“I won’t. I promise.”
He left her among the carvings and stepped out into the room. The instant he did, his uncle’s voice grew calmer.
“Caliph. There you are. Don’t you listen to that little witch. She’s going to get you into trouble.”
Caliph looked fearfully toward the fireplace but Sena was not there. He wondered where she had gone.
Nathaniel reached out and took hold of Caliph. He lifted him off the floor. Caliph felt the heat of his uncle’s hands, as if there was fever in them. Nathaniel sat down next to the bed and put Caliph in his lap. The lights were low. Caliph felt himself ease into the soft warm pocket between his uncle’s arm and belly. Nathaniel rocked him with an oaken creak. The chair moved reassuringly, measuring the increments of minutes, a kind of grinding percussion to accompany the sadness of birds beyond the window.
“When I was young,” Nathaniel’s voice began softly, entreating and persuasive, “my half-brother and I went hunting.”
The bedtime story had begun. Nathaniel’s hands became finger-legs that trudged slowly over the landscape of Caliph’s lap. “One evening we stopped at the top of a hill,” his finger-legs stopped, “and watched the ducks rise out of the marsh.” The old man made quacking sounds. “We had bead guns. And we got them ready.” Noises of glassy ammunition clicking into chambers. “We aimed carefully. And then we fired!” Nathaniel made zipping sounds through his teeth and his two hands became both the ducks in flight and the glass beads speeding toward them.” One duck fell and landed in a shadow of Nathaniel’s robe. “Then,” he said, “we walked down into the marsh and looked for it. We walked up and down in the reeds, up and down in the grass, up and down. Up and down. But we never found it…”
The mystery was too much for Caliph’s young head and he dared to ask, “Where did it go?”
Nathaniel’s fingers spread like those of a street magician who had just vanished a card. “I don’t know. We never found it. That’s what she’s going to do to you, Caliph. Pay attention. Or you’re going to disappear. You’re going to disappear and never be found.”
The old man’s voice was positively chilling.
“Now off to bed. You understand?” He set Caliph on the floor and patted his butt. “And remember. Don’t you listen to her. Don’t you follow her. Don’t look for her. Because you’ll wind up lost. Forever. Where no one can find you.”
Caliph swallowed hard as he climbed into bed. When he laid down, he imagined himself cut open on a table with his uncle blowing into his lungs with a reed. “Useless,” said Nathaniel. Then his uncle thrust a steel probe down into Caliph’s chest. It went all the way through. Caliph could taste the metal, like the duralumin zeppelin beam that had killed him.
He woke with a start, breathing strenuously.
But the dream seemed never-ending. His bed swallowed him like a rumpled white ocean. Nathaniel was gone and the trees outside the huge warped window were barren and black and the sky was gold with morning. He looked at his hands in the light and they were small.
I’ll build a kite this morning, he heard himself think—but it was not him. He was still a stowaway in his own skull. Eavesdropping. A kite big enough to carry me away from here.
Then a hand touched him from behind. He jumped with surprise and fear but arms encircled him. He turned, and in turning was enveloped by the shadow of her neck, the sweet toasty smell of her lotus-pink hair. Her blue lips kissed him sexually, not as a woman kisses a child. And he wanted her. As a boy wants his first young schoolteacher. She tasted of candy floss. Warm and soft and splendid.
It isn’t bad, uncle, he thought angrily. It isn’t bad if she makes me fall where I’m never found. This is it. He turned into her carnival of colors. I’ve found it, uncle. I’ve found it.
The duck landed here.
20Holomorphy measures its cost in cuts. According to holomorphic charts, the human body contains seven cuts.
CHAPTER
27
The fall from Sandren had lasted over a minute. Then the four witches had leveled off and landed in the blue-green coils of a vast wind-shaken grassland north and east of Seatk’r, a mile beyond the point where the ghetto’s fingers of glittering trash flowed like artificial effluence down the foothills’ morning-shadowed ravines.
This was the story Caliph heard. He remembered none of it. The Odalisque and the Bulotecus had both descended for the pick-up. Caliph had been unresponsive. As the flagship of the Iscan Crown, the Bulotecus maintained a tiny room packed with medical necessities. Caliph had been put on a stretcher and hauled on board. Taelin too, had been ferried over from the Odalisque for treatment. Even Miriam had been stitched up.
Crews were shuffled. Dr. Baufent had come over to the Bulotecus. She attended to Caliph personally. She had administered first aid, but Caliph had come out of his daze under his own power. Even when Caliph pressed her, Baufent denied having given him any kind of tincture.
“No, I did not,” she had said. “What do you mean a tincture?” Caliph’s insistent questions had put her on the defensive. “I don’t even know what a tincture would be. I can assure you I have no idea what you are talking about.”
He had asked about Sena.
“No. Miss Iilool was certainly never here. I think she would have been arrested the moment she set one foot on this ship.
“No she didn’t give me any tincture for you to drink. King Howl, look at me.” She had shined a chemiostatic light into his eyes.
“You’re delirious. You’ve been hallucinating.”
* * *
ISHAM Wade and Mr. Veech looked at the four witches with deep skepticism while Anselm and Baufent held their opinions like clipboards, close to their chests.
Caliph’s head was still foggy but he clung to the moment as best he could, trying to pay sedulous attention. His head was still swimming with echoes of dreams, visions … hallucinations? He didn’t know what to call them.
All the ranking members of the crew had been gathered on the Bulotecus’ rear deck. When they weren’t staring at the witches, they were staring at him.
They think I’m losing it.
Among the noteworthies were the physicians, the airship captain, Sig and the Iycestokians—Whom Caliph had not been able to justify keeping locked up. Lady Rae was asleep in one of the staterooms.
The Bulotecus had moored in Seatk’r.
That much Caliph knew for sure.
“I really must demand a private audience,” Mr. Wade hissed in Caliph’s ear. Meanwhile the witches were explaining Alani’s death.
“—so he died from wounds … sustained from the creature that was attacking King Howl,” Miriam summed up.
The story attained a certain level of credence based mostly on the fact that Caliph was still alive. Caliph had little choice other than to believe the account. He could remember nothing about the actual event.
Since the government of Seatk’r was being uncooperative, the Odalisque climbed back to Sandren. It scouted the area. The monsters in the city seemed to have slunk off. The Odalisque retrieved what bodies had not been eaten and returned to report. The Pplarian airship, it seemed, was still in Sandren, waiting for the High King.
I don’t like it, Alani would have said. Caliph could almost hear the spymaster whisper in his ear. Baufent had yet to examine the body and confirm cause of death.