Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  Khloht is a Veyden word and the Veydens are a tall, olive-skinned, rusty-haired, heavily tattooed people that live in the fringes and murmur fearsome myths about the depths of a homeland they have never fully explored. I speak Veyden well enough to be confused by their legends and poorly enough to be incapable of adequately translating kloht into Southern Trade. The closest synonym I can offer is complacent. The Complacent Jungles. Although lurking, listless and indifferent might be equally correct. Apparently there is a Veyden saying that when the end of the world comes, the jungle will not care.

  We carved our way south, all the way through Khloht and out the other side. Near the great necropolis of Ooil-Uauth, on the luminous shores of a pink ocean below the equator, my servants built a palace of stone to withstand the decay of the climate and I began my long wait for the end of the world.

  Caliph noticed movement in the room. It disturbed him. A page drifting from a shelf had settled against the floor. He looked toward it with uneasy curiosity, trying to gauge the limited strength of the fireplace draft. Eventually he turned his attention back to the journal. The handwriting of Arkhyn Hiel was vaguely familiar and he followed one of Sena’s notes to another entry in a separate volume.

  Journal Entry: C. Tides: 557, Y.o.T. Meeting: Li—White Moon, 3rd: A.H.

  In the far north, near the Glacier Rise, the red-bearded Nanemen have many myths, more perhaps even than the Veydens. In Naneman mythology they speak of the Hjolk-trull, the Ones Before. But even the Hjolk-trull had ancestors, those called Gringlings: the Writers and Eaters of Time.

  The archives at Shaerzac University, which will survive the Civil War of ’61 …

  “Will survive?” Caliph whispered. He glanced up at the dates. One of them had to be wrong. He felt something cool drag across his neck and slapped at it. More drafts? His stomach turned cold and rolled up on itself as if fists had clenched the ropy mass of his entrails. He looked at the date of the journal entry, a full four years before the Civil War of ’61, and tried to find some reasonable explanation. The second five could be a six, he decided. And maybe the seven was actually a two with an overly short base stroke. Five sixty-two. That would make sense. Except for the inexplicable future tense associated with the war. Nevermind. The whole thing was handwritten, unedited and therefore certainly full of mistakes. He was too tired to care.

  … which will survive the Civil War of ’61 house texts that describe the Gringlings in the words of scriveners from the previous century. Besom’s Dictionary of Unusual Legend defines the Gringlings with a single sentence that sounds suspiciously like plagiarized fable:

  A mythological radiant people endowed with the gift of prophecy who authored legendary books until the Rain of Fire.

  This is, by my own account, an accurate description.

  But at the High College of Desdae there are private collections. There are deeper myths crawling out of White Tongue, Mallic and Old Rilk. Many of the pages have been translated. Many more have not.

  I was there … or will be there. I went through the entire library and afterward compiled the Sothic Myth: The Fallen Sheleph of Jorgill Deep, by Arkhyn Hiel. It was a task for which I … would be … commissioned by the Cabal whose fingerlings I later killed.

  Writers and Eaters of Time. I am a Gringling, you see. Not in flesh but in spirit. I once tapped a holomorphic hybrid of floro-dririmancy to check the heartbeat of the north: the color of the petals, the way the blood dripped from the zebrian orchid’s ovaries and anthers. I knew soon. Soon—soon the Sslia5 would open the book.

  Caliph scowled. He had little patience for this sort of drivel and had to force himself to keep going. Sena’s notes now pointed him toward a different stack of papers. He rummaged and found the reference.

  Excerpt: pages 23–27

  The Fallen Sheleph of Jorgill Deep

  Precipice Books © 1546 S.K. by Arkhyn Hiel

  Caliph stared at the colophon for a moment: an engraving that depicted a man falling from a cliff into an abyss. He had never seen it before and it must have come from some small press, perhaps even privately owned. The perspective was from overhead, looking down at the back of his wind-whipped hair, his spread fingers. It seemed a bizarre thing to transfer into an excerpt. As Caliph stared at it, he thought about his uncle and the way he had died, leaping from the cliffs at the north end of the city. As he sank deeper into the chair, a morbid chill crawled on to his chest and squatted there.

