Black Bottle (6 page)

Taelin felt her stomach pitch. She closed her eyes but her balance was off. She had to kneel down. She felt grains of stone roll under her fingers.

Her esophagus clamped down on an airy pressure that climbed up the back of her throat. She got control of it. After a few moments the feeling subsided and her head cleared enough that she risked opening her eyes.

At the edge of the dais stood a man, exceptionally tall and pale, wrapped in a single luxurious heap of long dark fur. His feet were similarly booted to the knee. He was talking with a journalist who had just ended the conversation by saying something she couldn’t parse in a loud, cheerful voice. Then the journalist and his shoulder bag turned in her direction. He smiled at her, raised his bulky camera and snapped a litho.

Fantastic.

Caught for all time: kneeling at the temple of Sena Iilool.

She struggled to her feet and rested a moment. The man in the fur wrap came over. He smelled of overly sweet perfume and his smile was too symmetrical, like something coming out from behind a mirror.

“May I help you?”

Taelin pushed her goggles back into her hair. “Yes, I’m wondering if you … if your congregation … if your
religion
really believes that Sena Iilool is a god?”

“You smell like apples.” He looked down at her with lavender eyes, deep-set under yellow brows.

Taelin scowled. She wanted to tell him that he smelled rather cloying himself but she wasn’t interested in a pissing contest. “Is that right? You people believe she’s a god? Goddess? Whatever?”

The man said, “Belief is not required.”

“This is a temple, isn’t it?” said Taelin.

The man’s smile diminished but his eyes almost incandesced in the sunlight. “We do not answer questions here.” His head was shaved but a nap of blond velvet covered his pure white skull.

“You’re not interested in converting anyone?”

“No.”

“Can I look around?”

“Yes. But please, do not disturb the colligation.”

“What’s a colligation?” Her father being a lawyer, she understood a colligation of facts used to support an argument but …

“We do not answer questions here.”

“Oookay. I’ll just look around then.” She gave him a smile that he did not return.

The dais hovered twenty feet behind him. She wanted to crouch down and look under the bottom step, discover if the whole massive thing were really floating, but to do so felt childish.

Instead she walked toward it, set one foot on the impossibly smooth monument and stepped up. As she did, she felt her nausea return momentarily. Just a flicker at the bottom of her stomach.

She paused, then climbed the other two steps and passed one of the red veils.

The scene that greeted her sent her vision rolling. Among the snapping silks knelt a stunning host, mostly pale Pplarians. They faced north, knees on cushions of scarlet embroidered with black. In front of each worshiper stood a two-foot amphora of dark glass. The mouths of the amphorae were wider than their bellies, spun into broad funnels by whatever glassblower supplied them.

To the right of each worshiper knelt a man or woman in red silk who assisted them through the act of oblation: inserting the needle, depositing the other end of the vacuum tube into the mouth of the amphora. Taelin watched in horror as row after row of phlebotomists methodically went through the venepuncture, then bandaged up their patients and helped them lie down, heads on the pillows that had previously cushioned their knees.

Once their patients were comfortable, the phlebotomists raised smaller silver amphorae, spilling liquid from these sparingly into the larger vessels before capping the tall black amphorae with ornate lids.

Young vergers with silver trays of fruit, drinks and biscuits glided the spiral aisles.

Eventually the devoted were led out along the spiral and a new worshiper was guided in to take their place. The turnaround was slow; people trickled in and out. They seemed to both come from and disappear toward the region farthest from where Taelin stood.

Taelin watched as a phlebotomist lifted one of the black amphorae. She clutched it close to her body with both arms, and hauled it north to yet another dais where she ascended three more steps and entrusted her burden to a muscular Pplarian. He in turn labeled and hung it at a forty-five-degree angle from a magnificent silver scaffold. It swung gently with others that had been filled and made Taelin’s stomach hurt.

None of the worshipers spoke, but Taelin could hear even above the snapping silks, the dribbling echoes of the hollow amphorae, the colligation, the vast sound of blood collecting drop by drop, which she now realized had to be linked somehow, impossibly, to Sena’s use of holomorphy.

