Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  Wind drew under the balloon, playing the cables and stirring the scent of grease. Taelin could look down from her position on the cabin roof and see nearly three hundred sixty degrees of mountain, sky and drifting green landscape.

  She couldn’t believe she had told the High King the truth. But how had he gotten hold of one of her grandfather’s journals? And why? She felt for her necklace, then remembered throwing it on the deck. She wanted to look for it but couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her hiding spot, facing the High King again or anyone he might have told. She imagined everyone on the ship sharing a good laugh about her fake little church.

  No. She would wait here until the Odalisque docked. Then she would quietly disembark. Her quest was over. She had been beaten. She would go home … to Pandragor.

  Her father was certainly on the Pandragonian ship, providing advice to the emperor, busy as always. Too busy to see her in person, of course, but not too busy to assign her murderous political chores and send them to her by courier bird. She hated him. But she would endure him for the sake of a ride. The Pandragonian ship would gladly pick her up and divest Caliph Howl of his token southern ally. Then everyone could say that she had somehow been offended, perhaps Caliph Howl had even made a pass. Another brick in the foundation of a true north-south war. This thought too, rippled pleasantly through her stomach, that she might be influential enough to cause a war.

  Taelin couldn’t help a small indulgent grin. Pandragor would destroy Stonehold. More importantly, they would destroy the High King’s witch.

  Fantasies. Pure fantasies, but she laughed at them under her breath. Then she almost cried.

  Had she failed? Oh yes, she had failed. Her religion was a fraud. But weren’t they all then? And couldn’t Nenuln be real? Wasn’t it possible that her necklace had been a nugget of truth buried in her grandfather’s chest? Some forgotten reality he had rescued from the jungle? I’m so pathetic, she thought. What’s happening to me?

  What’s happening to …

  The door to the starboard deck opened and the High King emerged, followed by his spymaster—the horrible man that had invited her on this nightmare trip. They were both dressed in formal black and white, sparkling with little bits of silver: they were ready for the conference.

  “I’m saying we don’t have the men to cover you from whatever’s going to happen,” said Alani. His voice was soft and grave but it carried perfectly, bouncing off the rigid balloon.

  “What am I supposed to do? Not go to the conference that we flew here to attend?” Taelin listened intently to the High King’s irritation.

  “We need the men we left in Sandren,” said the spymaster. “That hospital is a charade. Pull the plug and—”

  “Look like a fool? Pull the plug and look like I rushed up there with a box of cotton balls? Then realized I was in over my head and abandoned them?”

  “It’s not ideal but—”

  “You’re damn right it’s not ideal.” Caliph’s voice rose. “Those are people up there. Real people! We’re the only ones with medical supplies. No one else is going to touch this.”

  “Then you have to make a choice,” said Alani. “Either we go to the conference, or we return to Sandren. But we can’t feasibly do both.”

  “And why didn’t we know this yesterday?”

  “Because,” Alani sounded remarkably calm, “the intelligence arrived this morning. I’m telling you, the priestess from Pandragor has been getting correspondence from her father, she’s—”

  “Alani.” Caliph interrupted his spymaster with a voice that gave Taelin a chill. “If she’s a problem, get rid of her. Send her home. I don’t want to hear about her again.”

  “Fine. I’ll arrange it,” said Alani.

  “Back to the conference,” said Caliph. “If I don’t show up, they’re going to vilify me regardless of any humanitarian efforts I’m making up there.” He pointed at the city-state and momentarily glanced up. Taelin jerked back, trying to shrink into her chair. “You know that,” Caliph continued. Apparently he hadn’t seen her. “You know how things are stacking up.”

  “Yes, but,” and Taelin could see the strain in Alani’s face now as she leaned forward again, “we believe they’re going to make an attempt on you if you show up. That’s why I’m telling you to pull out of Sandren. I need those men back down here—”

  “Put another watchdog on me.”

