Black Bottle (28 page)

Defying geometry, Her massive collection of flesh existed everywhere, as if the world of Adummim were a cloth draped mercifully to hide Her holocaust mass, as if She
was
the planet’s core. Imaginal buds swelled within Her, pushing Her against the dimensions. She sagged atop the hierarchy of all Abominations …
Herself, the Daemon-God, enrobed in the wetness of Her delicate mucosa and strung with orbs of star fire that drew cosmic fumes off the sun … She had lain here, synchronous with the tick of stars.

Sena felt the surface of her body prickle, and the cool startling arrival of a tear, which had broken loose to tremble on her cheek. It was a broadcast, even to herself, of her indescribable awe. Her bones resonated with the frequency coming through the membrane until she almost couldn’t stand. She felt a horrible need to get down, to prostrate herself on the slippery floor, to give in, to give up, to die.

The holes in the fabric of the world were several feet across, far larger than what Nathaniel Howl had estimated so many years ago and much larger than what Arkhyn Hiel had found in the jungle. Arkhyn had found and contained his tiny pinhole with blood and math. But these were much too wide for that. These holes could not be sewn up.

Sena stared through the rents and wept. She felt the slackness of her face, the power of the Goddess scouring her mind, scraping out thoughts until she was blank and empty as a bowl. It took energy to think.

The Monstrosity moved. Here was Caliph’s puzzle. Here was the Monster behind the door. It was too large to see, a magnificent septum, a world of deep-pitted flesh. Bigger than the Glacier Rise, It rubbed its corpulence against reality like a streetwalker grinding on her client’s knee. Endless persistence would soon pay off. A carcass the color of palest amber was on the edge of Its spectacular discharge. But Naen’s gyrations held no promise of life—only an inevitable world of wild, baying entropy to come.

Twenty thousand years,
Sena thought.
Her birthing had been postponed.
But now, sooner even than Sena had guessed, Naen would free Herself. And this time—unlike the aftermath at Soth when beings from other worlds had stuffed Her back—there was no way to stop its coming.

The Ublisi’s terrible mistake in the gardens of Jorgill Deep had been undone, but now the Syule were gone and so were the Yilthid. The Pplarians, by their own admission, wielded a fallen and anemic incarnation of their former might. There were no ambits anymore, great enough to hold the Yillo’tharnah back. Soon—soon, They would have Their day.

The Chamber’s floor rippled with green and purple darkness. Green and purple light.

Sena tore her eyes from the widening rents and looked toward an anomaly guttering at the end of a chain. She wiped her eyes and scowled at a lamp, suspended over trunks of burst wood and red iron bands. The lamp illuminated a handful of coins that glittered just beneath the water. There had been troves here, secreted by the Willin Droul when the king of Sandren, prior to the evolution of lord mayor, had worn the Hilid Mark.

“You lit a lamp for me?” Sena said.

Her question was not addressed to Naen. Naen would never answer. But something else did, a hunched up four-foot entity of denigrated splendor. It was a Lua’groc, come up from the depths to greet her, to see her fabled arrival in the cyst.

“Hagh, hagh, haughphssss.” The Lua’groc’s laugh-snort resembled tuberculosis. A shadow of a talon crept across the Chamber wall and pointed toward the flame that screwed thick black filaments of smoke into the draft.

“Is
dreamt,
Sslia—lamp is dreamt.” Its molestation of human sound did not interfere with Sena’s ability to understand. Its words were irrelevant. She understood that the lamp was fabricated.
But why?
Why would They dream a light for her? That was the bit she couldn’t fathom. She could not make sense of Yillo’tharnahic logic.

More spasmodic coughing belched from the Lua’groc’s glass-toothed mouth. Sena detected a shimmer covering its body, a cloak of purple silk that had been dreamt dry. She averted her eyes. She did not enjoy this. The burden of seeing everything was often too much, and she felt a touch of felicity for the way that the vapors of Yoloch damped her sight.

“You dun bring the book,” the Lua’groc croaked.

“Would I be Sslia if I were that foolish?”

The click of its interlocking teeth communicated a smile.

Sena looked over its head to where the end of her quest—the origins of the navels of the world—rested on a simple black-glass shrine.

“Come count them,” the fish-priest burped.

Sena walked past him and stood before the shelf.

Two.

Her eyes roamed the tiny space in vain for another moment but, no. It was as she had thought.

She crumpled to her knees and rested her forearm on the shrine’s black edge. It didn’t matter that she had expected this. She rested her head against the cushion of her arm. The sound of water bubbling at her knees, in and out of the holes in the floor, seemed to sob right along with her. It soaked her through and through. With this cruel delivery of the truth, she felt all hope die.

For a long time she knelt, considering the future, letting the sea purl in around her. “That settles it,” she whispered to herself.

Nathaniel’s journals had deceived her. He could not write her in. She had almost dared to believe, not in his promise, but in the number. In a small corner of herself, she
had
believed—like a little fool.

But there were only two stones on the shelf. She scolded herself viciously for kneeling down here, in front of
Them.

Two was the number. How could she have ever believed anything else? The knowledge shook her with its power.

She held her stomach with her hand.

From behind, the Lua’groc brushed her shoulder with a tentative, hunger-driven talon.

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed. She stood up, whirling, wiping her eyes, sodden and uncomfortable below the knees.

“You are the god we eat!” the Lua’groc screamed back.

Sena spoke in the Unknown Tongue, pushed her ambit out into the dream-vapors, and deprived the Lua’groc’s feathery external gills of air. This silenced it. It gurgled and bowed, disappearing beneath its purple cowl. She did not
wish
to see it.

