Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

Now it made sense, his smug announcement that he had found Arrian’s head, floating in the ocean.

  He must have known full-well that the rubies would never work. Yet he had left no part of his deception to chance. His ambit was every bit as strong as hers and just as she had hidden her thoughts from him, he had done the same.

  He had foreseen her. He had known it would come to this.

  Sena swallowed hard. Now she was thinking, remembering how Nathaniel had raged when she had come back from Soth without the body, but how calmly he had mentioned finding Arrian’s head.

  Arrian’s eyes would last an eternity.

  And all of this, every detail down through the centuries, all the research Sena had waded through at Desdae, in the south, in the long dark hours at Isca Castle: all of it had been compiled by Nathaniel Howl with the sole purpose of fooling her.

  Sena was dumbstruck. How could she not have seen this coming?

  It was as if Caliph had seized this one moment of clarity, this admission from Nathaniel, and remembered it subconsciously. He had guided her to it as if he had known that it was important.

  Pshaw, Nathaniel hissed. And Sena stood up straight in Caliph’s dream. Because this was not the Nathaniel from the past. This was the real shade, the lich-thing come crawling over her brain. You think Caliph guided you to this memory? You fool.

  “Why?”

  Because I want you to know—that you had to be shown. Doesn’t that hurt? You simply weren’t smart enough to win.

  “You could have convinced Arrian to give up her eyes,” Sena said with belated understanding. “She trusted you.”

  Which was something you would never do.

  “But I left her there,” said Sena. “You didn’t think I’d leave her body at Soth.”

  A coincidental victory. And momentary.

  But Sena grasped mentally at this slender ray of hope.

  Sena could not believe that she had avoided his trap—almost—and that she had done it by accident.

  Not good enough.

  “Would you have tried to cut your pages from Arrian’s back?”

  No. I’ll use yours. You won’t be going anywhere. Neither will your little grub.

  Sena’s mind went to her womb. Her thoughts locked up. He knew. He knew and he was doing something about it—out there in the real world while she was stuck here, inside Caliph’s tinctured head. Yella byun!

  He had told her to use the tincture to get her out of his way, while he executed his plan. Sena looked out of the dream, just in time to see Stonehold drop dead.

  The eruption that radiated from St. Remora didn’t melt the falling snow. It didn’t disturb the white-caked wires strung above the streets. It made no sound at all as it uncoiled in the heart of the city, while the city’s populace still slept.

  Vaccinated as it was, Isca wasn’t to be spared, it was to be harvested according to Nathaniel’s plan.

  The god-pudding calved in St. Remora’s depths—birthed dead but dreaming from that crimson world. It landed in Isca with a squelchy ripple of ethereal sound. The first of the Yillo’tharnah to physically arrive. St. Remora’s clockwork pulled it out: lightless, formless and asleep … a fetus still tethered to the dark … its plasmatic black subtrahend contracted, sending an unconscious blast outward, a feeding reflex—exactly like a solvitriol bomb—barreling through Isca.

  Quick as a scavenger, Nathan Howl wrought his equation and sucked the dislodged lives out of Isca like egg whites, leaving the Yillo’tharnah stillborn.

  Sena turned and ran. She had to find Caliph. Her plan had just fallen apart.

  * * *

  CALIPH rested on his back. The ceiling of his uncle’s lab was coffered white. In one of the squares a spider had made an invisible web. Caliph could see a moth dangling in the threads, sucked dry. It seemed to struggle when the breeze from the windows disturbed it. He sensed that this was not real. That all of this had happened before. He knew he was in a tincture dream. But he could not control it. All he could do was go where the dream took him. He was a passenger. A voyeur looking back on his own life.

  Caliph’s eyes noticed things: fly flecks on ceiling paint, cracked plaster, discoloration where there had been a leak in the roof.

  He turned his head toward the lab’s bank of windows. Several were open. The old whitewashed metholinate pipes came up through the floorboards. He followed them with his eyes, around the window frames and up through imperfect holes in the ceiling. He could feel how nervous his tiny body was, heart racing like a hamster wheel.

