Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  Sena liked ice cream regardless of the season.

  He wound the thermal crank and flicked the lid on his chemiostatic watch. He was fuming. He plunked down and dished himself some dessert. She was uncontrollable. Unreliable. Unfathomable. And what was he going to do about it? Evict her?

  After nearly two years on the throne, he had a grip on most aspects of his domain. He knew how to handle the burgomasters. Multinational relations were a work in progress. But Sena?

  There was a steaming cup of milk and honey on the table, recently placed by one of the servants. He pushed it aside and opened the wine.

  Partly because he didn’t want to think about her and partly because he couldn’t help it, he tried instead to focus on his country’s politics. He could already hear the journalists.

  Have the Pandragonians given us any ultimatums, your majesty?

  Is solvitriol research still going on at Glossok?

  No and no.

  But the problem of the solvitriol accord dragged him down onto the nearby chaise. He grabbed a pillow and lay back, staring up at the ceiling. No ultimatums yet, he would lie.

  What would Nuj Ig’nos report once he arrived in Pandragor? Caliph had seen machinations like this before: the charade of diplomacy laying the groundwork for a bloody inevitability. He sat up and poured himself another glass of wine.

  He had tried to assure the visiting diplomats that Stonehold’s solvitriol research had been abandoned; that the facility at Glossok had been shut down. But tours hadn’t satisfied his critics. Now they were demanding access to Stonehavian factories, warehouses, even the cellars of Isca Castle.

  “I can’t do it,” he said aloud. “Letting them in is a no-win. We’ll wind up like an old circus beast, limping through hoops, extending our paw every time some ticket-holding monarch wants proof we’ve been declawed.” The second glass … or was it the third?… went down like the first (or the second). Too fast. It puckered his mouth.

  No proof you give will be enough.

  Caliph frowned. “No. It won’t.” He almost looked around for the speaker.

  Solvitriol’s just a pretense. It was a breathy scratch inside his head more than a voice. Caliph looked at the bottle of wine and noticed it was over half gone. “Yore absolutely right. Alani and eye whir thinking the same thing. Why wood they come awl the whey up hear win they’ve got wore on they’re hands rite next door?”

  The voice in his head was asexual and monotone. It reminded him, for blurry reasons, of his childhood. Its answer felt miraculous.

  Caliph scowled.”What dew yew mean, ’the whiches told the south’?” he asked the invisible speaker.

  He pictured his uncle’s book, the Cisrym Ta. For no reason that he could think of, its faded red and filthy hide rose up in his mind. The room had grown distant, it reached him only through a filter of gauzy impressions, one of which was that the presence he was talking with smiled like a sarchal hound.

  My uncle’s book …

  In his head, he heard the words: It’s mine!

  Caliph didn’t find it strange. He almost laughed as he took another drink. It tasted like brine.

  Caliph pawed his face with clumsy fists. “Why everyone care about an errant text ewe bot in Sandren four five scythes?”

  You mean arrant?

  Caliph laughed. A moment of clarity seized him. “Ewe told me its pages were pounced from stillborns! That’s fucking errant!”

  He spoke as though the voice in his head belonged to Sena, though he knew with vague growing terror it did not.

  “Why the Pandragor want that book?”

  Iycestoke wants it too.

  Caliph felt the words sink through the wine in his stomach and settle at the bottom. “Do they? Then why dun the Three Kings jush bye it? Ice-stoke can by anything. Ann if we’re don’t selling, they can shend there thieves two steel it … bam!” He clapped his hands.

  He looked toward the voice but saw only his empty hand. He heard a padded thud. The glass was empty too, rolling on the rug.

  Caliph eased back into the chaise, watching his hand flicker as twilight wobbled through the wet windows across from him.

  He could feel the wine smoldering in his cheeks. The chaise was rotating on a slow teetering axis.

