Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  The thing’s cool skeletal embrace drew its small mass up close against Caliph’s chest where it adjusted to his panicked movements. It flinched beneath his elbows, swinging its “body” around to his lower back. The creature, or thing, was lightweight and sinewy, hairless and flecked with ferruginous eyes: both on its central thorax and nestled in the deep soft flesh of all four of its “shoulders.”

  It was boned like an old woman.

  Caliph had no idea what it did or how to use it. Still, the long hairless appendage that sprouted from the top of the weapon’s rib cage, and which ended bizarrely in a single plumose frond, seemed to be the business end. Like the antenna of a moth, it quivered slightly and stayed erect, hovering behind his head. He had to crane his neck to see where it floated, preoccupied, seeming to taste the air.

  I guess I’m armed, he thought. He still felt naked with nothing in his hands but if he didn’t have to manipulate a weapon he supposed that was for the best. His whole body hurt, his neck in particular. He could feel where the Iycestokians had stitched him up.

  The hallway he had followed ended here at the weapon locker but there was a wide archway that opened onto the airship’s deck. He could feel the desert heat tonguing through the exit, mixing with the cool air of the hall.

  He looked out tentatively. Nothing moved except the shadow of the feathered appendage, which lengthened before him. He watched it slide forward over the smooth metal decking, silently checking the kiln-dry air.

  The deck itself was devoid of both weapons and men. Caliph tested its desertion by venturing to the railing and looking down at the wreckage of his former ship. The sound of the alarm faded behind him. He turned and moved toward what he believed was the front of the craft.

  Most of the ship’s crew had probably been assigned to the wreck site.

  Even so, he stepped quietly into the shadow of an airlock cased in black flaking metal, veined with conduits. On his right, a glass housing flecked with orange water stains glistered from the pastel fluctuations of solvitriol energy inside it. The doors opened automatically, double-startling him, first with their sudden hissing movement and then with the thing behind them, like a person in a sun-sheltered cave. Skin shimmering and silver.

  It was a woman with greasy red-brown hair, and the hint of a double chin. She stood there a moment, shorter than he was, staring at him while a single strand of milky saliva stretched between her lips.

  Caliph recognized the disease despite its not having eaten her down to the bone yet. She carried a subtle roll around her midsection. What he couldn’t understand was how she had gotten here, aboard the Iycestokian ship. Then he noticed the patch on her tight-fitting uniform sleeve. She was a crew member.

  She bleated like an injured animal and walked toward him. Caliph’s instinct was to try and help but when she touched him, when her hands clenched in his shirt, the feathered tail behind his head came down. A slender talon of bone emerged like a dewclaw from a hidden fold near the tentacle’s end and punctured her through the chest. The attack brought the woman to her knees.

  She looked into his face without any emotion. He reached out and grabbed her by her soft meaty arms, her shoulders, steadied her and eased her toward the deck.

  She came down on her right side with the bone spine still inside her, limbs nerveless, eyes staring as if bewitched by the soul-lights in the glass housing beside the door.

  Caliph didn’t know what to feel for her. Partly he was numb as he stood up and watched the spine withdraw, retracting silently into a cartilaginous groove beneath the frond.

  The breeze from the desert was hushed enough that Caliph turned his head at the sound of footsteps just inside the airlock. He could feel the frosty coolness of the ship’s interior leaking out into the heat around him. The ghastly shapes of two more crew members with glazed eyes and silver skin were coming out onto the deck.

  Caliph backed off, wary.

  He looked over his shoulder for a means of escape and at that moment heard a dry brittle sound in the sky.

  It came from the direction of Sena’s ship. A crescent formation of hooded Iycestokian vessels flanked her as she sat motionless several miles out. The black hooded warships made a gloomy crackling sound that spread by means of lilting murmurs interspersed with terrifying sizzles and pops and other surprising crescendos. The sound birred out in every direction, then echoed back from the edge of space.

  The crackle resonated in Caliph’s body an eternal moment before the Iycestokian guns fired in unison and turned the Pplarian airship into a symbol. Caliph couldn’t even scream.

