“I see. When I realize what the riddle is not asking, I’ll get my insight. Is that it?”
“Like when you dropped the Pandragonian accord into that black envelope and sent it away…”
She’d unsettled him. But his eyes didn’t go saucer. He looked at her narrowly; refused to ask how she knew this secret thing. “Are you trying to tell me that there’s no way to patch things up with Pandragor, peacefully?”
“No. That’s true, but that’s not what I’m trying to tell you.”
Sena felt the cold vacuous creep of a claw drag itself over her skin. The thing by the ceiling had slunk down to give her a slithering admonition. She heard words in her head, asking her what she was trying to do.
The voice was something Caliph would certainly have recognized if he had heard it. It was a voice that had once laughed and moved air in the house on Isca Hill, just as it had screamed commands through the jungle before poisoning a host of slaves—down to the last child.
The voice did not belong to a man. Not by Sena’s standards. It had once belonged to a Gringling king. And a desert queen. The voice that was not a voice had sounded across many lifetimes, preserved by Veyden tinctures. Phylacteries made of bone had carried it nearly to the end. But finally, it had collapsed into its foundation of femurs and costal splinters: a cradle for a new entity made of dust. With its ancient soul untethered, the shade of Nathaniel Howl was like a baby’s breath gone wandering beyond the world’s rim.
Only recently had it been pulled back, saved from listless transcosmic vagrancy. Now it was desperate to enter Sena’s brain. She did not underestimate its cunning, or the math that had gathered in its folds like dirt in a nomad’s cassock. The shade, the specter, the ghost—whatever it was—sensed that the stars had finally turned. Soon, it whispered to her. Soon—soon.
Caliph was still talking. “No offense but I think that’s bullshit. How can you know there’s no way for peace with Pandragor?”
“I didn’t—”
The shade did its best to distract her.
“If the accord is useless, which I know it is, I think I can still—”
“Caliph. There is no way for peace with Pandragor.” Her harshness was a result of irritation, of the stress that the shade was putting on her.
The words set Caliph back. He rested a finger across his upper lip.
The shade worked Sena’s throat violently.
It whimpered and slobbered, black claws scurrying over her like bounding rats. Sena felt their discrete impacts against her abdomen, breasts and throat. They thumped her back and thighs. Everywhere. They fled in ebbing tides only to return and burrow against her snatch. They nipped, delved and tested—hurried and mindless.
Sena braced herself. The shade pushed into the cleavage below her belt loops and designer tag. It boosted her from behind, trying to spread her croup. She couldn’t concentrate on what Caliph was saying.
“What do I do with that?” Caliph was asking. “Do I make you my top advisor? Do I hand you the throne?”
“I’m not trying to tell you about Pandragor, Caliph. I’m trying to tell you about something else.”
“And what’s that? More about the book. The Sisterhood? You’re going to destroy the world or something? You see how impossible this is for me to understand?”
Sena nodded. It was hard to ignore the shade’s insistent nuzzling at the base of her skull. A horrible black rushing sound had begun roaring, not unlike pressing a seashell to her ear. Nathaniel wanted her to stop this conversation.
“What’s wrong?” asked Caliph.
The voice was shrieking. A thousand black hexes burnt down onto her lips, like blisters, wicked numbers, sigils spinning. Nathaniel tried to seal her mouth, stifle her tongue.
Sena moved her lips with calm, calculated composure and answered Caliph’s question. “I’m haunted, Caliph,” she said.
Nathaniel’s specter seemed to go insane. It clawed at her eyes.
“Haunted?”
“Yes. Did you know there’s a legend about your uncle’s book, that he actually managed to haunt its pages after he died?”
Caliph shook his head, clearly perplexed by this sudden swerve, chilled perhaps but also perturbed that they were once again on the topic of the book.
“It’s something to think about,” she said.
Caliph visibly disagreed.
“It’s a kind of parable,” she said. “Nathaniel’s possession of the thing he craved? It’s a lesson in obsession.”
She watched that analysis chew into Caliph’s face. The muscles in his cheeks reacted with a spasm. A coldness passed between them as it registered with Caliph that she could be talking about him. Caliph swallowed. “I don’t like talking about my uncle.”
“Don’t worry about him.”
“You said you were haunted. You can’t just say something like that and—”
“I have my ambit.”
“Ambit?”
“It’s old holomorphic theory,” said Sena. “Very old.”
“Not something they taught at Desdae?”
“Your ambit’s hard boundary is at the end of your fingertips, at the surface of your skin. What you project beyond that is variable. Your influence. But this,” she pinched his arm softly, “is your boundary. If this boundary is impenetrable, nothing can touch you. That is your ambit. That is your uncontestable line.”
Caliph laughed. “Right. So, anyway…” For a split second she saw a tremor in the jaw muscles that walled his face. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. Finally, he said, “I should go down and see how it’s going. Will you be all right?”
This amused her in a surprising way, that he—so fragile—would ask her if she would be all right.
“Yes. I’ll be fine.”
Soon his devotion would crumble. Even now it stood out as an abeyance of logic.
“Are you worried about the conference?” she asked.
“A little.” One side of his face hitched up around the words. “It’ll be fine.”
His mind had already moved on to other things. He was feeling guilty about the litho-slides Alani had taken of physicians setting up the field hospital. Sena knew. He felt scrubby about the fact that he was capitalizing on the political advantage of his response. Especially now that he could tell the disease was much worse than he had anticipated, that his physicians couldn’t put a dent in this catastrophe.
“Do you think it might be canceled?” she asked.
“The conference? No. This is going to be the most important speech I’ve ever given. It damn well better not be canceled.” Then he looked her in the face and said, “But for the moment—” He shrugged. “I’m just glad we’re in a position to help the Sandrenese.”
It was a thank you, an acknowledgment of the vaccine, the doctors, the way she had planned this out.
Sena felt ashamed.
* * *
CALIPH couldn’t put his finger on what was happening between them. The whole evening had been tainted, charged by his sexual frustration; her curious choice of topics; the darkness and the haunted sounds of the Ghalla Peaks.
He felt like he needed her comfort, her reassurance before tomorrow, but the thought of making love to her in the luxury of the ship while soldiers and physicians worked through the night …
People were dying out there in the streets. He could hear the howls carried over the rooftops.
When Sena’s hand touched the back of his head, despite the disparity of the evening, despite the bruises on his body, he was ready to set them aside. He considered dragging her back to the stateroom or whether she might just let him throw her up against the wall.
But her expression had hardened. She said, “Strange, isn’t it? That the same plague we had in Isca is gutting Sandren. How do you think it traveled so far without affecting the rest of the north? How do you think I knew?”