Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  * * *

  NAEN fanned over the equator and pressed the ruins where Caliph was just beginning to feel the kind of unity with Sena that he had not felt for many months. He began to understand things, as if he was inside her, part of her. He began to love the sheet of vellum she was drawing on, profoundly, though he was unsure why. It was primal, like loving sunlight and fresh air. Ancient as his mortal need to be touched.

  Sena set her teeth and concentrated. She finished the first glyph and pronounced it. She felt her stomach empty. Her sight dimmed. Her depth perception was gone. She began on the next.

  Caliph tried to take a step forward but his forearm was still impaled in the bed of tines. He jerked up short. Sena held his hand. She paused to settle him like a curious child.

  The sky was turning from pink to gold. The Goddess of Light was breaking on the horizon.

  In a moment of mixed emotion Sena leaned forward and kissed Caliph. He felt it as a sticky soft plucking. His lips were thin and dry; hers were jungle slugs. Then Sena hurried to finish her work, composing the final dots and dashes of the glyph.

  Caliph’s arm ached deeply.

  There were forests of waterspouts holding up the sky above the ocean. The Great Cloud Rift had fallen into the planet’s core. Its god-tons of rock had sloughed away and released the radiant unsleeping horrors through cracks a hundred miles wide.

  * * *

  MEADOWS burn. Mountains and deserts dissolve like sugar in a buttered pan.

  But Sena is not capturing the world in a glyph.

  One of her eyes is already gone. She steadies the second sheet. Above the altar, Naen looms as the ink spreads. A yellow-white cloud in a sky gone black, shredding the atmosphere in her wake.

  “I think I’m going to fall over,” says Caliph.

  It is his first complaint. He has leaned on his impaled arm, put all his weight onto it, but having given so much fluid, even that will no longer support him.

  “You did good,” she says. He cannot see the horror that is right on top of them, nearly blocking the invisible doorway in the sky.

  * * *

  CALIPH looked at the woman he loved. His insides were hollowed out and packed with fear—because he felt himself dying. He watched her incisors dig into her lower lip. The final words he heard her say were “Fight for it, Caliph. Fight for it!”

  It seemed to him as if she had been writing on two different sheets of paper at the same time. As if he were looking at separate worlds. Sena existed in both of them, in all of them.

  Then all separate realities collapsed into one and something horrible and amazing burnt through the fabric of every universe and melted their fibers together. An object. A great red orb. Its path and position was identical to the planet’s size and movement around the sun. A crimson world flowered inside Adummim, cold and gleaming. The white and golden mass in the sky reached out for him.

  Caliph’s mind was far away as the end enveloped him. He was thinking that there would be no more new days. No luncheons or silk stockings. Bureaucracy, pastries, love, ice cream, vague connections on the street corner at the steaming vendor cart, the dirty hand delivering you your change …

  The eyes reflected in store glass staring through themselves at what they wanted to be …

  These had been burnt up in this ceremony in the jungle.

  For a few spare seconds, Caliph saw humping mountainous forms judder in the red world’s unbroken oceans of mud. Risen. Shining with a slurry of clay and starlight. For that single instant, Caliph stared. Then the thousandfold tendrils of negative space splashed toward him. Naen reached for him and he screamed.

  He thrashed brokenly against the hot suffocation, molten slag, organic compost instantly stewed to mush. Fumes of burnt obsidian and sweet methane filled him like a balloon but enormous pressure held him down. He was being squeezed. Crushed. Devoured.

  Caliph flailed, arm and leg, across the brink of oblivion. His body came apart. He felt Sena’s hands adjust his bones. Her fingers slipped under the strips of his skin and followed them down with the practical brevity of a seamstress. Then he heard Sena speak a single word and he snapped together, hard and slippery. Strong as stone. He felt the tincture carry him out of his old body into this new one, into a new place, a place that was difficult for Them to hold onto. He had become a perfect orb, black and slippery, moving through Their grasp. He focused all his determination …

  And then, fast, he was out. Like a melon seed pinched between thumb and finger, shooting from darkness into strange light.

