Black Bottle (54 page)

I think I know what you are up to,
said Nathaniel.

Sena felt her throat clamp tight. She hoped desperately that he did not. Below her, the hollowness of the plateau flourished with gauzy indigo things. They were many and one at the same time, silent yet moving and enormously cognizant of both her and Nathaniel’s presence.

She did not warn Nathaniel of his danger. If he was undone here, she would be glad. If he was foolish enough to stay a moment longer, she would rejoice.

And he was. He stayed stubbornly, glaring at her while an army of pebbles inched in the wind, making sound as it crossed the vast key bed of solid rock, beneath which stirred the presence he had to fear.

The Yillo’tharnah began to uncoil. They seeped out like carbonic gas and yet he pressed her, hatred ferocious enough to anchor him.
I think I
know
what you are up to …

The huge black pillar behind him moved with shadows. Its lee side held a deeply carved depiction of some hideous creature or agglomeration of creatures and though embossments many feet deep had withstood the sand, they showed nothing more than the badly cratered semblance of a host of eyes and moving fur.

I will protect the book and wait for your return.

Finally, Nathaniel fled.

He was gone in an instant, slipping out between Their claws.

Sena heard the pebbles move. She looked down to where it seemed an entire ocean had once raged like a river for eons and worn the bedrock to a satin finish. Occasional pits, where softer minerals had been hollowed out, harbored little handfuls of gravel. There were whispery designs in the stone. A repetitious pattern of timorous shapes, cast random as dice. Sena’s eyes traced the faint outlines of teeth, sockets and jumbled ribs—not of prehistoric fish—but of men and women.

Fossils of the old world.

With Their only prey gone, the Yillo’tharnah unrolled slowly, lethargic and tired. Sena waited for Them as the clouds thinned above her head and opened on an enormous red star sinking into the valley beyond the plateau. A smaller brighter point of light, dwarfed by the scarlet titan, glimmered and followed its epic descent.

Here at the edge of the plateau, on the brink of a huge vertical miter in the world’s crust, Sena noticed the angles of intersection with the surrounding geography, how they proscribed light and reflected darkness. It was a phenomenon she had never seen before. Darkness cast itself through lit canyons of sky in beams and pillars and gradients. Lovely and terrifying.

And then she realized how the vast valley before her, a megalo-doppelganger of the Great Cloud Rift, resembled a sunken font and how the distant crumbling mountains, High Horn in particular, felt like the worn stumps of non-human caryatids in a row. As if this had once been a continent-sized temple, a building that could tip the world …

At that instant, Something groped skyward through the rock, touching her abstractly, mouthing her with its thoughts. A vague threat rose through the fossilized stone.

Sena was afraid.

A moaning sound coursed through her ears. Her dark trench coat snapped as if clothespinned to a line. How strange! They had inverted the colors.

Her coat had been red. But now it was black and the bandeau underneath had changed to crimson. She tried to change it back, to re-imagine her clothing, but realized that her ambit extended precisely to the limits of her skin, not a fraction more.

You look better in black. Red is your accent.

They were not Nathaniel’s thoughts. These thoughts came from below, smooth, dark and vast as a polar ocean. They were not words. They were not even sentences. It was by approximation that she interpreted them. There was no humor, even sardonic, to their composition. Just as there was no sincerity. The thoughts were devoid of recognizable logic or opinion.

What made them so breathtakingly alien was that they did not mean what they appeared to mean. The Yillo’tharnah had no opinion on color, or style. They were not commenting on her sense of fashion. Their thoughts communicated a simple yet multilayered threat. What They had really said was, “We are here. We see you. Notice that you have little power in this place.”

Where is the book?
the Yillo’tharnah thought at her. Again it was a thought too large to encapsulate with words. Not a question at all but rather a caress—a kind of worship. They knew she had left it out of reach—like Taelin’s necklace. They knew this and did not attempt to tear through vague parallel coordinates in order to make a snatch.

Sena felt the writing in her skin grow even colder as They retraced what They had written, making certain she had not modified the design. Her pages had been cut from the prescribed location. She had done nothing wrong.

