Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

The posters were everywhere: INDULGE YOURSELF. GET TICKY!

  She passed Jesuexe Furrier where Sena’s pavonine eyes stared back at her.

  Taelin shivered.

  A letter had come from her father by bird that asked her to do things she didn’t want to do—that she had no intention of doing. She wandered the streets to clear her head.

  The morning had remained dismal. Clouds grazed single-story structures, astonishingly low.

  While she browsed the upscale streets where ice had been salted away, people passed her with ostentatiously manicured creatures on glittering leashes. In shape, the small faceless monsters resembled furred maggots with bizarre haircuts. Stubby legs propelled them around while drool flowed from gaping holes at the front of their bodies.

  Taelin sat down under one of the smooth patinated bronze dragons whose sinuous body made a shape like lightning over Octul Box’s fountained mall. Lily white spatters had put the sculpture in a sour mood. Its eyes indicated it wanted to tear something apart. Taelin could relate.

  She had tried to console herself with a bottle of Pandragonian perfume. Sena’s return had been delayed by weather and no new audiences were being granted. Nevertheless, Taelin put her name down for an appointment at the earliest convenience and left a cruestone.

  She glanced toward Isca Castle. Even from Octul Box, the blue-black carrion birds played an evil game: leading her gaze repetitiously toward cages made hazy by two hundred yards of intervening mist.

  Assuming the Iscan staff (or Sena) granted her an audience she couldn’t help morbidly envisioning herself suspended there, left to rot, while the castle’s mythic spindles marked her grave. Would even her father be able to save her if she wound up on the witch’s bad side?

  Pandragor had not executed anyone in over two hundred years. Not that Pandragor was perfect, Taelin mused, but if some of its values rubbed off on these northern backwater rogue nations of the world … well, maybe things would improve. It was simplistic and imperialist and she knew it. But Pandragor was the freest country north or south of the Tebesh Plateau. She believed in it. She trusted it.

  She opened her box and took out the pearlescent bottle, fingering the snowy braided cord and ball: its every detail spoke to her of home. It was indulgent but she couldn’t help herself. She pumped the atomizer once and the crisp spices of the desert infused Isca’s icy air, transporting her over eight hundred miles to the south. She lifted her wrist, closed her eyes and inhaled.

  Her choices for the rest of the day remained open to possibility. Her list of “to-dos” included finding an architect (at the top) and applying for a permit that would allow her to stand on street corners and talk about religion (at the bottom). She quickly settled on an item in the middle that had been chewing on her thoughts, bothering her irrepressible curiosity.

  Having made up her mind, Taelin repacked her perfume and stood up to hunt Isca for the abomination.

  She had heard it was monumental, gluttonous and shocking; fed regularly by the city’s eccentric types.

  According to her map, purchased earlier at a tobacco shop, the path to its lair was a straight line, by streetcar.

  Taelin walked to the nearest stop and waited with a small crowd. A thin Naneman in pinstripes scratched his tatty beard. He stabilized a unicycle in the other hand and stood patiently, trying to ignore a pair of strawberry tufted twins that brawled around his ankles. Taelin smiled and gave him one of her cards.

  When the streetcar arrived she boarded and found a seat behind one of the oval windows. With a lurch and a flatus of ozone-smelling gas, the car pulled away and soon ducked through a mildew-cankered tunnel where light dwindled under the Hold. They emerged again into sunlight and soon Taelin realized it was time for her to get off. She climbed out onto the tomb-shaded slope of Barrow Hill’s east side, well within view of the startling Avenue of Charms. Startling because of the view.

  From the station, framed by decorative wrought iron, Taelin gazed through Temple Hill’s blackened fingers. They groped out of theophanic fog banks, glittering through amethystine piles of smoke. The temples’ myriad spires looked arthritic and lost, floating free of their foundations.

  Incense Street broke east from the avenue and snarled with awesome statues and strangely dressed people. Taelin marched down into the morass where vendors sold aspersories and vials of chrism.

