Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  The empty page was a victory and for a moment she allowed herself to smile, to look from the fathomless cosmos, from the creation that the glyph had formed, down into another possibility. A tiny one. The secret dream sleeping in her womb.

  * * *

  WHAT if she had never opened the book?

  But Sena knew. To look away would avert nothing.

  In Their eagerness to break through, lay the makings of the pact. And she had made up her mind, forged her purpose from surprising cruelty, from the feral, animal ferocity of a mother protecting its child. It made her unpredictable. It made her capable of startling things. She would not turn away. This was her decision. She would not change it now. She would see this through.

  Sena put the Cisrym Ta into her pack along with the three crisp sheets of vellum that she had cut from her back. Then she pressed the rest of the pimplota root into a jar that she sealed and wrapped.

  She could see through the walls of the Pplarian ship to the great armada of Iycestoke that had surrounded her. They had not shot her down yet in the event that she had the book with her.

  She could hear the armored troops on the craft that had silently positioned itself directly above hers. She watched them release drop ropes, saw the men descend and land on the white skin of the Pplarian balloon.

  Atop the great modulating gasbag, they began their search for the hatch, the rungs that would lead them down to the decks, and to her.

  Yul had left. She was alone.

  The great capacitance of holojoules from the murder below Sandren had now been fully spent and there was little purpose in staying here.

  Sena gathered up her designer backpack, with the pimplota juice, the book and her other essentials.

  Where are you going? Nathaniel made her jump. He had returned quietly.

  “Come and see,” she said. Then with a bloodless word, she vanished from the ship.

  * * *

  AFTER Sena spoke she stood for a moment in front of the Howl Mansion, looking up at the unbroken windows that had always filled her with dread. She waited for Nathaniel to trace her movement and arrive. There was no reason to hide from him. Doing so would only fuel his anger.

  Snow buried the yard but brown weeds poked through and hissed at her. The mansion looked black, but the windows were red and seething, a scarlet sunset boiled inside each one.

  You can’t be serious, said Nathaniel.

  Sena dropped her pack in the snow. She left the book, the supplies for the ink, all of it—sitting in the weeds. “Why? They betrayed our trust.” She walked up into the wind above the yard and passed through one of the windows.

  Nathaniel followed.

  As I said, you can’t be serious.

  “I’m straightening this out.”

  You can’t threaten Them. And what about the book—

  “You’ll go back and protect it, won’t you?” Nathaniel resonated on a frequency Sena took for hoarse disparagement. “We’re a team now,” said Sena. “You and me.”

  Your half is bent on our destruction. Nathaniel had been here before, many times, on the other side of the glass, gathering secrets, collecting numbers. But he had never come this way. The road to the north was closed to him.

  Sena looked up at an atmospheric phenomenon that passed for violent thunder. It looked to her like the sunlight was sweating through layers of cherry gelatin and tar: cloud layers bowed around the front of a black and crimson storm.

  Gravel crunched under her boots.

  The dead world of the Yillo’tharnah was accessible only through Nathaniel’s estate. The house was a cork in the hole that the great holomorph had cut out. He had built imperfect windows, scraped them clean with math. They provided a smudged view of what lay inside.

  There were no furnishings here. No ecology. Sena felt like a child setting foot in a haunted place.

  “What did you study here?”

  Them. Of course. I found where They wait, separated from Their Queen, drowsing until She opens the doors. And there was the matter of wiring St. Remora’s clocks to this place. A tricky business, threading it from the church, then pulling it through from here. I wonder if you are here to sabotage—

  “Am not.” She scowled, insulted.

  This isn’t the dimension where Naen struggles at the world’s core, you know, with Her luciform brood? But you may have seen that in the Chamber? You’ve never been here before, have you?

  Sena didn’t answer, which only gave him cause to continue.