  Caliph watched and listened to the summer branches roll like waves beyond the windows. White winged insects shuddered and flashed, carefree amid the churning green. Humid summer smells mixed with medical antiseptic as his uncle turned and swabbed his arm.

  Overhead, a tin ceiling fan whispered while the brittle chirr of insects rattled in the heat.

  “Good boy,” said his uncle. Then there was a sharp pinch in the tender place at the crook of his arm. “Stay still.”

  Caliph winced and arched his back slightly. His head pushed into the pillow.

  “You’re Hjolk-trull,” said Nathaniel. “You know what that means?”

  Caliph’s eyes were streaming from the corners; the pillow soaked up his fear. He shook his head slightly because he could not speak.

  “Well the Hjolk-trull are descended from Gringlings, who are descended from Limuin … who are descended from gods. That makes your great-grandfather quite powerful, doesn’t it? If you believe in him. But I’m afraid he doesn’t care about you.”

  Nathaniel rummaged with some metal tools on a nearby tray. He tore a length of fabric tape and plastered it over the spot where the tubing came out of Caliph’s arm. Then he flipped a switch on a small machine and Caliph watched his blood run up through the coils. He felt dizzy.

  “I don’t believe in your great-grandfather,” said Nathaniel. “He exists, I’m sure. But I don’t believe in him. The scientific fact is that your blood is special. Aren’t you happy to be helping me?”

  Caliph nodded. The old man’s eyes glittered with lightless mirth.

  “Now hold still. We’re doing a test. I don’t have all the ingredients I need, but let’s see what we can accomplish without them.” The small machine made a sound that Caliph imitated by popping his lips. It was an airy pumping noise.

  Pop, pop. Pop, pop, pop.

  “Be quiet,” said Nathaniel.

  Pop.

  Caliph stopped but watched his blood run through the tubing, into a kind of pen that Nathaniel had picked up and was now adjusting.

  “What are you writing?” asked Caliph.

  Nathaniel chuckled. “I’m not writing. I’m drawing. You like to draw and so do I.”

  “What are you drawing?”

  “A jellyfish,” said Nathaniel. “To float in the abyss, in the dark, alone but beautiful.”

  Caliph couldn’t see the drawing from his position on the gurney but he could see his uncle concentrating, whispering. Outside, the trees kept rolling, rolling, churning. His head felt like it was on the end of a stick that was being swung around the room. “Uncle?”

  Nathaniel continued to whisper and draw.

  “Uncle, I don’t feel good.”

  The white laboratory ceiling had a black ring around it. Fuzzy. The ring was getting fatter and the hole in the ring was getting smaller. Most of the ceiling was hidden.

  “Uncle?”

  “Be quiet.”

  The whole room had nearly disappeared and Caliph reached up with his other hand to scratch at his eyes. Something was wrong. He couldn’t see. Everything was black. His head felt funny. And then he was falling. There were rocks all around, hitting him in the face. He was falling in blackness. The rocks were falling up and he was falling down. The rocks hurt. He was crying.

  The rocks hit him in the face. Slap, slap.

  “Wake up, boy.”

  Caliph could see the white ceiling again but it was fuzzy. His arm hurt and he was sweati
ng, giant drops. His fingers tingled as if both arms had gone to sleep. The machine was turned off.

  “Well I guess that has to be enough,” said Nathaniel. “I don’t want to kill my calf, do I?

  “Do I, Caliph?”

  The lab blacked out and Caliph snapped up straight. He heard Nathaniel’s voice again, but this was not a memory. This was something new.

  You can’t touch her the way you want to, Caliph. She’s gone infinite.

  Infinite.

  And you can’t trust her anymore.

  CHAPTER

  52

  Taelin looked up into the face of Dr. Baufent. “Hi,” Taelin said. Baufent looked serious. Baufent always looked serious. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Baufent.

  Taelin didn’t believe her. The doctor sat across from her on a bench in what looked to be a restaurant. There were copper fixtures and dark wood on the wall. When Taelin sat up she saw eyebrow windows above the booth, looking out at street level on an indistinct mass of shambling feet.

