Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  Duana stood on one arm of an enormous crescent beach. The white dunes rolled down to the Seas of Yoloch and standing in the drifts were hideous monuments.

  She could see clouds spread out over the sea—weather? underground?—and black waves rolling in, lapping the beach.

  Thirst consumed her. Duana ran for the surf.

  It was far. Farther than she thought. But when she reached it, she dropped down on all fours and guzzled like a dog. Her ancillas went too. It was fresh water, but it did nothing for her thirst. She drank until her belly felt ready to burst but her mouth and throat still burned.

  Silver-blue light licked out from each wave and rolled slowly up the cavern walls. It illuminated great cascades of prehistoric mineral deposits, grotesque mushroom shelves of stone.

  Duana gasped. It looked like a storm was coming, blowing in off the cavern’s horizon. She could see rain on the sea.

  Her stomach was aching. Her mouth was dry. Duana looked for Sena and found her, moving along the beach, between the three great monuments.

  Her eyes struggled to take the full perspective in.

  Each monument was a black claw, broad at the base, hooked at the top. Each one’s selcouth dimensions must have exceeded seven hundred feet in diameter alone. Their tips were several times higher: hundreds of thousands of tons of rampant basalt roaring upward.

  After many moments of delirium, Duana shouted at her ancillas. Sound barely seemed to travel. Or maybe she was going deaf. Or maybe the sound of the surf crushed everything else. It didn’t make sense how they had gotten separated, but her girls had fallen behind. Two black dots floundered in the sand. She shouted at them again.

  They began to run toward her. While Duana waited for them, she scanned the beach for Sena, struggling to see through warped air. She didn’t understand what was happening. She was breathing. It felt like air moving in and out of her lungs, but it was puzzling-hard to catch her breath. In the same way her body had ignored the water, the air had become a kind of pudding made of dream, an egg white riddle that mired her at the edge of this impossible sea and refused to properly oxygenate her blood.

  Farther down the beach, she saw Sena moving effortlessly, widening the distance between them. Duana began to panic. The sand was so deep and soft that she could barely move. She lurched forward.

  The light sent shadows rolling at incorrect angles. It drew her vision uncontrollably up one of the huge black monuments as she worked her way down the beach. Try as she might to focus on the white-black surf, her eyes tailed up, following the curve of that first great hook of stone. Like a dog’s tooth, corrupted by decay from where the waves had licked it, its far side was pitted and honeycombed with caves. Duana imagined getting lost inside. To think of its origin was to free fall through time.

  She could not take her eyes off it. It tore into her head. Every acre of its surface was smothered with designs like those endured upon the Stairs. Millions of semiform shapes. Billions of hours of cutting into stone. But there had never been armies of gibbering slaves, had there? Drooling mad as they worked themselves to death? Not even all the Lua’groc that had ever lived could have carved these things.

  The infinite detail, each and every shape unique—the Stairs, the monuments, had not been built.

  Images of giant mollusks molding their shells came unbidden to Duana’s mind, a stiffening of dream jellies. The excretions of deities that produced, instead of shells, the fabric of the dimension Duana herself had once called real. Never again would she think this way. This was a spawning ground where giant urchin forms had lashed limbs to mighty hooks of stone and agonized through the throes of unnatural birth. A soft place, still wet and uncured, but perhaps eventually it would harden like the rest of the world, into real places.

  How she understood this, or how she imagined this, she didn’t know. It felt like a telepathic bestowal of mercy, an explanation for what was clearly impossible. Epiphany in place of salvation. It felt like Sena was inside her head.

  Duana fell, both palms sinking into sand. She looked up where Sena skirted the sea and the surf unwound like a white thread tangling and untangling in the dark.

  The light, Duana realized was coming from the sea, many fathoms deep. Everything was in motion, carvings, clouds, and water. It was too much. Naci fell down beside her like a bag of laundry, unable to stand.