  His voice broke under the force, trailing off into a hoarse croak.

  Hands grabbed at him from behind and he heard the tentacle of his weapon whine through the air. The weapon thrashed and stabbed and killed but Caliph’s eyes were not on the silver people trying to maul him. He looked at the Pplarian ship that had opened like a white lotus, ejecting beautiful golden globules of light and giant starfish arms of cream-colored steam. He was listening to the reverberations of the guns. The entire sky warbled.

  Caliph felt the hands now. They were hurting, clawing, digging but he still couldn’t look away. Strong thin fingers pulled him, turned him. The white explosion vanished behind a tangle of dark torsos and arms. Why wasn’t his weapon protecting him? He looked down and noticed several bodies. Apparently it had killed five or six crew members while he had been distracted. But now the weapon was sweating great burgundy droplets, as if it was fevered. As if it was sick.

  The bone spine clawed feebly at one of his abusers before two grisly shapes pulled it from his torso and hurled it at the deck. Arms were everywhere, faces blocked out the sun.

  Caliph still felt drugged. He swung his stitched-up hand at his assailants and felt the wound tear open. He hollered. It didn’t matter. They surged again. A knot of carrion birds squabbling.

  Caliph looked through them at the sky. There was a square of light framed by their moving limbs and heads, ever-changing, a triangle, a squashed octagon of stratospheric blue. But at least he could see out, see past them to something beautiful, something pure.

  Ladies, gentlemen, members of the North-South Peace Protocol, we are here today, gathered at the great city-state of Sandren, a symbol not only of prosperity but of peaceful independence. I’d like to start by—

  His talk unrolled in his mind, aimed at the blue sublime.

  After a few moments he realized that he had lost track of the words and that the small aperture through which he had been looking had expanded. It was not framed by a frenzy of moving bodies anymore. The borders of his vision had stilled. He slid his elbows back along the deck, far enough to prop his head up and look around.

  Half a dozen men and women in uniform lay around him, brushed by wind, dripping in milky goo. The sun was a blazing white flare. Too hot. But there was a cool softness on his neck, supporting him. And a tiny bit of shade in the shape of someone’s head. He looked up at Sena’s face, upside down, hovering over him.

  For a moment he felt afraid. Terrified of her. Terrified because when she smiled it was not a familiar smile. Her hair was long and coffee-brown and her body was covered with red war paint. It was not Sena. It was Taelin, gooey and crimson and joyous.

  * * *

  THE dappled silvern bodies fell away from Caliph Howl. Taelin fired one more time at a livid torso still struggling to rise.

  Thick creamy strands spewed over the blazing deck and spread a bitter-sour smell. The grisly shape floundered and collapsed as the subtle venom paralyzed it and began its dissolution. Taelin stared unblinkingly at her handiwork. The changed crew reminded her of insects in tree sap; their silver-gold eyes bulged beneath the sun.

  She set the velvet gun down and moved around behind Caliph Howl. He was barely conscious. For a moment he seemed to recognize her and smiled faintly. His stitches had opened up and he was bleeding badly.

  “You are not going to die out here in the sun.” With great effort, she dragged h
im up a ramp and into the cockpit where the coolers were blowing through the vents. He had already passed out by the time she got him situated on the floor.

  It had taken all of her energy to move him and for a while she rested and listened to the desert howl. The cockpit was tubed with black pipes and glowing solvitriol bulbs. Most everything was written in Ilek with the exception of a chrome-and-brass fire extinguisher.

  The inside-girl was being quiet. Taelin eased back against the wall. Sweat and blood gelled on contact with the cool metal; she felt her skin stick to it. She was on the verge of relaxing, when the room darkened dramatically. Maybe the ship had pivoted in the wind. A sound thrashed against the fine hairs inside her ear.

  The only intelligible words she could pick out of the static-rich vibration were: I found my daughter’s head …

  Taelin shivered and stood up. She went back out onto the strange chitinous deck where the heat was baking the dissolving bodies. She picked up the velvet gun but nothing stirred.