  This dead plateau, with its netting of augered crypts, is where They hauled Themselves after the fuel ran out. They designed this place. Now They wait, suspended, gathered at one point, so that Their collective gravity might help to tear the fabric, loosen Their bonds and disgorge Them like slippery fish, following Their Queen from one world to the next, thrashing alien, renewed, reborn and ravenous.

  Sena walked north, passing a singular column that stood mightily against the wind. Her diaglyphs measure it precisely: one thousand six hundred eighteen feet tall. “Isn’t that your cue?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you turn back soon?”

  But the black gibbet of Nathaniel’s shade continued to follow her, suspended several feet above the plateau, refusing to blow away.

  I’m not leaving yet. It’s ridiculous to scold Them for what They did to you at Soth. Your vanity is repugnant. They will not listen to you.

  It felt strange to Sena that he was talking about these things rather than still assaulting her over his daughter. He seemed almost to pick up on this thought and abruptly change tack. What made you betray me?

  But to Sena, there was something wrong even in this question. His angle did not originate from his daughter. It focused only on him. Why had she betrayed him? Sena stopped and looked at Nathaniel directly, puzzled, letting her thoughts seep out. The shade had no clear features. Only a hint of sharpness both at the place its nose might have been and also at the ends of its hands. Nathaniel’s eyes were terrible black holes. “You care so little about her, do you?”

  What’s done is done. Your cruelty exceeds mine. Now that you’ve bottled her up, what will you do? Tell me again that we are a team?

  She didn’t believe it. He had not gotten over it so quickly. There was something he wasn’t telling her. Something she couldn’t figure out.

  A fleet of shadows passed over the ground, causing Sena to look up firmly into the wind. Grains of sand bounced off her corneas but she did not blink as a legion of dead flyers careened overhead. They fled the great red storm on the horizon with bodies that undulated like tissues caught in wind.

  I think I know what you are up to, said Nathaniel.

  Sena felt her throat clamp tight. She hoped desperately that he did not. Below her, the hollowness of the plateau flourished with gauzy indigo things. They were many and one at the same time, silent yet moving and enormously cognizant of both her and Nathaniel’s presence.

  She did not warn Nathaniel of his danger. If he was undone here, she would be glad. If he was foolish enough to stay a moment longer, she would rejoice.

  And he was. He stayed stubbornly, glaring at her while an army of pebbles inched in the wind, making sound as it crossed the vast key bed of solid rock, beneath which stirred the presence he had to fear.

  The Yillo’tharnah began to uncoil. They seeped out like carbonic gas and yet he pressed her, hatred ferocious enough to anchor him. I think I know what you are up to …

  The huge black pillar behind him moved with shadows. Its lee side held a deeply carved depiction of some hideous creature or agglomeration of creatures and though embossments many feet deep had withstood the sand, they showed nothing more than the badly cratered semblance of a host of eyes and moving fur.

  I will protect the book and wait for your return.

  Finally, Nathaniel fled.

  He was gone in an instant, slipping out between Their claws.

  Sena heard the pebbles move. She looked down to where it seemed an entire ocean had once raged like a
river for eons and worn the bedrock to a satin finish. Occasional pits, where softer minerals had been hollowed out, harbored little handfuls of gravel. There were whispery designs in the stone. A repetitious pattern of timorous shapes, cast random as dice. Sena’s eyes traced the faint outlines of teeth, sockets and jumbled ribs—not of prehistoric fish—but of men and women.

  Fossils of the old world.

  With Their only prey gone, the Yillo’tharnah unrolled slowly, lethargic and tired. Sena waited for Them as the clouds thinned above her head and opened on an enormous red star sinking into the valley beyond the plateau. A smaller brighter point of light, dwarfed by the scarlet titan, glimmered and followed its epic descent.

  Here at the edge of the plateau, on the brink of a huge vertical miter in the world’s crust, Sena noticed the angles of intersection with the surrounding geography, how they proscribed light and reflected darkness. It was a phenomenon she had never seen before. Darkness cast itself through lit canyons of sky in beams and pillars and gradients. Lovely and terrifying.

