Black Bottle (25 page)

He did not want to lose her. But he also did not want to follow her down where black cribriform deities could extract his residue from the air. Without body, without anchor, he would be lost, drunk up, as easily inhaled as a thread of smoke.

Sena weighed her decision. This could be her mistake, the one that would end all her careful plans.

The numbers are right,
said Nathaniel.
You don’t need to do this.

Sena listened to the Ghalla Peaks moan, from tubules and passageways, surging with the eternal damp that blundered upward. All the air that moved back and forth through the Halls funneled here. If the Halls were the mouth and nose of the mountain then the Staircase was its trachea and Yoloch was its pneumonic lungs.

Yoloch was the name of the sea, the name of the dreaming grounds, where the Abominations had once spawned during that brief season they had been free, before their time had ended—prematurely.

Sena waited for Duana to decide. She could hear the three of them whispering even so far away.

No more shadow games. No more flanking or misdirection. The geography dictated that there was nowhere to go but straight and down.

“Whuoo osou Muthirou?”
15
Sena called in Withil, despite the fact she already knew. She spoke to Duana because she knew the other woman was on the verge of giving up. Sena offered her own voice as encouragement.

“No one.” Duana sounded tired and thin. “Miriam is Sororal Head.” Sena’s stomach somersaulted when she heard the exhaustion in Duana’s voice. A pang of tenderness filled her. A trace of humanity that tempted her to tell Duana to go back.

There was a long pause.

“We can’t let you go, Sienae.”

“I know.”

“We have the book—”

For that instant Sena detected no trepidation in the other witch, which was good. “Do you?” Sena said.

Duana’s heart skipped. Sena sensed the other woman’s tongue rolling a question but, after a moment, Duana decided against it. Doing so wouldn’t be fair to her ancillas. There was no leeway here, at the top of the Stairs, to show any trace of doubt.

Duana whispered to her ancillas. “I’m going to talk to her. See if you can close the gap.”

The ancillas nodded. Then they slit their palms. There was nothing else to steal blood from. They had used up their potions getting this far. From their own hands ran the holojoules that fed their equation: one that hid sweat, location—even the sound of involuntary organs. They did their best to hide from Sena’s diaglyphs and when Duana spoke, they crept forward.

“Tell us what’s in the Chamber, Sienae. None of us know. Megan and Giganalee are both gone. Haidee too.”

“Ofoo Ou tuldoo auyou, auyou’doo leyghou,”
16
said Sena.

“I could use a laugh,” said Duana.

Sena stepped onto the Stairs.

15
W.: Who is high priestess?

16
W.: If I told you, you’d laugh.

CHAPTER

19

It felt like stepping into warm water. There was a murkiness to it, a knowledge that something was there, waiting—at the bottom.

Duana realized that Sena was descending. She lurched forward but when she got neck-deep on the stairs, she stopped again.

Her diaglyphs showed the difference, the way that the stone had changed. Resembling long mounds of congealed grease, the runs were hunched instead of flat, as if they had been built wrong. They lacked the correct angles to classify as stairs. In the walls, there were no coiled jellied limbs yet Duana got the impression of them. She imagined a bizarre rhythm of purpureal-umber shapes that drooled and dribbled toward the world’s core.

While she gawked, Sena slipped farther down over the gray weird translucent material.

“The Chamber’s relics belong to the Sisterhood, Sienae!” Duana called. She couldn’t let her ancillas see that she was afraid.

Sena didn’t answer. Duana’s quarry, that lithe body capped with golden hair, was disappearing quickly. Duana realized she had to make a choice.

She set her teeth and followed.

It was a strange pursuit. A hundred yards of empty staircase separated the qloin from its prey. So many steps. Their eely edges blurred into one vast sick-making pattern. Even her diaglyphs could not discern the limits of this place.

The moan of humid air mixed with the sound of her feet. The scenery rippled like the bottom of a clear, fast-moving brook. Duana squinted. She tried to clear her vision.

Was she dizzy?

Or was she seeing the staircase as it really was?

Space bent as strange immense larvae squirmed just below the world’s skin, under air and stone. Perhaps They could taste the
Cisrym Ta
’s exudations still clinging to Sena’s skin.

The moist gasses of the deeps poured up around her and with it, her diaglyphs began to fail. Air and stone and moisture flattened before her and the geometry of the steps dimmed. The silver compasses in her eyes no longer moved.

Finally, everything went black.

“Duana?” One of her girls broke the strict silence. “I can’t see.”

Rather than shush her, Duana whispered in Withil, “I know. I can’t either.”

She knew her girls were thirsty. None of them had anything to drink—or eat. As she realized this, her foot came down on something brittle and long, like a bone. It snapped loudly and she felt for it with her hands. Maybe it was a stick of burnt wood? She couldn’t find it. Maybe her thoughts had influenced the dream … created the bone transiently … because this was starting to feel like a dream.

