It serves me right.
Against his better judgment he had trusted her. He had wanted so badly for the two of them to beat the odds, for her to suddenly evolve and legitimize his trust.
He might as well have committed a brandy-filled chocolate into the hands of a homeless sot with the charge to guard it with his life. It was his fault, not hers.
He sprinkled soap flakes from a box into the spluttering bath. His heart pitched and frothed between damnation and forgiveness. He struggled with motive. Was the book really so important to her? Even now he wanted a reason to absolve her, grounds to purify that final, puzzling, seditious kiss.
Smooth hard fixtures turned below his hands, strangling the supply of water.
He bathed, washed his sheets and hung them from the curtain rods to dry.
He could still taste the drug inside his mouth, feel its weight roll through his head like cannonballs.
She had taken her boots beneath the chair and the bottle of oil she used to perfume her hair.
Caliph opened a panel where the servants stored the linens and pulled out a stack of fresh sheets. Her other toiletries stood nearby. He thought of David Thacker in the dungeons, pleading for a second chance. He remembered Grume’s. The promises. He recalled that Zane Vhortghast had saved his life—several times.
Caliph flipped the mattress, snapped the sheet like a sail and let it float across, imagining Sena on the other side. He looked savagely at the empty space where she might have been.
“The wind blows . . .” he muttered, leaving the old Hinter proverb unfinished. His whisper fizzled with morose histrionic resolve.
The next day was hot. Shouts and growling clangorous sounds from the steelyards in Ironside hovered in a steamy haze coming out of Temple Hill.
A new warship was nearly ready. Caliph harbored suspicions that it would prove useless in the days ahead. Yrisl still promised an aerial assault.
Caliph could see streetcars and zeppelins from a parlor on the castle’s east side. Flashes of light from metal and glass flickered across the room at discrete angles, shimmering a moment, then vanishing as some wagon or whirling airship flung sunlight off its faces.
Despite the afternoon reflections, the air in the room cosseted shadows. Caliph nibbled pastries and canned fruit from a tray. He had draped himself on a plush chaise, feet up on a priceless coffee table, regarding the newly certified metholinate levels with unsettled scrutiny.
Air horns and steam whistles usually percolated through the urban effluvium beyond the window as barges and cranes fought to load and unload cargo along the wharves. But the docks today were silent, devoid of commerce.
Sigmund hadn’t commented on Caliph’s foul mood when the two of them had talked earlier that morning and finalized certain technical details.
The better part of Caliph’s thinking had gone into one outlandish plan. Everything else had evolved into half-hearted contingencies devised to prolong the inevitable if the main plan failed—which was why Caliph had yet to tell anyone how it would come together.
Caliph sorted through a stack of paperwork he had been ignoring for some time.
In addition to the restructured metholinate reports, it contained a paper authored by the red-faced Dr. Baufent who had performed the autopsy on the ichthyoid men in West Gate.
Unfortunately, the physician had written the report as though to herself—which meant that it often became far too technical for Caliph to follow. Loquacious jumbled sentences muttered about pathogenic mucin, photophores and dense high-impact skeletal structures.
Caliph tossed it aside as he remembered her with foggy distaste. Though he was curious about the creatures’ physiology, the digressive report deflated his interest.
With Vhortghast gone and all the other craziness of the past few weeks, Ghoul Court had not been raided. It was still on the agenda but the timescale had been moved back . . . intentionally . . . ruthlessly. The raid was now a critical piece of timing in Caliph’s war plan.
He massaged his eyebrows where a dull ache had begun to throb. He pushed hard into the bone, rubbing in circles before daring to lift the next piece of paper—his afternoon itinerary.
Kam 2, 561
10:00 Lunch & reports
10:40 Messieurs Stepney, N
grüth and Bîm
11:40 Hazel Nantallium of Os Sacrum
12:00 General Yrisl . . .
The list went on. Caliph checked his watch. It was a quarter past ten. He shuffled through the remaining papers and digested what he could.
At 10:35 he strapped his chemiostatic sword around his waist, left the parlor and entered the royal study precisely on the half hour. The burgomasters of Growl Mort, Murkbell and Bilgeburg were waiting for him, chairs tugged together in a tight fraternal chevron as though huddling for warmth. They stood up the moment he entered.
Caliph shook their hands.
After obligatory pleasantries they all sat down, the burgomasters in their stiff velvet-padded chairs, Caliph at an enormous polished desk.
The burgomasters seemed paradoxically nervous and, at the same time, self-assured. Caliph supposed they had a shrewd agenda that Simon Stepney had failed to advance back in Hl
im when he brought the ugly little factory—which had not been melted into sling bullets but been miraculously retrieved by Gadriel from whatever box into which it had been tossed and placed for the hour with expert and subtle ingenuity on the High King’s desk. It sat prominently beneath a lamp, partially hidden from his guests.
Despite its presence, all three of the burgomasters looked, in a serene and well-disguised way, deeply rankled at being here. It must have been at the top of their minds that Caliph Howl had executed one of his best friends less than two weeks ago for treason. They minded their manners.
Caliph watched them. They outnumbered him. On their side were many years of experience buttressed by very high opinions of themselves. They would present their case, make their demands and force the High King to deal with their concerns. Holomorphic aberrations had not been kind to industry and time (for them) was running out.
Caliph stroked the brass nailheads on his armrest. For an eternity it seemed, he waited.
Bejamin Ngrüth cleared his throat.
“Your majesty. The . . . fungal outbreak . . . at Vog Foundry is only the beginning of my associates’ and my troubles. Business has gone slack in the face of the war. Everyone is either demonstrating or spectating or off stationed in western Tentinil.”
Caliph interrupted his momentum.
“Where’s Jaeza?”
The last of the big industrial boroughs’ burgomasters had not shown up.
Bejamin Ngrüth looked annoyed. Simon Stepney smiled as though pained. He gesticulated faintly as if pulling cobwebs from the air. “She had—prior engagements, your majesty. Though of course this was the top priority for her, an emergency, I’m afraid . . . came up.”
Bejamin Ngrüth agreed and rummaged in an oxblood attaché.
“Yes, she did however send her regards and apologies as well as this memo expressing her unanimity.”
He laid a crisp, white, notarized sheet of parchment on the desk in front of Caliph.
“Unanimity?” Caliph asked. “In what?”
Bejamin smiled and adjusted his silver spectacles. His hair was greased back in gleaming sandy bands. He forged on bravely.
“Your majesty, we haven’t disclosed this quarter’s profits yet, but we’re vicinal to bankruptcy. If the sluggish prewar economy and holomorphic chaos doesn’t get us, frankly the city’s flat pollution tax will.”