Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

It was becoming critical that I find the gold.

  I remember Khloht’s hot whisper sent a shiver through me that afternoon because, as I considered my options … the sweat rolling down my back, I knew there were no laws that reached from Iycestoke. There would be no eyes to see. None that mattered. My men were angry and so was I. We did terrible work under that red-streaked sky.

  I remember there was a boy in the village. So beautiful. I wanted to protect him even after I had stilled all his friends. His death seemed to cause it, as if his body was an ember. When he touched the ground the whole village blossomed with fire and reminded me of the beauties of Soth.

  I returned with ’s19 uln. Just as the priests had asked. They did not know I would keep it for myself.

  Caliph stared in disbelief at the foreign words. He looked at the three-letter name written in the Unknown Tongue and pronounced it aloud, softly to himself. “Naen.” Naen-uln? Nenuln? But what was uln? It was not a language Caliph had ever seen. Whatever it meant, it seemed too great a coincidence. Maybe Taelin Rae knew who Arkhyn Hiel was. He decided to ask her as soon as the Odalisque was ready to fly.

  I arrived in the Six Kingdoms, haunted, broken, gibbering like a fool. But I had it. I had found it and pulled it impossibly out of thin air. That was when I discarded my life. I locked my journals away and put the new gold I had found at the bottom of a box. After arriving in Iycestoke, I sent it away from me, by unmarked courier, to the empire of the west, to family that would keep it safe until I could be sure.

  My plan in motion, I exacted my anger on the priests and piled them in a dripping heap across the altar. In the event of capture, I had prepared tincture but took pains to cover my escape. I took my private army of loyal mercenaries south with an escort of Despche visionaries and fled into the heart of Khloht. My servants had no idea what I had done. They built me a house deep in the jungle by this strange ocean and I poisoned them in return so that none would know the way.

  These are the tokens of love. What a father is willing to do for a chance to find his daughter in the dark … before it is too late.

  I wish you could see how my quill presses the paper, my darling child, so richly. The precious Pandragonian ink I brought with in quantity loops and dashes with a scratching sound too loud for this empty stone house to bear.

  What I have done to reach you, you will never know.

  My true plans did not even begin until I reached the jungle, when I lived on tincture, moving here and there, not permanently. Rather I went out to a host of chosen bodies, flitting from one to the next. I became a scholar at Desdae riffling through books; an eccentric entrepreneur who bought a church and set about renovations in the north; a Lua’groc fingerling that spread the plague through Isca’s heart so that the north alone could survive the disease’s second run.

  And in this way, I have written time. I know what is going to happen. You cannot stop my exquisite, burnished, platinum designs …

  But if you are lovely to me, I will write you in.

  I can still do this, though now, finally, my time of tincture use over. Even Nathan Howl is dead … crushed by his own nightmares (my nightmares) when I threw his body from the sea wall in an attempt to verify Their love. Yes, I was fooled.

  They do not love me. They have never loved me. You may take some sadistic pleasure in this. They can only love the Sslia, as I now know, and I am sure They must have laughed in Their alien way as I threw myself into the mist and died against the rocks below.

  Wouldn’t you agree, Sslia? Wouldn’t you agree?

  I have foreseen your eyes, reading these words as only the Sslia can see. Don’t you see the number is three?

  I cut them.

  Three rubies in the dark, still resting with my desert queen.

  There is room for you. I will write you in. I tell you this from the ruins, while the nilith gurgle like deep-throated birds. Oozing beneath banyatha leaves: they are the song of mated love. I will write you in because I have listened to the jungle. You will belong to me.

  I am a voice on a page. You think you can read me. You think you can pick and choose what words to take.

  But I am real—a theater of the grotesque. I have become a quiet rustling horror like Khloht itself, flesh the color of the canopy. I dream awake that tarantulas have nested in my eyes. The directions I left to the Chamber were theoretical, you should be advised.

  I know your journey. And your task.

  I once assumed it would be mine. You should not go to the Chamber.

  Do not think that because I am dissolving with my books into food for millipedes that I have no power or insight. I am offering you a chance at escape. All you have to do is heed my words, listen to my advice. I will carry you. I will write you in!

