Caliph glared at the man who had led him here but then, the situation that had been impossible for him to understand became more so as, for no apparent reason, the monster behind the door reached out and grabbed Caliph’s Veyden guide. The pink paw came through the doorway and enfolded the Veyden, large enough to engulf the seven-foot man.
In response, the man dropped his net full of glowing spheres.
Caliph scrambled for them but they were already beyond his reach. They tumbled over the threshold, down a set of steep stone steps and into the sunken room. Caliph watched them go. One cracked and intense liquid sprayed through the fissure, losing its luminosity as it wet the wall.
The Veyden screamed as he disappeared under the black canopy of silk. A mortifying crunch put an abrupt end to his wailing.
What were the other Veydens doing? Caliph couldn’t see. Darkness had swallowed everything. He heard a second man scream. It too was cut short and followed by gruesome crunching. Caliph remembered his guide’s spear. It must have fallen somewhere. He dropped to his hands and knees, desperately searching.
That was the moment he heard her voice.
It spoke in a language he didn’t understand.
A prickle at the base of his hairline crawled up the back of his skull as Caliph’s eyes adjusted to the new level of gloom. Past the hideous black-draped shape that still swayed guardian, he detected a strange halo of light whose origin seemed remote.
It bled from behind a familiar, slender, diminutive silhouette.
Sena stood at least thirty feet away, perhaps at the center of the space beyond the door.
* * *
THE other Veyden wasn’t making noise. He might have crawled back toward the roaring cataract, feeling his way through the dark. Caliph didn’t know.
Baufent stood over Taelin’s senseless form, staring into the only light left: a pallid radiance that streamed—or so it seemed—from between Sena’s shoulder blades.
“The flawless won’t touch you,” said Sena.
Caliph didn’t know about that. The sounds of chewing, of breaking and grinding had only recently stopped. They had been terrible, and like the aftermath of a devastating quake, the silence that followed was both profound and uncertain.
He looked over his shoulder one more time at Baufent. Her eyes darted to him. She seemed to know what he was going to do. Without a word, she communicated her demands. Get back here! Don’t you dare leave me!
He motioned her to stay put, then looked down the stairs, past the hulking thing toward Sena’s halo.
Crossing the threshold was like entering a crypt. The room smelled of things long settled.
“What are you doing down here?” His voice was unsteady. “What happened at Sandren? What is all of this?”
He put the huge silk-covered thing behind him as he crossed the room but it was still there. It creaked against reality’s floorboards, almost insupportable.
He refused to look at it, keeping his eyes on Sena.
The steps had been uneven and slick with the fluid burst from the glass spheres, but the floor of the room was equally treacherous. It was relatively dry but each step sank in, an inch or more, into a peat-like sediment. It was like walking on cake.
“Why are you here?” He tried to keep his voice level but detected the sound of pleading in it. He was unprepared for the truth.
“I’m not with Them, Caliph.” His heart swelled momentarily. “But I wanted you to open that door.” The metaphor she had used on the airship came back to him. “I wanted you to see these things behind it because you never believed me. You never listened to me about your uncle’s book. I just needed you to understand.”
From behind, Baufent called out to him, desperate, pleading. Her voice prompted a vague sense of responsibility that he ignored.
The room was some kind of empty septic tank and as he crossed it, it sank its cold moldy teeth into his chest. He detected a slope. Some cement structure meant to control the flow of sediment. Sena stood on top of it. She was only a few steps away now. She said something in the language Caliph couldn’t understand and the thing at the doorway moved away. Caliph heard other movements in the tank. Other vast shapes, which he had not even noticed, began to disperse, hauling their giant forms into equally sized culverts.
“You have to understand something,” she said as he approached. “It’s you and me. Just you and…” Her voice trailed off for several seconds, hinting at deeper meanings. “… me.”
“Is it?” A tatting of mold on one of the room’s pillars seemed to absorb the phosphorescent light coming from her back. “I don’t think it’s been you and me for a long time now.”
Little was clear to Caliph except that Sena was standing in this horrid tank, surrounded by miscreations.
The long chase had worn him down. He had made up his mind, finally. But the realization made him miserable and desolate. He felt sick. Sick and weak and exhausted. He reached out and grabbed her by her fashionable jacket, hands knotting into fists.
He shook her violently. He took her by the throat. She was light and her body jerked limply under the force, as if she was helpless. She winced. He threw her on the ground.
“What did you do!” he screamed at her. “What did you do!”
All the dead people poured out through his scream. He could feel them as if they were there. His responsibility. As if they were staring at him right now. Alani and Sig and all the rest.
Sena did not look up from where he had thrown her. Light trickled between her leather collar and the back of her neck. It lit her hair. He could see flecks of sewer mud. Glops of black gunk from a puddle near her arm had splashed up and spattered her shoulder.
Chest heaving with shame and anger and uncertainty he stood over her with one bizarre thought in his head: what now?
He certainly wasn’t going to sink down on his knees and touch her, help her up, clean her off. What he was thinking of doing was unspeakable.
“Drink it, Caliph.”
He couldn’t see her face. He swung his chin to one side and cocked his head. Incredulous. He wasn’t listening to her. He would never listen to her again.
But already he had reached inside his pocket and found the tiny metal flask. It was leaden in his hand.
“No,” he said. “I won’t. This is over. This madness. It stops here. You’re going to fix it.” He was embarrassed at how childish his words sounded. “Get up,” he told her.
A few huge shapes shifted in the black wings of the chamber. Apparently not all of her immense underlings had left. He sensed some of them might be drawing closer but he didn’t dare to look. Were they her bodyguards? Would one of them now reach out and break him in its mouth?
Baufent’s voice called again, thousands of miles away.
Sena’s whisper drowned the doctor out. She whispered to the flawless first, passing them some instruction. Then she whispered to him. “You know everything you need, do you? To make your decision? Is that it, Caliph? You know so much?”
“You’ve been dosing me with these tinctures. Who knows what—”
“Your third dose isn’t going to kill you. Drink it.” She rolled onto her side and looked up at him. There was an ugly smear of mud on her face.
“Fix it,” he said. “Fix what you did!”
“I will. You drink it and I’ll fix it. I’ll fix everything.”
“Fix it now!” He wanted to call her a murderer, but felt the hypocrisy of the thing. He wanted to blame all his frustrations on her, starting with her inattentiveness over the past year to everything from the plague and his dead friends right down to this moment standing in this deplorable room. But he couldn’t. No matter what holomorphy she had used, he had chosen this. He had arrived here under his own power.