“You’ll get no argument from me on your second point since lies and murder are my business, sir. But I will tell you, Captain . . .” he referenced a book in his claw of a hand, “Bayans . . . that your assessment of me, while true, is inconsequential.
“Patriotism is a vagary defined by your individual hopes. Whatever you perceive national interests to be . . . however jingoistic or expropriationist. I myself am a pacifist and loyal to the crown which is no doubt where your sanctimonious diatribe springs from and why we do not see eye to eye.
“Let me be clear, Mr. Bayans, and ask you one question. When orders eventually came . . . as they surely would have . . . from Miskatoll to drop ordnance on the capital of your own country . . . would you have obeyed them?”
The captain said nothing. Perhaps some of his men were beginning to realize that the moral high ground he was clinging to was just another smear. Alani hoped as much.
“No?” asked Alani. “Either way you answer, as the commander of this airship, it’s going to sound rather bad coming from those patriotic lips.
“Perhaps, Mr. Bayans, I have saved you from your sins. But I digress.” Alani waved his pipe. “I see from your diary that you have a young son and daughter and a wife at home. Which brings us back to your stunning lack of choice in the matter and the truth of my grip on everything you hold dear. Do we understand one another?”
It was overkill to threaten the man’s family and Alani knew it. But in the current situation he frankly didn’t care.
The captain looked stricken. His men were completely cowed.
Still, one last question had to be asked. If it hadn’t, Alani would have been fabulously surprised.
“How did you get on board?”
Alani ended his smoke and tapped the dottle into his palm. He had no intention of answering.
The question by itself was enough. Caliph’s plan had been chillingly neat. He had tabulated casualties as a prerequisite for any plausible charade, hence the timing of Ghoul Court’s violent raid.
There wasn’t any crash along the White Leech. No crew of fifty airmen had gone down. But there had been bodies . . . plenty of bodies to advance that illusion.
The men of the Orison had met their weeping, joyful families in Octul Box at the lavish government estate. The crew had told their wives and children the only thing they knew—that their deaths had been faked to advance some strategy in war and that, for now, all of them had to stay under lock and key until the High King signed their eventual release.
Caliph too had coldly envisioned the execution of half a sky shark’s crew and the psychological brutality required to ensure the loyalty of the rest. But it was only the beginning, thought Alani, only the first edge of a very complex and complicated plan.
Caliph returned with Roric Feldman in custody and watched the Precursor dock over West Gate. It floated in above the heavy leaded obelisks whose panes boiled with emerald light. The beacons’ gleam scintillated, created columns in the glittering rain.
After the other ships had moored, the Byun-Ghala pitched north across the gray-swept city. Caliph tried not to think about what Alani was doing. He tried not to think about what would happen to Roric Feldman. He supposed their paltry adolescent feud had finally ended. Caliph Howl had won. It didn’t feel good.
He thought about the fresco on his bedroom ceiling, about tossing and turning during the course of oncoming sleepless nights. Isca slid by underneath him, gliding like the mottled back of a deformed nocturnal beast. He looked out from the observation deck through the rain, at the towers of his castle. There were lights, dim warm lights in his bedroom window and for a moment he dared to dream.
Sena had fretted through the evening after deciding once again not to try and escape.
She read from the C
srym T
.
Terrified of Caliph’s return she shut the ancient book with restive fingers and began a series of mindless preparations.
She took a bath. She oiled her ringlets, her sex, misted her flesh with the pore-clenching chill of Tebeshian perfume. She got dressed. The clothes she picked were diabolic. She knew just which things against her skin might drive the High King mad.
She checked her glowing watch four times as the room began to blush. The rosy light faded quickly and the sumptuous shadows around the bed turned brown.
The room cooled. She called a servant to light a fire despite the groaning foment in the radiator pipes. For a while, she sat mutely, preoccupied before the mirror. She penciled in her eyes and lips while her intestines wrung themselves through a series of algetic knots.
Her reflection was resplendent. Fishnet black and satin covered up her fear. Laces on her corset and sequential cunning straps battened down her persistent bent to fly. Hair and eyes, gold and sapphire, lips of buccal ruby: she was something gleaming but restrained, dark jewels set in velveteen soot.
A beguilement, she thought, that he will see right through.
As the grandfather clock tolled seventeen, the storm stilled and the clouds opened on the night. She left the cluttered vanity and poised near the western windows, faced but hardly looking at the magnesium fizzle of starlight.
The room was quiet when she turned her head in the direction of the door. A figure had materialized soundlessly, shrouded in the doughy darkness that stretched like something clotting in the corner of the room.
She held her breath.
A wayward glistening twist of her perfect hair dangled, catching firelight. Sena brushed it self-consciously, presenting her lure. She calculated the forward motion of her hips, pushing her pose over the edge of art, spilling her presentation into the void of breathless concupiscence.
She moved as though blown, ignoring her heart that twitched like something in a snare.
She had already taken several steps when she realized it wasn’t Caliph at the door.
A thin man in Desdae’s raven-colored scholar robes seemed to hover just above the floor. He watched her with Cimmerian eyes. Narrow, pallid lips overdrew a baleful smile and hair as fine as cotton candy trembled in a cat’s-paw off the sea.
The door opened behind him, swung through his semiform and erased him from the room.
Caliph stood nearly where the old man had been, slack jawed, gawking.
Despite her obvious effect on him, Sena’s poise had vaporized. Whether the old man had been real remained for some successive mental debate. Right now the moment of her opportunity was in jeopardy.
She forced her nerves to trickle back. She would not allow herself to lose this second chance—not until she had made a sterling assault.
Already she could see that Caliph’s inarticulate stupor had begun to harden into skepticism. Skepticism that he hurled at her with excruciating efficiency.
It startled her—to be an outsider.
Caliph seemed newly minted, as if she was seeing him for the first time. Palan’s tail, she thought, he’s changed! He’s changed and I never even noticed. She imagined the cruelty that must have passed like iced croissants around his table every morning. Those meetings. The endless plotting. Everyone he thought he could trust had sold him out. Even she. And now she was here, uninvited—and she couldn’t blame him, she couldn’t fault him in the least.
He walked past her, toward wardrobes still filled with bodices and lace.
“I’m a bitch,” she whispered. It stopped him in his tracks.
He turned like a weapon on a turret: tensile, dark and cocked. Sena saw him scratch his arm.