  Arrian must have looked like one of those leaning sensual forms carved along the Coasts of Gath: a white statue of a woman cradling an urn beneath empty eyes, lovely limbs tangled in the vines. Her chin would have been proud, her lips thin. She would have had hair the inhuman fluid color of pearl and eyes like tiny plaques of jade.

  And, in fact, all of this is true.

  Few people would believe I saw her again … from the inside. But in the Khloht Jungle there are secrets carved in stone. Memories, you could call them. At Ooil-Uauth, bizarre mathematics have been graven into oblate rhombohedrons. They are alien things, cracked and decayed long before they were reused and fashioned into canted beehive tombs. These are the buildings in a vast necropolis with no way out, whose inscriptions provided the recipe for poisonous shuwt tinctures that the Veydens now use to suspend the shadow of their body in the solvent of another’s soul. They are Gringling secrets. And I should know. From these conical ziggurats, the Veydens condensed that time travel was impossible. But that fact is wholly unrelated to accessing events. To inhabiting non-time.

  This has ever been the secret of the Gringlings, whose knowledge the Veydens first discovered. We were the builders of the Staircase to Infinity, which bore our memories but did not survive the century of terror that the Ublisi unleashed—when the Yillo’tharnah scoured the world.

  Our Staircase was sundered, refashioned into the necropolis at Ooil-Uauth. But our memories and our recipes remained.

  These are the carvings that the Veydens found. Through judicious use of shuwt tinctures and other holomorphic secrets that I relearned from the jungle, I compiled the Sothic Myth, a piece of work that I have no doubt will be ridiculed as pure fabrication by any scholar of “serious disposition.” The toxins have caused intracranial bleeding, and I myself can see the way my meninges have seared to the inside of my skull: a feat that only detracts from my credibility, no doubt.

  But I did not compile the myth for scholars. This is my own press, purchased with my own funds, for my own reasons: to remember my daughter.

  And I will gladly burn the feckless cells of this pathetic mind with potion after potion of shuwt tinctures in my quest to see her again.

  For the inexperienced, shuwt tinctures provide a mishmash of hallucination and truth—the first several journeys take the drinker into the youth of self rather than into the minds of others—Veyden spirit guides are able to enter the vision and teach the user how to focus the lens. But I am no novice. I am a Gringling, despite the flesh I have lost. My mind is quite intact.

  I will begin by saying that Arrian was a sheleph.6 Her power was supposed to one day match her beauty when she inherited all her father’s holdings.

  I am, of course, her father.

  But at fifteen, her only love is sitting in the fortress walls, watching clouds blow in above the ocean. All day, she sits and watches and sketches with colored sticks of pigment, blending with her fingers, greasy pastel hues into sheets of parchment that are made in Lewyl and shipped to Soth specifically for her.

  When she tires of sketching, she lays the sheet aside and listens to wind come between the paper and the stone. Finally, the drawing is pulled off the wall and carried out over the surf that foams three hundred feet below. She watches the colors in the sky change from morning yellow to midday blue to evening indigo. She watches all day, nearly every day, soaking her jade eyes in the colors, infusing her brain like a sponge.

  “Cor, come here,” Arrian calls.

  Corwin looks up from where he is teasing a centipede with a st
ick. He has it cornered in a shady damp niche of the parapet. The centipedes on Soth are nearly a foot long and offer plenty of fight. The iridescent black-blue and yellow striped body coils around Corwin’s stick and stings the dead wood repeatedly.

  “I’m rather busy,” he says. He has thin blond hair which blows straight back in the wind but his eyes betray a weakness of the heart that causes him to look at all girls with a form of awe. He flips the centipede across the battlement with his stick. I can tell he ponders crushing it for an instant.

  “Cor?”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Fetch me my colors,” Arrian says when he is close enough that she does not have to yell.