  When I was a child I wanted to save people. Even before I became Arkhyn Hiel. That is why I welcomed the Ublisi at Soth; why we gathered in the garden on my daughter’s birthday, red book in hand. I wanted to save people: return them to Ahvelle.

  Do you see? Omnispecer? Do you see?

  You must leave what you love behind. This is the axiom of life. Go to Soth for me, where I cannot go.

  Collect my daughter. If you do this thing for me, I will write you in and you and I will see the world freeze in gorgeous brittle panorama, like desiccated insect wings.

  Zylich-a-au-bi, Sslia.

  You will find me in the south.

  Caliph shut the book. Engrossed as he was, he was wrenched out of the text by one of his men.

  “Majesty? Just to inform you, sir. The Odalisque is ready. Ready for departure?”

  The soldier’s strange tone indicated that Caliph must have looked as dazed as he felt.

  He rubbed his eyes and checked his timepiece. His stomach growled, gurgled really, upset by the erratic schedule he was keeping.

  But there was no time for breakfast. He had to get down the mountain. He had an important meeting below.

  As he stood up and nodded that yes he was ready for departure, he thought about his uncle. At the same time, a particular and disturbing memory of Sena reached out to him from their time at college. She had been lying on the floor of the library with him, propped on pillows, books spread across the deep soft carpet. They had been studying for hours. It was her eighth year and final exams were only a few weeks away. Soon she would be graduating, leaving him behind.

  Sena had rolled from her stomach to her side and propped her temple on her palm. The weight of her head had tugged her left eye into a teardrop shape. She had smiled and said, “I wish I could have met your uncle.”

  18Such were the extravagances of the Yilthid queens living on the cusp of the Rauch Desert.

  19U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Nayn.

  CHAPTER

  21

  Sena stood ankle-deep. Phosphorescent currents slurped and swirled in tidal pools within the disintegrating floor. Eddies of foam and sputtering bubbles sprayed from sudden vortices that gurgled throughout the pits.

  The Chamber’s floor, like a glassy black coral, contained holes within holes and the Chamber itself was a series of cysts within the pillar’s husk. To Sena, it seemed fitting, an almost beautiful kind of symbol for what this monument contained. While it looked like an accident of tides and stone, this too—all of it—was a softened collop where reality met dream.

  Here, golden ovoids seared the cochlear darkness without casting true light.

  Sena noticed where Naen’uln’s body had burnt through stone and air. Naen’uln meant Naen’s gold. Where Her massive bulk had brushed and smoldered through the papery skin of here, Her over-embellished shape appeared. The golden ovoids within the Chamber were not physical objects. They were literally Naen’s gold—holes that revealed the color of the God-Thing’s skin.

  Defying geometry, Her massive collection of flesh existed everywhere, as if the world of Adummim were a cloth draped mercifully to hide Her holocaust mass, as if She was the planet’s core. Imaginal buds swelled within Her, pushing Her against the dime
nsions. She sagged atop the hierarchy of all Abominations … Herself, the Daemon-God, enrobed in the wetness of Her delicate mucosa and strung with orbs of star fire that drew cosmic fumes off the sun … She had lain here, synchronous with the tick of stars.

  Sena felt the surface of her body prickle, and the cool startling arrival of a tear, which had broken loose to tremble on her cheek. It was a broadcast, even to herself, of her indescribable awe. Her bones resonated with the frequency coming through the membrane until she almost couldn’t stand. She felt a horrible need to get down, to prostrate herself on the slippery floor, to give in, to give up, to die.

  The holes in the fabric of the world were several feet across, far larger than what Nathaniel Howl had estimated so many years ago and much larger than what Arkhyn Hiel had found in the jungle. Arkhyn had found and contained his tiny pinhole with blood and math. But these were much too wide for that. These holes could not be sewn up.

  Sena stared through the rents and wept. She felt the slackness of her face, the power of the Goddess scouring her mind, scraping out thoughts until she was blank and empty as a bowl. It took energy to think.

