David slumped against the bars, crestfallen.
“Cabal of Wights. Only I’m not them anymore. They cut me loose like a sturgeon on a three-pound line.”
“Who are they? Some cult? Why in Emolus’ name would you join—?”
“Yeah, some cult! Some bad-ass, sacrifice you to the oyster-god cult! I don’t even know where they’re at. I’m the fringe on the lunatic fringe! We’re dry-bottom boys. They don’t tell us shit. I went for eight years not hearing a word, Caph. I swear. Then I meet a man in the street. I could tell right away he was one of the mucks. He was following me around King’s Road by the bistros. Tall, thin. Showed me his tattoo and said I was activated. But all he said to do was make sure the sewer grates in the east garden of Isca Castle were unlocked by noon on the twenty-fourth of Lüme. I swear. I swear I didn’t think that people were going to get hurt.”
“Then you didn’t think,” snapped Caliph. “And you’re a bigger fool than I thought. I took you in! I gave you money, a job, a place to live!”
“I was twelve—”
“Fuck twelve! How old were you when you unlocked the grates?”
“They would have killed me!”
Caliph was shouting. “And I couldn’t have protected you? Inside the castle? You provided them their only way in!
“Forty-two dead! You! You killed them! And now I’m supposed to what? Bail you out? Throw clemency in the face of my judges, the jury, the families of the forty-two soldiers we buried middle of this week?”
David rested his forehead on the bars. He chuckled softly.
“Do you remember our freshman year? When we bunked with Roric Feldman?”
Caliph nodded.
“Roric used to say the damnedest things,” whispered David. “He used to say to us, ‘Boys, if you fuck a sheep, what’s done is done, you have to shear your kids.’ I guess I fucked a sheep, Caph.”
Caliph’s heart went limp and cold. He stood to go.
“Caph, wait. I know . . . I know you.” He bit back on more tears. “I know you can’t . . . save me. But don’t leave me here. I’ll do anything not to spend my last hours down here.”
Caliph sighed. When he looked at David, trembling, emaciated, holding his butchered hand, he wanted to shout at the guards, call them over with the key, tell them bathetically to let his friend go free. He believed David’s words were true, that he hadn’t thought about the consequences of unlocking the grates.
Still, the fact remained that after it was done, after it was over, David Thacker had not come bawling like a baby and thrown himself on Caliph’s mercy. No. He had relocked the gates to cover his ass. He had hidden the truth. He had lied.
“You’ve told Mr. Vhortghast all you know?”
“Yes.” David’s eyes shone pleadingly.
“Then I guess we’re done here.”
“Don’t leave me. Please . . .”
“Guards!” Caliph shouted.
“Please, Caph.”
The soldiers from Gate One came trotting.
David’s other hand reached out through the bars, catching Caliph’s fingers. The touch was warm and soft. A writer’s hand. Unused to heavy labor. “Please, Caph.”
Caliph didn’t look back.
The guards led him away.
As he recounted his experience Sena shivered. Cameron looked away across the black twist of city far below.
What have I become? Caliph thought. He knew that it was a question like David’s unspoken question that neither Sena nor Cameron could answer.
Four days later Caliph went to visit Sigmund Dulgensen.
Sigmund was appalled by David Thacker’s end, but not in the same way as Caliph. Sigmund didn’t have either the time or inclination to leave Ironside and talk about his loss. He and David Thacker had been proximal friends. Put any physical distance between the two of them and it was like they forgot one another existed.
A pot of coffee steadily lubricated the snarled calculations of solvitriol power. Sigmund was making headway. He assured Caliph that the lab’s security remained airtight. No one knew about the experiments. He looked giddy to plunge into a full account of his progress.
“I’m set up with a prototype, Caph.” Sigmund’s eyes were red but exuberant. “Take a peek at this.”
He pulled out a slender glass bulb haloed in iron, fitted with sockets or prongs at either end. He set it before the High King.
Caliph gazed at it for several moments, unable to speak. Like a chemiostatic cell the object glowed, but not green or citric yellow. It was not harsh or garish or easy to describe. Unusual pastel colors phosphoresced, crawling behind the glass. They rolled and ebbed along the iron bands, across the polished tabletop. They writhed, mucus pink or yellow ruffling into delicate shadows of lavender and powder blue. It was startling, mesmerizing to watch.
Caliph picked it up. It was cool, like a chilled wine bottle and tingled in his fingers like the back of a wooly caterpillar. He almost dropped it in surprise.
“What can it do?”
Sigmund was already chewing on his beard.
“Power a sword indefinitely. Power a fan, an ice maker, a conveyor belt—” He scratched the side of his face. “Whatever you want. Current generated is DC which means we can’t put it through a transformer like they have in the south or carry it very far, but you could hook it up to machines, wire it into a small string of streetlamps and guess what? They’ll never burn out.
“Enough kitties have gone whee to power a couple city blocks so far. I’ve got ’em stacked in racks down in the lab along with the adapters necessary to plug ’em in for electric lights and shit like that.”
Caliph nodded, still marveling at the tube of shifting light.
“Now here’s something that’ll really bake yer noggin. Come with me.”
He led Caliph down a metal staircase into the gritty squalor of the lab. Huge machines stood rampant, bolted to the floor. Bizarre geometry unfolded like industrial plant life. It moved on heavy hinges by hydraulics or pressurized gas.
Caliph noticed the rack of additional solvitriol cells Sigmund had mentioned. They scintillated against the wall, a pale rainbow of ethereal colors.
“You must have found a lot of stray cats.”
Sigmund shrugged and led him toward two giant anvils of grease-blackened steel. They stood opposite each other, fenced off by chains, and separated by an empty groove of space.
Like great metal shoes, the anvil-shaped things had been anchored to the floor with massive bolts as well as huge reinforced posts driven many feet into the foundations of the building.
“It’s mostly solid forged like the bulkheads for the Hylden but each of these were specifically designed to take the strain.”
Caliph heard an ominous creak deep in the floor.
“This was our prototype containment housing since the blueprints didn’t go into what we should do if we managed to separate. Now we’ve got something better.”
As usual, Caliph was lost in Sigmund’s racing dialogue, trying frantically to make sense of parts Sigmund left unsaid.
“Contain what? Separate what?”
Sigmund pointed toward the anvils, anchored to the bedrock beneath the building. More creaking sounded from deep in the rock, speaking of enormous forces exerting against the bolts and posts. Caliph still couldn’t tell where the strain was coming from.
The empty field of space between the anvils rippled with darkness.
“And what’s that?” asked Caliph, pointing toward the void.
“Mother of Mizraim, Caliph—what did you hire me for? Solvitriol power, man.” He slapped Caliph in the chest lightly with the back of his hand. “Souls. Remember?”
Now caliph saw them. At the center of each anvil a tiny window of pastel light gleamed fitfully from a bubble of glass embedded in the steel.