  Taelin looked toward the empty place where the Pplarian ship had been, but she knew that the Iycestokians could not kill her goddess.

  Faith was the opposite of fear.

  She was wondering where her clothes had gone.

  Caliph Howl needs help, she thought. I should go find Dr. Baufent.

  CHAPTER

  42

  A woman stood in the sky, surrounded by yellow-white chaos. Shrapnel, fumes and scalding steam cartwheeled through the air. Hulilyddic acid atomized from chemical cells in the Pplarian ship’s mythic compartments. The explosion had dispensed a sour perfume that floated in helices around her.

  The woman seemed preoccupied. Her fingernails sorted through her curls, scraping the scalp just above her forehead. This was visible in minute detail through the Iycestokian gunsights.

  “Sir, she just disappeared.”

  “What?” The commanding officer leaned forward and peered into the sight. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “She’s right there.”

  The gunner looked back.

  It felt like a glitch but there she was, miraculous and dazzling, standing in the sky. The gunner was afraid.

  The deep rigid fear that springs from the impossible had filled him and it had already spread man to woman to flight lieutenant to brigadier general up the chain of command, as each person in the armada took their turn at the scopes and stared.

  The scopes told the truth about the thing that couldn’t be, but was: in casual defiance of their might.

  * * *

  SENA fears that Nathaniel might still undo her plans. She fears the future and the moment when she will have to look Caliph in the eye. What she does not fear, are the Iycestokians.

  They have no way to cross her ambit.

  She does not hate them. They have no idea what is coming or what has already passed. They are just following orders, just demonstrating their violent national pride.

  What they believe is that the Duchy of Stonehold has a book, which they have been told to take by force. They do not understand the legend of the Sslia. Their guns have failed them and now they are confused, trapped within themselves, trusting to a shilly-shally episteme of vaccines and imperialism and all sorts of strategies divorced from what is real.

  It is because they know so little that she decides to save them.

  Returning from the Howl Estate she finds her airship flinderized, but this is a simple misunderstanding. The Iycestokians do not know what they want. They have made an error. She will give them what they need.

  And she will do it out of kindness, out of sacrifice. She will take a piece of her ambit to work this miracle on their behalf. But they will not thank her.

  She speaks and vanishes from the sky.

  Nothing can stop her as she arrives in the capital of Iycestoke City, in Molbul Square where the three turfs of the ochlocracy meet. She uses raw math to quiet the quarters before her main argument goes off.

  No terror-stricken cries lift from the silver crowds where disease has already taken its toll.

  She is barely there an instant before she is back above the desert. But in that instant, her voice is in two places at once, sound waves still projecting.

  In Iycestoke, an unnatural hush goes out over a six-mile radius of urban sprawl.

  It begins with a watchman positioned at the entrance to Ninel’s tomb: Iycestoke’s sacred monument. But it does not end there. Next to him lies another man with a worn and haggard face. His collar flaps senselessly against his cheek. Beside him rests a pale silvery girl dressed carelessly in black wool. To her left is another body and to that body’s right three more.

  The crowd crumples in the moment when Sena is there. It continues crumpling now that she has left. Across the enormous vapor-wrapped city, every breathing creature plummets. The starlings and pigeons have fallen from the sky like cruel hail. They plunge to the streets, thumping against cobble and brick.

  People sleep in unseemly positions, faces pressed to stone. Some kiss animal excrement, gutter grates and garbage. A few fall into puddles face down where they are doomed to drown.

  Iycestoke sleeps.

  “Shh—” and twenty million people more or less join the dreamless oblivion from which their bodies begin to burst.

  It begins with the watchman.

  His terrible stain spreads out behind Sena in the same instant that she disappears. It forks bizarrely like a pair of bloody wings, as if a plastic bag full of red paint has been hurled at the pavement.

