Black Bottle Read online

  Sena felt the cold vacuous creep of a claw drag itself over her skin. The thing by the ceiling had slunk down to give her a slithering admonition. She heard words in her head, asking her what she was trying to do.

  The voice was something Caliph would certainly have recognized if he had heard it. It was a voice that had once laughed and moved air in the house on Isca Hill, just as it had screamed commands through the jungle before poisoning a host of slaves—down to the last child.

  The voice did not belong to a man. Not by Sena’s standards. It had once belonged to a Gringling king. And a desert queen. The voice that was not a voice had sounded across many lifetimes, preserved by Veyden tinctures. Phylacteries made of bone had carried it nearly to the end. But finally, it had collapsed into its foundation of femurs and costal splinters: a cradle for a new entity made of dust. With its ancient soul untethered, the shade of Nathaniel Howl was like a baby’s breath gone wandering beyond the world’s rim.

  Only recently had it been pulled back, saved from listless transcosmic vagrancy. Now it was desperate to enter Sena’s brain. She did not underestimate its cunning, or the math that had gathered in its folds like dirt in a nomad’s cassock. The shade, the specter, the ghost—whatever it was—sensed that the stars had finally turned. Soon, it whispered to her. Soon—soon.

  Caliph was still talking. “No offense but I think that’s bullshit. How can you know there’s no way for peace with Pandragor?”

  “I didn’t—”

  The shade did its best to distract her.

  “If the accord is useless, which I know it is, I think I can still—”

  “Caliph. There is no way for peace with Pandragor.” Her harshness was a result of irritation, of the stress that the shade was putting on her.

  The words set Caliph back. He rested a finger across his upper lip.

  The shade worked Sena’s throat violently.

  It whimpered and slobbered, black claws scurrying over her like bounding rats. Sena felt their discrete impacts against her abdomen, breasts and throat. They thumped her back and thighs. Everywhere. They fled in ebbing tides only to return and burrow against her snatch. They nipped, delved and tested—hurried and mindless.

  Sena braced herself. The shade pushed into the cleavage below her belt loops and designer tag. It boosted her from behind, trying to spread her croup. She couldn’t concentrate on what Caliph was saying.

  “What do I do with that?” Caliph was asking. “Do I make you my top advisor? Do I hand you the throne?”

  “I’m not trying to tell you about Pandragor, Caliph. I’m trying to tell you about something else.”

  “And what’s that? More about the book. The Sisterhood? You’re going to destroy the world or something? You see how impossible this is for me to understand?”

  Sena nodded. It was hard to ignore the shade’s insistent nuzzling at the base of her skull. A horrible black rushing sound had begun roaring, not unlike pressing a seashell to her ear. Nathaniel wanted her to stop this conversation.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Caliph.

  The voice was shrieking. A thousand black hexes burnt down onto her lips, like blisters, wicked numbers, sigils spinning. Nathaniel tried to seal her mouth, stifle her tongue.

  Sena moved her lips with calm, calculated composure and answered Caliph’s question. “I’m haunted, Caliph,” she said.

  Nathaniel’s specter seemed to go insane. It clawed at her eyes.

  “Haunted?”

  “Yes. Did you know there’s a legend about your uncle’s book, that he actually managed to haunt its pages after he died?”

  Caliph shook his head, clearly perplexed by this sudden swerve, chilled perhaps but also perturbed that they were once again on the topic of the book.

  “It’s something to think about,” she said.

  Caliph visibly disagreed.

  “It’s a kind of parable,” she said. “Nathaniel’s possession of the thing he craved? It’s a lesson in obsession.”

  She watched that analysis chew into Caliph’s face. The muscles in his cheeks reacted with a spasm. A coldness passed between them as it registered with Caliph that she could be talking about him. Caliph swallowed. “I don’t like talking about my uncle.”

  “Don’t worry about him.”

  “You said you were haunted. You can’t just say something like that and—”

  “I have my ambit.”

  “Ambit?”