  Duana watched the waves reflect in long glittering patterns as Sena set out from shore. The wind took the Eighth House’s clothing in great billows of black as the weird light streamed up around her. She walked carefully among the waves, barefoot, moving out, heading for the third great monument whose base was buried in the sea.

  Duana could do nothing but watch as the Eighth House moved toward that incredible structure. She had no equation, no strength to follow.

  Naci was unconscious, probably from dehydration or lack of air. Duana realized this was it. There was nowhere left for them to go.

  * * *

  SENA felt the temperature drop. The wind changed as her foot came up off the wave and hit the slimy stone below the Chamber’s door. She stepped up onto the broad pitted plinth that jutted from the monument’s shoreward face. In the center stood a single door with a seal instead of a lock: a ring of gold blazoned with a dead eye at center, white and velvety, without iris or pupil.

  The fact that there were three monuments here, on the shore, seemed symbolic. It gave her hope that Nathaniel’s sum was right. She faced the seal and waited.

  This was not about keys. This was about tokens, ambits and permission. Despite all her power, Sena could go no farther. So she waited for the Yillo’tharnah, who had unfolded all the mysteries, who had written on her skin, to open yet another door. They had invested her with seeing to Their lusts and, to present, she had served Them. So this was an indulgence, but she was still obliged to pay in blood, as she had done with the lock on the book.

  She did not look back at the qloin. She did not want to see the gruesome fruit of her decision. But she heard the waves of Yoloch fill with hideous moving shapes, and black curling forms framed the periphery of her terrified eye. The surf heaved, raucous, delighted and strange and Sena imagined on Duana’s lips, a fragment of amateur prayer, spare syllables at most, before the qloin quickened and passed away into mist.

  Sena made no move to save them. These were the crimson drops to wet the tumblers. She staved off guilt by telling herself that the Sisterhood had made its choice long ago. All who swore the Sisterhood’s oaths and learned its combinations were part of the Witchocracy that had burned her mother at Juyn Hel.

  She would see them dead, all of them, a great bloody figure in her rising formula whose only remaining variable was when.

  As the seal on the Chamber cracked, she wondered for an instant if she was just a minion, some small obeisant thing, squirming in a tray, squeezing out predictable results to whatever stimulus They gave her.

  “I have forsaken my race,” she said to Nathaniel, then realized, there may have been no black tendrils in the sea at all. She looked down and saw in the vapors of dream that her hands were red and sticky—so perfectly scarlet against the black cyst beyond the open door. Some metaphor of guilt imposed by Them? Or was it her? Was it all her? She couldn’t remember whether she had whispered for their death.

  In the end it didn’t matter.

  Beyond the doorway gleamed the Cabal’s gold: shimmering beautifully, resplendent as any lucre. But only the insanity of obsession could make this gold shine. And shine it did: golden orbs molten, singing their way through layers of dream.

  Is this how you expected it to feel? she thought at Nathaniel.

  But the shade did not answer. In the great abyss she realized that she was, for the first time in many months, completely alone.

  17U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Soon.

  CHAPTER

  20

  I am not Arkhyn Hiel. And I was never Nathaniel Howl. I am Gringling. I am a Writer and Eater of Time.

  * *
*

  CALIPH re-read the passage where he had left off and paused again. It had to be some kind of joke.

  He reflected on whether he wanted to keep reading. What reason could Sena have for doing this? Handing him these books? Why was it so important to her? He reached into his pocket for his bottle of tablets. When he shook it, it rattled. There were not many left.

  He put one into his mouth and thumbed the bandage he had used as a bookmark. He scowled skeptically at the words on the page.

  When I ascended on the syrupy fumes of pimplota blossoms and left the luminous moths behind, my soul went south—searching for a phylactery. Below me, friends and flowers burnt like incense sticks beneath the Rain of Fire. Their smoke carried me. I rose and crossed the sky to float down into the desert, downy as a bit of ash.

  Like worms of flame working through a cinder, my grief consumed me. My daughter was gone.

  I wanted to die.