Sena tried not to move or recoil. Their touch was as icy as the world she stood on, racing around its dying star. The Yillo’tharnah touched her with the curiosity of a machinist examining a part for wear but she was still functional, well-oiled and shiny as the day They had made her. Her ambit was strong. They accepted her as perfect. The creation and the Creators were on level ground in this: both would last forever. She was beyond Their power to melt down, to recast. The gift could not be taken back. Which was why, Sena supposed, the integer had to be small.

Having traced the lines methodically, the Yillo’tharnah withdrew. They were satisfied.

It was her turn to assess. “You tried to take the necklace at Soth.” This was why she had come, despite Nathaniel’s admonition, to scold Them. To try to threaten Them for Their betrayal.

The reply from beneath the plateau was grim and smarmy, a hint not of apology, but of acquiescence—like a lawyer, Sena thought, reluctantly amending the contractual loophole It had authored.

She stood atop Their tomb, feeling insignificant, a tiny mite perched on the corner of a great piece of furniture. Their promise was clear: not to interfere again. But when They were free, she knew, there would be no promise that They would keep. Pleading would not change that, even though her instinct was to plead.

Sena gazed at the stars just beginning to gleam in the quadrant where the storm had burnt the sky. There was no oxygen here. Bright, young, feral suns, billions of them watched this version of Adummim spin like a marble on oblivion’s lip.

Her meeting was over. What could be settled was settled.

The number stood at two.

The Yillo’tharnah had recognized her and the lines in her skin lost their temperature as the capreolate Entities above the plateau pulled down, chilly and bloated. Acres of invisible sweet tendrils sank beneath the stone and boiled softly in the dark.

Sena felt the sand ping against her cheeks and knew it was time to go. Something like a gasp filled the hideous cold desolation of the plain.

She spoke a bloodless word and turned to step from the murrey vista, through a tall and impressive window frame, out again into the snowy yard.

The ruined estate of Nathaniel Howl loomed behind her. The trees creaked from the edge of the mountain woods.

Nathaniel was there, waiting for her, hovering over her shiny backpack in the snow.

CHAPTER

41

Taelin realized that the Iycestokians had locked her in her room. She knocked on the door. She called for help but no one came.

She shrieked and wept and tore objects off the walls. She scooped up the little crockery of flowers from the aluminum desk and hurled it out the window. After the flowers went other things: her clothes, her pen and a tin of tissue. Her letter to Archbishop Abimael went too.

The Iycestokian nation must be punished for locking me up,
she thought.
But how?
She looked around the room for a weapon, a letter opener, anything—

Then she remembered her razor. She snapped it up. The handle was still buttery with soap and blood. She took a moment to scream and pound on the thin door before whirling around.

It began to sink in just how austere the room really was, and how cell-like. She went for the curtains first; sliced them into strips. Yes. Iycestokian taxes would have to pay for that!

With the curtains in shreds she began cutting up the sheets and pillowcases, slicing up the mattress.

Sit down,
said the inside-girl.

“I don’t want to sit down. We need to get out. I’m on a mission from—”

You’re making a mess.

“Shut up!” Taelin’s shriek filled the room with sound. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

I will not. Father will come for me. I don’t need to do anything. Just sit down and wait. Wait like I did in the dark.

“You’re crazy. I have to get ready. I have to break my necklace. I have to get us to the jungle.”

But Taelin did sit down on the edge of the cut-up mattress and for a moment held the razor to her silver-spangled wrist. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll end this!”

It wasn’t true. She had tried before and lacked the courage. But as she bluffed, she noticed that her razor was an almost perfect match, color-wise, to the silver blotches covering her arm. The two very different things, knife and flesh seemed to blend together without any pressure at all.

It’s my birthday today. You can’t kill me on my birthday,
said the inside-girl.

“Get out of my head!” Taelin threw her razor on the floor, then she picked up the aluminum desk chair. It was incredibly light and delicate, just like the door to her room. She swung the chair like a pickax. It rang in her hands. Its legs bowed but the door dented and shuddered under the blows.

