Black Bottle (52 page)

No answer for the seasons! Prepare or perish! Ha! Plant, harvest, lay up fuel lest we freeze. Or we can travel … Go south! But we must react! We must do
something
. Because one morning the snow will fall. It is inevitable.

This is obvious, but notice how easily we accept it, like dull beasts. We know it in our bones. Our controls cannot reach the seasons, nor do we believe that they are sentient. So we do not scream at winter as we would scream at an animal for digging up our garden. Or too, when the child (despite scarf and mittens) fails to make it through the snow; the police find her later, stiff and pale in a ditch—they do not organize a search. They do not relentlessly hunt her killer or seek for justice.

It would be absurd.

*   *   *

C
ALIPH
stepped out of Nathaniel’s body, straight through the wall, into the wintry hydrae flailing in the underwater woods, following the sweet smell of the tincture.

Light swelled around him.

The trees darkened. The black sky turned white and the white trees turned black. They looked young and ancient at the same time, well-pruned and snapping, with a summer-sounding profusion of silver leaves. There were shadows in those dreamy trees, of warm comforting umber and purple-dappled reflections moving in their shade.

Silver leaves spiraled from black isentropic branches. Sena waited, one knee knocked against the other as if embarrassed or nervous. She was hiding someone behind her, holding someone’s hand. A little girl stepped out. Sena bent at the waist and whispered encouragingly in her ear.

Caliph began to distrust the vision.

But the girl smiled. She released Sena’s hand and ran in shy uneven steps toward him. Caliph had no idea what to do, but he crouched down instinctively and felt her arms wrap around his neck. She smelled of cold fresh air, sweets and paper glue.

Odd.

Over her shoulder, Caliph looked at Sena. There was a canal of black water beside them that reflected the leaves. Beneath its surface slipped endless schools of ivory fish. The child’s embrace was tight and trembling, as if she was afraid to let go.

While Caliph endured the awkward grasp—her entire body clinging to him—he noticed through the trees that he could see part of a city with nuanced domes perfect as soap bubbles. Like pieces of summer blown by children. But they were not whole and glossy. They were bubbles at the end of their existence, dry and ephemeral as spiderweb. Split seconds from vanishing forever into gold and lilac-colored light.

“Where
are
we?”

Myths and stilted verses translated out of musty books mumbled from his college days, out of Desdae; about a sweet forever after that stirred the poisoned tissues of his mind. The place to which the Gringlings had tried and failed to return.

Sena answered his thoughts. “This is the jellyfish glyph.”

Did that mean he was in a glyph? Or did that mean this had been a glyph at one time? He thought about the shape. The rusty darkness of that design he had seen in the
Cisrym Ta.

“Begun by Nathaniel,” said Sena. “I wrote the rest of it. Now you’re here.”

“But I’m dreaming,” said Caliph with light, musical condescension. “I’m drugged up on some ship in the desert…”

He did not feel compelled to be polite with his own imagination. He stared at Sena as he picked the girl up from the trail and held her easily in one arm. The child’s breath startled him, less restrained than an adult’s. It was loud and raspy in his ear.

“Don’t do this to me,” he said. He was talking to himself of course. But Sena glowed in the raking light through the trees: an icon, an advertisement almost, torn from the foggy streets, from the jumble of Isca’s billboards.

“It’s still hard for you to control,” said Sena. “I’ll help you. Stay with me.”

But a furious blackness erupted from the house on Isca Hill as if an ebon bedsheet had been thrown out one of the tower’s red windows. It flew down over the snowy front yard, casting Caliph in shadow.

Caliph felt the world roll. The yard became a white tablecloth snapped open.

Sena looked into Caliph’s face. “Hold on, Caliph.” The silver-leaved trees became a gleaming array of hoses and saline bags. Window light filled up the place where he was lying on a gurney. “This is a dream!” Caliph shouted. He pointed. “It’s a dream! You’re manipulating me.”

“No.” Sena’s gold hair caught light, white as the sun. It burned like snow. The glow became a halo, too strong to look at. Its aura obscured her whole body. It burned out his entire view of the world. Everything went white.

