Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  While Caliph endured the awkward grasp—her entire body clinging to him—he noticed through the trees that he could see part of a city with nuanced domes perfect as soap bubbles. Like pieces of summer blown by children. But they were not whole and glossy. They were bubbles at the end of their existence, dry and ephemeral as spiderweb. Split seconds from vanishing forever into gold and lilac-colored light.

  “Where are we?”

  Myths and stilted verses translated out of musty books mumbled from his college days, out of Desdae; about a sweet forever after that stirred the poisoned tissues of his mind. The place to which the Gringlings had tried and failed to return.

  Sena answered his thoughts. “This is the jellyfish glyph.”

  Did that mean he was in a glyph? Or did that mean this had been a glyph at one time? He thought about the shape. The rusty darkness of that design he had seen in the Cisrym Ta.

  “Begun by Nathaniel,” said Sena. “I wrote the rest of it. Now you’re here.”

  “But I’m dreaming,” said Caliph with light, musical condescension. “I’m drugged up on some ship in the desert…”

  He did not feel compelled to be polite with his own imagination. He stared at Sena as he picked the girl up from the trail and held her easily in one arm. The child’s breath startled him, less restrained than an adult’s. It was loud and raspy in his ear.

  “Don’t do this to me,” he said. He was talking to himself of course. But Sena glowed in the raking light through the trees: an icon, an advertisement almost, torn from the foggy streets, from the jumble of Isca’s billboards.

  “It’s still hard for you to control,” said Sena. “I’ll help you. Stay with me.”

  But a furious blackness erupted from the house on Isca Hill as if an ebon bedsheet had been thrown out one of the tower’s red windows. It flew down over the snowy front yard, casting Caliph in shadow.

  Caliph felt the world roll. The yard became a white tablecloth snapped open.

  Sena looked into Caliph’s face. “Hold on, Caliph.” The silver-leaved trees became a gleaming array of hoses and saline bags. Window light filled up the place where he was lying on a gurney. “This is a dream!” Caliph shouted. He pointed. “It’s a dream! You’re manipulating me.”

  “No.” Sena’s gold hair caught light, white as the sun. It burned like snow. The glow became a halo, too strong to look at. Its aura obscured her whole body. It burned out his entire view of the world. Everything went white.

  * * *

  CALIPH could hear an alarm. He assumed it was an alarm because he could also hear voices shouting beyond the wall of his room. The tincture didn’t want him to get up yet. Sena’s voice was calling him back, down into sleep. He didn’t even know if the tincture was real, or if it might just be some additional element of the dream.

  He heard echoes in his head of Sena’s voice, telling him that she had something else to show him. She was begging him to come back. She was pleading for him not to go, but he had seen enough. He was through with self-delusion. He was done with lying here on a bed when Sig’s body was still missing.

  “He’s not dead,” Caliph said with a drugged slur.

  The alarm sounded strangely animalistic. Certainly not mechanical. A kind of singing.

  Caliph got up, head throbbing. The room swung. The room nearly won; almost pulled him down. He steadied himself against the wall and noticed that the Iycestokians had taken remarkable care of him. Near the bed was a window that looked down on the wreck of the Bulotecus. His ribs were wrapped tightly with some kind of elastic. His eyes were swimming. He didn’t remember coming to the window. The smell of the little girl, the light shearing through the bright trees, Sena’s familiar posture on the path—

  He shook his head—gently—and regretted it. Sharp pain shot through his neck, all the muscles stiff as taproots.

  The room contained medical equipment.

  A knock at the door preceded, by only a few seconds, the entry of a man Caliph thought he had seen before, just after his capture. Tall and thin, there was a certain franticness to the man despite his being smoothed down with southern pomade. He looked disheveled and frayed at the edges, like he was barely holding himself together, like his composure was a hard-to-pull-off act. Caliph noticed blood on the man’s sleeve.

  “Siavush,” he said.

  “Where’s Sigmund?” said Caliph. “The big man. He was wearing a red shirt.”

  “We haven’t found anyone that fits that description.”