  “That’s another thing we need to talk about. All our remaining dogs are dead. Either someone’s managed to slip aboard and…”

  Taelin put her hand over her mouth. A dark shape had just appeared in front of her at the top of the metal staircase that spiraled down to the deck. Where it had come from, Taelin didn’t know. It looked down at the deck as if it too had been eavesdropping.

  The figure waited only a moment. Then it started down the metal staircase and Alani stopped talking. It wasn’t until that moment that Taelin actually realized it was Sena Iilool. Just as the High King’s witch turned through the spiral so that she was about to drop out of sight, she looked up, straight into Taelin’s face.

  A gust of wind tossed Sena’s clutch of curls forward, carrying the smells of sweet mint and lotus.

  Moments later she reappeared on the deck below, her back once again to Taelin.

  Alani looked stricken and the High King seemed to lose his perpetual color. “We searched everywhere just before we left,” Caliph was saying. “How did you get on the ship? Where have you been?”

  Taelin felt paralyzed as she watched the scene unfold. Would Sena give her position away? Would she be arrested for spying? Had the High King’s witch really just materialized out of thin air? What was happening?

  “Caliph,” said Sena, “we’re done here.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going south now.” Sena made no indication that Alani was even there.

  The High King’s mouth opened slowly.

  Alani’s frosty eyebrows lifted. A man in black came out onto the deck and addressed Alani. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know how she—” Alani raised his hand, indicating for the guard to stand down. The fact that sentries had been posted drove home to Taelin even more deeply how wrong it was for her to be here.

  “Sena,” Caliph gave his witch a pained smile, “can we talk about this later. I’m in a—”

  “There’s no meeting,” said Sena.

  Caliph scratched the side of his neck in irritation. “We came here for—”

  Sena had walked to the railing and now looked out at the throng of brightly colored zeppelins. “Alani is right. The south wants you dead.” The wind tugged every curl and strap attached to Sena’s frame as she stood squarely, one hand on the rail, one hand lifted gently as if to touch some hanging fruit. Then she said something Taelin could not understand.

  The daylight flickered as if an array of clouds was passing overhead at impossible speed. But the skies were empty and blue. Taelin couldn’t help looking up, just to be sure.

  When she looked back down, the brilliant circus of zeppelins hemorrhaged, every one cusp to keel. Not with fire. And not all at once. A kind of amplitude went through their frames that Taelin sensed more than saw. The eight-hundred-foot behemoth out of Bablemum was the first to go. The Grand Arbiter’s airship, billowing brass and aqua sails crumpled like a blown egg. As it folded, its skin, its duralumin beams and whipping cables, its beautifully fluted air intakes and shimmering fuel cell exploded into the blackest, brownest, most beautiful orchid-colored clouds.

  Taelin made a sound like a screen door, both spring and hinge. It escaped her mouth but no one noticed. She stared in shock at the—what? Fire? Smoke? The blowback volumes rolled and evaporated like dissipating mist.

  Twinkles of brilliant blue stuttered through the explosion’s brown heart. Then everything dissolved into burnt umber steam and blew east on the prevailing winds. The airship had simply disappeared.

  It was the same with the others. One after another. Dadelon’s red and silver. P
andragor’s orange and blue.

  Taelin screamed but no one heard her. All eyes and ears were tuned to the destruction. People were coming out onto the deck now for a better view. Sigmund Dulgensen and the diplomat from Iycestoke. Even Dr. Baufent.

  Sena had stopped speaking but the destruction continued. As if a slow breeze were moving west to east, when its leading edge touched a ship, that ship detonated and dissolved.

  There were over thirty. Prime ministers, dictators, senators; the flagship of the emperor of Pandragor turned to mist along with its entire entourage.

  After the last ship had dissipated, it was as if sky had been wiped clean. As if the entire gathering of airships had never been. Only three aircraft still floated like frightened islands. The Bulotecus, the Odalisque and the great white leviathan out of the Pplar.

  Taelin was still screaming.

