Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

“Where’s what?”

  “The poison.”

  High as she was, the blame tied her off, anchored her. She started to sweat. “I never—”

  “Shut up,” said Alani. And she did. His eyes made salient what repercussions waited should she fail to obey. “I don’t think you’re an assassin, Miss Rae. I think you’re ignorant. We’ll deal with this when I return. Until then, I want you in your stateroom. In bed.”

  She made the southern hand sign for yes after which he turned and strode to a weapon cabinet where he pulled out a gas-powered bow. “We’re not landing here,” he said loudly to the group gathered on deck.

  Caliph stood several feet away, tugging his lip thoughtfully. He looked so pensive. Taelin, who had momentarily had every intention of going to her room and climbing into bed, now found herself wanting to reach out and touch the High King’s mouth. It had to be the drugs Baufent had given her. Caliph and his witch had just killed her father. They were the murderers. Not her!

  She bit down on her rising anger.

  “We’re going to take some gliders,” Caliph announced. “Check for survivors. Twenty-minute sweep. Everyone else stays on the ship.” He looked across the city-state’s copper domes to where Sena’s white airship had stopped.

  “She’s waiting for us,” Alani said.

  Caliph did not reply.

  Taelin stayed where she was. She was not going to her room. I don’t have to obey him. Where are the Iycestokians? Where is my father? Stonehold is to blame. Stonehold’s government is very much to blame for this day!

  Her feet were planted despite Baufent’s occasional pleas. She could tell the doctor had given up. Caliph and Alani descend a staircase to the Odalisque’s cargo hold. From below came the sound of large doors opening with a hydraulic whimper.

  Accompanying them was the sound of an altercation. To Taelin it sounded like Caliph and Alani were at each other’s throats. It seemed the spymaster did not want the High King going down to assist with the search for the missing physicians, but by the sound of it, Caliph was going to have his way. This made Taelin smile with small feelings of vicarious vengeance.

  Moments later, sinister winged shadows appeared on the ground and then, gliding out from under the ship, Taelin saw a squadron of half a dozen men, blackish-silver wings strapped to their backs, green glows emanating from their spines. They wore dark flight suits and their eyes were chromium blue.

  They planed out over the mooring deck and landed gracefully. She could pick out Alani easiest because of his bald head. Caliph was harder but she soon decided that he was the one the other men felt obligated to assist in unbuckling his harness. Caliph had a sword. The rest held crossbows.

  They left their wings in an orderly row and darted down the broad white steps into the palace gardens. Taelin was worried that they would vanish from sight, but the pilot must have been watching too. The Odalisque moved, following the men on the ground. Taelin’s heart raced with excitement and fear as the deck crossed over a bosk of white-flowering bushes and brought her closer to the hospital tents.

  Now she could see the six men moving systematically between the white pavilions. Quickly. Crossbows pivoted with their shoulders and heads, always pointed in the direction they were looking. Caliph followed them, sword out. The blade was black with a silver stripe down its center and it left tiny silvery lights in its wake.

  As the Odalisque drifted sideways, Taelin got a glimpse inside the tent which Caliph had just entered. She saw him roll the body of a smell-feast over with his heel. Its fat red ostracean mass glistened in the sunlight.

  Taelin felt Caliph kick it. Her foot thumped. She felt it. What was happening?

  Caliph walked out of the tent, following his men.

  She had impressions of the garden’s boughs swaying around her, as if she was walking, literally, in his shoes. Her mind caught snippets of medicine packets and syringes scattered in the grass: things too small for her to have seen from a hundred feet above the ground. She could feel a static charge in her right hand, the hairs on her arm sticking up. His sword.

  What had Baufent shot her up with?

  Whatever it was, she wanted more.

  She stumbled away from the railing, leaving her crutches on the deck. She headed for the medical supplies.

  * * *

  CALIPH lost his footing and Alani had to help him up.

  “Are you all right?” The spymaster’s face composed stiff irregular lines that conferred no empathy.