It was not so cold here. Whatever the custard-colored dais was made of, Taelin could feel a mild warmth coming off it. The whole thing repulsed her. She backed out of the temple, down the steps and nearly into the towering Pplarian who had snuck up behind her.

Her fear, both at the Pplarian’s sudden proximity and the memory of what she had just seen, boiled out as anger. “How … what are you doing here?”

The man’s face twisted like white plastic at the edge of a fire. Taelin backpedaled, nearly falling in her effort to widen the distance between them. His words barely reached through her shock and horror. “The Omnispecer is not like you,” he said. “Axioms do not require belief.”

Taelin gaped. One of his lavender eyes glared at her, bulging and cycloid while the other seemed to have been sucked back into his head, partly hidden by a wrinkled sphincter of bleached flesh.

His grin returned, broad and venomous.

“We do not answer questions here,” he called out to her as she turned, still stumbling, dashing for the stairs.

CHAPTER

5

Caliph woke with a silverfish on his face. How it had survived the cold, he didn’t know. Nor did he know what time it was. He was wrapped in a blanket (another mystery) with the leather desk chair reclined beneath him like a sling. The muscles in his neck had stiffened. He rolled forward, chair tipping upright, and noticed a fire burning on the hearth.

Clearly, his staff had found him.

He picked up the book that had fallen to the floor. Curiosity about the characters in the journal drove him to find the next entry.

Journal Entry: C. Tides: 543, Y.o.T. Crow: Mas—Harvest, 15th: N.H.

Arrian Glimendula lived roughly twenty thousand years ago. Scholars place her at nineteen thousand, nine hundred fifty years old, give or take a year or two. My ruined estate in Khloht, overgrown with seventy years of jungle is still new by comparison. My poisoned servants are fresh gossip, sweet golden dates rotting in the sun. In the company of such a beast of legend, I am nothing. In this, I take comfort … despite the fact that it is a lie.

With sweet shuwt tinctures I was there, inside of her as I have been inside of others. My sense of self is muddy. As is my sense of time. I look out through Arrian’s eyes, see and sense Corwin’s adolescent frustrations. When Arrian met the woman on the ship Corwin stayed in the shadows, watching. After a while, he turned and marched up the coast, skipping stones into the Loor. The woman was Ublisi. She had come to Soth carrying the Red Book.

By then, the
Cisrym Ta
was already nearly three thousand years old (H.X.) yet it glistened like the day the Ublisi had bound it. The Ublisi stayed at Soth for three years; then, on Arrian’s eighteenth birthday, I returned through a poisoned stupor, escaping the jungle’s sultry spell on what fools might call
bent time
.

Cisrym Ta?
This was the name that Sena had always used for Caliph’s uncle’s book—the book that she had discovered and brought into the north—the book she had studied day and night and rarely let out of her sight.

If these accounts revolved around the
Cisrym Ta,
Caliph had a much better understanding of why Sena would be reading them. He turned the page and was once again confronted by the colophon of the falling man.

Excerpt: pages 49–51

The Fallen Sheleph of Jorgill Deep

Precipice Books © 1546 S.K. by Arkhyn Hiel

The upper arcades of Jorgill Deep are cleared. The floors are swept in both directions, inviting a menagerie of guests to dance atop the battlements. As the music begins, Arrian watches Corwin flirt ridiculously. He has become a sailor this last year, grown tan and arrogant. He no longer carries her colors.

Tonight, he looks fine, still damp from ocean spray and graceful from ever balancing on ship decks. Arrian banishes the annoying thought and goes to the high table where sweet-fig pies have been laid before the merrymakers. She samples the desserts and licks her fingers when she hears him stop directly behind her.

His voice and the clean smell of the ocean carry over her shoulder.

Arrian turns and smiles. “I thought you came to see
her
instead of me.” She gestures with her eyes across the battlement.

Corwin laughs a half-embarrassed laugh. He is only seventeen. “I doubt you know how to be jealous.”

Arrian’s eyes flicker. “You don’t know me well anymore.”

“Maybe not. But I sense your influence at this party. You’ve had the decorations hung exactly to your taste, probably fretting over them until early this morning.”