  Choking-sweet clouds that gushed from thuribles stung her eyes. She pulled her goggles down as she passed a chiseled font depicting a bearded ancient whose mouth let flow a never-ending vomit of cinnabar-colored water. She couldn’t help a second look. His tongue blistered and flagellated with unbelievable growths of rust-colored algae, consuming his lips it seemed with unbridled disease.

  People shoved past as she stared.

  A pair of giant idols offered her a route between their legs and she took it, raising her palm to a hawker who thrust something like a chicken bone into her face.

  She darted out from under the idols, down three marble steps and entered a thicket of black feretories overspread with white latticework. There, between a massive copper cage shaped like a teakettle and an engraver displaying sarcophagi, she found the abomination: Sena’s temple.

  It welcomed her with blood and screams.

  From the tumult of the street, a shriek of pain squealed up into the sky like a firework. A circle opened in the crowd and Taelin found herself on the edge of the ring, watching in horror as four white-robed suffragans from the Church of Kosti Vinish wrestled a group of Nanemen sentries. The southern priests were Ilek, certainly out of Bablemum judging by their purfled hems and shorn heads. The giant red-haired Nanemen opposing them clearly subscribed to Sena’s church.

  Taelin flinched as one huge northerner hurled his assailant into a brick wall behind the engraver. The Ilek man’s head gashed open and he fell, bleeding into the gutter. Enraged, the other suffragans drew knives.

  But now the city was moving in.

  Men in tall rubber boots with dark suits and chrome-blue goggles emerged from the chaos. The cobbles of the ancient street crackled under their feet as chemiostatic swords ripped out into the air and lanced the stones with bolts of lightning. The crowd fell back, instantly cowed. Two of the police drew batons and beat the southerners to the ground.

  Taelin covered her mouth and recoiled as the Nanemen sentries stepped back, allowing the Iscan police to twist the unconscious southerners’ arms behind their backs, cuff them and drag them away. One of the suffragans’ heads hung so low his face bounced along the uneven street, slack-jaw snagging momentarily on a brick. Taelin quailed at the sound of snapping teeth.

  The Nanemen sentries were not questioned. The police simply disappeared. Taelin wanted to scream. She wanted justice. But already the scene was being effaced by thronging people and she knew she risked everything if she made another scene. Taelin stood with her fingernails gouging her palms.

  She was only a few feet away from where the Nanemen had repositioned themselves on either side of the temple’s entrance. Snowflakes dissolved into fuming columns of steam that poured out of grilles flanking the way in. She half-expected the guards to accost her as she took a tentative step forward.

  They did not.

  There was no edifice in sight. Rather, a disc embedded in the first of a broad slope of steps decreed in several tongues that this was: the Fane of Sienae Iilool: Omnispecer.

  Omnispecer?

  The iron-trimmed disc bore a stunning alabaster relief of Sena at its center, eyes poured from pure blue glass.

  Bemused, Taelin ascended the white steps, slowly at first, still cautious of the guards. The steps abutted a massive wall of troglodytic clinker brick, encrusted with city soot and birdlime, far older than the smooth cream of treads below her feet. After several yards she had risen above the feretories and could gaze down into the befuddled warren of Incense Street. With no opposition from the Nanemen, she traveled another hundred steps, which put her around a corner. The ramp now climbed east, still huggi
ng the mountain of ancient brick. Where can this be going?

  Ahead she could see the staircase end against a blazing sheet of clouds. To the left: open sky and the tumble of rooftops that spilled down into Ironside. To the right: the vast pile of masonry ascended. The climb burned into her thighs. She stopped to rest and walked over to the safety chain that served as a railing. Four- and five-story buildings piled up over fifty feet below.

  The trauma of seeing the clash in the street still lingered. She felt light-headed. Queasy. But mostly she felt alone. She missed the blue-gold streets of polished marnite, the tittering sands and whispering tea trees. She missed figs and honey cakes and the vast bulrushes beneath Pandragor’s palatial quartz terraces where the Bainmum spread out into the White Marshes and fed the irrigation lines.

  She missed warmth.