*   *   *

C
ALIPH
could hear an alarm. He assumed it was an alarm because he could also hear voices shouting beyond the wall of his room. The tincture didn’t want him to get up yet. Sena’s voice was calling him back, down into sleep. He didn’t even know if the tincture was real, or if it might just be some additional element of the dream.

He heard echoes in his head of Sena’s voice, telling him that she had something else to show him. She was begging him to come back. She was pleading for him not to go, but he had seen enough. He was through with self-delusion. He was done with lying here on a bed when Sig’s body was still missing.

“He’s not dead,” Caliph said with a drugged slur.

The alarm sounded strangely animalistic. Certainly not mechanical. A kind of singing.

Caliph got up, head throbbing. The room swung. The room nearly won; almost pulled him down. He steadied himself against the wall and noticed that the Iycestokians had taken remarkable care of him. Near the bed was a window that looked down on the wreck of the
Bulotecus.
His ribs were wrapped tightly with some kind of elastic. His eyes were swimming. He didn’t remember coming to the window. The smell of the little girl, the light shearing through the bright trees, Sena’s familiar posture on the path—

He shook his head—gently—and regretted it. Sharp pain shot through his neck, all the muscles stiff as taproots.

The room contained medical equipment.

A knock at the door preceded, by only a few seconds, the entry of a man Caliph thought he had seen before, just after his capture. Tall and thin, there was a certain franticness to the man despite his being smoothed down with southern pomade. He looked disheveled and frayed at the edges, like he was barely holding himself together, like his composure was a hard-to-pull-off act. Caliph noticed blood on the man’s sleeve.

“Siavush,” he said.

“Where’s Sigmund?” said Caliph. “The big man. He was wearing a red shirt.”

“We haven’t found anyone that fits that description.”

Caliph decided the tension in the man’s face was linked to the alarm.

“You told Isham you had the book,” said Siavush. He spoke from the periphery of Caliph’s world in a hurried, terse way.

“I did,” said Caliph.

“I’m confused then, because Isham is recovering, enough to talk, and he said you showed him a
yellow
book. But I had heard that the book in question was red.”

“Well your information’s bad,” said Caliph as if barely concerned. “It’s always been yellow.”

“I see. We found half a yellow book, ripped through the spine, but it didn’t seem to be anything. Just a journal. It did, however … by Mr. Wade’s account, look like the book you showed him.”

“If you want me to cooperate, you’ll find my friend, Sigmund. Big man. Red shirt. He’s down in the wreckage somewhere.”
Lost under the sand …

“We’ll do our best, Mr. Howl. But we can’t stay here … long.” The “long” was peculiar to Caliph.

“Why not? This is a solvitriol ship. It’s not like you’re going to run out of fuel.”

A scream filled the hall outside the room and the sound of running feet pounded away.

“Listen, I need that book!” said Siavush.

“Really? What’s the urgency?”

“Where is it?” Siavush shouted. He drew out his pocket watch and flipped it open. Pastel light ebbed over his panicked face.

Caliph wondered what the rush was. He hated the sight of the solvitriol timepiece. “How do you do that?” He pointed at Siavush’s watch. “Cope, I mean. With the fact that you’ve enslaved souls to run your machines in the south? How do you get to the point where you believe that’s okay?”

“We don’t have time for this, King Howl. I don’t believe in souls.”

“That seems a bit arbitrary in light of the blueprints—”

“Gods. You northerners really are—” Siavush stopped himself. “Solvitriol power runs on the residue … of some power … left over from the body. That’s all. It’s a trace. Some kind of energy that used to—do something in the body. We don’t know what it is. But it’s not a soul.” Siavush snorted. “No tests we’ve ever run indicate that it thinks. Or that it can communicate. It’s not a ghost, Mr. Howl. It’s just what’s left over. And we’re practical enough to recycle.” His finger, emerging from the bloody cuff, did a small circle in the air.

Caliph’s injuries ached. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “The north has always been a bit more … superstitious. Anyway, that’s a beautiful watch. Could I see it?”

“I need the book. Now!”

Caliph reached out and grabbed the pocket watch. He pulled it up, high overhead. It was not until the chain had been looped around Siavush’s neck that the Iycestokian understood what was really happening.

