the holiday.
What time is it? He checked. That can’t be right.
He pushed himself out of the chair and walked briskly to the door. Sorting through his disheveled hair, he poked his head into the hall and asked the sentry stationed in the corridor for the time.
“A quarter of seven, your majesty.” Already nearly noon!
7Ambiguous capitalization. Does he know what these are?—Sena.
8A species of luminous moth extinct c. 11062 (O.T.R.).
CHAPTER
6
Caliph massaged his fingertips deep into his brow and grunted.
“Should I tell the seneschal you’re awake?” asked the man.
“No,” said Caliph. “No, no.” He struck out down the hall, headed for his bedroom.
The day swelled around him, burgeoning with details and unexpected events. It was bathe, dress, lunch, bid his so-called guests good-bye and burn wooden masks in a leafy bonfire by half past ten. After that, the Blue General briefed him before he took loring tea with the burgomasters at twelve. Twenty minutes later he met the papers and answered questions regarding diplomacy with the south. He left out the parts about Pandragor wanting immediate unconditional access to twenty different sites and mostly stuck to his lines, “We’ve both agreed to more talks and I think Ambassador Ig’nos shares my optimism … we’re looking forward to a positive dialogue in Sandren.”
By fourteen o’clock, just before dinner, Caliph had managed to clear his schedule and wriggle out of obligations at a maskless party in upper Murkbell where two-hundred well-heeled guests planned to close out the Funereal of the Leaves in style.
For Caliph, the cycle of days being High King, month-in month-out, resonated as a kind of unrelenting frequency. An insufferable pattern of noise and sound that he felt abrading him, disintegrating him slowly, both physically and mentally. To rule a country, he had established that you needed one thing more than any other: to want it.
But what Caliph wanted was tranquility. He wanted to polish his own shoes, get black marks on his fingers. He wanted Sena to come home, stop her endless research and take breakfast with him as the sun rose out of the west. He wanted time—with her. He wanted a family, fruit trees and idle chatter around the kitchen table.
Sena had offered that once. Did she still want it? A year ago they had been so close. Right after the war had ended, their goals had been braided into one line, reeling them forward.
But that had changed. She had stopped leaving the library. At one point the servants claimed that she had remained on her stool for an entire week while Caliph had been away handling affairs in Morturm. One hundred eighty hours in an ice-cold room without food or water, perched on a stool without a back? Was it even possible? The servants said they often found her in the dark with the lamps gone out. They said she didn’t move, but stared at the books, as if she was reading them.
Caliph’s thoughts lifted as a message arrived that Sena’s airship was coming in from the west, over Octul Box. He strode quickly through the statued opulence of a hallway overlooking the east courtyard, toward the castle’s zeppelin deck.
When he arrived, the evening was gray and dripping, not quite cold enough to sting. Caliph’s stomach felt loose, like it was lying on the blocks beneath him. He insisted on standing alone. The small army of servants in charge of the arrival had organized themselves half a dozen yards away.
Caliph kept waiting and watching … and waiting as the clouds churned.
Finally, the Odalisque materialized like something conjured out of magic smoke. It slid into position above the zeppelin deck and immediately, a terrifying chill coursed through him.
Sena had been gone nearly a year. It had been months since he had heard from her and, for him, the hiatus had metastasized into irrational unfamiliarity. He couldn’t wait to put his arms around her. Feel her. Smell her. Hear her voice.