  Inhaling the thick smoke-filled cold of the city and fighting off vertigo as zeppelins wheeled overhead, Taelin started climbing again. By the next corner she had doubled her height above the street. From her new perspective she could see that she stood on one of the edges of an enormous pyramid of brick whose slopes continued to rise above her. The steps led on, traveling south, but she could not yet see the peak. Or could she? She pushed herself up the broad treads toward the next corner.

  Reaching it, she found herself on a dizzying precipice with a historical marker that told her she stood two hundred sixty feet above the city. The marker formed the southeast corner of a vast plaza that topped the immense frustum of brick.

  From the top of the stairs she overlooked the entire city with the exception of the Hold: Isca Castle reared triumphantly to the north. Everything else spilled away into brown-black spindles of shingle and stone.

  From the enormity of the sky, Taelin turned her attention inward, to the objects at the center of the square. A dais of some buttery white mineral seemed to levitate just above the acre-wide surface. It consisted of three layers, or steps, topped with a hypaethral grove of black columns. Although the exact arrangement spread too broadly for her to be certain, she got the impression that the dais formed a huge disc and that the columns spiraled into its center.

  Her skin prickled. Tapestries of red silk undulated, effecting a kind of sanctum that seemed to float, cordoned from but flirting with the sky. It felt like the ground was tipping beneath her feet as she caught provocative, dizzying glimpses of people bending amid the black pillars, cradling silver vessels, glancing in her direction before vanishing again into the billowing scarlet canopies.

  Everything was in motion. The clouds, the distant zeppelins, the sails of cloth and the people behind them. Even the vast milky dais that supported the columns seemed to bob slightly …

  Taelin felt her stomach pitch. She closed her eyes but her balance was off. She had to kneel down. She felt grains of stone roll under her fingers.

  Her esophagus clamped down on an airy pressure that climbed up the back of her throat. She got control of it. After a few moments the feeling subsided and her head cleared enough that she risked opening her eyes.

  At the edge of the dais stood a man, exceptionally tall and pale, wrapped in a single luxurious heap of long dark fur. His feet were similarly booted to the knee. He was talking with a journalist who had just ended the conversation by saying something she couldn’t parse in a loud, cheerful voice. Then the journalist and his shoulder bag turned in her direction. He smiled at her, raised his bulky camera and snapped a litho.

  Fantastic.

  Caught for all time: kneeling at the temple of Sena Iilool.

  She struggled to her feet and rested a moment. The man in the fur wrap came over. He smelled of overly sweet perfume and his smile was too symmetrical, like something coming out from behind a mirror.

  “May I help you?”

  Taelin pushed her goggles back into her hair. “Yes, I’m wondering if you … if your congregation … if your religion really believes that Sena Iilool is a god?”

  “You smell like apples.” He looked down at her with lavender eyes, deep-set under yellow brows.

  Taelin scowled. She wanted to tell him that he smelled rather cloying himself but she wasn’t interested in a pissing contest. “Is that right? You people believe she’s a god? Goddess? Whatever?”

  The man said, “Belief is not required.”

  “This is a temple, isn’t it?” said Taelin.

  The man’s smile diminished but his eyes almost incandesced in the sunlight. “We do not answer questions here.” His head was shaved but a nap of blond velvet covered his pure white skull.

  “You’re not interested in converting anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Can I look around?”

  “Yes. But please, do not disturb the colligation.”

  “What’s a colligation?” Her father being a lawyer, she understood a colligation of facts used to support an argument but …

  “We do not answer questions here.”

  “Oookay. I’ll just look around then.” She gave him a smile that he did not return.

  The dais hovered twenty feet behind him. She wanted to crouch down and look under the bottom step, discover if the whole massive thing were really floating, but to do so felt childish.

  Instead she walked toward it, set one foot on the impossibly smooth monument and stepped up. As she did, she felt her nausea return momentarily. Just a flicker at the bottom of her stomach.

  She paused, then climbed the other two steps and passed one of the red veils.

  The scene that greeted her sent her vision rolling. Among the snapping silks knelt a stunning host, mostly pale Pplarians. They faced north, knees on cushions of scarlet embroidered with black. In front of each worshiper stood a two-foot amphora of dark glass. The mouths of the amphorae were wider than their bellies, spun into broad funnels by whatever glassblower supplied them.

