bottom of the beaker.
“See, the seeds don’t get blown up. You don’t feel it when a solvitriol bomb goes off. Buildings don’t break apart and go somersaulting through the air. There isn’t any discernable shockwave. But everybody. Everybody falls down.” Sigmund, shirtless in his blackened overalls, scratched his meaty arm while chewing at his beard.
“Some invisible inexorable tide comes in and washes your soul out of your body like a mussel from its shell. And you’re dead. You’re meat lying on the bottom of that beaker, nothing left to hold you up,” said Sigmund. “That’s what solvitriol bombs can do.”
For a while Caliph and Sigmund shared industrial-strength coffee mixed with brandy from Sigmund’s flask. They stared at the tunsia plate separating immeasurable opposing forces and listened to the foundations creak beneath the lab.
“What’s that dark ripple between the housings?” asked Caliph.
“The path of attraction,” said Sigmund. “You can’t see it in the smaller housing because the cells are just too close together. But it’s there. Displacing light. That’s all it is. I’ve been trying to find a way to predict how the cells will spin their housing so I can use the path of attraction to calculate some kind of endless cycle, you know . . . like a perpetual motion machine. But it’s still too dangerous to try.”
Caliph nodded. He asked all kinds of questions. What the attractive force measured at a distance of one, two, even three miles. What the ethereal blast radius of a solvitriol bomb would be. Sigmund had sketchy answers but promised he would do the calculations and get back to him in a couple days.
Their conversation eventually turned to David Thacker.
“I would never have pegged old Dave as a traitor,” muttered Sigmund.
“Nor I,” said Caliph.
“I suppose when you gathered up his things you found the second set of blueprints.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” said Sigmund. “I had David draw up a copy of the plans in case . . . well . . . in case you weren’t shooting straight.” He shrugged. “I just didn’t want you thinking I was planning something behind your back. It was just a safety net, that’s all.”
Caliph frowned and broke into a sudden sweat. He pushed his alcoholic coffee away.
“I had . . . I had David’s room searched. He didn’t have any blueprints, Sigmund.”
Sigmund laughed. “Sure he did. I told him myself to hold on to ’em if . . .” His voice trailed off.
“All he had was a box of creepy papers and a stack of forty gold gryphs.”
“Gold?” Sigmund was incredulous. “David was broke as a toilet pipe in Kaoul. He couldn’t afford socks!”
“So he sold the plans,” said Caliph.
“Unbelievable.”
“The Pandragonians know,” Caliph said. “They know and I bet they now have proof that we have access to solvitriol power.”
“Ideas who the buyer was?”
Caliph stood up.
“Yeah. I’ll see you in a couple days.”
When Caliph returned from Glôssok and touched down on the glowing zeppelin deck, Ns was already dying.
He saw the poor cat from across the vast expanse of concrete, lying on its side, the hazy whirring shape of a glimbender hovering over it. He ran, tried to chase it away, but the thing had already ejaculated its larva deep into Ns’ brain.
By the time Caliph crossed the deck, the furtive hairy eye on wings had gone, darting into the night.
Ns lay breathing quietly, his life force winding down as the hungry slugs squirmed inside his skull.
Rolling in a bath of their own digestive acids, the glimbender grubs would make short work of their host. After they’d eaten the cat’s brain they would spin silken cocoons inside the cranium, gestating for a month or more while the fur and skin moldered away. When they hatched, they’d come fumbling out of eye sockets or through the jaw.
There was nothing to be done.
Caliph called for Gadriel who summoned Sena to the deck. When she arrived, she wept and paced and stroked her dying pet.
Caliph tried to comfort her but she was inconsolable. Gadriel knelt with a tin of tissues at the ready.
Slowly, Ns’ breathing thinned out and settled into strange seizure-like quivers that served no respiratory function.
At last the animal stilled.
A wire seemed to burst in Sena’s brain, like a violin string popping at a concert. She reeled as from a blow, crumpled to the deck and into a deep lethargic swoon from which neither salts nor shouts could rouse her.
Caliph carried her to their bedroom and summoned the physicians. They came, hooded and robed in red, carrying bowls and scalpels