Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  In the pot was an organ, pale and rigid as a Pplarian phallus and covered with what looked like tiny black eyes. It rose vertically, at an organic angle. Fungoid. Whether it could see or hear or both, Miriam didn’t know. She spoke in cant to Autumn. “Are you going to bite your tongue?” She was only half-joking.

  “If I have to.” Autumn smirked.

  “You’d think they’d have come to check on us by now,” said Anjie. She nudged the pile of restraints with her foot.

  “I imagine they’ll bring breakfast,” said Miriam.

  After a short interval, Autumn scowled and said, “Can you hear that?”

  Miriam had no idea what she was talking about.

  “It sounds like—”

  “I hear it,” said Anjie. “It sounds like someone screaming through the wall.”

  Miriam still couldn’t hear it. “Maybe they’re torturing the High King.”

  Autumn looked out the window at Sena’s ship. “You know,” she said. “There’s enough blood on this boat to jump across.”

  Anjie nodded.

  “There’s only three of us left,” said Miriam. “I think we should regroup. I think we should go back to Skellum.”

  “I agree,” said Anjie. “We should regroup.”

  “But she’s right there,” said Autumn.

  Miriam didn’t know how to say it. Yes, Sena was right there. But Miriam knew Sena, far better, and Sena frightened Miriam. How did she communicate the wisdom of that fear without demoralizing her ancillas?

  A door clanged open at the end of the hallway. The sound was accompanied by the loud echoing rattle of a wheeled cart moving over the textured floor.

  It stopped almost immediately.

  “I’m not eating!” The sharp voice of Dr. Baufent made Miriam smile. She could picture the physician sulking three or four cells down.

  The sound of plastic scraping against metal was followed by a crash. Autumn looked at Miriam and covered her mouth. Only Anjie remained grim in the aftermath of what had probably been an entire tray of food, scattering across the floor.

  A man spoke with a thick Ilek accent. “Suit yourself. Maybe at lunch you’ll be hungry.” While he spoke, Miriam heard keys being applied, probably to the physician’s door.

  “What’s that?” asked Baufent.

  “Nothing,” said the man. “Just going to draw a little blood. We have to make sure you’re healthy.”

  Miriam looked at Autumn.

  “I’m healthy as a horse!” snapped Baufent. “Get your hands off me.”

  “They’re checking for the plague,” whispered Anjie.

  Miriam nodded and put a finger to her lips.

  “Please try to relax,” the man was saying.

  “What’s going on out there?” demanded Baufent. “I heard screaming.”

  “Nothing,” said the man. “Everything is fine.”

  “Ouch!” Baufent cried. “You cradle-custard … ouch! Sozzling … are you even trained to do this?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the man. “I’m doing my best.” But his voice was tense and strained. He did not sound as if everything was fine.

  The words were an invitation. Miriam signaled Anjie who started whispering fast frantic syllables, searching for holojoules. Just a drop. A small bead soaking into a cotton ball that might have been taped over Baufent’s arm, for instance.

  Anjie made the hand sign for yes and Miriam heard the result. Enough holojoules had been gathered to breach the specimen vial the Iycestokian had used to collect Baufent’s blood. It shattered with a pop. The men—Miriam could hear both of them—gave out panicked cries.

  It was Autumn’s turn to start talking. She quickly gathered the ounces into a stronger equation. A far more dangerous sum. Miriam listened as Autumn turned the fresh holojoules toward the task of understanding what she could not see: the region out of sight, down the hall, the landscape of the breakfast cart.

  There wasn’t much energy to work with and Miriam felt a pang of anxiety that Autumn might squander the small gift they had been given. But then Autumn’s equation changed gears and Miriam knew she had succeeded in finding a tool to manipulate.

  With a final word, Autumn ended her sequence and Miriam heard a scream.

  There was no point being quiet anymore. Miriam called out to the new supply, a coursing torrent pouring from the man’s chest, spattering over the floor from where a butter knife had been driven between his ribs. She used it first and foremost to slice—with numbers—through the other man’s throat.