  And then she realized how the vast valley before her, a megalo-doppelganger of the Great Cloud Rift, resembled a sunken font and how the distant crumbling mountains, High Horn in particular, felt like the worn stumps of non-human caryatids in a row. As if this had once been a continent-sized temple, a building that could tip the world …

  At that instant, Something groped skyward through the rock, touching her abstractly, mouthing her with its thoughts. A vague threat rose through the fossilized stone.

  Sena was afraid.

  A moaning sound coursed through her ears. Her dark trench coat snapped as if clothespinned to a line. How strange! They had inverted the colors.

  Her coat had been red. But now it was black and the bandeau underneath had changed to crimson. She tried to change it back, to re-imagine her clothing, but realized that her ambit extended precisely to the limits of her skin, not a fraction more.

  You look better in black. Red is your accent.

  They were not Nathaniel’s thoughts. These thoughts came from below, smooth, dark and vast as a polar ocean. They were not words. They were not even sentences. It was by approximation that she interpreted them. There was no humor, even sardonic, to their composition. Just as there was no sincerity. The thoughts were devoid of recognizable logic or opinion.

  What made them so breathtakingly alien was that they did not mean what they appeared to mean. The Yillo’tharnah had no opinion on color, or style. They were not commenting on her sense of fashion. Their thoughts communicated a simple yet multilayered threat. What They had really said was, “We are here. We see you. Notice that you have little power in this place.”

  Where is the book? the Yillo’tharnah thought at her. Again it was a thought too large to encapsulate with words. Not a question at all but rather a caress—a kind of worship. They knew she had left it out of reach—like Taelin’s necklace. They knew this and did not attempt to tear through vague parallel coordinates in order to make a snatch.

  Sena felt the writing in her skin grow even colder as They retraced what They had written, making certain she had not modified the design. Her pages had been cut from the prescribed location. She had done nothing wrong.

  Sena tried not to move or recoil. Their touch was as icy as the world she stood on, racing around its dying star. The Yillo’tharnah touched her with the curiosity of a machinist examining a part for wear but she was still functional, well-oiled and shiny as the day They had made her. Her ambit was strong. They accepted her as perfect. The creation and the Creators were on level ground in this: both would last forever. She was beyond Their power to melt down, to recast. The gift could not be taken back. Which was why, Sena supposed, the integer had to be small.

  Having traced the lines methodically, the Yillo’tharnah withdrew. They were satisfied.

  It was her turn to assess. “You tried to take the necklace at Soth.” This was why she had come, despite Nathaniel’s admonition, to scold Them. To try to threaten Them for Their betrayal.

  The reply from beneath the plateau was grim and smarmy, a hint not of apology, but of acquiescence—like a lawyer, Sena thought, reluctantly amending the contractual loophole It had authored.

  She stood atop Their tomb, feeling insignificant, a tiny mite perched on the corner of a great piece of furniture. Their promise was clear: not to interfere again. But when They were free, she knew, there would be no promise that They would keep. Pleading would not change that, even though her instinct was to plead.

  Sena gazed at the stars just beginning to gleam in the quadrant where the storm had burnt the sky. There was no oxygen here. Bright, young, feral suns, billions of them watched this version of Adummim spin like a marble on oblivion’s lip.

  Her meeting was over. What could be settled was settled.

  The number stood at two.

  The Yillo’tharnah had recognized her and the lines in her skin lost their temperature as the capreolate Entities above the plateau pulled down, chilly and bloated. Acres of invisible sweet tendrils sank beneath the stone and boiled softly in the dark.

  Sena felt the sand ping against her cheeks and knew it was time to go. Something like a gasp filled the hideous cold desolation of the plain.

  She spoke a bloodless word and turned to step from the murrey vista, through a tall and impressive window frame, out again into the snowy yard.

  The ruined estate of Nathaniel Howl loomed behind her. The trees creaked from the edge of the mountain woods.