  “It’s old holomorphic theory,” said Sena. “Very old.”

  “Not something they taught at Desdae?”

  “Your ambit’s hard boundary is at the end of your fingertips, at the surface of your skin. What you project beyond that is variable. Your influence. But this,” she pinched his arm softly, “is your boundary. If this boundary is impenetrable, nothing can touch you. That is your ambit. That is your uncontestable line.”

  Caliph laughed. “Right. So, anyway…” For a split second she saw a tremor in the jaw muscles that walled his face. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. Finally, he said, “I should go down and see how it’s going. Will you be all right?”

  This amused her in a surprising way, that he—so fragile—would ask her if she would be all right.

  “Yes. I’ll be fine.”

  Soon his devotion would crumble. Even now it stood out as an abeyance of logic.

  “Are you worried about the conference?” she asked.

  “A little.” One side of his face hitched up around the words. “It’ll be fine.”

  His mind had already moved on to other things. He was feeling guilty about the litho-slides Alani had taken of physicians setting up the field hospital. Sena knew. He felt scrubby about the fact that he was capitalizing on the political advantage of his response. Especially now that he could tell the disease was much worse than he had anticipated, that his physicians couldn’t put a dent in this catastrophe.

  “Do you think it might be canceled?” she asked.

  “The conference? No. This is going to be the most important speech I’ve ever given. It damn well better not be canceled.” Then he looked her in the face and said, “But for the moment—” He shrugged. “I’m just glad we’re in a position to help the Sandrenese.”

  It was a thank you, an acknowledgment of the vaccine, the doctors, the way she had planned this out.

  Sena felt ashamed.

  * * *

  CALIPH couldn’t put his finger on what was happening between them. The whole evening had been tainted, charged by his sexual frustration; her curious choice of topics; the darkness and the haunted sounds of the Ghalla Peaks.

  He felt like he needed her comfort, her reassurance before tomorrow, but the thought of making love to her in the luxury of the ship while soldiers and physicians worked through the night …

  People were dying out there in the streets. He could hear the howls carried over the rooftops.

  When Sena’s hand touched the back of his head, despite the disparity of the evening, despite the bruises on his body, he was ready to set them aside. He considered dragging her back to the stateroom or whether she might just let him throw her up against the wall.

  But her expression had hardened. She said, “Strange, isn’t it? That the same plague we had in Isca is gutting Sandren. How do you think it traveled so far without affecting the rest of the north? How do you think I knew?”

  He stared at her, panicked for a moment that the chemistry between them had evaporated. Her skin looked like graphite under the spell of the moons; her lips white petals. But the power he felt coming off the lines in her skin was no longer magnetic. They seemed to hum like power lines, as if they were capable of electrocuting him. The sensation stunned him into the one question he had never asked her.

  “Is it true? Just tell me. Is your temple real? Are you a—?”

  “I’m not crazy,” she whispered.

  He considered what this meant. But he couldn’t swallow it. He caved in. Even as he made his demand for proof, even as
he felt himself slip into the words of the Pandragonian priests decrying her from the street corners, demanding that she admit her lie, he couldn’t help himself.

  “Then bring one of them back,” he said. He swept his arm at the city, indicating Sandren’s many dead. “Any one of them. Bring them all back.”

  She was quiet. And he knew he had done something terrible. He had crossed a line. He had become like everyone else. And yet, how could she blame him? How could he not eventually need to see proof that she was so different?

  “You need more proof? Is that it?” she asked. “More proof than the fact that you are alive?” Her voice was not angry.

  But Caliph’s was. He heard how his tone had risen and how it now hinged between hysteria and indignation. But his emotions pushed him on. “If you did it for me, you can do it for them!” He flung his arm again toward the window, aiming generally at the tent hospital. “Isn’t that reasonable? If I were you, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be out there. I’d bring every one of them back to life.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “Trust me. But I don’t blame you for being angry. What I did for you was selfish. I didn’t want to go the distance, you know?” She looked away. “Without you…”

  “Angry? I’m not angry. I’m just confused. I’m just trying to make sense of what you’re saying. I don’t even know what you mean. Go what distance? You’ve been gone over half a year. Where? Why? What was more important than being with me?”