  People, she thought happily. Her head hurt and she was hungry. She reached up and touched a swollen goose egg exactly on the scar at the middle of her forehead.

  “You took a bump while we were carrying you,” said Baufent. The doctor seemed wholly uninterested in what was going on outside the window.

  “How did we get here?” asked Taelin.

  “Up some stairs, through several doors,” said Baufent. “The High King’s witch helped spirit you up.”

  “We’re in a restaurant! Have we ordered? Where is everyone?”

  “I don’t know,” said Baufent. “Sena said to wait here for you to wake up and that you’d know what to do.”

  Oh, thought Taelin. It must be time!

  “Where’s the High King?”

  “I don’t know. He abandoned us. It’s just you and me.” Baufent looked indescribably glum as she said this. Gray and tired and hopeless. She looked like she needed sleep. More than that, she looked utterly beaten, as if the thing that had been her had been pulled out and trampled and thrown away. There was no fight left in her face.

  Taelin pulled out her necklace. She looked back out the window where a dismal dawn made droplets flicker like tiny white flames. She began to work the soft metal of the demonifuge in her hands. Squinting past the rain, into the gray breadth of Bablemum’s tropical avenues, she could see the Lua’groc massing. Ghouls with leaden skin crawled from sewers followed by taller, thinner men and women that moved like insects or crayfish. Squeezing from the ground came fatter forms, grotesque and slippery, bulging and toad-like, skinned in silver and gold and pink. “Don’t worry,” said Taelin. “Sena’s a goddess. Do you want to play cards?”

  The things in the street seemed to be rejoicing.

  They seemed to be eating.

  “I’m going for a walk,” said Baufent suddenly. She stood up in a curt manner from the booth, put her hands in the deep pockets of her red coat and shuffled toward the door.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Taelin.

  Baufent gave a humorless smile. “Good luck, girlie.” She opened the door, stepped outside and shut it behind her.

  Taelin poked her nose over the window ledge again, looking out, trying to see what might happen, but there was too much commotion. Too much noise. Baufent’s entry to the street changed nothing. The celebration continued and Taelin slipped back down into the booth to continue working on her necklace.

  * * *

  SENA could hear snow falling around the eleven asymmetrical dials. Flakes toasted in orange light, glowed like bits of burning paper. As if there had been an explosion.

  Though St. Remora still snuffled and coughed, the city of Isca, the last city to contain real people, had settled. A hush clung like ice to every building. She saw where footprints in the new-fallen snow, of factory workers and children delivering the Iscan Herald, had ended in low piles of wind-rumpled felt. The snow came down over the dead in an act of reverence. In an act of symbolic mummification.

  All two million of the dead were coming after her, churning through the ether, wielded in the immaterial grip of Nathaniel Howl. The dead were his scepter, his stick of thunder, his trumpet blasting. Arrian’s head floated in the ocean and its eyes were missing.

  Sena ran through the tincture dream, looking for Caliph. She still had her colligation, but if she exhausted it now, there would be nothing left for later.

  She had meant to say good-bye, to show Caliph their daughter again. She had wanted them to be together, just one last time: all three of them. And the tincture could have provided that. It could have bent logic just enough to allow her to have, for a few seconds, that perfect family that she had never known.

  But Nathaniel had found out. It could only be her fault: some stray unguarded thought. Or maybe the secret had leaked from Caliph’s head.

  All she knew was that there was no time left to say good-bye and that she was in serious trouble.

  * * *

  CALIPH smelled his uncle, which was a musty blend of citrus and furniture dust mixed with a fume of urine and cold air, as if an elk had sprayed the bark of a tree, after first snow, high up in the mountain woods.

  He rode the tincture without choice, tumbling down a thread of memories. He was alone, directionless, and it felt like his brain was on fire.

  His uncle was here, choking him—not as a person chokes another person but as a fable, a sort of inescapable story that posited Caliph as its central character, which Caliph had no control over and which he felt, with the unaccountable clarity bestowed by nightmare, would end as fables generally did: gruesomely. The walls of his uncle’s house closed in on him like a black envelope, the same sort that contained the solvitriol accord. He was being crumpled, crushed …

  And then Sena’s hand took hold of his and pulled.