  Nathaniel was there, waiting for her, hovering over her shiny backpack in the snow.

  CHAPTER

  41

  Taelin realized that the Iycestokians had locked her in her room. She knocked on the door. She called for help but no one came.

  She shrieked and wept and tore objects off the walls. She scooped up the little crockery of flowers from the aluminum desk and hurled it out the window. After the flowers went other things: her clothes, her pen and a tin of tissue. Her letter to Archbishop Abimael went too.

  The Iycestokian nation must be punished for locking me up, she thought. But how? She looked around the room for a weapon, a letter opener, anything—

  Then she remembered her razor. She snapped it up. The handle was still buttery with soap and blood. She took a moment to scream and pound on the thin door before whirling around.

  It began to sink in just how austere the room really was, and how cell-like. She went for the curtains first; sliced them into strips. Yes. Iycestokian taxes would have to pay for that!

  With the curtains in shreds she began cutting up the sheets and pillowcases, slicing up the mattress.

  Sit down, said the inside-girl.

  “I don’t want to sit down. We need to get out. I’m on a mission from—”

  You’re making a mess.

  “Shut up!” Taelin’s shriek filled the room with sound. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  I will not. Father will come for me. I don’t need to do anything. Just sit down and wait. Wait like I did in the dark.

  “You’re crazy. I have to get ready. I have to break my necklace. I have to get us to the jungle.”

  But Taelin did sit down on the edge of the cut-up mattress and for a moment held the razor to her silver-spangled wrist. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll end this!”

  It wasn’t true. She had tried before and lacked the courage. But as she bluffed, she noticed that her razor was an almost perfect match, color-wise, to the silver blotches covering her arm. The two very different things, knife and flesh seemed to blend together without any pressure at all.

  It’s my birthday today. You can’t kill me on my birthday, said the inside-girl.

  “Get out of my head!” Taelin threw her razor on the floor, then she picked up the aluminum desk chair. It was incredibly light and delicate, just like the door to her room. She swung the chair like a pickax. It rang in her hands. Its legs bowed but the door dented and shuddered under the blows.

  Give up. We don’t
need to try to get to Ahvelle. Father will open the way.

  Taelin remembered her descent into the dripping gulf of nightmares, where the hoarse voice in her head had been real, where the inside-girl had been the outside-girl, the girl with the petrified eyes, the girl whose head Sena had sawed off and dropped into a shopping bag.

  “Sena will save me from you!” Taelin screamed. “When the necklace breaks, I’ll be free of you!”

  The door bonged and twanged like a bell forged from the wrong sort of metal. Its upper portion started to bend when the latch gave way and Taelin followed her chair out into the hall.

  “Nenuln’s light!” She saw herself in a mirror hung above a table, flanked by two crockery pots of flowers. There was blood on the mirror. Blood on the floor, on the pots of flowers. She seemed to blend into the scenery, naked and coated with red grime. What happened to my clothes? She let go of the chair. Her palms were lined with deep aching trenches.

  In the distance, something shrieked constantly, echoing around corners and nearby, just a few feet down the hallway from the table and the lovely mirror, a man on his hands and knees was vomiting. The man had one hand on his weapon, but he was busy. Taelin took it from him with a sense of déjà vu. It was a velvet gun. She hefted its soft bulk against her chest and stepped past its owner, bare feet unable to avoid the warm slippery spatters.

  The hot light of an open airlock made her blink and the dry biting fragrance of the desert beckoned her past the vomit. Outside, in the blast-furnace heat, she could see shapes dancing crazily, haloed by the blinding sun.

  * * *

  CALIPH reached into the locker fully expecting to regret it. When his fingers brushed the first cool leathery shape, the hair on his arm sprung up. His eyes struggled over the object’s long-hung thinness: like a plucked goose. It flinched slightly, then touched him back. It stretched out with an appalling willingness, coming off the rack like an infant reaching from its mother toward a stranger. Headless, simian and dark, Caliph could not tell whether it was actually intelligent.