  Caliph was already self-conscious about fumbling his harness. He felt drunk.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  His men were following trampled grass toward the Sandrenese palace and he was following them. The smell of flowers mixed with wet stone and the fumes of spilled antiseptic. There were more scattered bandages in the grass.

  Up ahead, Rosewind’s pink-brown blocks cavaulted into circular tourelles and around onion domes. The fact that its former tenants were dead lent it a subconscious taint that Caliph tried to ignore as he and his men scrambled over the cement cargo ramps on the building’s northwest flank.

  His team of men was surrounding a familiar side door when he realized for the first time how quiet Sandren seemed. Aside from the hum of the Odalisque overhead, all he could hear was the creak of branches and the giggle of leaves. If there had been birds here on his last visit he couldn’t remember. Maybe Sandren was too high.

  He looked toward the gate that had held the hoard of howling patients at bay. It still appeared to be shut but he couldn’t tell for certain at this distance.

  His men had already stacked up around the door to the palace but Caliph was staring down into a brick and mortar pit on the left. Lined with steps and a door marked with a familiar warning in High Malk. The door stood open, which seemed inexplicably wrong. Two men were already checking it.

  Pale green beams of light shot into the darkness of the utility vault as his men turned on tiny torches. Caliph glanced at Alani who was watching the men at the vault with unbroken concentration. Alani wore a scowl. The other men were waiting patiently at the palace door for the signal to enter.

  Caliph saw everything shimmer as if they were standing in the desert, heat waves rippling off the ground. He braced himself against the palace wall, feeling dizzy.

  “Go back to the gliders,” Alani whispered. “Wait for us there.”

  Caliph felt deep shame associated with the command, shame for demanding to come with—only to inexplicably fall so ill that Alani could see it in his face. His stomach rolled. It was no use. Alani was right. And there was no reason to let pride get in the way.

  What is wrong with me?

  He squinted back across the grass toward the ciryte platform. It seemed impossibly far away.

  His limbs felt wobbly and his head seemed to be floating away from his feet. He set out, stumbling, and heard Alani curse.

  The words, “Help him,” came like bubbles in the sunlight-colored air.

  Then the pavement’s beautifully fractured and intricately pitted surface raced toward his face. He loved the pavement. Its porous intricacies. The lichens. The stream of ants like grains of hardened molasses rolling two directions at once. He loved the smell of mold.

  Someone grabbed him under the arm and pulled him away from the ground, which made him inexplicably sad. His view panned away from the ants, toward green windy shapes and what looked like dancing men.

  He saw white lines appear and disappear at crazy angles. Swords reflecting light?

  Something had happened. He still had his own sword in his hand. He struggled to unscrew the safety ring. It defied him, a black puzzle in his fingers. Then there was a snap.

  Hm?

  He felt the weapon hum in his grip. He must have triggered it. The thing was certainly charged. He set his feet far apart, trying to stay balanced, trying to keep the blade away from the ground. A vague understanding that he might kill himself registered enough to demand his full attention.

  He pivoted on on
e foot, trying to aim himself in the general direction of the chaos. The palace walls were so big. They overawed him. He nearly sat down to stare.

  Then as if out of an ominous opera performance, where all sounds hushed on the cusp of the starring villain’s appearance, Caliph heard the sound of a great animal walking into a building. Maybe it was into a building. The heavy leather crush of a foot against tile, the muscular shake of its bulk within the harness, and the breathing … Caliph heard it.

  Only this wasn’t the pastoral grunt of some deep-chested quadruped. This was the slithering whine of air sucked through gooey vents or gills. It was a slurp mixed with a shudder.

  Before his eyes, gigantic feet, frog-like, pulled up from the concrete in formidable pyramids of muscle. They were attached to legs that folded precisely in the way that Caliph would have expected from a giant amphibian-learned-to-walk.

  The legs almost hypnotized him. They jackknifed through a graceful, varied gait. The movements of huge muscle packs, stretching fluidly thigh-to-toes, pulled the “heel” up past the monster’s hip. With every step, this “heel” came tantalizingly close to hitting the creature in the back.

