“Things have changed during your illness. As I said, we have several agendas.”
Sena felt her stomach pitch, wondering about Caliph.
“A few days ago,” Megan continued, “a zeppelin was lost in the Valley of Nifol. Shot down. Certain powers in the south had valuables, priceless valuables on board. Which they believe are being ferried into the Duchy of Stonehold.”
“So you’ve made a deal with them? What does the Sisterhood get out of it?”
Megan did not smile her cunning smile as Sena expected. Instead, Megan’s voice cracked, almost quavered. What she said still sounded so pitiless and cruel that Sena winced at the words. “Not yet, Sienae. Until you’ve realized the task before you, I would be giving everything away in the event of your torture.”
Sena reeled for a moment but recovered quickly. She knew it would be useless to persist so she went down a different road. “At the very least I have to know who I’m helping and what I’m helping them achieve.”
This time Megan did smile, albeit unkindly. “For now, all you need know is that we are in league with Pandragor.”
Sena spent five days trying to get back in shape. After morning exercise, she sifted through the newest piles of holomorphic research the Sisterhood had compiled in the vast underpitched barrel vaults of parliament’s basement.
It was frightening stuff.
Holojoules, the raw malleable energy the holomorph drew from blood and dropped into change equations, represented a quantifiable tally of individual annihilations. At a cellular level the number of sacrifices the holomorph needed was astonishing.
Holojoules were naturally limited to the amount of blood in the holomorph’s body. There was an old saying, “You can cast what you can cut,” and it always brought to Sena’s mind gruesome pictures of the greatest holomorphic achievements realized only through suicide.
Yet, according to the notes in the basement, there was another way, an older way. And the Sisterhood had found it. It was spelled out in meticulous ledgers that Sena read, reminding her of stories she had found at Desdae pertaining to hemofurtum and the dead empires that had practiced it. She imagined white curtains stirred by salt winds, sheltering hundreds of spell slaves that had once slit their snowy skins, collecting holomorphic energy into slender silver ewers.
Vast colligations, as they were called: giant collections of silver vials filled with the fluid to argue reality.
After all, holomorphy was a kind of legalese that focused reason through the lens of the mathematician. Holomorphs were reality lawyers whose logic convinced the world to bend.
The Sisterhood’s research covered it all. Sena found slides spotted with various samples of erythrocytes and platelets in stiff paper boxes. She examined them, remembering plant cells under the monocular at Desdae, moving the coarse and substage adjustments. Focusing. Switching through the jumble of parachromatic objectives.
These lacquered brass drawtubes in parliament’s basement were equally powerful and gorgeous, sliding on clock oil under the smooth subtlety of half a dozen finger controls.
At Desdae, she had fumbled in amazement at the squirming glowing life. With the soupspoon mirror condensing light through the slide, thylakoids, vacuoles and chloroplasts had lit up in lucent green, magenta and aqueous blue dyes. She had marveled at each level of magnification, then pricked her finger over a fresh slide and watched herself die.
But hemofurtum made self-mutilation obsolete. The nonphysical numbers in the ledger subtracted against themselves to produce remainders greater than zero. They were capable of snatching iron-rich proteins at the moment of flux. Vampirism.
Hemofurtum’s central equations revolved around a mathematical loop. It was designed to siphon blood from a source outside the holomorph’s own body . . . hold the energy, use some to take again. Its logic was frightening, a kind of gruesome sipping answer to the elusive perpetual motion machine.
Once the reaction began it was up to the holomorph to turn it off. The only limit to the equation was linked to how many pints were available in the vicinity. If the holomorph was willing to siphon or even kill an unlimited amount of people, then the equation’s apogee would be roughly synonymous with population.
Sena left the basement feeling awed and sick.
At noon on the twenty-third, Sena convinced Megan to let her retrieve some things from her cottage in the Highlands. She promised to return in time for her mission to Stonehold.
Sena took a chemiostatic cab toward Jyn Hêl8 where her mother had been burned seventeen years ago. No one would question her going in this direction because no one would dare