  * * *

  SENA dragged him hard, out of the tincture dream and into black champagne, into an endless bubble where the universe swarmed. Gibbering sputtering shapes eclipsed the stars. She felt a tug. Some force pulled her backward. She was a swimmer experiencing a bite. Then the Yillo’tharnah let go. It was a warning. A reminder.

  She held onto Caliph tightly, regained momentum and emerged.

  “Yella—!” Sena shouted and stamped her feet. The tug had dragged her off course. She had not arrived inside the ruins of Arkhyn Hiel’s stone house, but on a rocky fossil-rich escarpment twenty yards to the north. Somewhere, she imagined the Yillo’tharnah were laughing.

  Caliph was sweating profusely. Sena slapped his cheeks in an effort to bring him around. He would not survive this tincture journey. His brain was bleeding. She shaved some of her ambit to stanch his hemorrhaging—just enough to see him through to the end. She couldn’t afford to waste power now. Not with what was coming.

  “Where are we?” he mumbled. He looked positively green as his eyes drifted over the stone palace that pawed the sky.

  “We crossed lines,” she said. “We’re two thousand miles south of Bablemum.” Sena felt Caliph steady himself beside her on the escarpment. His legs wobbled but he got them working. He scowled at the barren, shadow-raked clefts before panning his eyes, once more across the remnants of the palace then down into the more unusual ruins of Ooil-Uauth.

  This was the vista Arkhyn Hiel had once enjoyed from his terraced lawn. The topsy-turvy dirty white and pink annulated stacks of Ooil-Uauth thrust from the valley like the stilled ends of colossal earthworms. They were misaligned with both jungle and sky. What streets might have existed were shrouded by trees.

  Caliph stared at the tall narrow domes, traced with day glow. He looked bewildered.

  Beyond the blunt ugly crests, which seemed set in frozen upheaval, Naobi trembled above the ocean, flanked by two morning stars. Wind came straight up the face of the hill. It stirred every plant and filled the breeze with slapping sounds.

  With it came Nathaniel. He roared out of the north.

  Sena braced for impact.


  “You see the ruins, Caliph? Not the ones down in the jungle.” She pointed with her whole arm. “The stone house, right there. Go inside. Find his skull. Smash it. I’ll hold him as long as—”

  She couldn’t believe the force that struck her. It shook her. It pushed her. Her feet slid back, grinding against the stone. She was surprised because she had thought herself to be immovable. Her ambit shone as she pushed back, gleaming like a star.

  Nathaniel’s power struck her so hard that she felt the planet shift. She lost several inches of ground. Then her feet caught. Her willpower anchored her to the spot but Nathaniel’s pressure against her moved the world. Adummim tilted on its axis, into a new direction.

  He was moving her, whether she liked it or not.

  * * *

  CALIPH did as he was told not because he felt overly confused or childish but because he believed, for the first time, that she was right.

  Nothing had made sense since reality had failed him in the skies over Sandren. That was how he felt. Reality had failed him and it was a personal betrayal.

  He was doing this now, which was not founded in reality. Reality had abandoned him and so he abandoned reality. He was doing what Sena said because he trusted her, despite everything.

  He believed in her not because she had earned it but because he had always thought himself to be a better-than-average judge of character. That was why he had stuck it out all the months she had been gone. And now, since there were no facts anymore, or courtrooms or juries, he tossed aside the judgments that logic had forced him to levy against her. He went back to what he felt, which was trust in a raw half-buried sparkle of goodness that had managed to survive the brutality of her Shradnae childhood.

  Caliph trusted—perhaps too much. He climbed the escarpment, scrambling for the ruined stone house. Behind him, the spectral presence of his uncle filled the sky. He could feel the size and shape of Nathaniel’s power, like something sensed in dream. The gravity of this moment was not delivered by things seen or heard. Caliph heard nothing but the shrill cry of jungle crickets. He saw nothing but the ruined house. But Nathaniel’s existence was something he could sense.