  “I went to the Pplar, to the jungles. I wish I could tell you everything, Caliph.” She opened her mouth as if to say more but no sound came out. It was like she was afraid. Her eyes slid sideways in her head as if wary of someone or something listening.

  “Why don’t you?” he pressed. “Tell me everything?”

  “Because. You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “That’s not for you to decide.”

  “In this case it is, Caliph.”

  “If you told me I would believe you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “And you won’t cure the Sandrenese? Are you saying that you can’t do that either?”

  “What I’m saying is that there aren’t any gods coming to save us—or you. No one can save the Sandrenese. You have to save yourself, Caliph. It’s down to you. It’s down to your ambit.”

  Caliph found her conviction chilling but her behavior was too bizarre. Gods or not, he believed she was wrong. He believed she was crazy.

  Looking down at the tent hospital, all he knew was that the Sandrenese could not save themselves. People were bad at saving themselves, he thought. The world didn’t work that way. In the real world, people saved each other.

  Sena looked at him with an expression of deeply fractured sorrow. He wondered if she could still read his mind, if she was always reading it.

  His uncle’s book had changed her, hurt her, made her this way. He stood up. Compelled partly by his own self-righteousness to go down to the hospital.

  “You’re right, Caliph.” The words sent a teeming pitter-patter of icy pincers up his back.

  Right about what? he thought. There was a long pause during which he stood, patiently attuned to her.

  “You’re right, Caliph, but when you can, will you read these?” In her hand she held two thin books, sandwiched together, one old—one not so much.

  “I don’t have time to read!”

  “You missed them,” she said, “the night you were in my library.”

  His whole body congealed.

  “They’re important,” she said.

  And he believed her. He felt that if he didn’t believe her, in a spite-fueled way, he would be justified. But his gut told him that not believing would also be a terrible mistake. And besides, he had promised that he would believe her.

  She seemed so childish in the face of what was going on: Stonehold was on the brink of sanctions if not war. This conference, which was of critical importance to protecting the duchy, had been derailed by plague. He was in very real danger of being assassinated. All he wanted to do was help, despite the odds. And she treated all of it like a diversion, a table-game between them that they were talking over, distracted from, potentially uninterested in finishing.

  Caliph held out his hand for the books.

  On entering his palm, their texture worried his fingertips. Their weight conveyed immediately an irrational sense of defeat that settled at his core: another burden he had allowed her to saddle him with.

  CHAPTER

  15

  The day after the attack that had won the Sisterhood the book, Miriam stood in Parliament with her Sisters.

  She imagined ice-cold air inflating her lungs as she stared into the marble surround. Great rectangles of black stone served as mirrors, framing the fiery hollow. The fireplace dwarfed her, its mantel entirely out of reach.

  While pretending to stare at her reflection she traced the thin scar around her neck with her fingers, feeling the completeness of its circuit. She felt giddy and strange to have been part of something so mythic. Yet it troubled her. She also felt violated. As if she had agreed to a hypnotism without realizing she would have no recollection of the event.

  Just the memory of cold air touching her insides.

  Miriam stared past herself. She could see the women behind her. Deep in the black marble, a red dress wavered like a brushstroke as one of the women reached for another beer. The surround’s atrous polish subdued the colors and turned the entire scene glossy as a litho.

  “Miriam, hon? Come get drunk with us. You earned it.”

  She turned around. The brown ten-pound contraption on the floor was open, hissing with green lights and ice. It held a dozen black bottles with red and silver labels.

  “Sure.” She walked over and took one, kissed its neck. It tasted of pungent southern soils.

  The spoils of war rested on a low table, before the semicircle of women in large leather chairs: the legendary Cisrym Ta. Its cover, still red after more than twenty-thousand years, had faded and torn. Could it really be that old? The black thorny mark on it threatened her vaguely. Its latch was locked.