  But when I alit on the aubergine skin of a woman reclined on a palanquin, I burnt straight in. She was a rani, a princess of the dunes. Not only was she my salvation, but my first entry to the world of dying flesh.

  Her clean dark body carried me through beds and temples and pools open to the moons, in and out of silk and cabric and satin by the yard. In the evenings we drenched ourselves in sandalwood winds above the River Ghaan, which has long since been effaced by fifteen thousand years of sand.

  Never have I been so rich as when I was with her. The very sheets of tissue kept in the scented box beside our water-throne18 were trimmed with golden thread: an extravagance that pales in comparison to a hundred thousand more.

  She was the enemy, a rumor we barely knew at Soth. But her power was magnificent. At dusk she basked in the celestial glow of silent engines, blue-white light that burnt across the river from the temple walls—and so, with the sinking of my Gringling isle, I laid prejudice aside.

  I took what I could get.

  Because the journey of the tincture, which had brought me to her, was not a certain thing. To permanently transmigrate is a possibility at best, rather than a dependable plan; if a vessel cannot be found, if wind off the sun should turn your flight awry, or if you are bewitched by lights and wander into other lands, there is no coming back. To escape death by shuwt tincture requires that you embrace the very thing. It is a journey that flows from a vial with a fatal dose.

  My outcomes have been lucky in each and every case, but the novice should certainly forbear.

  In my first vessel, the whip of manipulation proved elusive. Tucked inside my sable princess, I remained a passenger, gazing out the window at the countryside rushing by. Only after several hundred years of absorbing the world through her skin did I obtain a taste of true dominion as her mind began to fail. I can honestly say that I was more responsible than she in fashioning her tomb.

  Luck again had found me.

  I began my preparations thanks to her endless wealth. Never again would it be so easy. I had but to move her mouth and a nation of slaves obeyed.

  I ordered an array of three rubies cut as a trial run and melted all her jewelry into a bobbin of platinum wire. Two of the scarlet stones were large. The third I had chiseled to perfect dimensions so that, were I of a mind to dip it in enamel, it could have passed as one of my teeth.

  The wires were fitted to my arms and chest, my lower back and thighs. They traced my throat with preconceived designs. It was a kind of armor made of air. A kind of intricate lie.

  It would prove useless in the end.

  But it was a start.

  In the last days of her life, her slaves accompanied me into her tomb with ten days worth of food. Then I ordered them out and had the portals sealed. I lit the torches and sat in the empty passageways of stone and thought about my daughter, abandoned in the darkness of Soth. I imagined her torches had long run out. I imagined her alone, frightened, wanting an answer, wanting a friendly voice to tell her what had gone wrong.

  But that would never come. It was my holomorphy, my math along with the Ublisi’s that had failed her. Her wails would go unanswered. Her pleading prayers would not be heard. She would throw tantrums in the dark. She would scream until her voice left her. She would hunger for the taste of food—but would suffer on without it. It made me sick to think of this and that I had no means to reach her.

  I could not even use a tincture to penetrate the depths, lest my untethered soul be lost to the Yillo’tharnah in the dark.

  I thought about the rubies. One for me and one for her and the tooth for someone else …

  The wires were a failure. The rubies remained undarkened, in their little frames of wood.

  A test. This is just a test, I thought. So I ate my last meal and fitted the gems across my eyes. Then I lay back on my bier of stone to give my desert princess some semblance of dignity in death. Then I drank the tincture for a second time. My lovely ancient queen. She may have been the only woman outside my daughter for whom I ever bore a facsimile of love.

  When the tincture took hold, I tried to lie still so that her body would not be disfigured with the contortions of my undoing. And then, as her heart failed like a worm after rainfall, trapped by its own blindness on that concrete slab, I found myself standing above her. Three hundred years made it hard to say good-bye, but time was short for me to find another vessel. So I started walking.

  I left the tomb and the desert behind. I went north, through mountain and jungle, across the Lake of Sky.