  The Monstrosity moved. Here was Caliph’s puzzle. Here was the Monster behind the door. It was too large to see, a magnificent septum, a world of deep-pitted flesh. Bigger than the Glacier Rise, It rubbed its corpulence against reality like a streetwalker grinding on her client’s knee. Endless persistence would soon pay off. A carcass the color of palest amber was on the edge of Its spectacular discharge. But Naen’s gyrations held no promise of life—only an inevitable world of wild, baying entropy to come.

  Twenty thousand years, Sena thought. Her birthing had been postponed. But now, sooner even than Sena had guessed, Naen would free Herself. And this time—unlike the aftermath at Soth when beings from other worlds had stuffed Her back—there was no way to stop its coming.

  The Ublisi’s terrible mistake in the gardens of Jorgill Deep had been undone, but now the Syule were gone and so were the Yilthid. The Pplarians, by their own admission, wielded a fallen and anemic incarnation of their former might. There were no ambits anymore, great enough to hold the Yillo’tharnah back. Soon—soon, They would have Their day.

  The Chamber’s floor rippled with green and purple darkness. Green and purple light.

  Sena tore her eyes from the widening rents and looked toward an anomaly guttering at the end of a chain. She wiped her eyes and scowled at a lamp, suspended over trunks of burst wood and red iron bands. The lamp illuminated a handful of coins that glittered just beneath the water. There had been troves here, secreted by the Willin Droul when the king of Sandren, prior to the evolution of lord mayor, had worn the Hilid Mark.

  “You lit a lamp for me?” Sena said.

  Her question was not addressed to Naen. Naen would never answer. But something else did, a hunched up four-foot entity of denigrated splendor. It was a Lua’groc, come up from the depths to greet her, to see her fabled arrival in the cyst.

  “Hagh, hagh, haughphssss.” The Lua’groc’s laugh-snort resembled tuberculosis. A shadow of a talon crept across the Chamber wall and pointed toward the flame that screwed thick black filaments of smoke into the draft.

  “Is dreamt, Sslia—lamp is dreamt.” Its molestation of human sound did not interfere with Sena’s ability to understand. Its words were irrelevant. She understood that the lamp was fabricated. But why? Why would They dream a light for her? That was the bit she couldn’t fathom. She could not make sense of Yillo’tharnahic logic.

  More spasmodic coughing belched from the Lua’groc’s glass-toothed mouth. Sena detected a shimmer covering its body, a cloak of purple silk that had been dreamt dry. She averted her eyes. She did not enjoy this. The burden of seeing everything was often too much, and she felt a touch of felicity for the way that the vapors of Yoloch damped her sight.

  “You dun bring the book,” the Lua’groc croaked.

  “Would I be Sslia if I were that foolish?”

  The click of its interlocking teeth communicated a smile.

  Sena looked over its head to where the end of her quest—the origins of the navels of the world—rested on a simple black-glass shrine.

  “Come count them,” the fish-priest burped.

  Sena walked past him and stood before the shelf.

  Two.

  Her eyes roamed the tiny space in vain for another moment but, no. It was as she had thought.

  She crumpled to her knees and rested her forearm on the shrine’s black edge. It didn’t matter that she had expected this. She rested her head against the cushion of her arm. The sound of water bubbling at her knees, in and out of the holes in the floor, seemed to sob right along with her. It soaked her through and through. With this cruel delivery of the truth, she felt all hope die.

  For a long time she knelt, considering the future, letting the sea purl in around her. “That settles it,” she whispered to herself.

  Nathaniel’s journals had deceived her. He could not write her in. She had almost dared to believe, not in his promise, but in the number. In a small corner of herself, she had believed—like a little fool.

  But there were only two stones on the shelf. She scolded herself viciously for kneeling down here, in front of Them.

  Two was the number. How could she have ever believed anything else? The knowledge shook her with its power.

  She held her stomach with her hand.

  From behind, the Lua’groc brushed her shoulder with a tentative, hunger-driven talon.

  “Don’t touch me!” she screamed. She stood up, whirling, wiping her eyes, sodden and uncomfortable below the knees.

