“It is so important. Which is why I gave it to them. They’ll keep it safe, Caliph. In the meantime, I have errands in Sandren. Don’t worry. The Sisterhood can’t use it. Even if they open it … it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
She hung on his question. “To save the world,” she said.
This sent a hairline crack through the invisible wall between them. She watched it creep slowly, as Caliph puzzled over her words. Soon it would turn elaborate and ugly. Sena left the room and went to stand outside in the sunlight. Caliph followed her as though leashed.
She inhaled, let the cold air fill her, but did not feel cleansed. At her feet, sunlight scoured the metal, working to efface the terrible associations from the night before.
“What do you mean?” Caliph asked. “That it’s too late to save the world? You mean the Shradnae Sisterhood is trying to save the world? From what?”
Sena had turned her head to watch his mouth move as he asked this inevitable question. He wore a crooked premonition, gathered at one side of his face as if he sensed what was coming.
“From me,” she said. These two words tapped the wedge into place.
“I don’t get it.” But he did get it. She knew, in his guts, how the rimy dark angle of her words, worked shardlike between his ribs. He chuckled, trying to make light of it. Trying to transform the absurdity into a joke. “I thought the Sisterhood was always the, you know…” he popped his lips and twirled his finger, “the enemy.”
“They are,” she said softly.
“I don’t really understand what you’re saying, then.” He tried to smile. Failed. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Sena turned away from the sun, away from him. She saw herself through Caliph’s eyes, wanting to feel what he felt. He saw her irises flickering with tiny arcs as she turned. He saw her walk resolutely away, through the doorway, leaving him on the deck to believe finally and unequivocally that she had lost her mind.
And that was better. The fissure at least, between the two of them, would give Caliph some dignity, some space and time to claw his way back.
* * *
FOR several minutes, Caliph stood mystified. But then the deck boy arrived. Caliph preferred the Bulotecus to the Odalisque. On the Bulotecus, Specks would have handed him the message, floating and smiling.
The boy on the Odalisque said nothing as he gave Caliph the note.
Caliph took it and pulled it open. As he read, Sena’s delusions of grandeur melted into the background.
What it said, even in the shadow of last night’s attack, put a disquieting spin on Sena’s insistence that the Iatromisia be included in this ill-fated flight.
The city-state of Sandren had seen countries rise and fall. Its rich unattainable eye had long gazed over the Atlath Continent with a kind of supreme multifaceted neutrality. The city-state’s wealth was enormous. It had never been looted. It was, as it had always been, aloof to armies marching under and around it. Only one fool had ever attempted a siege.
Caliph tugged his lip, bewildered to read that during the last thirty-six hours, coinciding with a stay of warm sloppy weather, Sandren’s citizens lay dying.
Details were sparse. Some kind of sickness. Rumors chased their own tails.
As Caliph’s three airships neared the great jag of the Ghalla Peaks, he could see other zeppelins clustering.
A flock of balloons drifted together, enormous gasbags bearing crests and colors, each one from a different nation. The airships’ ponderous bodies were lanced and strafed by light; despite this, they looked small and powerless against the mountain’s cool gray backdrop.
Birds enmeshed the conflux in helices that twisted slow as summer gnats. Some of them carried messages between the ships. Information was spreading.
Caliph called for field glasses. He felt them arrive in his hand and looked southwest at the congregating vessels. There were craft from Waythloo’s Iron Throne, Wardale, even the Society of the Jaw. He made out one bizarre ship from the Theocracy of the Stargazers; another, pale as a cave beetle, from the Pplar. Fane, Dadelon, Iycestoke, Bablemum, Greymoor and Yorba. They were all here. A circus of colors. A sky full of political clout.
Behind the harlequin minnow-shaped bodies, where the sun could not yet reach, Caliph made out the black arms of Sandren’s famous teagle system. Great brackets of metal lunged from vertical clefts in the rock. Small only in perspective, the brackets trailed down the mountain’s sheer face, ending amid a smoky cluster of buildings that broke out into the sun and glinted like overturned trash.
Far above the conflux of zeppelins, the brackets led up, carrying their threads of cable toward the hidden city-state of Sandren.
If the Sandrenese were sick, Caliph was eager to hear the details, eager to see how he could help.
Some of the heavier airships had already docked at a great platform suspended halfway up the mountain: a half disk of grilled metal supported by cables and struts. The elevators could be summoned to this platform and the airships were moderately protected from the buffeting, generally east-blowing winds.
Not all craft could make the thirteen-thousand-foot ascent to the city.
Caliph handed his field glasses off and sent a message to the captain, requesting that he motor them in.
Not forty minutes later, another bird arrived with a message from the south. This one was an invitation.
Caliph was being called to Bablemum’s great flagship. There, Grand Arbiter Nawg’gnoh Pag would host the pre-conference party in the evening. It would be a way to gather and make sense of the crisis, what had happened to the Sandrenese, and how best to help.
Having had no sleep, Caliph finally gave in. He slept for several hours, woke, grabbed a sandwich from the kitchen and met with Alani in private.
“This could be it,” said the spymaster. “We need to be careful tonight.”
“They’re not going to kill me on their own ship,” said Caliph.
Alani coughed into his fist. “It’s Bablemum’s ship.”
“Pandragor controls Bablemum. Wouldn’t that be a little too obvious—”
“You’re right that they won’t likely make an attempt until after you give your speech,” said Alani. “Nevertheless—”
“I’m not afraid of them.”
“You should be.”
“Nevertheless what?” asked Caliph.
“Nevertheless, we’re going to put a watchdog on you tonight.”
“This is crazy. We’re going to be late.”
“No we’re not.” Alani snapped his fingers at one of his men. “Bring us a dog.”
“Yes, sir.”
Caliph was still talking. “I hate watchdogs.”
“I know.” Alani sounded genuinely apologetic. “But it’s the best way.”
Caliph frowned. His stomach hurt.
“You look nervous now,” said Alani. “That’s good.”
“Isn’t it your job to be nervous?”
“Trust me. I’m doing my job.”
“Well if you’re nervous, then I shouldn’t be. It’s my job to go to this thing and keep Stonehold’s head from dragging in the—”
“That will be your job later, when you deliver your speech,” said Alani. “But not tonight.” He raised his index finger. “Tonight your only job is to stay alive. And with a little prudent fear, that job will be made considerably easier.”
Caliph growled and adjusted the button cover at the middle of his throat. He pointed to it fiercely with double fingers. “Is it fine?”
“You look perfect.”
Alani’s man came back from belowdecks, leading a tubby dog on short legs.