  Caliph’s dazed eyes followed this jag of bone down to the knee. It was upon the knee that the whole upper portion of the leg and torso seemed to balance.

  Each thigh bone nested in the corresponding cup of an atlatl-like sling while the mighty feet and ankles of the beast propelled and kept everything else aloft.

  In split seconds, Caliph absorbed the marvelous power and how most of the creature’s weight was clearly in its feet. It could lean and stretch in ways that seemed to defy gravity. But the double-bent legs that powered the ranine body were only the beginning. At roughly eight feet off the ground, Caliph had to crane his neck to see the monster’s head. The skull hung much lower than the shoulders and the tip of its snout, which reminded Caliph of both a catfish and a salamander, was lower than either its neck or the prominent fan of its beefsteak-colored gills.

  The whole body was so hunched, so crouched, so incredibly folded up in fact, that Caliph decided it could have easily stood up and reached eighteen feet into the sky.

  Eighteen feet with its jaws, that was. Caliph had no way of accounting for the potential length of its many-jointed arms.

  The hand of the bodyguard that had pulled Caliph to his feet had been gone ever since the creature’s arrival. There was a large red blur in the periphery, covering the cement, and Caliph heard the monster’s talons drag like plastic strips against the stone. It grabbed a cinder block–sized chunk of the man’s torso. Like a distracted child moving messy candy toward its mouth, it gave no outward sign of enjoyment or even that it was eating. The consumption of Caliph’s bodyguard seemed a reflexive action, unconnected with the movements of its eyes.

  Caliph lifted his sword, which felt incredibly heavy. The impression of shouts and desperate actions behind the creature came to him as out of heavy fog.

  Where did you come from? Caliph thought.

  The crouched shape turned slowly, golden-gray and shimmering. Its empty eyes—like porcelain pie-plates stuffed with pink gelatin—were dead, soulless and without recognizable intelligence. But they were looking at him. Of that, Caliph was sure.

  He stumbled backward, away from the crunching mouth. Blood drizzled from the end of its snout, heavy and fast. Around this horror, a clutch of darkened barbels oozed though the air with dissimilar gravity, curling, stretching and swelling like snail eyes.

  Even in his dizzy condition, Caliph noticed the asymmetry of the hands that were moving slowly toward him. One was an ungulate horn, which hooked sharply toward the ground; the other was a translucent duck claw banded in tropical brown and white—swaddled in ancient skin and brandishing an array of talons in Caliph’s direction.

  He waited for the beast to reach out and take him. It opened its mouth, canyon-wide. He felt like he was leaning over a pit. A strange gravity drew him in. He felt the immense power of the monster’s will and teetered, feet losing traction with the ground. His boots rolled on gravel, then nothing but air.

  Before his face, the deep interior of the monster swelled with fatty pink ridges. Caliph heard his name at the back of the python throat where some discreet muscles manipulated air. “Caliph Howl,” it had said.

  Or at least he imagined it had spoken to him.

  Then the jaws moved forward, propelled half a step. The talons reached out from the end of its impossible five-jointed arm.

  Caliph raised his chemiostatic sword. The still-humming black-and-silver blade met it halfway. A blinding flash of light filled the world, accompanied by a sizzling bang: like someone striking an empty metal drum with the flat of their hand.

  The creature stopped. Smoke poured off its skin. Caliph dropped to the ground. He backed away as it lost balance. Fabric that had covered the hump on its back smoldered. A low, ugly red flame danced around its skull as the huge body thundered against the concrete.

  With his view cleared, he stared over the carcass to where a second creature had one of Alani’s men in its jaws. In mere seconds the man was gone, crushed and tossed down its throat like a springbuck in the throat of a saurian.

  Head foggy, Caliph climbed over the sticky, charred carcass that reeked of burnt salmon and stumbled toward the second monster. He thought he might black out but he didn’t. He swung his weapon as hard as he could.