  If I can just survive this year, he thought, don’t get assassinated at the conference on the fifteenth. Just make it through the year. He closed his eyes. The voice was gone. He heard the wind pick up and the rain turn flaky and cold. Make it through the year and I’ll walk away from all of this …

  He envisioned snow creeping down into the courtyard where black trees stretched spidery vaults over a late milk-and-sugar sky. The door opened and the scent of southern perfume slunk over him while the world sank into huckleberry night.

  “Caliph?” This time it was real. It was not the hissing in his head. This time it was Sena’s voice. He struggled against the darkness to find her. He had missed that voice. So much. “Caliph?”

  But he was feeling warm and silly, head curled around the wine. He muttered something to the darkness as her cool fingers touched his burning cheek.

  * * *

  “PEW … smells like boy.”

  Sena drew back from Caliph’s flushed skin.

  But the stuffiness was different from the numbers and the presence that had been here. She stared through the wall at a residue of integers—which was something she could do.

  This was her new life, her new eyes, just one year old, encapsulated, isolated and different from everyone else. This life beyond life had stranded her on an island that was both unapproachable and incomprehensible to the people that moved around it. People shrunk away from her. People feared her.

  It was not so different from being insane. Indeed, she still wondered if that wasn’t a more elegant solution. It was impossible to relate to anyone anymore. In the sunlight that slipped around her season-to-season, melting away her days, the busy milling throngs had become high-speed patterns. People were predictable static. Background noise. Faint chemical-electrical residues in air. She had little patience for them: self-absorbed and oblivious under the racing cycles of the sky.

  Only the Pplarians understood.

  In her hand she held a crumpled letter from Yul, her “humble servant.” It contained numbers important only to her. A key to the chambers. Chambers inside of chambers. The numbers were soaked in blood. She had read the letter without looking at it. She would always be reading it.

  Yul was Pplarian. He did not worship her. But like the rest of the Pplarian nation, he understood the gravity of her situation. Once, the Pplarians had come here, out of the dripping blackness. They had distilled on the mountains, seventeen thousand years ago. Because of their origins, they recognized the markings on her skin, and took pity on her. They had seen this before.

  * * *

  SENA scooped herself a cup of melting ice cream and looked around the room.

  The presence that had been here with Caliph had burnt numerical anomalies into the air, like the trace of cigarettes hours after the smoker had left. It troubled her.

  She watched over Caliph’s sleep with involuntary math, hexing and double-hexing the doors and windows to the parlor without blood, making sure they were secure at the same time she concentrated on finding the intruder. Her brain no longer focused on only one thing at a time. She stepped across the hall, into the ballroom. Her eyes, cut with tiny sigils, sorted through the glitter of New Market beyond a terrace of three walls.

  Out in the darkness, she discerned people talking, journalists finishing up articles for tomorrow’s editions, digging through her affairs with spade-like tongues. She collected all kinds of information, most of which she already knew.

  As she searched for the specter she exhaled softly on the windowpane and drew a flower-like shape in the glass, something habitual and only tangentially related to her current concerns. She looked through the shape. Out amid the pale sizzle of Isca’s blackened streets she found it.

 
It had departed from the parlor in haste, low and ebeneous. He—it—knew she was furious that it had dared to speak to Caliph. Now it thought to hide, hanging away, between the upright fingers of buildings, levisomnous and horrid.

  Why was it here, bothering Caliph? A charade of affection? Trying to fool her into believing that it could care for anything outside itself? Or did it know?

  She whispered to it—the thing—miles away, warning it not to come again. She threatened it softly, carefully, telling it that she could change her mind. She reminded it that she was not obligated to do its bidding.

  The thing dislodged itself from the district of Maruchine. Unafraid, it sneered and exited the city, billowing out through West Gate. It skirred beneath winter trees that clutched over Howl Lane. In an instant it had vanished, not into, but through the house on Isca Hill.

  “Soon,” Sena whispered. The word fogged her drawing. “Soon—soon.” Then she left the ballroom and wandered through the hallways until dawn.