  He passed through the Nocripa and held his breath as if underwater. He kept his eyes in front of him and did not look back. He was fighting for every inch, every moment, going for speed, blinded by stars that did not move.

  He did not give up.

  In a different time, the light tunneled, natal and traumatic, but it also thronged with warmth.

  The light became orange and blue—leaves in autumn. Supple black branches spindled over a canal, lit with catoptric perfection. In the water, dappled movements swarmed: fish like white lilacs. And through the trees, Caliph saw pale mythic domes and spires quaver—somehow susceptible to wind.

  * * *

  IN the dream, the tincture is gone. Burnt up. He has moved on. Someone in the dream asks him a simple question that he cannot understand.

  * * *

  CALIPH looked down at a girl on the path, divorced from logical timelines. Her hair was curly and dark brown. But her eyes were crocus–ice-blue. Her skin was pale and glittered with subtle platinum lines. The loveliest child he had ever seen. Standing in the cold.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that’s a nice one, isn’t it?” She pointed at the ground.

  “Oh. That is a nice one.” He crouched down. There were actually two shiny husks on the path at their feet, like stones, each resting by a strange whorl-like pattern in the clay. Both were like summer beetles fallen in autumn. Both were broken and empty.

  Aislinn bent at the waist, like her mother would have done, and picked one of them up.

  It was still beautiful. Caliph hadn’t thought of it as such until she said so. To him it was small and ugly. But Aislinn said it was beautiful and then she pressed its cold hard shape into his palm. It bit him strangely, like a talisman.

  Aislinn touched his other hand. All her fingers wrapped around two of his. She tugged, swung his arm.

  “You should keep it,” she said. She assumed her propensity for stone collecting was something shared by everyone.

  He slipped it into his pocket. “All right, I will. You want to go home?”

  “Yes.”

  He picked her up. The girl rested her head on his shoulder, draped her arms over his back. He knew where he was going. Into the mist-drenched sweetness of unending autumn. He could smell it—whenever he breathed. He could feel it on his skin, a crisp pomaceous tartness: cold from hanging in trees against the stars.

  His head was clear.

  The girl traced the lines on the back of his neck as she always did. As she had done since she was half again as small.

  He carried her toward Ahvelle, toward the shining crest of the jellyfish glyph. There was no one to ridicule their ascent as some mawkish final illustration in a children’s book. Even if there had been, Caliph would not have cared. He was glad to be mawkish.

  He found no sorrow in having changed. No sorrow that he wasn’t breathing.

  25Ulian ink.

  APODOSIS

  Though I fail, my success is enough.

  Isn’t it?

  Because when there is no way out, you must go deeper in. Then you will find that the direction you have taken does not end. Your walls will crumble. Your path is endless.

  I learned this from you.

  You taught me to be relentless.

  I cut three sheets of skin from my back. The third was meant to keep all three of us together. But it could not, and therefore, onto it will go this letter.

  I knew eve
n a year ago that it wasn’t going to be me. I hoped. I wished. I went to Sandren to double-check. But I wasn’t destined to be hurled into the sea: a message in a bottle, born by knowable tides toward an island paradise—newly made.

  It was Nathaniel’s paradise. I only finished it. I had other things to worry about. It has been complicated, trying to get you both out while Nathaniel watches my every move.

  When I wrote your glyph did you feel yourself come apart at the seams? Did you feel how I stitched you back together, so carefully? So tight? And then, into your new home, your new phylactery, the tincture packed you. All of you. Your body, the very fabric captured in my eye. The seed of you.

  I know that feeling. To be cut apart, turned into a symbol. Perfected. Your design shining like a gem.

  And this is the part where you will think, How strange!

  That she put me into her eye.

  I used to laugh at the old holomorphic prescriptions. They read like fairy tale recipes for spells. (I never told you the outrageous equation for opening the Cisrym Ta. I am so sorry for the scar I gave you.) But these recipes contain more than numbers, which was hard for me to understand. Initially, I laughed at their strangeness but now I know, only the preposterous should be set aside. The unknown is what I embraced.