  Caliph decided the tension in the man’s face was linked to the alarm.

  “You told Isham you had the book,” said Siavush. He spoke from the periphery of Caliph’s world in a hurried, terse way.

  “I did,” said Caliph.

  “I’m confused then, because Isham is recovering, enough to talk, and he said you showed him a yellow book. But I had heard that the book in question was red.”

  “Well your information’s bad,” said Caliph as if barely concerned. “It’s always been yellow.”

  “I see. We found half a yellow book, ripped through the spine, but it didn’t seem to be anything. Just a journal. It did, however … by Mr. Wade’s account, look like the book you showed him.”

  “If you want me to cooperate, you’ll find my friend, Sigmund. Big man. Red shirt. He’s down in the wreckage somewhere.” Lost under the sand …

  “We’ll do our best, Mr. Howl. But we can’t stay here … long.” The “long” was peculiar to Caliph.

  “Why not? This is a solvitriol ship. It’s not like you’re going to run out of fuel.”

  A scream filled the hall outside the room and the sound of running feet pounded away.

  “Listen, I need that book!” said Siavush.

  “Really? What’s the urgency?”

  “Where is it?” Siavush shouted. He drew out his pocket watch and flipped it open. Pastel light ebbed over his panicked face.

  Caliph wondered what the rush was. He hated the sight of the solvitriol timepiece. “How do you do that?” He pointed at Siavush’s watch. “Cope, I mean. With the fact that you’ve enslaved souls to run your machines in the south? How do you get to the point where you believe that’s okay?”

  “We don’t have time for this, King Howl. I don’t believe in souls.”

  “That seems a bit arbitrary in light of the blueprints—”

  “Gods. You northerners really are—” Siavush stopped himself. “Solvitriol power runs on the residue … of some power … left over from the body. That’s all. It’s a trace. Some kind of energy that used to—do something in the body. We don’t know what it is. But it’s not a soul.” Siavush snorted. “No tests we’ve ever run indicate that it thinks. Or that it can communicate. It’s not a ghost, Mr. Howl. It’s just what’s left over. And we’re practical enough to recycle.” His finger, emerging from the bloody cuff, did a small circle in the air.

  Caliph’s injuries ached. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “The north has always been a bit more … superstitious. Anyway, that’s a beautiful watch. Could I see it?”

  “I need the book. Now!”

  Caliph reached out and grabbed the pocket watch. He pulled it up, high overhead. It was not until the chain had been looped around Siavush’s neck that the Iycestokian understood what was really happening.

  In small countries, like Stonehold, thought Caliph, men were still taught things forgotten in Iycestoke. Things that Siavush, in his slippers in the morning, would not understand … no matter how many pieces of northern journalism he might read over breakfast. In Stonehold, where the mountains could kill you. Where the wind and sea and sarchal hounds …

  In Stonehold, where survival was a real struggle, men were taught how to survive. They did silly things. They wore swords.

  But as Siavush’s hands groped ineptly, without the slightest notion of how to save himself, even against a man so badly wounded, Caliph felt some sick-making pride in coming from a long tradition of what the north called Stonehavian resolve
and what the south had always labeled simply as brutality.

  Caliph did not stop even after Siavush’s face was purple and his full weight pulled forward from the knees. His body was kneeling but it wanted to lie down.

  After counting out a full minute, Caliph let the chain go. He dragged the body to the room’s tiny closet.

  Not possible.

  Caliph was sweating. He felt inexpert at this. He felt like he might throw up. He went to the window and looked out. In his current condition he doubted he could heft Siavush’s body through the window. Dropping it into the desert wasn’t very subtle anyway.

  “Fuck.” This was ill-thought. But what else was he going to do? The alarm was still quacking its strange high-pitched song. It seemed strange that no one had come to check on him. It felt bizarre that there were not more sounds of running feet.

  Where were the guards?

  Caliph gave up on hiding the body and opened the door. The cramped hallway beyond was, perhaps because of the alarm, empty of people, but painted in blood. It looked like there had been a slaughter. The walls were coated. The floor was covered with a red half-congealed sauce.