  Sigmund Dulgensen gaped. He was white-knuckled, both meaty fists on the rail. Beside him, Alani looked like a dark cutout with a knife glued in his hand. It reflected the sky. Taelin didn’t know where it had come from or why he was simply standing there, gripping it like a talisman.

  Her gaze panned down from the cerulean gulf to the deck, searching for Sena. But she wasn’t there. No trace. Then Taelin’s eyes caught the tip of Caliph’s finger and followed it off the deck. A Sandrenese condor? The High King pointed.

  Of course not.

  Sena was walking on the sky.

  Taelin fell back in her deck chair like a wet towel. A vibration, a sound she couldn’t hear, modulated the air, ringing in the zeppelin’s frame. It made her crutches buzz against the roof. She could feel it in her chair, her clothing, tissues and teeth: a strange hum, like the aftermath of traumas she had felt before, at hospital, sapping her strength almost to the point of sleep.

  Drowsily she watched Sena walking: a red and black and golden speck in the endless blue. Then her lids closed and she dreamt the nightmare all over: that her father was on Emperor Junnu’s ship, screaming as he was eaten by eldritch fire.

  * * *

  CALIPH ordered Isham Wade and his bodyguard confined to quarters until he figured out what was going on.

  Mr. Wade protested violently at first but he and his bodyguard were quickly overpowered.

  What exactly had happened remained unclear but it certainly appeared that Sena had single-handedly, with less effort (or thought) than it took to lift her hand, annihilated every person and every zeppelin in a ten mile radius of sky. The impossibility as well as the improbability of the act were the only things maintaining a semblance of doubt in Caliph’s mind.

  Five minutes in the past, a multinational conference was underway. Now, all the assembled leaders of the world’s mightiest nations had been erased, leaving the questions of succession, leadership and national relations drifting, less than ashes in a void.

  Caliph tried to remember everything she had said to him before her disappearance, before he had left her on the Odalisque and gone down to oversee the hospital. He remembered disregarding the stranger portion of the things that she had said. He remembered thinking that she was crazy. Could she have read his mind? Could she be angry enough to do this? Was it really Sena? What, oh what was going on?

  He was too numb to feel. No anger or sense of betrayal. He mumbled something as he stood at the railing. “I think she told me she was going to destroy the world.” It came out sounding random, devoid of context, the only thing he could think of to say.

  “Nice,” said Sig.

  No one else spoke.

  Sigmund turned away and marched to the deck’s wet bar. He poured himself a drink.

  “When did she tell you this?” asked Alani. It felt like a ridiculous question to Caliph—that the spymaster was taking it seriously—but Caliph answered anyway.

  “A few days ago. What are you thinking?”

  Alani’s eyes were fixed on Sena, in the middle of the sky, still walking for the Pplarian ship. “I’m thinking whether she can do it or not doesn’t matter. It’s her intent that counts. She thinks she’s a god.”

  Sigmund bellowed with laughter. “There’s no tech I know of that can sort out three dozen airships and selectively destroy them in ten seconds while the rest are left un-fucking-scathed. If she’s not a god what the fuck classifies?”

  “It’s holomorphy—” said Caliph.

  “Oh yeah … I see mathematicians walk on the sky all the fucking time!” Sig tossed another drink past his teeth.

  “She didn’t cut herself,” said Taelin.

  “What?” Caliph glared at her. He hadn’t even realized she was there but now the priestess’s tired, tear-streaked face registered with him. She had crept up directly behind him on the deck.

  “Don’t holomorphs have to cut themselves?” she asked.

  “I think we should take any real deliberation privately,” Alani whispered in Caliph’s ear. “This is going to break down quickly.” And the spymaster was right. Sig was getting drunk and the priestess was positively rigid with shock. Dr. Baufent asked if it would be all right to administer her a sedative.

  “I need—” Caliph tried to get their collective attention. “We need to figure out exactly what happened,” he said. “If Sena did this … I don’t … I don’t know how to … we just need to find some answers.”

  “Find some answers!” cheered Sig.