  There is no more fitting phylactery for the things I wanted to save—than my eyes.

  With my eyes, I looked to the future. They apprehended what was important, sorted through the clutter, focused on that which I desired. They were the seeds of all my actions and filled with what mattered most to my heart. It is true that I carried what I loved best in my eyes.

  I find it unaccountable that such alien horrors as the Yillo’tharnah should have so much insight as to my nature, to set the number at two and force me to wrestle with these emotions. Perhaps it amuses Them, that the Sslia should be faced with these introspections at the end, that I must go blindly into the future, on hope, my ambit divided and reduced. My eyes plucked out, my tongue silenced.

  But at least now, it is done.

  I spent all summer preparing the math that could change you, like the Yillo’tharnah had changed me. In this I feel some success. Know that this was never about preserving a species or salvaging the greatest mind. It was never about saving a people. It was, in every instance, about transformation. About leaving the split, gooey chrysalis behind.

  This is not betrayal. This is evolution.

  I wanted you to understand that I did not consult with kings or clergy or ask for the opinions of philosophers or conservationists, holomorphs or seers. And this was on purpose.

  Why?

  Because, quite frankly—fuck them.

  This was my decision. And I admit it was selfish, like everything I have ever done.

  Our daughter went first because I owed her that. Because, among many things, I regret the tiny bones I left in the ground at Desdae. Tell her I love her. I had to fight for her because she was so young, because she couldn’t have escaped under her own power. You went next, on your own. You had to fight for yourself because I was already overcome. And you won, as I knew you would.

  It is what I wanted. You are finally free—from everything. This is a repetition of the sacrifice my father made for me. I am proud to be caught in the noose, hanging like a question mark at the end of the day, for both your sakes.

  I have written this before my fate has reached me, in secret, away from Nathaniel’s prying eyes. But I hope for what is to come.

  Right now you are chasing me. Right now you don’t understand what I have done. One day you will open this book and you will find this note tucked inside its cover, passed to you like we did in class.

  I have made notes to help you remember.

  In the bookcase of the house you now live in, you will find the Cisrym Ta. And therein, in Inti’Drou Glyphs, is a trace of me and you. Seeds floating in sunlight over Thilwicket Fen, strung out on the breeze that buoys them. In the evening slant, by the shadow of a road, glows the packed clay of my youth with a boy named Caliph Howl. I love this memory. It comforts me beneath the groaning of the world, spinning in blackness, while the Abominations send tremors through my core.

  You will read it. You will discover the possibilities. But that is not why I chose you. I picked you because I love you. And there is no other reason.

  I see something clean as clouds flowing across the Healean Range, sky bright as glazed porcelain painted by sun and shallow sea. In the book rests your future—captured—in an instant held. Drifting on the trajectory of our throw.

  I can already feel the pressure on my back and the miles of still-accreting sediment begin to weigh. I will be the first fossil of the new world. My ambit—so small.

  But They cannot dislodge me or draw me out. I am not Nathaniel Howl, soul uncoupled from body and mind. I am only buried under mud and heavy numbers, beneath the new continents, as They once were buried.

  As we ignored them, I am: a grain of sand, muffled by Their pallial secretions, stuck until the tides go out again.

  —S.

  BOOKS BY ANTHONY HUSO

  The Last Page

  Black Bottle

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Anthony Huso was born in Minnesota and has lived in Asia, Europe, and around the United States. When not writing, he is a video game designer. Titles he has worked on include Dishonored, Call of Duty: World at War, and Boom Blox Bash Party.

  He currently lives and works in Austin, Texas, with his wife and daughters. His blog can be read at www.anthonyhuso.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  BLACK BOTTLE

  Copyright © 2012 by Anthony Huso

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by James Paick

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Huso, Anthony.

  Black bottle / Anthony Huso.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2517-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4299-8553-6 (e-book)

  I. Title.

  PS3608.U82B53 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2012017275

  e-ISBN 9781429985536 (e-book)

  First Edition: August 2012