* * *
SENA could hear snow falling around the eleven asymmetrical dials. Flakes toasted in orange light, glowed like bits of burning paper. As if there had been an explosion.
Though St. Remora still snuffled and coughed, the city of Isca, the last city to contain real people, had settled. A hush clung like ice to every building. She saw where footprints in the new-fallen snow, of factory workers and children delivering the Iscan Herald, had ended in low piles of wind-rumpled felt. The snow came down over the dead in an act of reverence. In an act of symbolic mummification.
All two million of the dead were coming after her, churning through the ether, wielded in the immaterial grip of Nathaniel Howl. The dead were his scepter, his stick of thunder, his trumpet blasting. Arrian’s head floated in the ocean and its eyes were missing.
Sena ran through the tincture dream, looking for Caliph. She still had her colligation, but if she exhausted it now, there would be nothing left for later.
She had meant to say good-bye, to show Caliph their daughter again. She had wanted them to be together, just one last time: all three of them. And the tincture could have provided that. It could have bent logic just enough to allow her to have, for a few seconds, that perfect family that she had never known.
But Nathaniel had found out. It could only be her fault: some stray unguarded thought. Or maybe the secret had leaked from Caliph’s head.
All she knew was that there was no time left to say good-bye and that she was in serious trouble.
* * *
CALIPH smelled his uncle, which was a musty blend of citrus and furniture dust mixed with a fume of urine and cold air, as if an elk had sprayed the bark of a tree, after first snow, high up in the mountain woods.
He rode the tincture without choice, tumbling down a thread of memories. He was alone, directionless, and it felt like his brain was on fire.
His uncle was here, choking him—not as a person chokes another person but as a fable, a sort of inescapable story that posited Caliph as its central character, which Caliph had no control over and which he felt, with the unaccountable clarity bestowed by nightmare, would end as fables generally did: gruesomely. The walls of his uncle’s house closed in on him like a black envelope, the same sort that contained the solvitriol accord. He was being crumpled, crushed …
And then Sena’s hand took hold of his and pulled.
* * *
SENA dragged him hard, out of the tincture dream and into black champagne, into an endless bubble where the universe swarmed. Gibbering sputtering shapes eclipsed the stars. She felt a tug. Some force pulled her backward. She was a swimmer experiencing a bite. Then the Yillo’tharnah let go. It was a warning. A reminder.
She held onto Caliph tightly, regained momentum and emerged.
“Yella—!” Sena shouted and stamped her feet. The tug had dragged her off course. She had not arrived inside the ruins of Arkhyn Hiel’s stone house, but on a rocky fossil-rich escarpment twenty yards to the north. Somewhere, she imagined the Yillo’tharnah were laughing.
Caliph was sweating profusely. Sena slapped his cheeks in an effort to bring him around. He would not survive this tincture journey. His brain was bleeding. She shaved some of her ambit to stanch his hemorrhaging—just enough to see him through to the end. She couldn’t afford to waste power now. Not with what was coming.
“Where are we?” he mumbled. He looked positively green as his eyes drifted over the stone palace that pawed the sky.
“We crossed lines,” she said. “We’re two thousand miles south of Bablemum.” Sena felt Caliph steady himself beside her on the escarpment. His legs wobbled but he got them working. He scowled at the barren, shadow-raked clefts before panning his eyes, once more across the remnants of the palace then down into the more unusual ruins of Ooil-Uauth.
This was the vista Arkhyn Hiel had once enjoyed from his terraced lawn. The topsy-turvy dirty white and pink annulated stacks of Ooil-Uauth thrust from the valley like the stilled ends of colossal earthworms. They were misaligned with both jungle and sky. What streets might have existed were shrouded by trees.
Caliph stared at the tall narrow domes, traced with day glow. He looked bewildered.
Beyond the blunt ugly crests, which seemed set in frozen upheaval, Naobi trembled above the ocean, flanked by two morning stars. Wind came straight up the face of the hill. It stirred every plant and filled the breeze with slapping sounds.
With it came Nathaniel. He roared out of the north.
Sena braced for impact.
“You see the ruins, Caliph? Not the ones down in the jungle.” She pointed with her whole arm. “The stone house, right there. Go inside. Find his skull. Smash it. I’ll hold him as long as—”
She couldn’t believe the force that struck her. It shook her. It pushed her. Her feet slid back, grinding against the stone. She was surprised because she had thought herself to be immovable. Her ambit shone as she pushed back, gleaming like a star.
Nathaniel’s power struck her so hard that she felt the planet shift. She lost several inches of ground. Then her feet caught. Her willpower anchored her to the spot but Nathaniel’s pressure against her moved the world. Adummim tilted on its axis, into a new direction.
He was moving her, whether she liked it or not.
* * *
CALIPH did as he was told not because he felt overly confused or childish but because he believed, for the first time, that she was right.
Nothing had made sense since reality had failed him in the skies over Sandren. That was how he felt. Reality had failed him and it was a personal betrayal.
He was doing this now, which was not founded in reality. Reality had abandoned him and so he abandoned reality. He was doing what Sena said because he trusted her, despite everything.
He believed in her not because she had earned it but because he had always thought himself to be a better-than-average judge of character. That was why he had stuck it out all the months she had been gone. And now, since there were no facts anymore, or courtrooms or juries, he tossed aside the judgments that logic had forced him to levy against her. He went back to what he felt, which was trust in a raw half-buried sparkle of goodness that had managed to survive the brutality of her Shradnae childhood.
Caliph trusted—perhaps too much. He climbed the escarpment, scrambling for the ruined stone house. Behind him, the spectral presence of his uncle filled the sky. He could feel the size and shape of Nathaniel’s power, like something sensed in dream. The gravity of this moment was not delivered by things seen or heard. Caliph heard nothing but the shrill cry of jungle crickets. He saw nothing but the ruined house. But Nathaniel’s existence was something he could sense.
Caliph entered the house through one of many ruined windows. He skidded on tumbled blocks, coated with living green scum. Amid the ubiquitous growth everything looked the same.
He could see what had once been a doorway was now choked with a swollen tumor of roots.
Amid the creepers and moss and dismal predawn light, shapes were hard to separate. The room he had entered was open to the sky.
Caliph felt the ground shudder under him and glanced back through the ruined walls to where Sena stood quietly, faced away from him. He could see nothing beyond her but black trees tossing in the wind. Yet he sensed Nathaniel. And he sensed the wall separating him from his uncle. That wall was Sena. And she was beginning to break. Nathaniel’s might began leaking through the chinks in her defense.
What are you waiting for? Sena’s voice sounded in his head. This is why I brought you here. To be free of him.