how they worked. Shrdnae field agents were forbidden from any kind of relationship that could compromise them: pregnancy in the all-female organization was strictly regulated. For Shrdnae operatives, sex was part of their training. It was an art form they perfected just like assassination and like their trademark knife sheaths, their legs didn’t open unless it was part of the job.
She knew I was going to be king . . . was she using me the whole time? Caliph’s brain froze around a new thought. Her letter! Just to lure me out where they could kill me? Ransom? He couldn’t help himself. He pitched forward on his hands and knees, retching; everything he’d just eaten turned out in the grass.
For a while he stared at the weeds, watching the slick amber liquid attract bugs. His torso convulsed again; he didn’t care what the women were doing.
“Sena’s always taken her men watered down.”
“Not her boyfriend,” Caliph managed to croak. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He felt dizzy from the heat, like he might pass out.
“You must know her well enough to walk through her house and take her horse.”
“I wish I was her boyfriend. I went to school with her.” He picked one of the Naked Eight at random. “Name’s David.”
“Get up, David . . .”
CHAPTER 7
Caliph stood up. As he did, the woman on the roof pitched forward like a gargoyle breaking loose from a building. She plummeted into the weeds at Caliph’s feet, landing with a simultaneous crunch-thud; she did not move again.
He turned around. The woman behind him was standing perfectly still with a shaft of gleaming metal sticking out of her cheek. She fell forward into the flowers, brushing Caliph’s shoulder on her way down.
Caliph ran.
He vaulted the split-rail fence and landed in the pasture, heading for the horse. He saw its tentacle tails flipping gently like a fistful of snakes, its slab teeth shearing contentedly through grass. It looked up, watched him for a moment, then roared. Its claws ripped massive clods of sod from the ground as it bolted away, racing for the far end of the pasture.
Caliph slipped and skidded in a patch of mud; the momentum flipped him onto his back like a turtle, speeding him over moss and horse shit down a gentle slope and finally depositing him near the edge of the pond.
When Caliph opened his eyes, the sun had gone behind a cloud and everything looked gray. There were men with duralumin wings and chemiostatic cells on their backs, landing in the pasture. They cradled gas-powered bows and huge compression guns in their arms. Their goggles were chrome blue. Their flight suits black.
Caliph heard heavy propellers and looked up. Not a cloud. A vast porcine airship blotted out the sun.
There were men surrounding him. They wore rapiers and made signals with their hands, telling each other what to do. So fast. Caliph couldn’t tell where they had come from but he assumed they too had dropped from the zeppelin.
“Caliph Howl?”
A man was shouting from slightly uphill. He reached down and pulled Caliph from the mud. “Caliph Howl?”
Dazed beyond speaking, Caliph could only nod.
“I’m Master Sergeant Timms.” He shook Caliph’s hand, seemingly unfazed by the thick muck covering almost every inch of Caliph’s body. “Trying to give us the slip there again, literally . . .” He smiled. His teeth were slightly crooked but very white.
Caliph looked around. It seemed obvious that Stonehold had found him. Snipers had killed the Shrdnae Witches and this man was now taking him north. Far north. Over the Country of Miryhr, east of Eloth, past Sena—wherever she was—beyond the Greencap Mountains and down into the Duchy of Stonehold.
Caliph knew he didn’t have a choice in this. He didn’t have a choice that the women were dead, or that he didn’t want to be king. He knew that now, suddenly. He didn’t want to be king. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to find Sena either. Everything between them must have been a lie. Or was it?
His mind was already toying with ways to suspend judgment. Maybe there had been a mistake.
He was walking, letting Master Sergeant Timms steer him like a cow toward a harness that hung from a cable like a tail trailing into the sky.
“Don’t worry, your majesty. You’re safe now. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Caliph felt the buckles snap around his chest, his groin, his legs. He looked across the pasture to where more men were corralling