She nudges him with her elbow, enjoying his nearness. Wreaths holding candles bear indigo ribbons and the flames illuminate white flowers overhead. The pergola above the arcade is burgeoning with blooms. “I brought you a gift from the mainland,” Corwin says. “Since you’ve never been away from Soth, I thought a little something foreign might be good.”

“I love it here,” Arrian says defensively. “We have perfect seasons all year round.”

Corwin replies with slow enticing words. “On the mainland they have snow.”

“Snow?”

Corwin grins. He reaches up and shakes the pergola, generating a storm of petals. “It’s white and cold and flutters from the sky—like rain but more slowly.” Arrian watches his lips move.

“I belong here, Cor. You’re the traveler, not me. Besides, father says I should marry.”

Corwin laughs. “You!—who’ve never had a suitor or anyone you loved, what would you do with marriage?”

Arrian bites her lip softly. Her father is calling her from behind the high table. “I’ll be right back.”

Corwin watches her go. The ghost of an old ache passes ever so faintly through his face.

The party is for celebrating both Arrian’s birth and the anniversary of Jorgill Deep’s desecration. All the guests know that Arrian’s father has something special planned and servants are beginning to usher the party downstairs toward the courtyard.

In a chamber off the arcade where the music is only a murmur, Arrian meets her father. It is strange to gaze on what is no longer me. As usual, the Ublisi stands at his side. Maelstroms of stars turn in each of her unsettling eyes. Arrian has never seen her eat or sleep. She has heard that Ublisi have no need of mundane necessities.

Her father has told Arrian that tonight will be the culmination of higher things. Deeper studies. The Ublisi has worked out some holomorphic secret of unlocking, which will redeem Soth, an equation that will bring back the radiance of Ahvelle.

At Jorgill Deep, there is a knot of stone, a weird whorl of minerals: cream-colored, spiraled into blackish and brownish granite—all of which swirl up into something like a protruding navel on the ground. It is the remnant of where one of the chambers
7
first landed. A backward crater that defies standard physics. It is graven with glyphs not even the Ublisi remembers how to read and it rests in an unused alcove in an overgrown section of the courtyards of Jorgill Deep.

“Arrian,” her father says. “We will be going down to the courtyard. My gift to you tonight,” his voice—my voice—softens, “will lift us to a better place.” He has green irises that I remember from the mirror, blunted with age, and he rests his hand gently on his daughter’s shoulder. She is the only creature that he still dares to love.

The Ublisi says nothing but, with her cosmic white eyes, stares all the way through Arrian’s face.

A chill goes through the birthday celebrant as the Ublisi turns slowly.

“Come.” Arrian’s father puts her hand on his arm and leads her to the courtyard where the guests have already gathered under a pavilion of midsummer blooms. Glasta
8
flutter through the garden and fan the smell of nectar.

The Ublisi’s tall form seems to float across the lawn to where the stone knot has been extricated from an overgrowth of black pimplota. The Ublisi holds the bright red book in her hands. Its corners are shod in sparkling metal where proud Nekrytian serpents tense in intricate designs.

Arrian knows about this book. It is occasionally still called the
Gymre Ta,
the Banishing Book: because of its role in locking D’loig in a prison in the stars. Its creation supposedly took a thousand years. But these days, it is simply called the
Cisrym Ta,
the Red Book—not only for the color of its cover, but for its fearsome results in the ongoing Yilthid War.

The Ublisi stretches her arms beneath the moons and all the guests grow quiet.

Only the glasta still flutter.

Arrian stands near her father, his large hand clasped over hers. She can feel his anxiety. He has helped with the study and the preparation for this night, being a great mathematician. He waits now, breathing hard, for the golden lights that will soon fill the courtyard.

The Ublisi begins to speak in the Unknown Tongue. Her numbers fill the air, bloodless and clean. Her voice sounds like a chyrming creature far away on the mountain of Soth. For an instant, molten glassy shapes distort the courtyard air. A sudden plunge in temperature reveals every exhalation. Inaudible frosty notes pluck a staccato stillness in the yard.

The formula does not last long, but the moment of silence that follows feels eternal. One guest looks to the next, anxiety smoking between their lips. Arrian’s eyes meet Corwin’s and she sees a ghost of apprehension, a sailor’s instinct, perhaps. His body shifts in that infinite moment of doubt as he begins his first step toward her.