Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  But as she stood in an icy balcony off the west wing, overlooking the wild fingerlings of the Willin Droul, Miriam knew this had nothing to do with domestic unrest. All that had happened was that somehow, after hundreds of years of clandestine warfare, the Willin Droul had gotten the upper hand. They had moved their dominion out of slumbering lightless reservoirs and unleashed their disease on an unsuspecting world.

  Days ago, when word of the plague had first reached Sandren, many of the lower Houses had struck out through the cold. They had gone while Miriam was away, before the citizenry had turned. Before it was clear what was happening, sisters of the Fourth House and below had gone to be with their relatives.

  If Miriam had been here she might have stopped them. Megan certainly would have stopped them. Those sisters that had stayed behind now maintained their vigil from Parliament’s second floor.

  Two hundred twenty-two women. Hardly a crowd. More like the number of tourists on a slow day, a scant sprinkling, nearly lost amid the frescoed empyreal chambers. They were all that was left to guard the seat of Shradnae power.

  Naobi burned five nights from full, pure white above the milling yard, which gave Miriam a clearer view of the numbers they faced. A thousand at least. Hundreds had frozen to death, but others had arrived. Their cries filled Miriam like the white moon filled the ice on the balcony railing.

  Miriam looked up and imagined a vast ghostly squirming in the abyss beyond Naboi’s vivid corona.

  Polar lights? she thought.

  After crossing lines from the desert how could she think that? They had lost Anjie between the worlds. They had lost so many girls. They had lost their position of power here in Skellum and now, they had also lost the book—a secret she was trying to keep from the Sisterhood.

  To Miriam, the faint ebbing tendrils in the sky were sinister. As if the Devourer had come back and turned its ravening on them. Was this it? Was she the last head of the mighty Shradnae witchocracy, destined to cope with the crumbling infrastructure Megan had left behind?

  The sky swirled horribly above Parliament, black and hissing.

  “Everyone’s assembled.”

  Miriam felt ambushed. She had not heard Autumn approach. Now she could make out the ice crackling underfoot. It bothered her that Autumn had snuck up on her without even trying.

  I’m a detriment, Miriam thought. A liability. Her injury could, in the course of any engagement, prove disastrous. Autumn knew it but said nothing.

  Miriam smiled at Autumn whose calm, sweet-timbred voice, rather than reassuring her, reminded Miriam of all they had been through—and where they were going.

  “All right,” Miriam said. She kissed Autumn on the mouth, softly. Then she put her arms around her and held her close.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. She could feel Autumn’s shoulders tremble inside the embrace. Thankfully there was no sound.

  “We’re going to catch her,” said Miriam. “We’ll end this. I promise you. We’re going to be all right.”

  * * *

  MIRIAM left the balcony and the soft whickering cries of the ghouls and went into the yawning end of Parliament’s largest meeting hall. All that remained of the Sisterhood was here, gathered by firelight and colorful metholinate lamps. Perhaps there were still qloins in Yorba or Greymoor but birds had been sent and none had returned. So this was it. All of them.

  The room stilled as she took her position.

  Miriam took a sheet of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it. She held it loosely, in one hand.

  “Here we are,” she began. Her voice cracked. She had never been comfortable in front of crowds.

  “The questions you have are simple. ’How did this happen?’

  “‘Where did this terror come from?’ And most importantly, ’What do we do now?’

  “All of us have lost friends and loved ones. I share your grief. As you know, until this morning, I was in the south, tracking Sena. Over the past three days I have lost some of my best friends. I was forced to leave them: in Sandren. And in the desert.

  “We know from what papers were able to publish before sickness stopped the presses that the Willin Droul’s disease is everywhere. It is in the north and the south, the east and the west.

  “The people of other nations cannot understand the significance of this event. Sadly, it may be too late for many of them to ever learn. But we know. We know this sickness marks the end that our enemies have long threatened.

  “We knew this would happen if the Willin Droul ever returned. The Sisterhood was founded on preparing for this war.

  “I know some of you believe Sena has assumed the mantle of the Eighth House. That Giganalee passed it on to her before she died.

  “Even if that is true … Sena must be stopped.

  “How do we stop a myth? How do we stop a legend?

  “We stop it with truth. We stop it with determination. We stop it because we must. And most importantly, we stop it together.

  “We cannot fear the future. For the enemy’s sickness we have wards. For the enemy’s lies we have truth. Against their desires for destruction and chaos, we will bring the hammer of order and hope. We will meet them with blade and tongue.

  “We will turn them, we will win. And when we prevail, when their false hopes have been heaped in the street, we will have fulfilled the thing this Sisterhood was destined to fulfill.

  “Prepare yourselves. Tonight, we fly. Together we go south. Our enemy will know fear.”

  Miriam raised her slender fist.

  A subdued cheer went up in the hall.

  * * *

  EVEN from under Parliament’s roof Miriam could sense the cold empty wave-like motion of the sky. It leaned on Parliament’s ancient steel trusses.

  Dizzy and upset, she left the front of the room, barely acknowledging the applause.

  Autumn would get the girls sorted.

