they’ve got wore on they’re hands rite next door?”
The voice in his head was asexual and monotone. It reminded him, for blurry reasons, of his childhood. Its answer felt miraculous.
Caliph scowled.”What dew yew mean, ’the whiches told the south’?” he asked the invisible speaker.
He pictured his uncle’s book, the Cisrym Ta. For no reason that he could think of, its faded red and filthy hide rose up in his mind. The room had grown distant, it reached him only through a filter of gauzy impressions, one of which was that the presence he was talking with smiled like a sarchal hound.
My uncle’s book …
In his head, he heard the words: It’s mine!
Caliph didn’t find it strange. He almost laughed as he took another drink. It tasted like brine.
Caliph pawed his face with clumsy fists. “Why everyone care about an errant text ewe bot in Sandren four five scythes?”
You mean arrant?
Caliph laughed. A moment of clarity seized him. “Ewe told me its pages were pounced from stillborns! That’s fucking errant!”
He spoke as though the voice in his head belonged to Sena, though he knew with vague growing terror it did not.
“Why the Pandragor want that book?”
Iycestoke wants it too.
Caliph felt the words sink through the wine in his stomach and settle at the bottom. “Do they? Then why dun the Three Kings jush bye it? Ice-stoke can by anything. Ann if we’re don’t selling, they can shend there thieves two steel it … bam!” He clapped his hands.
He looked toward the voice but saw only his empty hand. He heard a padded thud. The glass was empty too, rolling on the rug.
Caliph eased back into the chaise, watching his hand flicker as twilight wobbled through the wet windows across from him.
He could feel the wine smoldering in his cheeks. The chaise was rotating on a slow teetering axis.
If I can just survive this year, he thought, don’t get assassinated at the conference on the fifteenth. Just make it through the year. He closed his eyes. The voice was gone. He heard the wind pick up and the rain turn flaky and cold. Make it through the year and I’ll walk away from all of this …
He envisioned snow creeping down into the courtyard where black trees stretched spidery vaults over a late milk-and-sugar sky. The door opened and the scent of southern perfume slunk over him while the world sank into huckleberry night.
“Caliph?” This time it was real. It was not the hissing in his head. This time it was Sena’s voice. He struggled against the darkness to find her. He had missed that voice. So much. “Caliph?”
But he was feeling warm and silly, head curled around the wine. He muttered something to the darkness as her cool fingers touched his burning cheek.
* * *
“P EW … smells like boy. ”
Sena drew back from Caliph’s flushed skin.
But the stuffiness was different from the numbers and the presence that had been here. She stared through the wall at a residue of integers—which was something she could do.
This was her new life, her new eyes, just one year old, encapsulated, isolated and different from everyone else. This life beyond life had stranded her on an island that was both unapproachable and incomprehensible to the people that moved around it. People shrunk away from her. People feared her.
It was not so different from being insane. Indeed, she still wondered if that wasn’t a more elegant solution. It was impossible to relate to anyone anymore. In the sunlight that slipped around her season-to-season, melting away her days, the busy milling throngs had become high-speed patterns. People were predictable static. Background noise. Faint chemical-electrical residues in air. She had little patience for them: self-absorbed and oblivious under the racing cycles of the sky.
Only the Pplarians understood.
In her hand she held a crumpled letter from Yul, her “humble servant.” It contained numbers important only to her. A key to the chambers. Chambers
The voice in his head was asexual and monotone. It reminded him, for blurry reasons, of his childhood. Its answer felt miraculous.
Caliph scowled.”What dew yew mean, ’the whiches told the south’?” he asked the invisible speaker.
He pictured his uncle’s book, the Cisrym Ta. For no reason that he could think of, its faded red and filthy hide rose up in his mind. The room had grown distant, it reached him only through a filter of gauzy impressions, one of which was that the presence he was talking with smiled like a sarchal hound.
My uncle’s book …
In his head, he heard the words: It’s mine!
Caliph didn’t find it strange. He almost laughed as he took another drink. It tasted like brine.
Caliph pawed his face with clumsy fists. “Why everyone care about an errant text ewe bot in Sandren four five scythes?”
You mean arrant?
Caliph laughed. A moment of clarity seized him. “Ewe told me its pages were pounced from stillborns! That’s fucking errant!”
He spoke as though the voice in his head belonged to Sena, though he knew with vague growing terror it did not.
“Why the Pandragor want that book?”
Iycestoke wants it too.
Caliph felt the words sink through the wine in his stomach and settle at the bottom. “Do they? Then why dun the Three Kings jush bye it? Ice-stoke can by anything. Ann if we’re don’t selling, they can shend there thieves two steel it … bam!” He clapped his hands.
He looked toward the voice but saw only his empty hand. He heard a padded thud. The glass was empty too, rolling on the rug.
Caliph eased back into the chaise, watching his hand flicker as twilight wobbled through the wet windows across from him.
He could feel the wine smoldering in his cheeks. The chaise was rotating on a slow teetering axis.
If I can just survive this year, he thought, don’t get assassinated at the conference on the fifteenth. Just make it through the year. He closed his eyes. The voice was gone. He heard the wind pick up and the rain turn flaky and cold. Make it through the year and I’ll walk away from all of this …
He envisioned snow creeping down into the courtyard where black trees stretched spidery vaults over a late milk-and-sugar sky. The door opened and the scent of southern perfume slunk over him while the world sank into huckleberry night.
“Caliph?” This time it was real. It was not the hissing in his head. This time it was Sena’s voice. He struggled against the darkness to find her. He had missed that voice. So much. “Caliph?”
But he was feeling warm and silly, head curled around the wine. He muttered something to the darkness as her cool fingers touched his burning cheek.
* * *
“P EW … smells like boy. ”
Sena drew back from Caliph’s flushed skin.
But the stuffiness was different from the numbers and the presence that had been here. She stared through the wall at a residue of integers—which was something she could do.
This was her new life, her new eyes, just one year old, encapsulated, isolated and different from everyone else. This life beyond life had stranded her on an island that was both unapproachable and incomprehensible to the people that moved around it. People shrunk away from her. People feared her.
It was not so different from being insane. Indeed, she still wondered if that wasn’t a more elegant solution. It was impossible to relate to anyone anymore. In the sunlight that slipped around her season-to-season, melting away her days, the busy milling throngs had become high-speed patterns. People were predictable static. Background noise. Faint chemical-electrical residues in air. She had little patience for them: self-absorbed and oblivious under the racing cycles of the sky.
Only the Pplarians understood.
In her hand she held a crumpled letter from Yul, her “humble servant.” It contained numbers important only to her. A key to the chambers. Chambers
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