  This used all seven cuts from the first body and left her with seven from the second.

  But seven was not a small number in holomorphic terms. It was the threshold of sacrifice. It represented enormous possibilities.

  Dr. Baufent was shouting. The strange phallic fungus in its pot was screaming and men armed with living weapons were pouring through the hallway door. Miriam watched them slip in the blood as they scrambled down the hallway, searching for the perpetrators. They did not move gracefully. They seemed ill. She turned her math. Their weapons betrayed them.

  Now there were gouts and torrents of blood, holojoules singing in the air.

  Miriam and her sisters exited the cell through fringe space as the violence continued to spread through the ship. Miriam guided it carefully, avoiding Baufent, avoiding those they had flown with on the Odalisque. It was a courtesy. She took blood from the Iycestokians. A great deal of it. Fully two-thirds of the crew went into her equation. Finally it was enough for the three of them to cross lines.

  Miriam looked back on the world as if it were a litho. As if they stood on a color image of a prison. A two-dimensional picture of a cell … and no more capable of holding them.

  Miriam stepped off the image and moved past copper wires, tubing and thick-lensed dials caked with grime. On the edge of the vessel’s cockpit she found a woman that might have been the captain of the ship. She did not look healthy.

  Miriam felt the darkness boiling behind her. She skirted the lip of the abyss, pulling her ancillas with her. The window back to reality shifted beneath her feet at absurd angles: she saw the Iycestokian airship from top down, the foot of a passing bird—stark against the sky. She didn’t have much time to deliberate.

  She glanced into another room and saw a man with silver skin curled up on the floor.

  “It’s not worth it,” she said to Autumn. “We need to regroup. I’m taking us home.”

  Miriam dragged them north. Her decision meant that she would not be Coven Mother. She would remain Sororal Head. But she had had enough. Her girls had had enough. She didn’t care what happened to the High King of Stonehold. Her little group had suffered too much.

  With the holojoules of a hundred eighty lives propelling them, Miriam found the places where the starlines intersected the planet and calculated her coordinates.

  She pulled her sisters along the outside. They travelled vertically in a higher dimension, up reality’s thickness, thumbing through the pages to find the right place to reinsert themselves.

  At her back, Miriam felt the void. She had crossed lines before and while there was the worry of losing touch with her window back, this time it was different. This time she felt something in the space behind her. A presence she didn’t dare look at.

  Instead, she looked at riverbanks, a cloud, a weathervane on a barn. She looked at a pile of silver bodies in a village and the things that were eating them. She had to concentrate on these things, on tractors and naked footprints in the snow. She had to focus on her window in order to keep from turning around.

  Something was there. Prickling her skin. Just over her shoulder. Behind the corner of her eye.

  “There’s something following us,” said Autumn.

  “Don’t look back.” Miriam gasped. She could see Skellum through the window.

  “It’s made of gold,” said Anjie. “Gods it’s so beautiful…”

  Her back crawling, Miriam stepped through the image and shuddered violently. She
stood in Parliament at the great black fireplace. Safe. With a bright blue day pouring in through the windows. A chill went from the crown of her head, all the way down her spine.

  “Oh—” Autumn’s voice sounded like she had misplaced something important.

  “Don’t worry,” Miriam said. “We have the book. We’ll find a way to open it. We’ll go back for Sena—” She turned around. “I just couldn’t risk it anymore. I couldn’t risk you—” Miriam counted heads. All two of them. Autumn’s face was pale.

  “Where is Anjie?”

  CHAPTER

  39

  Caliph heard the screaming but it sounded far away from where he was lying, encased in bandages, tucked in with warm fuzzy pain medication that the Iycestokians had administered. Sena’s pink hair and little black nurse uniform gave him confidence that this was all a dream. Scene two. Act something or other. Invert it. Stir it with a wooden spoon.