Who would have guessed you could die from walking downstairs?
Falling perhaps—especially a fall like this. But Duana wasn’t thinking of a fall. She was thinking that going
down
was the easy part. The notion of coming back up was what terrified her. To struggle without sufficient food or water, climbing endlessly in the blackness until exhaustion and hopelessness won out? Duana realized that walking down these steps unprepared was a decidedly one-way trip. Still, she couldn’t give up. Miriam had sent her after Sena with a terse command:
stop at nothing.

From the deep, something new. Waves of distortion rolled up, ripples from a great stone dropped in still water. Duana felt them slosh against her brain, her skin. Her legs trembled.

“Sena! Wait!”

Her ancillas had already stopped and Duana knew she couldn’t keep this up if Sena didn’t answer. They needed a sign. Damp with perspiration and stress, Duana pulled out her watch. For a moment she held it closed, waiting, not wanting to open the thing and give away her position. What if Sena was there, right in front of her, staring at her in the dark?

“Where is the Chamber?” Duana tempered her voice.

“Deeper.” Sena’s voice sounded from below, many yards at least. It rose to Duana’s ears fragmented and strange as though parceled in a string of bubbles.

Naci, the youngest member of the qloin, finally broke. She called out to Sena in a fit of angry desperation, “Why don’t you just kill us?”

Duana reached out and seized the girl by the arm, squeezing hard in an effort to rein her in. Another wave of distorted ether-that-passed-for-air eructed from below. Sena’s strange voice came with it. “
”
17
it said. And then again, “
.”

Duana thought it was an equation at first. She almost whispered a counter. Then her heart chilled as she realized that, although it
was
the Unknown Tongue, it had sounded almost exactly like Trade.

It felt like a kind of word game. A puzzle. Each number-letter had a different weight. A different meaning.
was a nonphysical six, a three-stroke mark of power linked both to destruction and escape.

Three, seven, six. “Soon.” What did it mean? Prepare, create, destroy? Soon. Soon. Sena had chanted it once, then twice. What did that mean?

Time pulsed. Like a heartbeat now. The bursts coming closer together. The modulation of time rolled up from what Duana hoped was the bottom of the Stairs.

“Qyoitoo,” Duana whispered to her qloin. “We follow her down…”

But she knew their obedience had been secured, not through anything she herself had done. Rather, it was the High King’s witch that had given her girls a reassurance that their quarry was still there, below them, and that they had not crossed some otherworldly border where everything had vanished and all that was left to do was to slip senselessly forever into solitary night.

Sena made a noise. A foot scuff. It had to be Sena. Duana clicked her tongue as if to goad a horse and led her ancillas down.

Time rolled up. A scroll to be put away. Hunger and thirst subsided only to return. Duana’s muscles turned to jerky and then … days or hours later, in the sweeping black eternity, they failed her altogether. She lost her balance and fell into a sitting position on the greasy steps.

It wasn’t really that she couldn’t take another step but rather that she had become disoriented. Her eyes were playing tricks, forming strange polychromatic shapes like when she clenched them too tight. Finally, she made sense of it.

There was light.

Not real light, but dimness rather than blackness, so dim, in fact, that it had fooled her.

Below her, far away, something moved.

Thrum!

Like a sound, a heartbeat, but this pulse outpoured air and its faint reverberation was felt rather than heard. A great wet wind vanished up the steps.

If there was any color at all to the light, Duana decided it was a soft grayish-blue. It ebbed so tenderly, almost imperceptibly. Every so often it flickered. She wondered what she was seeing and why her compasses had not come back. Why were her diaglyphs still not working?

Below her, Sena moved like a polyp, sinking down the esophageal arch. Her shape was lost in the size of the tunnel. Duana gauged it at fifty yards wide and thirty run to crown. It was enormous.

She looked back at her girls. Both of them were pale and silent, lit from below and contrasted against the fathomless blackness that choked the upper reaches of the Stairs. Naci clutched the wall and closed her eyes at the same time Duana felt another of the massive swells roll through her body. This one felt like it had nearly dislodged her soul.

Duana pointed at their quarry.

There was no place to hide. Hunters and hunted were equally visible now, all of them, small specks moving relentlessly into the deep.

With the cover of darkness gone, Duana wasted no time flipping the alabaster cover of her watch. It illuminated her hand like a glowing oyster. They had been on the Stairs all night!

Thrum!

Duana gasped but tried to run some meaningful calculation. She held her watch open and walked down the Stairs, minding her speed, counting her steps, watching the time.

Her estimation reached an average of twenty steps every ten seconds. Despite the absence of her diaglyphs, she gauged each step at ten inches deep. They had been on the Stairs for roughly seven hours with occasional breaks. All of which worked out to … impossible.

She double-checked. Could they really be that deep? Eight miles down? Duana snapped her timepiece shut and stared into the silver-blue gulf below, bounded by concave walls.