Black Bottle (66 page)

He looks at Sena closely. “That’s what happens when whole cultures are annexed. That’s what happens when the world loses its ability to steer. And you know, I guess I thought … that people were more sensible.”

“I’m just the sexton,” says Sena. “I dug the hole.” Her mouth is beautiful. Her teeth are an omegoid array of enamel shields standing in pink gums. Her tongue dances behind them.

He doesn’t know why he notices this.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he asks. “Why fill me up with drugs?”

“No matter what I did, I couldn’t get to three.” Sena looks more sincere and more bereft than she ever has before. “This is about transcendence. And you need permission. You have to forgive me for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for that.”

Caliph believes that there are interminable seasons bracketed by proterozoic soup and stars—wheeling over him.

“I wanted to tell you,” she says. “But I couldn’t. It was too dangerous. Your uncle could have—”

But Caliph barely hears her. The sky is not yet light but there are shapes in it. He watches them press and queue like the shadows of frenzied shoppers pressing against frosted glass. There is a red glow behind them as they bang for the clerk, demanding that the bolts be snapped back for their turn to enter, trample and consume. For some reason he imagines all the windows of his uncle’s house blowing out in prismatic splendor as the Yillo’tharnah molt across the sky. They are black laughter, exultant and empty.

“Hold my hand,” Sena whispers.

Caliph laces fingers with her. She has done terrible things. But perhaps she is about to follow through on her promise—and fix everything.

Her hands feel cool. Cooler than the gooey air. The reflection of his face, in her black eyes, is serene and resolved. She guides his forearm over a bed of hollow tines.

The lectern-altar is a ghastly cackle of stone and ancient residue. When his arm is in position, she helps him press it down. The hollow slivers go through him effortlessly, popping from the skin in glistening pincushion-array. He gasps, sets his jaw, says nothing. Blood pours from him into the stone channels, down the drain and into the tubing of a pen.

He looks up, dazed by the creamy pink fume rising over the trees. He doesn’t know that his brain is bleeding.

*   *   *

S
ENA
lifts the pen with the heavy tubing. A small bottle screwed into the hose mixes pimplota ink as it fills with his blood. When her quill touches the first page, the world shakes. When her pen lifts the tremor ceases.

She can tell that Caliph is disconcerted. He knows now that this is real. He remembers when his uncle did this to him as a boy. The quill’s nib is sharp and supple and drips with the ink of worlds.
25

But she must focus all her attention on this act. She cannot search for power and she cannot afford to draw it from herself.

She reaches for the colligation. She pulls holojoules, endless incredible amounts of holojoules from her black amphorae still frozen in Isca. The temple atop the great frustum is empty. It floats, cold and desolate in its realm above Incense Street. But the gelid pots of blood are still there, preserved.

Sena uses all of them.

It hurts her to do this. She feels each pen stroke in her skeleton. The scrape of the quill against the paper is deafening. As sensual as satin or milk poured in morning light.
She feels the stone lectern beneath the vellum, formed of Adummim’s geology through ancient dreams—set here as a traitor, for this purpose, to murder the continent.

But the lectern has changed its politics, aligned itself with the new power. The grain of its smooth rock surface kisses the underside of the sheet as she writes in cool defiance of the apocalypse around her.

*   *   *

N
AEN
fanned over the equator and pressed the ruins where Caliph was just beginning to feel the kind of unity with Sena that he had not felt for many months. He began to understand things, as if he was inside her, part of her. He began to love the sheet of vellum she was drawing on, profoundly, though he was unsure why. It was primal, like loving sunlight and fresh air. Ancient as his mortal need to be touched.

Sena set her teeth and concentrated. She finished the first glyph and pronounced it. She felt her stomach empty. Her sight dimmed. Her depth perception was gone. She began on the next.

Caliph tried to take a step forward but his forearm was still impaled in the bed of tines. He jerked up short. Sena held his hand. She paused to settle him like a curious child.

The sky was turning from pink to gold. The Goddess of Light was breaking on the horizon.

