Black Bottle Read online

  I care only for my daughter.

  The book will tell me of my successor’s arrival. I have put my mark on its pages. When she opens it, I will know.

  Yes, you. You: SIENAE IILOOL.

  I see your cunning face.

  They will write Their runes in your skin and for a time you will try to fight against those strictly metered designs—clabbered in their loveliness. But I know, in the end, you will find them too gluey, too consolidated to work against. The runes will trace your every movement. Your every action will be known to Them. You will give in. And then, my dear, I will return from my far wanderings. I will bargain with you for my daughter’s release.

  By the time you read this, it will be too late for you. You may think you can escape without me, but you will be wrong. You will find it in the math. Look. Take all the time you want. You may think I am powerless now. I have no mouth to speak, no blood to draw. But you are wrong.

  St. Remora is my mouth.

  I can open it. There is an eleventh dial that connects with Them, down below the church, in a womb of vesicated black. It is the trigger of my weapon, my postlude, my ultimatum. Do not tempt me with its use.

  On my whim, I can draw the Old Thing out, a Sectua’Gaunt22 still ravenous for souls. When it births into the church, its first thought will kill a hundred thousand people. Its second will kill a hundred thousand more. Souls.

  Do you think solvitriol technology was dreamt by man? Invention is reinvention, finding the path that has been found uncounted times before. They are the dreamers, the inventers of solvitriol technology, not us.

  1600 S.K./537 Y.o.T. Moons

  —N.H.

  I have inherited a diaper-dragging brat along with the house. While it would be convenient in some regards for him to become permanently lost in the mountain woods and thus join his relatives, I have determined that he is a remarkable creature. His father was at least part Hjolk-trull. This means, if nothing else, he is the serendipitous second ingredient (since Gringlings are extinct) for ulian ink! Sad news that we cannot pen the other sheets yet. I am, however, able to begin on the stopping point of our escape, our own little island in the stars—which won’t have to pass the same touchstone as the others. In the meantime, I feed him like a little tick; once he’s swollen with a few more pints he’ll be a fabulous capsule!

  (undated loose page)

  She cannot dig me out! She cannot ignore me.

  I am the one who installed the eleven dials in the church! I am the one who cut the ruby bottles and turned them black! I fitted the house on Isca Hill with her windows shining bright! Your lovely trat did nothing but find the book in a bin on March Street! She is going to show you these pages. Do you not think I knew how all of this would turn out? What? AM I NOT A GOD?

  I am the one who found Naen’uln! I am the one who hunted the jungles for it endlessly, who bent numbers around it so that it could be moved! I am the one who painstakingly prepared years of notations, filling the margins of the Gymre Ta23 with enough instruction that a drooling retard could have discovered the truth! She is no prodigy! I fucking made her!

  I have been here from the beginning! Not her! I! Me! All of me! In every pathetic fibrous cyst I endured! Me! Who once wept for my lost humanity but now laughs at the stupidity of attempting to … For the sake of what!?

  What!

  I found the book. I found the ink! I have done everything. And now? To be relegated finally to the role of watcher? While she proceeds with Their blessing?

  I despise you. All of you. And you will not escape without me. I have laid it into the foundations. You cannot extricate yourself from ME! In the end, I will encompass you and devour you. And you will dissolve slowly across a billion years.

  I have fit myself with jewels and darkened them to the moment, bound them to me as I did in the desert. Only this time: this time it will be different.

  Caliph,

  I know this has been hard for you to read. He was never your uncle. You wonder why I gave you these books. You wonder what I did at Sandren and why. I know you. You will figure this out.

  —Sena

  * * *

  THERE was a knock on the door which was good because Caliph felt sick and hollow and dark inside. He couldn’t take any more. He closed the book, pushed himself out of his chair and crossed the room. When he opened the door he was surprised to see the priestess of Nenuln standing there looking better—physically.

  He was less surprised to see that she also seemed to be lacking a sense of humor. Her face was pale with terror and Caliph was just about to open his mouth and ask what was wrong when she blurted out, “What in Palan’s name are you reading?”

