Then, as abruptly as it had begun, everything grew quiet. Sena’s heart clenched rapidly like a nervous fist.
Her meticulously balanced pile had shaken down to a low mound. Another faint tremor rumbled deep inside the mountain.
Standing up, Sena repeated the numeric charm, no longer certain of its efficacy.
The quake had roused the last of summer’s bugs. She watched them take flight, sing wildly, trying to seduce a mate. Overhead, predators circled the yard, feasting on the insects’ heedless love: soft green bodies gnashed in tiny vicious maws.
Sena returned to the castle.
The streets were alive. The cobblestones and lamp-lit bistros along King’s Road were packed with little crowds talking about the quake. The High King’s witch went unnoticed.
Sena crossed into the Hold and over the drawbridge; she took a coach to the castle from the gate. When she arrived, she went inside and began her long climb up to bed.
Caliph’s whisper arrested her. It came out of a blackened parlor that bordered the hallway, a temporary lair where he had holed-up to brood.
“Where were you?”
Sena jumped. She turned toward the tall narrow doorway that framed a curtain of negative space.
“I was at your uncle’s house—thinking.”
Caliph’s shape materialized from the darkness as out of brackish water. Sena’s imagination transformed the scene; she pictured herself hovering over him . . . his body floating in a pond. Shadows filled his eyes and collected around his limbs and neck. His robed arms reached out and pulled her slowly toward him.
It struck her both morbid and funny at the same time. She hadn’t pictured him worrying about her. The realization made her feel strangely warm.
“I’m all right,” she whispered.
“I thought I might have lost you,” he said quietly.
It would be tonight or never, Sena thought. They went upstairs. Sena closed the bedroom door.
She slipped powder into his wine. They drank and flirted. Caliph unlaced her blouse and kissed her shoulders. She wanted him suddenly, savagely. It had been weeks now without relief. But the drug was quick. Foreplay became the only play as it slipped from delicious to slurred to clumsy and revolting. Caliph collapsed, a clouded expression on his face.
Sena sighed.
Distraught but determined, she pricked her finger and whispered the words that would deepen the rest of the mountain herb. If the narcotic did not keep him quiet, the Unknown Tongue would.
She looked at him.
Under the oil lamp he seemed like a sleeping copper figurine. Molten orange and blue-black shadows drooled across him.
Sena hesitated and touched his chest. She grew momentarily softhearted. I love him, she told herself. And he loves me. She held her sickle knife over his chest, deliberating.
With a quick jerk the blade parted his skin.
She chose the muscle of his upper arm for the task. For a moment he did not bleed. Then the dark fluid ran, an endless supply, flowing from the tissue into the silver vial she held below it. He twitched slightly, eliciting a groan.
Her thumb pressed the flesh above the cut and instantly the flow stopped. With her teeth, she tore a piece of clean linen.
Her hands moved delicately, like moth wings, fingers caring for the wound with attentive tenderness. She held the skin apart and filled it with orange powder.
Then she whispered a weak equation, using Caliph’s own blood to mend him. The skin closed slightly.
She took another piece of fresh linen she had soaked in antiseptic and wrapped it several times to bind the wound, embalming him, it seemed.
With utmost care she removed the tourniquet. She stoppered the silver vial and got dressed.
Betrayal.
It caused a strange pain in her heart.
Caliph shifted. A dark wrinkle passed over his features as though from a bad dream. The monkshood would cause vivid hallucinations.
Lifting her pack quietly, Sena turned the gold handle on the door. Her skirt murmured in a rustling chill that trickled from the window. She left him to dream.
CHAPTER 29
Caliph dreamt of Marco.
Vivid stripes seared the horizon like orange marmalade trapped between layers of molten tar. The color was intensely bright. Leaves rustled. Stars peeped down through a steeple snared by trees.
Caliph fought his way through saplings and emerged in a lowering black yard heavy with sinister shapes.
The creature met him in the dark.
“Hello, Caliph.” He wore tattered black. “It’s been a long time—”
The voice mulled stately, obsolete decorum with viperine cunning.
Caliph felt strangely unafraid. The sliver of citrus-colored light cut through Marco’s faded shroud. The arms of trees remained starkly visible, showing through his body. His face and eyes startled the gloom: waxen white set with dismal inky jewels. Marco radiated displaced malice.
“It is bedtime,” Marco said. He spoke as though reciting archaic poetry. “Bedtime for kings with a story for their end.”
A flurry of tattered black filled the air; Marco twirled and perched on a slumped headstone. He balanced impossibly, knees pulled up under his chin, arms dangling, eyes inapprehensible beneath the brim of his hat.
“Which amuses more?” he asked. “That your nursemaid was a dead king? Or that the two of us would talk long hours—both fearing that he might hear? And now the irony that we talk on . . . while he slumbers underfoot?”
“Why are you here?”
“To warn you of his return,” said Marco. “The teeth of his neglected ghouls clatter useless verses in the yard . . . poetry for soil . . . basking rhymes unripened by the moons.”
“What poetry? I don’t understand,” said Caliph. In his dream he was eight years old.
“They seek validation in your ears. Our master is coming back, young Howl—and with him comes the end of kings.”
Fear filled Caliph and burst through the dams of his control, cracking thick mental barriers erected from childhood as protection from the eldritch and profane.
In the dream, Caliph defiled the grave on which he stood, unhindered by the trivialities of range or barriers fashioned from zippers and cloth.
A steaming golden stream spattered across the headstone on which Marco perched.
The echo of the specter’s laugh resonated through the mountain woods, behind the crickets and across the Healean Range. He dropped from his perch, stood behind the carven stone inscribed with Caliph’s uncle’s name.
What have I done? Caliph thought.
Uncle will be furious.
Caliph lurched up in bed. His own sticky vapor cloying in the sheets. Cooling rapidly. He was mortified. Strange dark shapes blew around the room, shadows twisting from the open windows. He looked down at his arm with confusion.
The wound throbbed with his heartbeat.
Slowly, the realization of what had happened filled him with humiliation and loathing. Not just the bed-wetting, but the fact that he had let this happen . . . this wound. Cameron had told him about his uncle, charming a girl, using her blood to open the book . . .
He felt the aloneness. The exquisite rejection. An estranged and primal howl reverberated in the fleshy dark caverns of his chest.
Her pack was gone. His uncle’s book was gone. Sena was gone.
It butchered his emotions like one of those senseless bulbs of meat under Thief Town.
And yet . . . he had felt it coming.
Caliph gathered up his sheets and dragged them from the bed. He turned the knobs on the tub. Stammering hot water burst from the fixture. His body rippled with gooseflesh as the bitter residue cured across his skin.