  Time bent for me—but always forward. My journey seized in a vise, bowed beneath a sledge, perpendicular, until it nearly broke. But just before my tether snapped, I found him, an untold thousand years away: a boy playing with his brother in the sand, teasing scorpions with a stick as if to say: remember.

  I had not yet used tincture to see Corwin on the parapet with the centipede but that was hardly relevant. With time and the tincture, with enough centuries of memory, one learns that everything has happened before. In the moments before I sidestepped my destruction and walked into the boy, I saw many things.

  That boy’s name was Arkhyn Hiel.

  I crawled up through his bones to roost in his rib cage like a tumor. We played late that night.

  Perhaps because his mind was young, I found my way into his brain far more quickly. Though my assimilation was swift, certain inclinations and gentle dispositions that belonged to him ultimately became mine. Toward the end of his use, I broke even those and assumed absolute command. But these permanent journeys, you understand, are only forward. It is the temporary ones that lead us most often into the past.

  Again, I digress.

  Arkhyn was born in Pandragor where the skies sear your eyeballs with blue and the sands are the color of crystallized honey. In a narrow strip of green that grows along the Bainmum River, I grew up inside him, chasing viperflies and moeritherium.

  His organs were sound, devoid of fatal flaws. No blueprints for malignance. No sequence ticking down to infirmity and collapse. I would be able to run this body hard.

  When my new father moved our family to Iycestoke I found the Cabal for the first time. They were searching for the book. I stayed late at the synagogue under the pretense of prayer but eavesdropped on the priests instead. They spoke in quiet voices behind a purple drape.

  I was clumsy. They discovered me. But I confounded their impulse to murder me with my ancient Gringling tongue. They discerned that I was a precocious child, sly and willing to take their secret oaths. They put the Hilid Mark above my navel and I vowed to serve them to the end.

  Little could they know the monster they had let into their ranks. I made a banquet of their texts, every rumor they had collected about the book. It was as if their organization had been established for the single purpose of teaching me what had happened since I lost my daughter to the cataclysm at Soth.

  As my brain acquired secrets it became tunneled and deep. Paranoia flowed like an eternal hot breath from the priests’ yawning mouths, until I was coated every inch with their
talk, their armor and their weapons.

  I was soon coated with sweat and blood and the deep fungal grime of the jungle. My toil had turned from collecting knowledge to collecting treasure for the Cabal and finally to quests for less practical spoils. I had already traveled to the markless deserts and, by memory alone, unearthed enough riches from the disintegrated empire of my rani queen to fund a thousand lives.

  Between the desert princess and the body of Arkhyn Hiel lay uncounted years. These are the mysteries of the tincture.

  In my modern life, the Cabal sent me to Veyden villages, searching for a new kind of gold. In unweeded ruins I pieced together the languages of Khloht and realized the Veydens had discovered our carvings—Gringling carvings—on tumbled slabs of stone. Our secrets had leaked into the tribes. The Veydens had rediscovered the recipe for our tinctures. Such familiarity allowed me to make too swift friends with Veyden elders along the equator.

  One sultry winter afternoon when the sky was sliced open like an elongated wound and red light streamed over Bujait Mountain, I made a terrible mistake.

  Having grown careless in my observances of village protocol and mistaking myself for a full-fledged member of the tribe, I did the unthinkable.

  How can an entity as old as me, so full of accumulated knowledge fall to…? But this is the path of men. To endlessly repeat our errors by sleeping in our flesh. The flesh moves while the mind sleeps and it will justify itself, atop a mound of bodies if need be.

  It was hot that day. No hotter than normal, I suppose. But the heat had built up in us, like birds in roasters. The jungle steamed and stank.

  I was thrown out of the village near the hot springs at Krom. The mistake I had made was simple. I asked the Hija of the village to let me see the burial ground of his fallen kings, a secret the Veydens kept to prevent demonic possession of the royal bodies. My error cost me eight months’ worth of labor and I could not return to the Cabal empty-handed.