While the Lua’groc groveled, Sena looked back at the dream-made shelf that held the stones that were not actually stones. They were, however, two pieces of
something
like corundum, darkened by blood and math, the remnants of what had fallen out of mystery and time. They were the seeds. They were
true relics.
They were
eyes.

When they had streaked down like chance meteorites into Adummim’s molten mud, they had left their strange markings forever on the planet crust. These two stony things had formed the navels of world. One had fallen at Soth. The other had come down thousands of miles away in the Duchy of Stonehold at the edge of the Dunatis Sea.

These were the myths upon which other myths had been spun. Common sayings whose origins were unknown to those who used them had been founded on these objects.
By the Eyes! Lost as the Eyes of Agath!

There were obscure love metaphors associated with them.
Eyes make a navel.
But people didn’t know, they didn’t realize that these ancient turns of phrase had sprung not from people, not from the notion of two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes and then making a baby—but something more literal.

These objects, once so full of math and power had produced not craters of destruction when they struck Adummim, but dual navels of something else—of life.

The Cabal had found them both, what was left of them, and brought them here as tokens of the time when their Masters would once again be free. This was the creation myth of the planet.

The bubbling, mewling sounds of the Lua’groc mixed with those of the bubbling floor. It was nearly dead. Rather than let it suffocate, Sena released it.

She watched its drooping branch-like gills begin to capture molecules again, the blood trickling just below the organs’ transparent, ice-like sheen.

She hated it, this vile temporary creature. She hated its mortality. The temptation rose inside her, dark and howling, to let her frustrations out. She imagined the violence her fingers could conceive, impromptu, adjusting as they traced like filet knives over the architecture of its bones. More aquatic than most, this hissing wretch should have needed water to breathe, but in the dreamt bubble of Yoloch, it seemed air was the same as sea. Sena had no interest in the details. She wasn’t breathing. But the Lua’groc was. And what it was breathing at the moment was her charity.

“Get up,” she said.

The Lua’groc obeyed. Its silvery-gold hand pushed off the glass-black floor.

“Tell the flawless to stop. Tell them to leave Taelin be.”

“Cannot.” The Lua’groc could barely speak, weakened from its strangulation.

“Tell them—”

“Dun demand. I not you messenger.” It nearly shrieked. “You the god we eat!”

She knew better than to talk—this was one of the Cabal’s woken preternarcomancers, freed from beds along the coastal shoals, no longer required to gaze into the future on the Cabal’s behalf … the future was already known. Speaking with it would only lead to circles of rage and despair. She picked her words carefully. “Then perhaps I will
not
go to Ulung.”

“You sure go—mah,” it burped quietly. “You go, I see in dream. You nid go. You wan go.” It extended a translucent fish-bone talon toward her face. “You go for revenge. I see in dream. You wan revenge. Cannot turn away. We wait tat final joy of bleeding wat you promise in our mouth. Onli wait now. So sleepy swim north in cold. You bring them south for us to eat!”

Sena felt her stomach turn. The preternarcomancer was right. She
was
bluffing. She would go to Ulung as planned and rid herself of her indignation once and for all. But that was for later. She had other things to tend to now.

“See me in your dreams, do you? Let me tell you what
I
see. I see the flawless, reaching high as they can, still unable to touch Taelin Rae. I see them fail. I see all of them fall.”

“Cannot fall. Hard die them—lah.”

The Lua’groc dream-priest giggled almost musically and turned away. Sena saw the lamp lob a mirage of light against its skin, a fragile iridescence like fresh paint splattered in the swarming darkness of the cyst. Above furtive lobster-like antennules, in a deep-socket surrounded by glistering silver flesh, the soulless black sheen of the preternarcomancer’s pupil glared at her: cold, lidless and cruel—hostility suspended in a jelly of blood.

For an instant Sena allowed herself to see it. Then the Lua’groc waddled deeper into the cyst and made a quiet soft-lipped splash.

“I could have killed you,” she whispered. But it was gone, down into the luminous depths.

She looked at the two broken gemstones, the two “eyes” and picked one of them up. She hefted it within her hand. It had been hollowed out, gutted by extremely clever math. It was not a gemstone. Not really. The thing it once contained had long gone free.

Or, according to the Pplarians, the being that had made them, had failed. According to the Pplarians, there had never been anything inside. Only the power and the math carven on the surfaces of the gems had made it to Adummim, which apparently had been enough.

But what was
supposed
to have been inside, had never made the trip, had never made it through. The Eyes had always been empty. According to the Pplarians, the legend of the Sslia was a dark story with a bitter end and the Eyes of Agath were just empty bottles, useless as Nathaniel had written that they would be.

It was all true and yet she had needed to come here, to see for herself.

“Two plus baggage,” she said as she held the broken orb up before her eye—like a sundered walnut in the late part of the year. But its cosmic black shell harbored a mercurial reflectivity. Sena could feel its antiquity against the ridges of her skin.

Despite its overall smoothness, her fingertips detected flaws, bubbled and pitted—minute craters here and there randomly, as if it had sustained countless impacts from sugar-sized grit, which instead of penetrating the object’s extraordinary thickness, had turned its surface molten. The orbs had been created to carry and protect. They were chambers. The chambers within the Chamber.

Duana would have laughed.

Sena hurled the Eye at the floor. It was her will, rather than the strength of her arm that shattered it into glittering dust.

She was bitterly glad she had come. Her cheeks were sticky but the angry warmth had left. She composed herself. She got ready to leave. Naen’s golden lights threatened, trembled, stirred behind her. But leaving this place would not bring Sena any peace.

On the outside, Nathaniel would be waiting. He would attack her the moment she emerged, besiege her with questions and attempt to discern what she had learned.

Sena prepared herself for his assault, the horrible sensation of his touch, his whispers in her brain. She would be ready for him. She would do what she was best at. Her most well-honed talent.