  To the right of each worshiper knelt a man or woman in red silk who assisted them through the act of oblation: inserting the needle, depositing the other end of the vacuum tube into the mouth of the amphora. Taelin watched in horror as row after row of phlebotomists methodically went through the venepuncture, then bandaged up their patients and helped them lie down, heads on the pillows that had previously cushioned their knees.

  Once their patients were comfortable, the phlebotomists raised smaller silver amphorae, spilling liquid from these sparingly into the larger vessels before capping the tall black amphorae with ornate lids.

  Young vergers with silver trays of fruit, drinks and biscuits glided the spiral aisles.

  Eventually the devoted were led out along the spiral and a new worshiper was guided in to take their place. The turnaround was slow; people trickled in and out. They seemed to both come from and disappear toward the region farthest from where Taelin stood.

  Taelin watched as a phlebotomist lifted one of the black amphorae. She clutched it close to her body with both arms, and hauled it north to yet another dais where she ascended three more steps and entrusted her burden to a muscular Pplarian. He in turn labeled and hung it at a forty-five-degree angle from a magnificent silver scaffold. It swung gently with others that had been filled and made Taelin’s stomach hurt.

  None of the worshipers spoke, but Taelin could hear even above the snapping silks, the dribbling echoes of the hollow amphorae, the colligation, the vast sound of blood collecting drop by drop, which she now realized had to be linked somehow, impossibly, to Sena’s use of holomorphy.

  It was not so cold here. Whatever the custard-colored dais was made of, Taelin could feel a mild warmth coming off it. The whole thing repulsed her. She backed out of the temple, down the steps and nearly into the towering Pplarian who had snuck up behind her.

  Her fear, both at the Pplarian’s sudden proximity and the memory of what she had just seen, boiled out as anger. “How … what are you doing here?”

  The man’s face twisted like white plastic at the edge of a fire. Taelin backpedaled, nearly falling in her effort to widen the distance between them. His word
s barely reached through her shock and horror. “The Omnispecer is not like you,” he said. “Axioms do not require belief.”

  Taelin gaped. One of his lavender eyes glared at her, bulging and cycloid while the other seemed to have been sucked back into his head, partly hidden by a wrinkled sphincter of bleached flesh.

  His grin returned, broad and venomous.

  “We do not answer questions here,” he called out to her as she turned, still stumbling, dashing for the stairs.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Caliph woke with a silverfish on his face. How it had survived the cold, he didn’t know. Nor did he know what time it was. He was wrapped in a blanket (another mystery) with the leather desk chair reclined beneath him like a sling. The muscles in his neck had stiffened. He rolled forward, chair tipping upright, and noticed a fire burning on the hearth.

  Clearly, his staff had found him.

  He picked up the book that had fallen to the floor. Curiosity about the characters in the journal drove him to find the next entry.

  Journal Entry: C. Tides: 543, Y.o.T. Crow: Mas—Harvest, 15th: N.H.

  Arrian Glimendula lived roughly twenty thousand years ago. Scholars place her at nineteen thousand, nine hundred fifty years old, give or take a year or two. My ruined estate in Khloht, overgrown with seventy years of jungle is still new by comparison. My poisoned servants are fresh gossip, sweet golden dates rotting in the sun. In the company of such a beast of legend, I am nothing. In this, I take comfort … despite the fact that it is a lie.

  With sweet shuwt tinctures I was there, inside of her as I have been inside of others. My sense of self is muddy. As is my sense of time. I look out through Arrian’s eyes, see and sense Corwin’s adolescent frustrations. When Arrian met the woman on the ship Corwin stayed in the shadows, watching. After a while, he turned and marched up the coast, skipping stones into the Loor. The woman was Ublisi. She had come to Soth carrying the Red Book.

  By then, the Cisrym Ta was already nearly three thousand years old (H.X.) yet it glistened like the day the Ublisi had bound it. The Ublisi stayed at Soth for three years; then, on Arrian’s eighteenth birthday, I returned through a poisoned stupor, escaping the jungle’s sultry spell on what fools might call bent time.