  She took another drink.

  Giganalee’s laugh gurgled up near Miriam’s elbow and terrorized her.

  The Eighth House’s withered frame sat propped in a huge chair. Her face clung to her skull like crepe fabric.

  Miriam noticed the old woman’s fingers, unrelated bones that had been tied together somewhere inside her lace sleeves. They poked out awkwardly, fiddling with her beer as she coughed and giggled without explanation.

  Worried that she might choke, Miriam leaned forward and asked if she was all right.

  But the Eighth House did not answer. Sisters had dressed her up in full ceremonial garb tonight for the celebration. Giganalee’s coal-black dress was cut from silk and trimmed with midnight-colored lace. Peeking from beneath, a white satin lining swaddled her throat and claws, conferring the elegance of a decorated corpse.

  “Madam D’ver?” Haidee took the bottle out of Giganalee’s fingers and tried to calm her but Giganalee continued rocking in her chair, bubbling with laughter.

  We are lost, thought Miriam.

  An iatromathematique showed up with a sedative. She spoke in a soothing whisper into Giganalee’s ear as she rolled up the old woman’s sleeve. Her arm resembled suet. A quick injection put her into a torpor and several girls wearing white gowns maneuvered her frail body onto a wheelchair that they silently rolled away.

  “What do we do now?” asked Duana.

  Haidee straightened her crimson hem. “Whatever we want.”

  Miriam found her conviction repugnant. “Really? How do we open it?”

  “There’s a recipe,” said Haidee. She wagged her chin and scowled at Megan from under her eyebrows. “We have it.”

  “A recipe none of us can follow,” said Miriam. “Unless one of us wants to admit to a little faron12 on the side?”

  “That’s just hocus-pocus.” Haidee swung her beer bottle b
ack and forth like a pendulum from the neck. “You don’t have to love him … or her.”

  Duana interrupted Miriam’s response. “Why would Sena give us the book unless—” She snatched her hand back from the cover. “Shit! It’s cold.” Miriam saw Duana swallow her fear, which made the surgically perfect scar encircling her neck ripple.

  “A better question is: how do we know this is the real book?” Miriam used the hem of her dress to twist open another beer. “I’ve seen Sena throw a glamour. She’s better than any of us.”

  All nine women stared at the Cisrym Ta.

  “She said she’d drag us through the jungle,” said Duana, who looked unabashedly worried.

  Autumn Solburner was a dusky-skinned girl that Miriam tried not to show outward favoritism for. She entered the conversation cautiously, seeming to wonder why Miriam was being negative. “This is what the Houses have been trying to accomplish for decades.” She turned her palms up. “This is the book. It’s not a fake. We’ve won, Miriam. We have it. Why aren’t you happy? The Willin Droul doesn’t stand a chance.”

  Miriam gave Autumn a serious look then said, “Sena’s in Sandren. That’s where the Chamber is.”

  Haidee set her bottle down and pointed at Miriam. “You hush.”

  “I will not. She’s going to the Chamber and you know it.”

  No one talked. Haidee’s black eyes burned across the table at Miriam. Miriam didn’t feel like backing down. She had been the last Sister in Stonehold, the last to speak with Sienae Iilool. She knew what she was talking about. “What is it?” she asked. “You don’t want to admit it? You’re the one in the red dress … Mother.”

  “Shut up,” hissed Haidee. “I’m not Coven Mother yet so be happy. We all know you think you deserve it but it’s not coming to you so quit being sour.”

  “Don’t turn this into that old argument,” Miriam snapped. “This isn’t about you or me. It’s about the Sisterhood and the fact that the Eighth House is insane. We need a leader that—”

  “Bite your tongue!”

  “I will not! Giganalee is incompetent!” said Miriam. “If she’s not, get her out of bed and bring her down here so she can sentence me to Juyn Hel herself!”