In a moment of mixed emotion Sena leaned forward and kissed Caliph. He felt it as a sticky soft plucking. His lips were thin and dry; hers were jungle slugs. Then Sena hurried to finish her work, composing the final dots and dashes of the glyph.

Caliph’s arm ached deeply.

There were forests of waterspouts holding up the sky above the ocean. The Great Cloud Rift had fallen into the planet’s core. Its god-tons of rock had sloughed away and released the radiant unsleeping horrors through cracks a hundred miles wide.

*   *   *

M
EADOWS
burn. Mountains and deserts dissolve like sugar in a buttered pan.

But Sena is not capturing the world in a glyph.

One of her eyes is already gone. She steadies the second sheet. Above the altar, Naen looms as the ink spreads. A yellow-white cloud in a sky gone black, shredding the atmosphere in her wake.

“I think I’m going to fall over,” says Caliph.

It is his first complaint. He has leaned on his impaled arm, put all his weight onto it, but having given so much fluid, even
that will no longer support him.

“You did good,” she says. He cannot see the horror that is right on top of them, nearly blocking the invisible doorway in the sky.

*   *   *

C
ALIPH
looked at the woman he loved. His insides were hollowed out and packed with fear—because he felt himself dying. He watched her incisors dig into her lower lip. The final words he heard her say were “Fight for it, Caliph. Fight for it!”

It seemed to him as if she had been writing on two different sheets of paper at the same time. As if he were looking at separate worlds. Sena existed in both of them, in all of them.

Then all separate realities collapsed into one and something horrible and amazing burnt through the fabric of every universe and melted their fibers together. An object. A great red orb. Its path and position was identical to the planet’s size and movement around the sun. A crimson world flowered inside Adummim, cold and gleaming. The white and golden mass in the sky reached out for him.

Caliph’s mind was far away as the end enveloped him. He was thinking that there would be no more new days. No luncheons or silk stockings. Bureaucracy, pastries, love, ice cream, vague connections on the street corner at the steaming vendor cart, the dirty hand delivering you your change …

The eyes reflected in store glass staring through themselves at what they wanted to be …

These had been burnt up in this ceremony in the jungle.

For a few spare seconds, Caliph saw humping mountainous forms judder in the red world’s unbroken oceans of mud. Risen. Shining with a slurry of clay and starlight. For that single instant, Caliph stared. Then the thousandfold tendrils of negative space splashed toward him. Naen reached for him and he screamed.

He thrashed brokenly against the hot suffocation, molten slag, organic compost instantly stewed to mush. Fumes of burnt obsidian and sweet methane filled him like a balloon but enormous pressure held him down. He was being squeezed. Crushed. Devoured.

Caliph flailed, arm and leg, across the brink of oblivion. His body came apart. He felt Sena’s hands adjust his bones. Her fingers slipped under the strips of his skin and followed them down with the practical brevity of a seamstress. Then he heard Sena speak a single word and he snapped together, hard and slippery. Strong as stone. He felt the tincture carry him out of his old body into this new one, into a new place, a place that was difficult for Them to hold onto. He had become a perfect orb, black and slippery, moving through Their grasp. He focused all his determination …

And then, fast, he was out. Like a melon seed pinched between thumb and finger, shooting from darkness into strange light.

He passed through the Nocripa and held his breath as if underwater. He kept his eyes in front of him and did not look back. He was fighting for every inch, every moment, going for speed, blinded by stars that did not move.

He did not give up.

In a different time, the light tunneled, natal and traumatic, but it also thronged with warmth.

The light became orange and blue—leaves in autumn. Supple black branches spindled over a canal, lit with catoptric perfection. In the water, dappled movements swarmed: fish like white lilacs. And through the trees, Caliph saw pale mythic domes and spires quaver—somehow susceptible to wind.

*   *   *

I
N
the dream, the tincture is gone. Burnt up. He has moved on. Someone in the dream asks him a simple question that he cannot understand.