  Caliph felt his gorge rise. He started pulling off his bandages as he went, not wanting to stand out in case someone passed him in the hall.

  Where is everyone? he thought.

  Not knowing where to go or what to do, he followed the hallway to its end and met no one, headed away from the sound of the alarm in what he imagined was a good first step at getting his bearings.

  He passed a room with an open door that looked in on the unmistakable resting form of Isham Wade. He was on a gurney of sorts in a cabin identical to Caliph’s. The main difference was that Isham Wade had been hooked up to a system of insectile-looking machines. He looked gray. Silver really. His skin was horribly changed and speckled with black spots.

  Plague? But how would Isham Wade have caught the plague?

  Caliph hesitated a moment at the doorway. He thought about pulling the plugs. No. There was nothing to do here. Nothing that would make Caliph feel better. He looked hard at Isham Wade, angry and repulsed.

  The man had already contracted his punishment. Caliph would not interfere.

  He moved on into the hall’s terminus, which was a wide space that surrounded an open locker full of weapons. Caliph stared at it while the alarm wailed. That sound might have explained why it had been left open, unattended. But it was not serendipity that made him stare. Rather it was uncertainty and fear, both over whether this was truly a weapons locker and whether finding it ajar had just saved him or put him into deeper peril.

  He stared at the rack of sedate, dark, leathery things and questioned whether they were watching him. All he knew for certain was that they moved.

  CHAPTER

  40

  The tantrum of shadows that whipped and splattered over walls, rooms and mechanisms had finally retreated. Nathaniel’s ghost had left the Pplarian ship and gone south in a rage, bent and billowing and thorny. It cursed Sena. It howled and ranted on the mountains: on K’rgas, on Bujait and Jag’Narod. It raged back and forth between Veydith and the Kallywarthing.

  Sena could hear it in the thin, tropospheric miles that girdled the world. It drew over the jungles like a black squall, gathering in on itself, a clock spring tightening.

  He had not foreseen this. That she might sentence Arrian to Taelin’s body had never entered his mind.

  Sena felt a little swell of pride but the danger offset her euphoria. Would he unleash St. Remora?

  Nathaniel had disappeared south, beyond the equator.

  She hoped not. In the meantime she dug in the moist peat of a Tebeshian pot, beneath the alien stain of the flower’s shadows, and snapped off part of the pimplota’s root. Growing the pimplota from a twenty-thousand-year-old seed in the span of a few moments required only marginal holomorphic tampering.

  The root came out of the peat, clean and waxy, like a mummified toe: purple, ghosted with hair-like tendrils and morsels of dirt. Juice coursed over her fingers. Nearly black.

  She extracted the liquid with a small wooden herb press. It dribbled through a short spout into a shallow clay mixing vessel. Sena wiped her hands, willing her cells to repel the pigment. They came clean instantly. She sat down and drew out a silver vial. The same silver vial that she had taken to the Howl Mausoleum twenty-three months ago.

  She would have used her own if she had any: Hjolk-trull blood. So incredibly rare, like those moths from the steppes, on the verge of extinction … the bacteria in their fur capable of miracles.

  In one sense Caliph could be reduced to this vial, stoppered and preserved. Just an ingredient. Just a substance to be manipulated. Sena put the smooth metallic cylinder to her lips. She could smell iron and steel. It made her feel close to him.

  She opened it and poured all but the last of his cells into the clay vessel. A few drops she spared. Then she added salts. Together, with the acids and tannins of the pimplota juice, the suspension formed an ink that would not deposit, thicken or mold. It would never fade, crack or flake.

  This was the recipe for ulian ink, the ink that had written the Cisrym Ta.

  Sena corked the clay vessel and shook it vigorously, using math to quicken the reaction. It required no heat. She strained the liquid through a hair sieve and poured the resulting colloid off into a glass bottle.

  It was time to test the ink.

  She took out her gunmetal pen and depressed the beryllium filler. It slurped. Ink glugged from bottle to sac.