  Returning to Skellum had turned out to be critical. Another day without leadership and she might have found the whole of Parliament empty, the entire Sisterhood disbanded.

  And that was the most demoralizing part of the Sisterhood’s situation. The flawless had not come to Skellum. In Skellum there were no primeval horrors. Here, there were only fingerlings. It was just the disease and the onset of the transformation.

  The Willin Droul had not found it necessary to send a single cabalist to the Shradnae seat of power. No battles with ancient abominations here as there had been in Sandren. Miriam felt the hot embarrassment of that truth: that the Willin Droul no longer considered her organization a threat.

  The Sisterhood could not stay in Skellum. Here they were trapped and useless.

  In the Shifting Sands near Umong a pile of markers delimited the starline that the Sisterhood would follow. There in the wreckage, outside of Bablemum, the entire Sisterhood would arrive—perhaps irrevocably—in the deep south.

  Miriam had used Megan’s scrying dish to find Caliph Howl, filling it with her own blood. The sacrifice had bought her fifteen minutes of insight; the numbers in the bowl had told her he had arrived over Bablemum.

  This was frightening because it meant, most likely, that he was still chasing Sena and that Sena had indeed arrived in the oldest city on the Tebesh Plateau.

  Bablemum was where the Bedrigan Aquifer bubbled up. So ancient that the locals took pride in their fossil water, as if some antediluvian vitality imbued what came up through pipes and wells. A local company bottled it and shipped it all over the Tebesh Plateau at exorbitant prices.

  Used to anyway.

  The oldest city in the south had looked ominously silent through the blood in Miriam’s dish.

  Why would Sena lead him to Ulung? That dark watery stronghold within the aquifer? Was Sena just a puppet of the Willin Droul? If so, could the Sisterhood face the flawless at Ulung with any hope of success?

  Miriam thought about the aquifer, which connected through underground seas and rivers, to the east, west and north. Prehistoric cracks
that led beneath the Ghalla Peaks had allowed the flawless to poison Sandren. They could reach Stonehold. They could reach anywhere.

  There was no telling how many of them were down there, sliding through the dark, tainting the drinking water of a million cities with disease.

  CHAPTER

  44

  Despite having woken from a terrible dream, Caliph breathed easily. His body tingled with pleasant, torpid warmth. The dusty rawness of the desert, which had made his throat sore and shunted blood through his sinuses, had been replaced with gauzy humidity. Air soft as cobwebs dragged over his skin; he could hear the outside world, ebbing on the draft. Based on sounds, someone had put him to bed with the window open.

  His ears opened like sinkholes, funneling sound directly into his brain. He was curious where he was, but still too sleepy to open his eyes.

  Big occasional droplets dinged on tin, thumped on wood. Intermittent. There were tree sounds as well, or maybe grass, behind which murmured a faintly unnatural urban stillness. Soft electrical purring mixed with the unmistakable sob of tree frogs.

  Caliph lingered, enjoying the after-rain smell and the softness of his pillow.

  Faint flickers and far-off thunder encouraged him to stir. His last memory was of Taelin bending over him. He swallowed hard. His throat itched and his eyes were puffy and hot. The air tingled with sweet black molds and mildew.

  He squinted; sat up; dug the crust out of his tear ducts and realized that he didn’t feel nearly as well as he had thought. Though warm drugs still gloated in his capillaries, vague pains lingered.

  He set his feet on the cool flooring and peered toward the window.

  “Mizraim … Emolus—”

  He got up and stumbled toward the astonishing view.

  Beyond the window, the sky boiled with ultramarine storm clouds, immolated by Naobi.

  He was still on the Iycestokian ship. He recognized the smell. But while he slept, it had moored at the edge of a city where great stupas, not of stone but of ornamental iron, enmeshed the clouds. Black cage-like shrouds surrounded and capped the city’s more compact structures.

  Purple lights in cupolas and minarets bled wetly through the grilles. Copper wires and golden transformers traced the blackness with countercoiled designs. Signs glowed and bubbled in the empty streets. Tropical trees hissed as wind pushed through husk-like silken fronds.

  He drank it in for several moments. Then he noticed a folded stack of papers, propped up, labeled with his name in Sena’s handwriting. He picked the papers up nervously. They were paper-clipped together. Their contents had been typed.

  He read them by moonlight and scowled.

  Session #2: Phismas, Sae 9

  Stenographer: X. Fadish

  Subject: [redacted]

  How are you feeling?

  [redacted]

  Good. What would you like to talk about today?

  [redacted]

  I see.

  That’s a lot.

  Well let me try to respond to all of that. I’ll start by saying yes. The Veydens do say that visions without actions are only dreams.

  [redacted]

  No. No one really knows where the Veydens got their pseudosciences from. Some claim they deciphered old stones in the jungle.

  [redacted]

  Yeah, well the Pplarian-Gringling link is really just speculation. You’d be hard-pressed to get a group of scholars to believe—

  [redacted]

  Sure, but nowadays, Greeny culture is practically invisible. We’re like birds in the market. We’ve been skinned and chopped into anonymous pieces. Our origins have been sterilized.

