“Enough of this.” Callia outstretched a hand, selium-filled bangles jangling together, and Detan felt a wrenching in his gut. Something about the sel he held above him felt pestilent, repulsive. He was overwhelmed with the desire to push it away from him before the gangrenous contagion could spread.
No. He shook his head. And held.
The Larkspur shuddered, Pelkaia’s smile fading as she fought her own battle against Callia’s perverse talents. Thratia approached the hull of her ship, Callia on her heels, and reached for the ladder.
Pelkaia kicked the bundle.
The canvas unfurled, dumping a motley collection of half-rotted vines atop the heads of both women. They sent up a chorus of swears, swatting at the tangled vegetable mass, molded flowers mashing into their hair.
Callia’s coat was smeared with rot. Detan could have sung at the sight.
“Stop fucking around!” Thratia’s cutlass made short work of her entanglement, but she was still smeared in the rich nectar of the sticky blooms. Detan recognized the flowers then: the ones Tibal had pointed out to him at the fete.
Shit.
“Told you,” Pelkaia called, “you missed one!”
The doppel waved her hand, and the missing pipeline popped into existence. No trouble digging there, after all. Only this one was defunct, its leather tube infested with selium-fed bees. Bees that, according to Tibal, were rather fond of thistle blossom.
A swarm rose, a cloud blacker than any he’d ever seen, the buzz in the air heady enough to set his teeth vibrating. They coalesced and turned, irritated by the absence of the sel that had been hiding them. The sel that they had no doubt been happily snacking upon until the moment of its dissolution.
Thratia leapt for the Larkspur’s ladder. Pelkaia must have been expecting the move, because the Larkspur danced out of her reach. Out of all of their reach, flitting further away from the mouth of the Smokestack than anyone could leap.
With one last explosive curse, Thratia threw her blade down and sprinted toward Callia’s dinghy.
“And just what the fuck are we supposed to do?” Detan screamed at Tibs above the buzzing roar, the shadow of the swarm preceding them across the ashen ground. Tibs grinned, pointed at the Happy Birthday Virra! looping around the mass and headed right for them, Ripka at the helm.
Problem was, Ripka had never flown a damned thing before in her life.
“She’s all over the blasted sky!” Detan screeched, trying to get a handle on his panic lest he lose control of his cloud.
Tibal scowled. “I showed her how it’s done, she’ll–”
The swarm slammed into them. Fist-sized bees, bodies gorged with sel, broke over them like a wave. He heard Thratia screech a war cry, saw dozens of the things drop dead around Callia as she extended her perversion of selium to the gas already in the bee’s bellies. Detan spun round, swatting wildly, feeling bloated and fragile bodies burst under each swipe.
There were too many to swat.
Chapter 41
Bright hot kisses of pain blossomed on Detan’s arms, his cheeks. Creatures angry that he wasn’t food took their rage out on his tender flesh. He screamed, heard Tibs yell something much more manly, and then Tibs yanked him down beside the rock he’d been hiding behind. He had a cloak stowed there, and dragged it over both of them. It was thick and coarse woven, enough to keep the stings at bay as long as they didn’t let any gaps show. Hard to do when you had two men crowded under one blanket.
“You stupid sonuva–”
Tibs elbowed him hard in the side. “If you’d just gotten your ass over to this side of the rock when I’d signaled!”
“Signaled! What signal? Oh shit, shit, New Chum–”
“Had his own cloak on his back. Saw him drop down and start crawling to the rendezvous site as soon as Pelkaia made her appearance. Pits below, can’t you pay any attention?”
“Rendezvous? Ripka was headed straight for us!”
“Uh, well, I can’t say why she’d decide–”
“Shhht.”
Bees dropped from the sky, thunked into view in the tiny little sliver between the cloak and the ground. Fat bodies twitched and collapsed in on themselves with rot.
“Honding,” Callia said, “would you stop cowering?”
“Errr.” Nerves wound tight as a propeller spring, he peeled back an edge of the cloak and glanced up.
Callia stood above them, arms outstretched, the eye of a storm of dying insects. His stomach lurched, reacting to her perversion of the selium all around. It was almost enough to make him lose his concentration on the cloud he held above. Almost.
Her face was half purple, a red welt smack dab in the center of one cheek, her outstretched arms pocked with identical marks. Despite the pain she must be feeling, she smiled. He hated her for that. He hated her for a lot of things, sure, but that smile was an icepick to the heart.
“Get up, idiot.”
“I rather like it down here.”
“You will leave with me. Now. If Thratia lives then she can take back her ship on her own time. I’m done with this place.”
“Well, that’s a real nice invitation, but I’m afraid I have plans that I just can’t back out of. It would be ungentlemanly of me.”
“Get. Up.”
“Err…”
He looked at Tibs, but he just shrugged. So this was it, then. His rescue. Well, it had been a damned good try. Joints aching, flesh burning, he pushed himself to his feet and let the cloak drop around him. Tibs stood beside him, arms crossed over his scrawny chest.
“I’m coming, too.”
“Fine,” Callia said, her tone flat as a cloudless sky.
From the corner of his eye a familiar shape darkened the sky; careening, bobbing, determined. Detan stiffened his jaw, pushed back his shoulders. Stall, you mad Honding bastard. His hands flitted through the air, a hopeless, childlike gesture, as if he could grasp a viable idea from the aether.
Callia smirked, a river viper sensing blood in the water. “Nothing more to say, Honding?”
“I–” He shoved a hand in his pocket in an effort to affect an unconcerned slouch, and his fingers brushed paper. The paper he’d nicked from Thratia. He pulled it free, a neat little square, and flicked it open. The familiarity of the handwriting punched him in the gut. Apothiks were always careless in forming their letters. Bel Grandon was no exception.
“Oh,” he said.
“Now isn’t the time for love notes,” Callia grated.
Detan looked up from the familiar scrawl and studied the whitecoat. Strain fractured the lines around her eyes, sallowness had crept into her cheeks. Whatever effort she was expending holding the swarm back was doing her no good. He felt detached – slowed in time – freed somehow from the events around him by the small collection of words he held.
And all the while, he dared not look directly at the black blob bobbing closer across the sky.
“Do you know what this is?” He turned the paper around to face her, and saw her eyes narrow with suspicious recognition. He pressed on before she could answer. “It’s a mercer cipher. Not a particularly opaque one, it seems the owner wasn’t too concerned about it falling into the wrong hands.” He snorted a bitter laugh. “Maybe she’d hoped it would.”
He flung the paper at her and let it tumble to the ground, wilting in the soot between them. With a pained groan he dragged his good hand through his hair and then took a half step forward, pointing at the discarded note. “I have been an idiot. An absolute, bumbling fool!”