In small countries, like Stonehold, thought Caliph, men were still taught things forgotten in Iycestoke. Things that Siavush, in his slippers in the morning, would not understand … no matter how many pieces of northern journalism he might read over breakfast. In Stonehold, where the mountains could kill you. Where the wind and sea and sarchal hounds …

In Stonehold, where survival was a real struggle, men were taught how to survive. They did silly things. They wore swords.

But as Siavush’s hands groped ineptly, without the slightest notion of how to save himself, even against a man so badly wounded, Caliph felt some sick-making pride in coming from a long tradition of what the north called
Stonehavian resolve
and what the south had always labeled simply as
brutality.

Caliph did not stop even after Siavush’s face was purple and his full weight pulled forward from the knees. His body
was
kneeling but it wanted to lie down.

After counting out a full minute, Caliph let the chain go. He dragged the body to the room’s tiny closet.

Not possible.

Caliph was sweating. He felt inexpert at this. He felt like he might throw up. He went to the window and looked out. In his current condition he doubted he could heft Siavush’s body through the window. Dropping it into the desert wasn’t very subtle anyway.

“Fuck.” This was ill-thought. But what else was he going to do? The alarm was still quacking its strange high-pitched song. It seemed strange that no one had come to check on him. It felt bizarre that there were not more sounds of running feet.

Where were the guards?

Caliph gave up on hiding the body and opened the door. The cramped hallway beyond was, perhaps because of the alarm, empty of people, but painted in blood. It looked like there had been a slaughter. The walls were coated. The floor was covered with a red half-congealed sauce.

Caliph felt his gorge rise. He started pulling off his bandages as he went, not wanting to stand out in case someone passed him in the hall.

Where is everyone?
he thought.

Not knowing where to go or what to do, he followed the hallway to its end and met no one, headed away from the sound of the alarm in what he imagined was a good first step at getting his bearings.

He passed a room with an open door that looked in on the unmistakable resting form of Isham Wade. He was on a gurney of sorts in a cabin identical to Caliph’s. The main difference was that Isham Wade had been hooked up to a system of insectile-looking machines. He looked gray. Silver really. His skin was horribly changed and speckled with black spots.

Plague?
But how would Isham Wade have caught the plague?

Caliph hesitated a moment at the doorway. He thought about pulling the plugs. No. There was nothing to do here. Nothing that would make Caliph feel better. He looked hard at Isham Wade, angry and repulsed.

The man had already contracted his punishment. Caliph would not interfere.

He moved on into the hall’s terminus, which was a wide space that surrounded an open locker full of weapons. Caliph stared at it while the alarm wailed. That sound might have explained why it had been left open, unattended. But it was not serendipity that made him stare. Rather it was uncertainty and fear, both over whether this was truly a weapons locker and whether finding it ajar had just saved him or put him into deeper peril.

He stared at the rack of sedate, dark, leathery things and questioned whether they were watching him. All he knew for certain was that they moved.

CHAPTER

40

The tantrum of shadows that whipped and splattered over walls, rooms and mechanisms had finally retreated. Nathaniel’s ghost had left the Pplarian ship and gone south in a rage, bent and billowing and thorny. It cursed Sena. It howled and ranted on the mountains: on K’rgas, on Bujait and Jag’Narod. It raged back and forth between Veydith and the Kallywarthing.

Sena could hear it in the thin, tropospheric miles that girdled the world. It drew over the jungles like a black squall, gathering in on itself, a clock spring tightening.

He had not foreseen this. That she might sentence Arrian to Taelin’s body had never entered his mind.

Sena felt a little swell of pride but the danger offset her euphoria. Would he unleash St. Remora?

Nathaniel had disappeared south, beyond the equator.

She hoped not. In the meantime she dug in the moist peat of a Tebeshian pot, beneath the alien stain of the flower’s shadows, and snapped off part of the pimplota’s root. Growing the pimplota from a twenty-thousand-year-old seed in the span of a few moments required only marginal holomorphic tampering.

The root came out of the peat, clean and waxy, like a mummified toe: purple, ghosted with hair-like tendrils and morsels of dirt. Juice coursed over her fingers. Nearly black.