  He did not feel compelled to investigate the shrieks, which was a nice change, since they were fiction—and he was tired. Nor did he feel compelled to jump up off the bed and grab Sena by the … arm? There was little clothing to grab her by. He could grab her by those two short ponytail bunches or the slender heels on her boots, but doing either would probably steer his reasons for grabbing her in the first place down the wrong road. And that would be terrible given the fact that so many people had died.

  He was angry with her. Partly because of what she had done. Partly because the real Sena had ignored him—and only this Sena, the dream Sena, the one he made up, still paid him any mind.

  The real Sena evaded him …

  In her white flying machine.

  The drugs made him think of her as one of the beautiful insects he had pursued with nets and burning fingers, with breathless leaps and desperate eyes—as a child.

  He had broken many handles against the headstones, where the insects landed to fan themselves, only to watch them flutter away like silent laughter.

  Could he blame them? The only thing to do, if he ever caught one, was stick a pin through its lovely body, drip poison on its head and tape its wings down inside a cigar box until it dried. Sena’s fate would not be so different if he caught her.

  He heard another shriek but still didn’t feel compelled to investigate it. That was a relief because he was so tired. His head was thinking in circles.

  Everything, the whole world, was a cool intravenous drip and nothing could be expected of him. That was why, instead of jumping off the bed and grabbing Sena by the arm and shaking her when she showed up miraculously in his room; instead of asking her what in Emolus’ name she had been doing, he instead focused on the sparkling tube between her fingers. He didn’t want to drink it. He remembered the pain from before. His bones tearing through his skin. But her expression was quintessentially sincere.

  “I just want you to understand,” she said. “Think of me as your Veyden spirit guide.”

  This made him laugh. He couldn’t understand what she meant but he smelled the sweet familiar fume around her, which was lovely until the ship pitched and he nearly threw up. “Are you really here?” he asked.

  For a moment he determined there was no one in the room. Then she said, “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just help us? Help me find Sig…” He was deeply interested in what the fictional Sena might say and which of his thoughts his subconscious would choose to impose on her lips: concocted by himself to soothe himself. When she said nothing he took the sparkling tube and swallowed the tincture.

  “It’s going to be different this time,” said Sena.

  And it was. This time there was little pain.

  One eyelid blink and he stood in the house on Isca Hill, feeling the cold at one of the windowpanes and watching the snow come down in the front yard. A cap of white obscured the head of a statue with a broken sword and seraphic wings lost among the trees. “Soon-soon,” he heard himself whisper. But he was not himself. He was not Caliph Howl. He saw his hand come up to the frosted glass, old and roped with purple veins.

  His uncle’s hand.

  “Soon-.” Three, seven, six. His finger drew a shape in the crystals on the glass. Almost like a flower opening.

  But it was not a flower. The Unknown Tongue registered with him even in this crude medium. The symbol was a nonphysical two.

  The two represented the only hope Nathaniel had in the world. Caliph realized this. He experienced his uncle’s thoughts directly, without filter, as if they had been his own. He could taste the wetness in the old man’s mouth—so foreign. Feel the frailty of his slender bones and translucent skin.

  The numbers rolled through Nathaniel’s skull over and over. They were his mantra, his instructions. Three—seven—six. Prepare the page. Create the ink. Escape the world.

  Six. Slippery six. The six’s surfaces curved protectively around that lower curl. As if hiding something. Such a subtle shape. Almost a mistake really. Adjust part of its arc just a little and it would turn into a zero.

  Prepare, create, escape. Twice. Once for each of them.

  He drew the number two again on the frosted glass.

  Caliph laughed a little at the notion of the Yillo’tharnah but even as he laughed he felt something squirm between the lobes, down in the germinal recesses. A sensation he could ignore only if he kept thinking fast, sliding forward quickly and rationally—else the thin crust on which his empirical sledge traveled give way. And whatever squirmed underneath the ice, if he fell through—

  Then his uncle’s ice-black eyes cracked. And he did fall through. And all the glass in the long hallway of the house on Isca Hill shattered and Caliph looked out with no barrier between himself and those strange wintery trees that moved their branches like cnidae: a forest of pale hydrae in a murky pond, immortal and silent—

  What were they? Were They the Yillo’tharnah?

