Ladies, gentlemen, members of the North-South Peace Protocol, we are here today, gathered at the great city-state of Sandren, a symbol not only of prosperity but of peaceful independence. I’d like to start by—
His talk unrolled in his mind, aimed at the blue sublime.
After a few moments he realized that he had lost track of the words and that the small aperture through which he had been looking had expanded. It was not framed by a frenzy of moving bodies anymore. The borders of his vision had stilled. He slid his elbows back along the deck, far enough to prop his head up and look around.
Half a dozen men and women in uniform lay around him, brushed by wind, dripping in milky goo. The sun was a blazing white flare. Too hot. But there was a cool softness on his neck, supporting him. And a tiny bit of shade in the shape of someone’s head. He looked up at Sena’s face, upside down, hovering over him.
For a moment he felt afraid. Terrified of her. Terrified because when she smiled it was not a familiar smile. Her hair was long and coffee-brown and her body was covered with red war paint. It was not Sena. It was Taelin, gooey and crimson and joyous.
* * *
THE dappled silvern bodies fell away from Caliph Howl. Taelin fired one more time at a livid torso still struggling to rise.
Thick creamy strands spewed over the blazing deck and spread a bitter-sour smell. The grisly shape floundered and collapsed as the subtle venom paralyzed it and began its dissolution. Taelin stared unblinkingly at her handiwork. The changed crew reminded her of insects in tree sap; their silver-gold eyes bulged beneath the sun.
She set the velvet gun down and moved around behind Caliph Howl. He was barely conscious. For a moment he seemed to recognize her and smiled faintly. His stitches had opened up and he was bleeding badly.
“You are not going to die out here in the sun.” With great effort, she dragged him up a ramp and into the cockpit where the coolers were blowing through the vents. He had already passed out by the time she got him situated on the floor.
It had taken all of her energy to move him and for a while she rested and listened to the desert howl. The cockpit was tubed with black pipes and glowing solvitriol bulbs. Most everything was written in Ilek with the exception of a chrome-and-brass fire extinguisher.
The inside-girl was being quiet. Taelin eased back against the wall. Sweat and blood gelled on contact with the cool metal; she felt her skin stick to it. She was on the verge of relaxing, when the room darkened dramatically. Maybe the ship had pivoted in the wind. A sound thrashed against the fine hairs inside her ear.
The only intelligible words she could pick out of the static-rich vibration were: I found my daughter’s head …
Taelin shivered and stood up. She went back out onto the strange chitinous deck where the heat was baking the dissolving bodies. She picked up the velvet gun but nothing stirred.
Taelin looked toward the empty place where the Pplarian ship had been, but she knew that the Iycestokians could not kill her goddess.
Faith was the opposite of fear.
She was wondering where her clothes had gone.
Caliph Howl needs help, she thought. I should go find Dr. Baufent.
CHAPTER
42
A woman stood in the sky, surrounded by yellow-white chaos. Shrapnel, fumes and scalding steam cartwheeled through the air. Hulilyddic acid atomized from chemical cells in the Pplarian ship’s mythic compartments. The explosion had dispensed a sour perfume that floated in helices around her.
The woman seemed preoccupied. Her fingernails sorted through her curls, scraping the scalp just above her forehead. This was visible in minute detail through the Iycestokian gunsights.
“Sir, she just disappeared.”
“What?” The commanding officer leaned forward and peered into the sight. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “She’s right there.”
The gunner looked back.
It felt like a glitch but there she was, miraculous and dazzling, standing in the sky. The gunner was afraid.
The deep rigid fear that springs from the impossible had filled him and it had already spread man to woman to flight lieutenant to brigadier general up the chain of command, as each person in the armada took their turn at the scopes and stared.
The scopes told the truth about the thing that couldn’t be, but was: in casual defiance of their might.
* * *
SENA fears that Nathaniel might still undo her plans. She fears the future and the moment when she will have to look Caliph in the eye. What she does not fear, are the Iycestokians.
They have no way to cross her ambit.
She does not hate them. They have no idea what is coming or what has already passed. They are just following orders, just demonstrating their violent national pride.
What they believe is that the Duchy of Stonehold has a book, which they have been told to take by force. They do not understand the legend of the Sslia. Their guns have failed them and now they are confused, trapped within themselves, trusting to a shilly-shally episteme of vaccines and imperialism and all sorts of strategies divorced from what is real.
It is because they know so little that she decides to save them.
Returning from the Howl Estate she finds her airship flinderized, but this is a simple misunderstanding. The Iycestokians do not know what they want. They have made an error. She will give them what they need.
And she will do it out of kindness, out of sacrifice. She will take a piece of her ambit to work this miracle on their behalf. But they will not thank her.
She speaks and vanishes from the sky.
Nothing can stop her as she arrives in the capital of Iycestoke City, in Molbul Square where the three turfs of the ochlocracy meet. She uses raw math to quiet the quarters before her main argument goes off.
No terror-stricken cries lift from the silver crowds where disease has already taken its toll.
She is barely there an instant before she is back above the desert. But in that instant, her voice is in two places at once, sound waves still projecting.
In Iycestoke, an unnatural hush goes out over a six-mile radius of urban sprawl.
It begins with a watchman positioned at the entrance to Ninel’s tomb: Iycestoke’s sacred monument. But it does not end there. Next to him lies another man with a worn and haggard face. His collar flaps senselessly against his cheek. Beside him rests a pale silvery girl dressed carelessly in black wool. To her left is another body and to that body’s right three more.
The crowd crumples in the moment when Sena is there. It continues crumpling now that she has left. Across the enormous vapor-wrapped city, every breathing creature plummets. The starlings and pigeons have fallen from the sky like cruel hail. They plunge to the streets, thumping against cobble and brick.
People sleep in unseemly positions, faces pressed to stone. Some kiss animal excrement, gutter grates and garbage. A few fall into puddles face down where they are doomed to drown.
Iycestoke sleeps.
“Shh—” and twenty million people more or less join the dreamless oblivion from which their bodies begin to burst.
It begins with the watchman.