  Caliph ignored his whisky-guzzling friend. Suddenly the books Sena had given him seemed imminently important. “She said she was headed south,” he said softly to Alani.

  “Who wants to get vaporized?” said Sig. He was pouring glasses.

  “And we’re still alive,” said Alani. “So she must want you to follow her.”

  “And what’s your opinion of that course? If we follow her?”

  The spymaster pawed at his snowy beard. “I think it comports nicely with my objective of shooting her down.”

  Caliph’s heart twanged strangely but didn’t rebel at the idea.

  “Unfortunately we have a couple other serious issues at the moment,” said Alani, “the men we left in Sandren … and the fact that we need to get you back to Stonehold.”

  “Well I’m certainly not going back to Stonehold until we’ve resolved this.”

  “Oh, really?” Alani finally tore his eyes from the sky and looked hard at Caliph. “What if the unthinkable happens?”

  “We’ll reinstate the Council, temporarily. I’ll step down. We’ll send a bird right-fucking-now.”

  Alani pressed his lips together.

  “All of this is going to point our way,” said Caliph. “We’re the only ones standing. If we don’t sort this out, every country is going to take aim at us … at the duchy. I’m not going to be any safer up north.”

  Alani’s stoicism crumbled slightly, and his eyes told that Caliph was right. The spymaster looked at his shoes as a way of showing his assent.

  Caliph felt the crushing impact of Sigmund’s arm wrapping around his shoulders. “Here, Caph. I brought you a drink.”

  Caliph received it rather than argue. He dumped it over the railing as soon as Sigmund and everyone else turned to watch Baufent, administering an injection to a hysterical and grief-stricken Lady Rae who was bawling about her father on the Pandragonian ship. After it was over, Sigmund leaned in close to his friend and spoke lowly in a voice that only Caliph and Alani could hear.

  “What the shit, Caph?” Sigmund sniffed while holding his glass in the air. “Why do you smell like apples?”

  CHAPTER

  24

  It was only minutes later that Taelin sagged at the railing, watching the ship to which Sena had escaped molt through myriad similar forms. It was white, of Pplarian design and it was rising fast. As it punched through layer after layer of atmosphere, the ship’s shape changed in subtle gradual ways. Taelin couldn’t tell if this was real or a result of Dr. Baufent’s injection. What did seem certain was that Sena’s ship moved quicker than the Odalisque and Taelin worried in a detached way that Sena might escape.<
br />
  Why is she going to Sandren?

  Was Caliph following her or was he headed for the tent hospital?

  Briefly, Taelin thought about the passengers with altitude sickness. They might have to endure another hour; then the Odalisque would ferry them home to Stonehold. She supposed what patients remained would be crammed into the other vessel with the crew. That was what she would do if she were the High King. High. King. Hiking. I’m high.

  The Odalisque clambered like a bubble through thick liquid, rising once again over the cliffs where it buoyed into the sun.

  Her body vibrated with the engine as it motored them in over the platform. From the railing, she looked down through southern flowers. The hospital tents flapped quietly in a breeze from the east. There didn’t seem to be anyone around.

  A tin of bandages lay scattered over the grass but most things seemed orderly enough. One of the patient tables had overturned but Taelin could see no sign of movement. She asked the obvious: “Where are they?”

  Caliph leaned out over the railing. The muscles in his jaw twitched. “I don’t know.”

  Baufent was trying to lead her off the deck. “You should lie down,” the physician kept saying. But in the aftermath of the horrible thing that had just happened, no one was functioning efficiently. Baufent probably wanted to stay out on deck like everyone else and see what was going to happen next.

  “What will happen next?” Taelin asked loudly to anyone who would listen.

  Alani turned and hissed in her face. “What happens next, is that you shut your mouth. When we get back I’m personally escorting you off this ship.”

  “Where? Seatk’r?” Taelin heard her voice crack. “I can’t get off there! In the ghettos! I’ll be—”

  “You’ll get off where I tell you to get off,” said Alani. “I found the note. Where is it?”