  Corwin sighs. “Can’t we do something else?”

  She pulls a strand of pale hair down in front of her eyes. “I want to draw, Cor.” She knows he will succumb but she does not know why. Even at fifteen, love is a far-off thing; her mind is green and innocent from her isolation on the island. That is my doing. I know that her Gringling bones will carry her out of childhood soon enough, into an eternity of adulthood.

  “I spend all my time with you and you’d rather draw,” Corwin complains.

  “Rather? Rather than what? As I recall, you were off playing with bugs.”

  Corwin raises his eyebrows.

  Arrian makes a pained face. “Cor—!”

  “I’ll get them,” he grumps. It is a long way to her room on the other side of the stronghold, a good ten minute walk in both directions. Sometimes he walks it five times a day and only now, toward the end of summer, has he started to complain.

  Arrian watches the ships come and go bearing her father’s loyal emissaries. They have empty hands but carry rumors on their lips. They speak of frightening creatures in the south, hated races: Groull and Yilthid. It is a strange time, I tell her, though she does not understand what makes it so any more than she understands the way Corwin looks at her.

  She watches the ships come and go as she watches Corwin come and go, with colors and paper and pitchers of icy things to drink. It does not occur to her that Corwin is her only friend.

  While she waits for him, Arrian sees a strange ship move into the harbor. It has turquoise sails and rigging like gold thread and from the main mast blows a pennant with a symbol of both moons intersecting. By the time Corwin returns, it has docked and she points it out to him. “I’m going to draw that ship.”

  “I can’t even see it from here,” says Corwin. “Just a speck of color.”

  “I can see it very well,” Arrian replies, picking up one of the blue-green sticks he has brought. “Even if I never saw it again I should remember it always. Have you ever seen a boat so lovely?”

  Corwin looks over his shoulder for the centipede but it has slithered off. “No. Maybe we could go down and see it better.”

  “Father doesn’t like me near the docks.” Arrian’s voice is like a fife.

  “I don’t think he’d like you dangling your feet this high above the surf either but he doesn’t seem to notice that. Why would he notice the other?”

  “If we go down you’ll have brought my colors for no reason.”

  Corwin shrugs. He knows indifference is the only way to coax her.

  Arrian gathers up her pigments and lays them in the little wooden case. Corwin offers to carry it out of habit. He picks up the parchment and follows one step behind.

  Jorgill Deep gets its name from the cleft between the mountain and the sea cliffs where it rests. The fortress itself is the only spot of civilization on an island whose ancient name comes from the mountain: Soth. Soth is a great hooked horn of blackened rock that casts a nearly eternal shadow over Jorgill Deep. The stone here is mostly volcanic and the fortress was hewn of basalt by Gringlings and beings that the Gringlings once called Limuin: the Infinite Ones.

  Some Limuin remained behind after the Banishing. They renounced Limuin prophecy and surrendered their titles. Limuin became an offensive slur synonymous with elitist and disparager. Infinite Ones was replaced with Ublisi, a title that means Smooth Thinker. The Ublisi now use their intellect to expand and secure the Gringling Empire against the expansionism of the southern Yilthid and their Groull slaves.

  The vast prismatic panes of Jorgill Deep now reflect the sunlight in proud white-gleaming sheets, glaring out from the nullifidian bulk and heavy tracery of the walls. Arrian feels coddled behind them, safe inside a structure that has scoffed for millennia at every kind of storm. She gazes at the splendid ship in the harbor and walks gracefully out through black arcades atop the battlements. Flowering vines grow here and frame the sky with perfumed boughs drooping with white petals.

  “What if it’s an Ublisi come to visit your father?” Corwin says quietly. “Would you be frightened?”

  Arrian is surprised that his thoughts have been identical to hers. She is peering curiously toward the harbor. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “I’ve never seen one before.”

  “I hear they have no blood. That’s queer to think of. They can’t die. Ever.”

  “Oh, Cor! It’s probably just an ally. A household from the south. They say southern ships are grand to look at.”