*   *   *

C
ALIPH
looked down at a girl on the path, divorced from logical timelines. Her hair was curly and dark brown. But her eyes were crocus–ice-blue. Her skin was pale and glittered with subtle platinum lines. The loveliest child he had ever seen. Standing in the cold.

“What did you say?”

“I said that’s a nice one, isn’t it?” She pointed at the ground.

“Oh. That
is
a nice one.” He crouched down. There were actually two shiny husks on the path at their feet, like stones, each resting by a strange whorl-like pattern in the clay. Both were like summer beetles fallen in autumn. Both were broken and empty.

Aislinn bent at the waist, like her mother would have done, and picked one of them up.

It was still beautiful. Caliph hadn’t thought of it as such until she said so. To him it was small and ugly. But Aislinn said it was beautiful and then she pressed its cold hard shape into his palm. It bit him strangely, like a talisman.

Aislinn touched his other hand. All her fingers wrapped around two of his. She tugged, swung his arm.

“You should keep it,” she said. She assumed her propensity for stone collecting was something shared by everyone.

He slipped it into his pocket. “All right, I will. You want to go home?”

“Yes.”

He picked her up. The girl rested her head on his shoulder, draped her arms over his back. He knew where he was going. Into the mist-drenched sweetness of unending autumn. He could smell it—whenever he breathed. He could feel it on his skin, a crisp pomaceous tartness: cold from hanging in trees against the stars.

His head was clear.

The girl traced the lines on the back of his neck as she always did. As she had done since she was half again as small.

He carried her toward Ahvelle, toward the shining crest of the jellyfish glyph. There was no one to ridicule their ascent as some mawkish final illustration in a children’s book. Even if there had been, Caliph would not have cared. He was glad to be mawkish.

He found no sorrow in having changed. No sorrow that he wasn’t breathing.

25
Ulian ink.

APODOSIS

Though I fail, my success is enough.

Isn’t it?

Because when there is no way out, you must go deeper in. Then you will find that the direction you have taken does not end. Your walls will crumble. Your path is endless.

I learned this from you.

You taught me to be relentless.

I cut three sheets of skin from my back. The third was meant to keep all three of us together. But it could not, and therefore, onto it will go this letter.

I knew even a year ago that it wasn’t going to be me. I hoped. I wished. I went to Sandren to double-check. But I wasn’t destined to be hurled into the sea: a message in a bottle, born by knowable tides toward an island paradise—newly made.

It was Nathaniel’s paradise. I only finished it. I had other things to worry about. It has been complicated, trying to get you both out while Nathaniel watches my every move.

When I wrote your glyph did you feel yourself come apart at the seams? Did you feel how I stitched you back together, so carefully? So tight? And then, into your new home, your new phylactery, the tincture packed you. All of you. Your body, the very fabric captured in my eye. The seed of
you.

I know that feeling. To be cut apart, turned into a symbol. Perfected. Your design shining like a gem.

And this is the part where you will think,
How strange!

That she put me into her eye.

I used to laugh at the old holomorphic prescriptions. They read like fairy tale recipes for spells. (I never told you the outrageous equation for opening the
Cisrym Ta.
I am so sorry for the scar I gave you.) But these recipes contain more than numbers, which was hard for me to understand. Initially, I laughed at their strangeness but now I know, only the
preposterous
should be set aside. The
unknown
is what I embraced.

There is no more fitting phylactery for the things I wanted to save—than my eyes.

With my eyes, I looked to the future. They apprehended what was important, sorted through the clutter, focused on that which I desired. They were the seeds of all my actions and filled with what mattered most to my heart. It is true that I carried what I loved best in my eyes.

I find it unaccountable that such alien horrors as the Yillo’tharnah should have so much insight as to my nature, to set the number at two and force me to wrestle with these emotions. Perhaps it amuses Them, that the Sslia should be faced with these introspections at the end, that I must go blindly into the future, on hope, my ambit divided and reduced. My eyes plucked out, my tongue silenced.