  21G.L.L.: Great Cloud Rift, literally the Crack of the Devourer.

  22U.T.: .

  23Another pseudonym for the unnamed book (the Cisrym Ta). Gymre Ta means book of war.

  CHAPTER

  29

  Sena saw across time. The thing before her was from the sea and it reminded her of Tenwinds.

  Pplarian bioengineering, the nautrogienilus with its shell—so like patinated steel—was framed perfectly by the room’s striking white iridescence. It formed a brutish pelagic curl that had been bolted to the floor.

  Other echoes of Pplarian shape-crafting had spilled out of the north, squirmed through careless fingers and floor drains into subregions of evolution. They cropped up again in the wild, emerging from bogs and silent tarns.

  The monsters.

  Smell-feasts, ganglolian and other slippery masses. But this thing with its shell and mollusk flesh, its rich briny stink, took her back to Tenwinds in a visceral and unexpected way.

  She could smell the oily ocean, taste the salt again and the fishy wetness that spluttered endlessly. And memories of Tenwinds meant memories of Aislinn.

  It was because she had been so strong that the one instance of her crying forever echoed in Sena’s head.

  The moments had crystallized. It was as if she was still there. She could replay the sequence endlessly: remember Aislinn dragging her toward docks cobbled out of stone and oxidized metal plates found long ago above the salt flats, where some goliath machine had been cannibalized.

  Eerie, alien-looking apertures not quite suitable for human frames had been reinvented as arches beneath the wharf. Remnants of odd markings and irregular rivets still rusted across vast sections of tramontane metal. A bolt the size of a rowboat rested on its side above the piers. Scavenged a hundred years ago from something now covered over, it had long been the symbol of Greenwick Harbor.

  The boards by the ocean were slippery and dark, anchored to the ancient perversion of metal and crusted with whitening barnacles. Spidery orange thewick crabs scuttled helter-skelter.

  Aislinn’s cold hand gripped Sena by the elbow. Sena remembered the feel of her arm flapping over her head like a flag as her mother pulled her toward smells mixed by waves.

  Back in the center of the village, the clock tower glowed; its illuminated face displayed the hours the two of them had been charitably allowed. Now Aislinn sought passage to the mainland while the town growled, no longer welcoming with its shops of cinnamon and fish.

  Tenwinds’ courtrooms had debarred Sena but they had swallowed her mother. For endless hours—for days it seemed—Sena had been sequestered in hallways where squares of light inched over walls devoid of decoration. She had listened to solemn adult voices seep under doors until the droning had put her to sleep, head on her doll, alone on the hardwood floors.

  Now, as her mother marched her down to the docks, her strongest memories were of Shamgar Wichser, the somber-faced admiral-mayor whose shadow emphasized the question mark of her father’s body dangling in Tenwinds’ square.

  The coast was wintry. The pebbles crowned in ice. Out of season for a trip to the mainland.

  She could feel the fear pouring out of her mother’s palm as cold sweat, a clammy toxin Sena absorbed through the skin. It made her six-year-old heart bang like a caged finch.

&nb
sp; Together, they boarded a long dark shape lit with rows of golden lights floating in the harbor. Its iron sails snapped. Smoke retched into thin icy air. Her nose felt like a lump of clay. She looked back at her home as the vessel pulled away. The sodden gray buildings seemed to share her sadness; sparse leafless trees clutched the sinking sun like a bright fruit, a gift if only she would come back.

  Sena never went back. Her mother took her to Mirayhr.

  What Sena brought with of her father was his curly blond hair and an infectious smile. “The spitting image,” her mother always said. For a while, Sena still sang the nonsense song, “Daddy, Daddy I love you. Like an oyster-oyster I do-do-do.” But days and weeks choked it slowly until the melody disappeared.

  Aislinn’s name sounded cold, like one of those olden cities gone beneath the Loor. But even though her voice often matched the temperature of her name, Sena loved her. At least until they reached the mainland.