  “I want to get off this island!” Corwin suddenly spouts. “I want to see the mainland. Go places. Do something important.”

  “Father says it’s safer here on the isles.”

  “Your father doesn’t know everything!”

  Arrian stops and turns with a look of shock on her small dark lips. It has never occurred to her that anyone might have ideas that oppose those of her father and the sudden realization forces her to stop completely in order to digest. “By the Eyes, Corwin, why are you so upset?”

  Corwin looks down at the box of colors in his hands. The sunlight on the wood shines gold and turns his fingers copper. He bites his lip while color flushes his ears and cheeks. Only when Arrian begins walking again does he venture to respond. “I’m just tired of being here and never seeing the world.”

  “What does that have to do with my father?”

  “Nothing.”

  He wants to say that he is upset with himself. I know he is angry for not having been braver, brasher. He should have killed the centipede. He should not have gotten her colors. He should have kissed her, brushed his hand across her waist and then …

  There are noises coming from the harbor, excited shouts and the roll of drums. Corwin and Arrian take a tertiary staircase down to a small balcony the guards seldom use. It looks out from a tiny room that punches clean through the fortress wall and grants a good view of both the docks outside and the courtyard within. From here, they can see Arrian’s father standing with a body of men in robes, personal advisors who whisper in each other’s ears. It is strange that I know what they are whispering. The drums are also those of her father’s men: sea turtle skin stretched over hoops beaten with soft leather mallets.

  But Arrian is staring at the ship. The prow, covered with beaten copper and silver studs, seems to burn its reflection into the dock waters. At the center of one of the sail’s moons, a silver eye is painted. Arrian can see a dark-skinned woman in white silk stepping gracefully near the landing while bare-chested albinos flex their muscles to get the moorings tight. Their shoulders are red from the sun.

  It is a delicious scene.

  The woman wears a copper carcanet with red jewels, anklets and bracelets that explode in the sunlight. Part of her face is lined with a curious black design—even darker than her skin—which seems to hold her eye like a diamond in a claw.

  The drums fade and Cendrion harps fill the air with soft music. Arrian notices green and blue veils hanging in the gate. They bloom fatly in the wind while the woman and her servants seem to float toward her father.

  Caliph checked the time with bleary eyes. The soothing aroma pouring from the lanthorn was a natural stimulant but he closed the book across his stomach. His head ached. He didn’t understand why Sena must have been reading this particular account, for long hours, locked away in thi
s freezing chamber just before she left.

  He turned his thoughts toward her return. The possibility of sex and quiet conversation made him long for her. Fire and wine would warm the moment of her arrival. He had already informed the staff of their duties, he had orchestrated everything.

  She would tell him all about her trip, what she had done, where she had been. He in turn would tell her about the problem with the Pandragonians. They would sit close together, feet touching.

  As the High King, he was forced to keep certain secrets. Maybe that was why he didn’t begrudge her a handful of locked doors; or judge her based on the books she read. In fact, her secrets were part of the allure, part of her intractable luster. The unfathomable still looked out at him from behind her mirror-like eyes.

  Caliph felt his lids droop despite the lanthorn’s light. He turned into the bow of the chair and barely heard the journal clatter to the floor.

  4O.S.: A stringed instrument with a woodwind built into the neck. It is held vertically in front of the body and played by blowing and plucking at the same time.

  5A possible transliteration of Jingsade (or Gringling script) into Mallic (or the language of the Lua’groc) and a word whose meaning is generally described in Trade as “deliverer/rescuer” but contextually often carries the connotation of “forerunner.”

  6O.S.: A Gringling princess.

  CHAPTER

  4

  In Octul Box, the infamous witch’s skin up-welled with a fantasy of jewels that beaded from her very pores. Dark and dazzling, both the expression on her face and the diamonds, like droplets of night sweat, seemed products of wild ecstasy. Taelin could see flexuous clones of precise lamplight in each gem, positioned by the jewelers who had engrailed her body, snapped lithos and presumably left her with the treasures.