  CHAPTER

  7

  In less than a week, Taelin resigned herself to the fact that snow and ice made new construction an absurd proposition. Men in the business simply laughed at her when she suggested breaking ground in Phisku—or the month of Tes as they called it in the north. Laying foundations was simply not plausible in the Duchy of Stonehold at this time of year. Taelin fretted a whole day before making up her mind. On Day of Whispers she packed it in and bought St. Remora instead.

  What she got in place of a church built to her specifications was a dark ruined hulk in Lampfire Hills and a hundred thousand beks in savings.

  As part of the break with her father, she had transferred her entire portion of the family’s wealth to Isca’s Crullington Bank. She knew many people would see it as a half-witted purchase: Saint Remora’s time-blackened facade of leaping creatures had melted from centuries of sour rain. It had been boarded up where Knife Street met Mark and squatters and worm gangs had taken up residence in it despite legends that pervaded the area.

  Taelin discovered most of the bad history after she had signed the title, never hearing from the bank about the murders or the whore’s guild that had installed the crimson glass. Prostitution candles still littered the building. Taelin didn’t even know what they were until one of the squatters explained fast burners.

  There had been drugs and violence and profiteering here, not to mention the questionable myth of the bortghast. Some urban specter the homeless siffilated about.

  To the positive, St. Remora lay only ten minutes’ walk from her aunt and uncle’s house. And she had successfully filed for the city to patch the building’s circulatory system on the basis that the church qualified as an historical landmark. Happy to trade the ancient foreclosure for a public record with his name stamped on the building’s promising new future, Mayor Kneads quickly capitulated, pulling down the last board and handing her the key (a moment captured by litho which subsequently made front page). Only when they flipped the power back on did she notice that the cathedral’s facade had not flared with oily orange and brown-green light.

  Rather it had glowed dimly all along.

  “Yeah,” the man from the city had said with something between boredom and condescension. “We don’t really know where those draw juice from. There’s a file on ’em down at public. You can check it out for yourself if you want.”

  The story behind the garish colors was that two decades ago, some eccentric investor had installed the dials asymmetrically across the building’s front before letting the loan lapse. He had replaced the rose window with a cluster of glowing clocks that didn’t seem to have much to do with telling time. The metholinate boilers in the basement did siphon some of their power into turbines that charged chemiostatic anomalies at the front of the building. Every time the boiler fired, the eleven large hermetic dials flickered with a slight surge of luminosity. But boilers or not … the dials never dimmed completely.

  Taelin hated them. Come spring, if she could spare the money, she would have them torn out.

  On the second of Tes, she bought detergent and wire brushes and put the squatters to work. Those who wanted could stay, with the provision that they earned their keep and followed her rules. Grinning dutifully, several bedraggled souls helped her scrape candle wax from the floor and scrub where campfires had blackened the frescoed ceiling.

  In the afternoon, Taelin caught Palmer smoking beggary seeds on the postern steps.

  When she scolded him, he handed them over with nothing more than a tilt of the head and a shrug of the shoulders. She was surprised by his acquiescence but pleased as she slipped them into her pocket and guided him back inside.

  The two of them spent the next couple days bringing some of the original polish back to the front doors. None of the imagery related to Nenuln, but Taelin didn’t care. The carvings and paint offered bright alternatives to worm gang graffiti and soot. All she needed was a warm, relatively clean place to shelter her flock.

  The flock consisted of nine people, three of which had been squatters. Taelin fed them twice a day so that, with the boilers restored and the windows replaced, the comfort of their former haunt far surpassed what it had previously been.

  On the sixth, Taelin woke up to the smell of Palmer’s body, right next to hers. He smelled of beggary smoke and was difficult to rouse. Her room didn’t have a lock, a detail she knew she would have to remedy later that day.