Give up. We don’t need to try to get to Ahvelle. Father will open the way.

Taelin remembered her descent into the dripping gulf of nightmares, where the hoarse voice in her head had been real, where the inside-girl had been the outside-girl, the girl with the petrified eyes, the girl whose head Sena had sawed off and dropped into a shopping bag.

“Sena will save me from you!” Taelin screamed. “When the necklace breaks, I’ll be free of you!”

The door bonged and twanged like a bell forged from the wrong sort of metal. Its upper portion started to bend when the latch gave way and Taelin followed her chair out into the hall.

“Nenuln’s light!” She saw herself in a mirror hung above a table, flanked by two crockery pots of flowers. There was blood on the mirror. Blood on the floor, on the pots of flowers. She seemed to blend into the scenery, naked and coated with red grime.
What happened to my clothes?
She let go of the chair. Her palms were lined with deep aching trenches.

In the distance, something shrieked constantly, echoing around corners and nearby, just a few feet down the hallway from the table and the lovely mirror, a man on his hands and knees was vomiting. The man had one hand on his weapon, but he was busy. Taelin took it from him with a sense of déjà vu. It was a velvet gun. She hefted its soft bulk against her chest and stepped past its owner, bare feet unable to avoid the warm slippery spatters.

The hot light of an open airlock made her blink and the dry biting fragrance of the desert beckoned her past the vomit. Outside, in the blast-furnace heat, she could see shapes dancing crazily, haloed by the blinding sun.

*   *   *

C
ALIPH
reached into the locker fully expecting to regret it. When his fingers brushed the first cool leathery shape, the hair on his arm sprung up. His eyes struggled over the object’s long-hung thinness: like a plucked goose. It flinched slightly, then touched him back. It stretched out with an appalling willingness, coming off the rack like an infant reaching from its mother toward a stranger. Headless, simian and dark, Caliph could not tell whether it was actually intelligent.

The thing’s cool skeletal embrace drew its small mass up close against Caliph’s chest where it adjusted to his panicked movements. It flinched beneath his elbows, swinging its “body” around to his lower back. The creature, or thing, was lightweight and sinewy, hairless and flecked with ferruginous eyes: both on its central thorax and nestled in the deep soft flesh of all four of its “shoulders.”

It was boned like an old woman.

Caliph had no idea what it did or how to use it. Still, the long hairless appendage that sprouted from the top of the weapon’s rib cage, and which ended bizarrely in a single plumose frond, seemed to be the business end. Like the antenna of a moth, it quivered slightly and stayed erect, hovering behind his head. He had to crane his neck to see where it floated, preoccupied, seeming to taste the air.

I guess I’m armed,
he thought. He still felt naked with nothing in his hands but if he didn’t have to manipulate a weapon he supposed that was for the best. His whole body hurt, his neck in particular. He could feel where the Iycestokians had stitched him up.

The hallway he had followed ended here at the weapon locker but there was a wide archway that opened onto the airship’s deck. He could feel the desert heat tonguing through the exit, mixing with the cool air of the hall.

He looked out tentatively. Nothing moved except the shadow of the feathered appendage, which lengthened before him. He watched it slide forward over the smooth metal decking, silently checking the kiln-dry air.

The deck itself was devoid of both weapons and men. Caliph tested its desertion by venturing to the railing and looking down at the wreckage of his former ship. The sound of the alarm faded behind him. He turned and moved toward what he believed was the front of the craft.

Most of the ship’s crew had probably been assigned to the wreck site.

Even so, he stepped quietly into the shadow of an airlock cased in black flaking metal, veined with conduits. On his right, a glass housing flecked with orange water stains glistered from the pastel fluctuations of solvitriol energy inside it. The doors opened automatically, double-startling him, first with their sudden hissing movement and then with the thing behind them, like a person in a sun-sheltered cave. Skin shimmering and silver.

It was a woman with greasy red-brown hair, and the hint of a double chin. She stood there a moment, shorter than he was, staring at him while a single strand of milky saliva stretched between her lips.