  [redacted]

  I’m entitled to use it. It doesn’t offend me at all. I like to remember that we’re green. I like the stigma: of wealth and cunning, smelling like turpentine and expensive smoke.

  [redacted]

  No, it’s not what we used to be about. We didn’t used to sell our secrets to the companies. But now look at us: in posh apartments on the avenues, living above Ilek and Pandragon and Despche alike.

  I’m proud of that, by the way. I’m proud that we’re doctors, psychiatrists, holomorphs for rent.

  [redacted]

  Sorry, I don’t give readings or sell talismans. I can point you toward some colleagues that will work out elaborate star charts. I don’t do that either. My approach is more direct, which I assume is why you came to me.

  [redacted]

  Yeah. Those questions aren’t really up my street.

  [redacted]

  I’ll try.

  [redacted]

  That’s right. You’re pretty well versed for a girl such as yourself.

  [redacted]

  Yes. You’re going to eat my heart with that silver spoon. Where were we?

  [redacted]

  Right. They call her the Sslia. It’s like uh … deliverer. The Deliverer.

  [redacted]

  Well that’s because it is a murky legend. You know this entity is not gender specific. Sslia is like—

  [redacted]

  Right. Exactly. There would be a lot of interest in making sure you get the right person for the job. (laughs) Assuming it was real.

  Anyway, I simply don’t know much about the subject. The only reason I know anything at all is because—you guessed it—shuwt tinctures.

  [redacted]

  No. I don’t believe that. Keep in mind none of this is science.

  [redacted]

  I don’t know if Pplarians have ever used shuwt tinctures. That’s way off track.

  [redacted]

  Okay. Fine. The short of it, right? Is that some entity, the Sslia, uses these tinctures to travel around in time—sort of. It’s part of some big apocalyptic bullshit scenario. So, in the end, supposedly, this Sslia uses the tincture to escape this epic black cosmic meltdown of the world or universe or whatever. He or she disappears and leaves everyone else in the lurch. That’s it. That’s all I know.

  [redacted]

  (laughs) You’re funny. No, I mean, no one knows, right? This legend is old as dirt. I have no idea whether there’s some grand purpose. I’ve certainly never heard of one. The Sslia just … does crazy stuff, and then disappears.

  [redacted]

  Well I think there are some drawings. Old engravings or whatever. But you know they always show the Sslia hooded and gender-neutral. The actual entity of the Sslia is described as having wings. Wings of light. And the power to destroy the world, of course, which is symbolized as a sword. That’s what this whole myth is about. The Sslia shows up, prepares the planet for the end of time—maybe that’s your grand purpose—then it opens up the floodgates of destruction and disappears instantly on a drug-induced journey into forever after.

  [redacted]

  Yeah, it is nice. Why can’t all recreational drugs have legends like this to bolster sales?

  [redacted]

  Right. These notes you’ve brought. You said they’re from your grandfather’s war chest? My opinion is that you should stop reading them.

  [redacted]

  Sure I can translate Veyden. I’m green, aren’t I?

  [redacted]

  This one here? Gnor-ak Gnak Zith’yn Auth-ich Aubelle Aubiel Gnak Naen’Uln Thu-ru Ryth-ich El.

  [redacted]

  Yeah. I know that.

  [redacted]

  No.

  [redacted]

  Maybe you’re thinking I’m an olive with its core cut out? Half-Veyden born and raised in Pandragor … long way from the jungles? So how can I be so sure of the deeper cultural significance?

  [redacted]

  Sure, but, I’m sorry, your translation is just wrong.

  Look, I’ll do it word for word, exactly. Darkness-in Light Exist (with a plural subject marker there) Many-of One Terrible Light White Moon’Gold Culminate-will Age-of Sadness. It’s a bit esoteric but the translation isn’t hard. Just that Naen bit.

  [redacted]

  Right, “white moon gold” is a bit am
biguous. That’s because Naen’Uln is a religious word. It could be purely descriptive—a thing that’s whitish-gold like the big moon—or it could be a proper noun. If I were to translate it for you into Trade I’d probably write it something like: In the darkness there are many lights, of which one Terrible Light, white-gold like the moon, will culminate an age of sadness.

  [redacted]

  Hey, if you want to think it means something different, use your translation instead. You won’t upset me.

  I just don’t think you should focus on this. It’s bad energy. It’s easy to read fear into that little Jingsade-sounding whatzit that some Veyden probably copied from a carved block.

  [redacted]

  (laughs)

  [redacted]

  Well, I’m laughing because here you are, sitting in my den of iniquity, asking me about shuwt tinctures but treating me like your priest.

  [redacted]

  No. What I do is offer counsel on the use of an extremely expensive, extremely dangerous and extremely illegal recreational drug. Why? Because I do feel some moral obligation to help really rich people not kill themselves while they’re getting high. It’s that simple. What other brand of drug dealer hires a stenographer? I do it so that my clients feel at ease, to provide them with a level of comfort. This isn’t a dirty brothel with syringes scattered all over the floor. This is an office, with comfortable chairs, a window and water in glass bottles.