  There, love was something the Sisterhood snipped into usable squares. The Sisterhood patched itself with love conscripted from its members: to bolster the organization, to control its enemies, to bait, seduce and kill.

  At Skellum, Sena drew pictures in class of her mother and her, holding hands. She wrote in large inept letters above their circle-smiling heads, Mamma and Me. But when the preceptress discovered the drawings, Sena received seven lashes with a ruler across the wrist.

  “You do not love your mother. You love the Sisterhood.”

  Seven strokes across the wrist and when Sena cried: one across the lips. It had happened several times.

  Sena slowly realized that none of the other girls had mothers. They slept in the nursery under the watchful eye of an Ascendant. But that difference between herself and the other girls ended when the Coven Mother, Megan, ordered Sena from Aislinn’s care. It was necessary, Megan said, for Sena to focus on her studies.

  Sena was a good pupil despite—or perhaps because of her anger.

  She learned quickly to recognize weakness. She was instructed vigorously in the arts of sex, manipulation and murder. All this, the Coven Mother claimed, was necessary for strengthening the Houses. For preparation of the war.

  “What is the war?” Sena asked her mother one day while sharing a rare lunch on Parliament’s lawn. They had taken off their shoes and Sena had just realized that they had identical toes.

  “Shh—” Her mother’s eyes had scanned the lawn without any movement of her head. “There is no war. Megan thinks it’s our business to protect the world from myths. She takes it far too seriously.”

  “But aren’t you friends with Megan?”

  “I try to be, baby-girl. But you know, we’re here because we have no place else to go. And never tell anyone that. That’s just between you and me.”

  “I won’t, Mamma.”

  In the end there were no bonds strong enough, not even between mother and daughter, to prevent the Sisterhood’s relentless training from tearing them apart. And finally, at long last, Sena realized that she hated her mother for bringing them both to Mirayhr: a dichotomy that ever after haunted her when Aislinn was found guilty of faron—the betrayal—and sent to Juyn Hel to burn.

  And so …

  Following in her mother’s footsteps, Sena had looked for companionship outside the Circles of Ascension, beyond Houses One through Eight. She had not done it out of desire for love (because love’s stuffing and toy-sized springs had been broken long ago) but out of rebellion. Out of hatred for the Sisterhood, she had warmed Tynan’s bed. And Caliph’s.

  * * *

  SHE looked at the double keel shell lined with tubercles that reminded her so vividly of a shattered childhood by the sea. The shell’s silver-indigo curves of gleaming carbonate had been anchored to the floor. Thick bolts held it upside down, foot in the air, diaphanous pink tentacles flailing like a bed of leeches. It was very much alive. The tentacles looked inexpressibly soft. Yet parlous.

  Sena came to it naked with her hair pinned up. The hair on your neck is fine as a gosling, Nathaniel whispered.

  She ignored him and straightaway eased into the pudding of tentacles, leaning forward until she lay on her stomach, fully cupped in their gentle tossing motion.

  The sensation was pleasant and strange as the watery pink arms oozed over her chest, abdomen and thighs.

  Are you proud of yourself for evading me? What did you tell him while you were alone in the tincture?

  To help block him out, Sena thought about the Pplarians who knew the road before her. They had come down from the sky, stranded here eons ago. Put here, they said, as a punishment. They knew about the Yillo’tharnah. The Pebella of the Pplar had heard the rumors out of Stonehold, like everybody else. Unlike everybody else, the Pebella put stock in those rumors and had invited Sena to the Pplar for an audience.

  When she had seen the markings on Sena’s skin the Pebella had tasked a group of Pplarians already in Isca City with the construction of the temple on Incense Street.

  Why?

  Not because they worshiped her. The Veydens worshiped her. The Lua’groc worshiped her in their horrible outlandish way. But the Pplarians? The Pplarians felt sorry for her. They had seen this bargain made before. The Yillo’tharnah rising from sleep, seducing Their “chosen one” with the not-quite-promise of freedom, the tantalizing false hope of escape.