  Iycestoke is red. Its citizens are spell-slaves in the purest sense. She gathers holojoules from ten million bodies and leaves the rest sleeping like wild cattle shot for sport to dream and die. Already she is back in the sky above the desert, with the holojoules in her mouth. The gunners on the Iycestokian ships have just seen her flicker in the sky.

  Nathaniel is frantic. He does not know what she is about to do. He reaches out tentatively to St. Remora and his soul machine, ready to bring his power source to life.

  But when he hears the numbers coming out of her mouth, he sneers.

  She is a merciful god. The Iycestokians are blessed. They will not find themselves in a labyrinth when the Masters come.

  Sena knows that this is a betrayal of the trust between her and the Yillo’tharnah she serves. But she smiles. It is payback for Their brazenness at Soth. They are angry with her now. She has stretched the limits of Their patience and now she pushes it to the absolute edge. The Yillo’tharnah are enraged. These souls will have a different fate. Unlike the rest of Adummim, the people of Iycestoke will not fall beneath a Yillo’tharnahic yoke.

  Sena takes the holojoules of ten million people and turns the blood of Iycestoke’s civilians against their great armada.

  It will not be true salvation, but it will be salvation’s shadow.

  * * *

  THE Iycestokian fleet fell out of the sky. All safety devices on all one hundred seventy-nine of the huge hooded monstrosities failed. Crews and admirals were caught by surprise.

  The sound of their plummet was not loud. The sound of their impact was. A chorus of metallic groans and deep geologic shrieks sounded a thousand feet below. The crashes did not echo above the blue and whisky-colored sand.

  Sena took no joy in it. The black crescent of wreckage completed a nearly perfect ring far below her feet, gaps filled in by craft that had—erenow—orbited her in a sphere.

  She looked down at the new geography and chewed her lip. God of a dying world. Light streamed from her shoulders, spitting rays through steam and dust and acid that had yet to fully clear. Emotionally, she was threadbare. Irritated at Nathaniel for his lunge toward St. Remora.

  You reckless fool, Nathaniel hissed.

  Sena walked across the sky, briskly at thirty knots, heading for the only ship she hadn’t touched.

  I found my daughter’s head, Nathaniel said. Floating in the ocean.

  “Call me callous but I don’t think you really cared about her. I think there’s something you
’re not telling me.” Sena looked across the desert, north and west, across the Great Cloud Rift and out to sea. Nathaniel wasn’t lying. Arrian’s head was there, bobbing like driftwood. Why had he gone searching for it? There had to be a reason beyond familial affection.

  This wasn’t a game.

  Nathaniel didn’t respond to her assessment. He had left the desert and gone out over the sea.

  Sena stepped from the sky onto the deck of the Iycestokian ship. Taelin was there, naked and blackish-red from head to toe. By comparison, her eyes and teeth looked incandescent. Dr. Baufent stood in the doorway, watching over Taelin’s shoulder with a terror-riven expression. Her whole body stiffened at the sight of Sena.

  Taelin rushed forward. She got down on her knees.

  “Shh,” Sena whispered. “Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” She pulled Taelin off the floor. “Get up, Taelin. Get up. We need to get you washed. We need to get everything and everyone washed. And we need to move Caliph into a proper bed. And then we need to get this ship moving again. Are you with me, Taelin? Do you understand?”

  Taelin smiled a grisly smile and nodded her hand up and down.

  CHAPTER

  43

  Earlier in the day, the Sisterhood had swung Parliament’s countless metal grilles closed across each towering windowpane. The pins were secured. Doors were bolted. Blood was spilt and the entire ground floor warded and sealed.

  Despite this, the windows had shattered within moments of the onslaught and winter had billowed in. A forest of arms still flailed between the bars at every casement. Snow drifted through the central hall. The statue of the Eighth House in the atrium had become part of a frozen wasteland. Nevertheless, the silver mob did not break through.

  Miriam mused momentarily over the not-quite irony that Mirayhr’s citizens had always been careful to muffle their criticism of the Witchocracy. Only now—after they could no longer enjoy whatever freedom a victory might earn—had they found the courage for rebellion, for revolution.