  When she finally got Palmer awake, he smiled sheepishly. She frowned and told him kindly but clearly that this was her space and that he couldn’t just plop down and sleep wherever he wanted. He looked confused with the sunlight blasting his bright blue eyes, pale skin and orange hair in a mad snarl on top of his head. A scrawny Naneman, wasted by the streets, but with a decentness and a sincerity still present in his eyes. He didn’t argue, just nodded quietly and gathered up his clothes.

  She made him breakfast. Tebeshian coffee for herself.

  After that she put him to work caulking cracks in the basement and set herself at a small table to formulate her budget and forecast expenses. The savings made by buying instead of building had stacked up in the church’s larder: great sacks of wheat and shelves of canned goods. The northern brands offered no reassurance, all of them strange. Without a sense of quality, she chose the canisters of powdered milk that seemed the most welcoming: cartoon faces of bovine happiness shining in purple ink.

  By the end of the day, she judged her stores sufficient to maintain the shelter for several months. She could begin pulling some of the burden off Cripple Gate, planning to feed one hundred twenty meals a day. The larger soup kitchen, two miles to the west, served nearly five hundred. But Cripple Gate was supported by Hullmallow Cathedral and the Church of the Mourning Beggar. They had more resources—a fact that didn’t keep them from noticing her efforts.

  Taelin read the paper on the morning of the seventh and smiled. She was making an impact. People knew who her father was. The government couldn’t ignore her for long. And it didn’t. Mail arrived shortly after the paper indicating she would have her audience with Sena Iilool.

  Taelin tried to contain her joy—and her anxiety. Don’t be rash. Be persuasive. This was her chance. The one she had been waiting for. Everything else she had tried in her life had ended in disaster. But this was going to be different. Deep inside, Taelin knew she was still young and inexperienced, perhaps even a bit naive. But she also knew that she was special because, unlike so many other people, she had the desire to do great big fabulous things and that was what she hoped to accomplish here in Isca.

  She wanted to unleash something that would change the world, something they would remember her for. Forever.

  But before attempting to bring public censure down on Sena Iilool, Taelin wanted to meet the woman face-to-face. After all, none of the papers or magazines Taelin had read indicated that Sena’s church had been established by her. Rather, the phenomenon had come out of the Pplar. Whenever a journalist had put forth the quest
ion about people worshiping her, Sena had always politely declined to comment. It gave Taelin hope that eventually the blasphemy would end.

  Taelin spent the rest of the morning rehearsing what she would say. She left the midday meal service in Palmer’s hands, caught a streetcar at five before the hour and arrived on time, eighty minutes later.

  The gates of Isca Castle were free of snow and a traditional Stonehavian carriage shuttled her from the gatehouse, through the south bailey and up to the castle doors. It was a cold ride.

  A butler with the name GILVER pinned on his lapel signed her in.

  After a brisk walk they arrived in a distant wing of the castle. Gilver stopped outside a set of oaken doors, knocked lightly twice then turned the polished porcelain handles and stepped partway in. His body expertly fenced Taelin off in an unobtrusive way. “My lady, the missionary Taelin Rae to see you from the new—”

  “Reestablished,” corrected Taelin.

  Gilver gave her a tight smile then continued. “Reestablished Church of Nenuln.” His voice echoed as if he were talking into a metal drum.

  Though Taelin heard no response, Gilver stepped aside, granting her access to the chamber. This single gesture, and the demeanor with which he performed it, seemed to elevate her from stranger to guest.

  Taelin walked into the stark room.

  A sheet-draped piece of furniture despaired in the southwest corner. Aside from that and a ticking thermal crank the space was empty.

  A woman in tight black riding pants straddled a wooden stool. Blond as a candle flame, she perched proud, silent and eerie.

  Maybe it was her irrational sense that this was an ambush that caused Taelin to look up at the frescoed ceiling. Against the gray plaster, resplendent egg temperas of creepberries and vines had darkened with the centuries.

  The ticking of the thermal crank was deafening.