  A floorboard in the hallway creaked and Nathaniel looked down. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  Caliph saw himself, his own mirror-haunted eyes. His own small body, tense-fisted, dragging his pillow across the floor. He heard his own asthmatic breathing. He had tears in his eyes.

  “I saw something in my room,” said Caliph the child.

  “Go to bed.” Nathaniel looked back out the window. Three-seven-six. Three-seven-six.

  Caliph could sense his other self. The perfect replica of that small person he had once been, rooted in the carpet as if in deep mud. Stuck. Too afraid to go back to bed, too afraid to speak and risk the consequences.

  Nathaniel looked at the child, standing in the hallway with the trembling lip, straight brown hair and—

  “Go to bed!” Nathaniel shrieked.

  Then he turned and stormed down the hall, leaving the boy in snow-sparked moonlight.

  Caliph went with his uncle. He had no choice. He was inside of him, feeling the startling energy of that body as it moved through the house by memory, charging through lightless passageways with confidence. Nathaniel climbed the stairs to his tower room, threw open the trapdoor and clambered into a space set with a canopy bed that resembled a black crown surrounded by walls of bare stone into which had been chiseled deep-plaited designs: symbols of dimensions interacting.

  He pulled his thick red book out from under a plate of quail bones and opened it to a marked page. The jellyfish glyph!

  It was not black like the other glyphs because it had been inked in pure, undiluted blood. Caliph knew this.

  “You are my creation,” Nathaniel said to the glyph. “My little island in the dark.”

  He stared at the glyph under moonlight until it glowed with a white halo, then lifted his eyes and studied the afterimage that wavered in the air of his room. In that image, more than the image on the page, lived the squirming. The white pieces of the glyph twisted and broke off like ice in black water, drifting into darkness—consumed.

  “They’re behind it. Always behind it,” Nathaniel whispered. “Waiting.” He chu
ckled with absurd glee, took a pencil and clicked the chemiostatic light on his desk. Then he sat down and wrote a small block of text in the margin of the Cisrym Ta:

  No answer for the seasons! Prepare or perish! Ha! Plant, harvest, lay up fuel lest we freeze. Or we can travel … Go south! But we must react! We must do something. Because one morning the snow will fall. It is inevitable.

  This is obvious, but notice how easily we accept it, like dull beasts. We know it in our bones. Our controls cannot reach the seasons, nor do we believe that they are sentient. So we do not scream at winter as we would scream at an animal for digging up our garden. Or too, when the child (despite scarf and mittens) fails to make it through the snow; the police find her later, stiff and pale in a ditch—they do not organize a search. They do not relentlessly hunt her killer or seek for justice.

  It would be absurd.

  * * *

  CALIPH stepped out of Nathaniel’s body, straight through the wall, into the wintry hydrae flailing in the underwater woods, following the sweet smell of the tincture.

  Light swelled around him.

  The trees darkened. The black sky turned white and the white trees turned black. They looked young and ancient at the same time, well-pruned and snapping, with a summer-sounding profusion of silver leaves. There were shadows in those dreamy trees, of warm comforting umber and purple-dappled reflections moving in their shade.

  Silver leaves spiraled from black isentropic branches. Sena waited, one knee knocked against the other as if embarrassed or nervous. She was hiding someone behind her, holding someone’s hand. A little girl stepped out. Sena bent at the waist and whispered encouragingly in her ear.

  Caliph began to distrust the vision.

  But the girl smiled. She released Sena’s hand and ran in shy uneven steps toward him. Caliph had no idea what to do, but he crouched down instinctively and felt her arms wrap around his neck. She smelled of cold fresh air, sweets and paper glue.

  Odd.

  Over her shoulder, Caliph looked at Sena. There was a canal of black water beside them that reflected the leaves. Beneath its surface slipped endless schools of ivory fish. The child’s embrace was tight and trembling, as if she was afraid to let go.