  “You are the god we eat!” the Lua’groc screamed back.

  Sena spoke in the Unknown Tongue, pushed her ambit out into the dream-vapors, and deprived the Lua’groc’s feathery external gills of air. This silenced it. It gurgled and bowed, disappearing beneath its purple cowl. She did not wish to see it.

  While the Lua’groc groveled, Sena looked back at the dream-made shelf that held the stones that were not actually stones. They were, however, two pieces of something like corundum, darkened by blood and math, the remnants of what had fallen out of mystery and time. They were the seeds. They were true relics. They were eyes.

  When they had streaked down like chance meteorites into Adummim’s molten mud, they had left their strange markings forever on the planet crust. These two stony things had formed the navels of world. One had fallen at Soth. The other had come down thousands of miles away in the Duchy of Stonehold at the edge of the Dunatis Sea.

  These were the myths upon which other myths had been spun. Common sayings whose origins were unknown to those who used them had been founded on these objects. By the Eyes! Lost as the Eyes of Agath!

  There were obscure love metaphors associated with them. Eyes make a navel. But people didn’t know, they didn’t realize that these ancient turns of phrase had sprung not from people, not from the notion of two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes and then making a baby—but something more literal.

  These objects, once so full of math and power had produced not craters of destruction when they struck Adummim, but dual navels of something else—of life.

  The Cabal had found them both, what was left of them, and brought them here as tokens of the time when their Masters would once again be free. This was the creation myth of the planet.

  The bubbling, mewling sounds of the Lua’groc mixed with those of the bubbling floor. It was nearly dead. Rather than let it suffocate, Sena released it.

  She watched its drooping branch-like gills begin to capture molecules again, the blood trickling just below the organs’ transparent, ice-like sheen.

  She hated it, this vile temporary creature. She hated its mortality. The temptation rose inside her, dark and howling, to let her frustrations out. She imagined the violence her fingers could conceive, impromptu, adjusting as they traced like filet knives over the architecture of its bones. More aquatic than most, this hissing wretch should hav
e needed water to breathe, but in the dreamt bubble of Yoloch, it seemed air was the same as sea. Sena had no interest in the details. She wasn’t breathing. But the Lua’groc was. And what it was breathing at the moment was her charity.

  “Get up,” she said.

  The Lua’groc obeyed. Its silvery-gold hand pushed off the glass-black floor.

  “Tell the flawless to stop. Tell them to leave Taelin be.”

  “Cannot.” The Lua’groc could barely speak, weakened from its strangulation.

  “Tell them—”

  “Dun demand. I not you messenger.” It nearly shrieked. “You the god we eat!”

  She knew better than to talk—this was one of the Cabal’s woken preternarcomancers, freed from beds along the coastal shoals, no longer required to gaze into the future on the Cabal’s behalf … the future was already known. Speaking with it would only lead to circles of rage and despair. She picked her words carefully. “Then perhaps I will not go to Ulung.”

  “You sure go—mah,” it burped quietly. “You go, I see in dream. You nid go. You wan go.” It extended a translucent fish-bone talon toward her face. “You go for revenge. I see in dream. You wan revenge. Cannot turn away. We wait tat final joy of bleeding wat you promise in our mouth. Onli wait now. So sleepy swim north in cold. You bring them south for us to eat!”

  Sena felt her stomach turn. The preternarcomancer was right. She was bluffing. She would go to Ulung as planned and rid herself of her indignation once and for all. But that was for later. She had other things to tend to now.

  “See me in your dreams, do you? Let me tell you what I see. I see the flawless, reaching high as they can, still unable to touch Taelin Rae. I see them fail. I see all of them fall.”

  “Cannot fall. Hard die them—lah.”

  The Lua’groc dream-priest giggled almost musically and turned away. Sena saw the lamp lob a mirage of light against its skin, a fragile iridescence like fresh paint splattered in the swarming darkness of the cyst. Above furtive lobster-like antennules, in a deep-socket surrounded by glistering silver flesh, the soulless black sheen of the preternarcomancer’s pupil glared at her: cold, lidless and cruel—hostility suspended in a jelly of blood.