  The momentum carried him forward but twisted off the creature’s skin. His blow turned down, dragging his arms with, buckling his body. He couldn’t recover. The sword left his hands and clanged against the ground.

  Lazily, the vast duck paw reached out for him, talons spreading.

  And then he was on his back in a cot, staring at the ceiling of his stateroom. No. Not his stateroom. He smelled medical supplies and felt nauseous.

  The weight of his breasts tugged at the center of his chest, pulling gently to either side. He reached up and cupped them, pushing them back together. They were soft and comforting.

  When he opened his mouth, he was screaming. He didn’t know why, but he was screaming.

  Dr. Baufent showed up almost immediately, shadowed by several other people. She looked down at Caliph with grave concern.

  “Bring me my satchel,” she snapped, and one of the shadows behind her disappeared.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?” Baufent tore into him. “No? What about this?” She held up an empty hypodermic. “Are you a junkie? Or are you just stupid?”

  Caliph didn’t know what to say.

  “Get me a drip,” said Baufent.

  “Ma’am,” a voice behind her sounded truly afraid, “there’s something happening on the ground.”

  “I am busy! Get Anselm to deal with it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Caliph was still holding his breasts.

  * * *

  TAELIN’S second scream seemed to be mental. At least she had no control over her body. She couldn’t open her mouth. She was moving without willing herself to do so, scuttling across a concrete slab on her palms like a crab.

  She reached for a sword just in front of her and grasped it by the handle. It felt cool and solid even though she was sure she was dreaming. The smell of burnt fish wrecked the air.

  She jumped up, strong but clumsy, surprised by her own strength, gripping the weapon.

  The palace scintillated: a pointillist’s figurative arrangement of pink and black and mica-white dots. She could hear the sounds of combat on her left flank but she could not move. Like in a nightmare, she was a watcher more than an active participant.

  Her neck was locked in a direction that cast her field of view just south of the palace’s grand facade, off the cement pad and down toward an additional spread of gardens.

  The taste in her mouth was foreign. She felt sweat trickle from the bridge of her nose down around her nostrils, incredibly real. At the edge of the cement pad, where a magnolia tossed in the wind, a gauzy darkness spluttered. It looke
d like black steam seeping into the air from no particular source but it held a shape that reminded her of the cloaks worn by college professors.

  At the top of it—sweet Nenuln—a puff of white that bobbed fly-away with the wind, sheltered a pair of cimmerian eyes. They glared at her with malicious delight. Together it was the semblance of a man standing under the tree, just barely. Just almost there.

  She walked toward him, which was the last thing she wanted to do, her sword out in front of her. As she approached, the shape grew taller, or perhaps it levitated slowly so that her vantage became that of a child at the foot of a grown-up.

  Something like an arm effected from the mist, a hand spread and extended. She felt a cool-warm pressure grip the crown of her head. And a vaporous voice said something about her necklace that she couldn’t understand.

  CHAPTER

  25

  There had been no report from Duana’s qloin.

  When the High King had floated down from Sandren to meet Isham Wade, Miriam and her five sisters had waited for either Sena or Duana to materialize.

  Neither had.

  In an effort to collect intelligence, while the High King slept, Miriam and her two qloins had crawled out of the rain and into his stateroom.

  The puslet was still cankered with neural cells it had cloned from Taelin Rae; its synthesis with Caliph’s brain was sloppy and any information it provided would be cloudy and intermittent. But Miriam did not care. All she needed was Sena’s location.

  Unfortunately, Caliph didn’t know.

  Sena had disappeared entirely, from diaglyph, blood scrying—even her lover had no idea where to find her.

  Miriam could only wait for things to change. But when they had, when Sena had shown up—Miriam found herself woefully unprepared.

  Sena’s immediate destruction of the airships had been paralyzing. For those precious moments, Miriam had been unable to think. And how she regretted it! By the time she had gathered her wits, the Eighth House—for who could doubt the meaning of Giganalee’s proclamation now?—was already walking toward the white ship.