  She adjusted it. A few test scribbles.

  Then she took a sheet of parchment—not one of the three sheets of her skin—and began to draw. As she drew, she felt the sky tremble. The desert below her charged with static. She whispered and the ink called for information, organizing itself quickly, capturing the dimensions, the contents, the structure of her mind. Omniscience was not a passive thing in this process. She could not approximate here. Isomorphism was not enough. The analogous shapes of letters, the property of being legible was meaningless in the creation of Inti’Drou Glyphs. Precision became essential.

  The enormous energy required to form the glyph came from her ambit and from what remained of the dwindling, evaporating holojoules she had coiled around the Pplarian ship. There was not much left. Most of the holojoules from the massacre at Sandren had slipped away. But there was still enough—just barely.

  She pulled them straight into her pen.

  Sena focused on the page until it felt like her eyes might cause it to burst into flame. Far away, the Cisrym Ta began to dissolve.

  Its form and information, its substance, was reduced, reconstituted. The essence of the thing that it was appeared in the glyph on Sena’s page.

  It was simpler than other glyphs, being a compression of a single object—no matter how dense. She looked at it, its shape devoid of the Dark Tongue instructions so familiar in the shadow of every glyph catalogued in the Cisrym Ta—she did not need them. In addition to this, its shape unsettled her. Different somehow than she had expected. It threatened vaguely and she associated it instantly—not as her own creation but as a curiologic phenomena—with watery allusions to blossoms, universes and myxozoa.

  The image stayed only long enough for her to appreciate it.

  Could she do this? Had she gotten it right? But when the sound came out of her mouth, passing over her vocal cords, it was nothing that she could have produced before the Yillo’tharnah had modified her. It was her first enunciation of a complete Inti’Drou Glyph.

  As she spoke, the shape on the page disintegrated. The glyph vanished and in its place, defined by coordinates she had written into the page, lay the Cisrym Ta.

  The book was back.

  But its movement from Parliament to her airship was not the miracle of the moment. Teleportation had not been the purpose of her proof. Nor was bypassing the wards in Parliament’s deepest vaults—the most secure vaults in all the north. Yes it pleased her, but this was not about thi
every. What this was, she thought, was proof that she could do it.

  Metaphorically, she had entered into the lowest scholastic grade of immortal entities that now surrounded her and had proven that she could learn to read and write and yes, speak in Their tongue.

  She reached out and picked up the book. With the tiny vial—and the last drops of Caliph’s blood—she released the lock, taking shortcuts she had been unable to take a year ago. She was above graveside incantations now. Beyond circles and candles and locks of hair. Because the Yillo’tharnah had granted her immortality. They could not kill her now and so, only the blood was essential.

  The latch on the book popped open and the hideous beautiful thing opened beneath her, symbols intact. Even Nathaniel’s handwriting in the margins had been preserved. A perfect copy. Not a copy, despite being one. That was a confusion derived from language. This was the book. It was the Cisrym Ta. Its only difference lay in its coordinates.

  She opened it to page eight hundred forty-seven directly, near the end of the book—as if she needed to check—and stared down at the page that still contained the jellyfish glyph.

  Its shape was the shape of branes touching. The beautiful violence that embodied the instant of discharge. In this glyph’s heart lived the mad excitement and headlong rush so typical of the processes of production: frozen at the moment in which new creation was released into the universe, ready for love and ridicule, nurturing and abuse. But there were sweepings scribed there too, in the shadows of that burst of energy, bruises and casualties. Sacrifices made to the machinery of creation, remnants discarded on the workshop floor that told of the incredible effort of making something new.

  Having succeeded with the Cisrym Ta, Sena spoke again. this time her vocal cords strained. The pronouncement was far more difficult but the glyph that Nathaniel had slaved over, the glyph that she had finished, vanished from the page.

  She stared at the blank sheet in the book and nearly laughed with joy. It had gone out. It had gone out, gone out, gone out! It was real. It had changed from a possibility, from a dream she had only ever seen in a tincture journey, to a real place, a real island in the stars!