  The Pplarians had assured her of this: that the way was false, that the Yillo’tharnah had never failed to catch Their prey after the prey had foolishly set Them free.

  “You are in a trap,” the Pebella had told her. Yul and the rest had vigorously agreed. “It is better not to free Them. You will fail as every other Sslia has. Under Their power, your ambit will be broken, the Lua’groc will have their sacrament of flesh and the Abominations will entomb your soul.”

  “But I have the Gringling’s notes,” Sena had said.

  To which the Pebella had answered nothing but told her servants, “Give the Sslia what help she needs.”

  The temple had been built, the colligation begun. Sena would not give up. She would not relent. She would fight until the end.

  Yul had brought the nautrogienilus and the airship from the Pplar. The Pebella was not on board. Her presence had been a ruse, orchestrated to coincide with the gathering at Sandren.

  The airship was not for Sena’s comfort. What it provided was something rational for Caliph to pursue. Caliph could not see Sena, therefore the vessel was now essentially the same as her. Caliph would follow it relentlessly, under the assumption that she was aboard. Even while she left and did other things, the Pplarian ship would draw the High King relentlessly into the south. This was part of her plan.

  You’re taking him to Ooil-Uauth? Nathaniel asked. Why? It’s pointless. It’s extraneous to the fabrication of the ink. You don’t need the altar …

  Her thoughts had slipped out. He had heard her. She scolded herself frantically but on the surface remained calm. “Extraneous, is it? Then why did you drive your servants through the jungle? Why did you tell them to build your house there? If I am going to do this, I am going to do it right. I am going to follow the steps. And if you don’t like it—”

  Fine! Nathaniel raged. He cursed her with ugly slurs.

  As Sena lay in the bed of pink tentacles, Yul came into the room. Yul could not see the thing that haunted her but one of his eyebrows lifted slightly, a betrayal of his thoughts that despite his foreign preferences, Sena reminded him of an alien pinup, posing on a pink anemone.

  The nautrogienilus’ foot supported her weight while its arms arched over her back. Its tentacles flexed, tips brushing her shoulder blades. Sena did not close her eyes as the first arm slipped into her skin.

  “Do you need anything?” Yul asked.

  “No.”

  Yul lowered his hairless head and left the room.

  The tentacles pierced her because she allowed it. She controlled it. All the arms moved in orchestra, slicing precisely. She could have done this herself but the creature provided
her with the fortuity of conservation.

  The beast needed few holojoules to guide.

  Each microscopic mouth chewed with surgical skill. She did not bleed as the first corner came up, tugged gently by a single arm. The meat beneath her skin was paler than pink, it was nearly white and shining. Fine radiant filaments stretched between the integument and a deeper glow of tissue. There were several layers. She did not enjoy it. She set her teeth. But this was necessary. Nothing else would endure the trip. Her skin embodied perfection at an atomic level—just like Caliph’s blood. Therefore, like his blood, it would last.

  The melon-colored blush of chewing organs took no notice of her thoughts. They moved rhythmically, until finally she shut her eyes.

  * * *

  THE nautrogienilus finished its methodical work, having avulsed a perfect square. It held the thin slab of flesh aloft, dangling from tubiform arms.

  Sena stood up. A field of light, evocative of the backswept membranes of a damselfly, streamed from the corresponding breach between her shoulder blades. The excised area was surreal in its perfection, as if drafted by an architect. Its upper edge ran level with her shoulders, its bottom chined the center of her back. She had directed the nautrogienilus to remove a quadrate from the only location on her body that would accommodate a flawless, unmarked sheet. It was the only part of her, of the necessary size, where the platinum designs never crossed. As if this span of skin had been prepared for exactly this purpose, planned in by the Entities who had gifted her with immortality.

  The Pplarians said it was part of the deception, that she was following exactly where others had gone before.

  To that, Sena had not argued but said simply, “I have to try.” She was different. This would be different. Her plan would see her through.