Black Bottle

Where are we going?

He couldn’t ask because the only word his guide seemed to know was come.

At the end of the barren court, an eight-foot wall blocked any possibility of progress. A ridge of cement topping the wall had been embedded with broken bottles and random shards of glass.

The Veydens drew up and Caliph wondered if they were lost. He turned to Baufent whose face was lacquered in wild color. A streetlamp beyond the wall threw its rays through the broken glass. Baufent’s face caught a reddish-purple triangle over one eye and a thin strip of green across her lips and chin.

She looked terrified.

Caliph listened to the bubbling sound of the streetlamp. He was just about to ask her opinion when one of the Veydens wrestled with a metal hatch set atop a short cement cylinder. The cylinder was twelve feet across but only four feet high and the Veyden knelt on it, fumbling with something.

With an objectionable grating sound he finally drew the hatch up. A mephitic burp rolled out of the city’s guts. Caliph peered in. Pestilential darkness sighed.

Why are we going down? thought Caliph. We’re supposed to be going to dinner …

“Come,” said the man.

“I don’t know about this.” Caliph directed his doubt at Baufent.

“I don’t know about it either.” She looked around, first at the serrated wall then back toward the stone doorway they had come through. “Do we really have a choice?”

“You always have a choice.”

The Veyden was getting impatient. He patted the top of the cement cylinder with the flat of his hand. “Come, come!” The other two had already gone inside.

Caliph thought of the Iycestokian ship, floating back at the edge of the city. It was the only place he knew that represented relative safety. But could he find his way back to it? What if he ran headlong into whatever had spooked his guides? Even if he did manage to reach the ship, carrying Taelin the entire way, he still didn’t know what to do from there.

And where would he—

“Come!” The man’s whisper resembled a shout.

Caliph glared at him. But the Veyden did not shrink. He beckoned, pulling with those great fingers, gesturing for Caliph to hand Taelin over.

Caliph looked at Baufent once more. She hesitated then nodded her assent.

“Okay,” said Caliph, after which he didn’t sigh or deliberate. He rolled Taelin off his aching shoulders and into the big man’s arms. Then he climbed atop the cement tube and looked down. The fumes smacked him in the face. He felt dizzy.

The man reached out and steadied him.

Of all possible realities, this had to be the most improbable. He found no humor in the bizarre fact that he was climbing into a foreign sewer. He gritted his teeth, clenched them until it felt like they might shatter. Then he helped Baufent up onto the access point and lowered her carefully onto the rungs.

“Thank you,” she said as she began feeling her way down into the dark. “I think.”

She was sturdy and powerful but he knew that she shouldn’t be doing this. None of them should be doing this.

*   *   *

THE walls of Bablemum’s sewer system sloughed like diseased flesh. Pale leprous hunks of masonry buckled and spluttered into residual pools. Everywhere, it seemed, vesical-pipes dropped into the vault. Hydriform.

But the inlets were quiet. Barely dribbling. They moaned with air currents, purposeless in the vacuum of the abandoned cityscape.

Squelchy walls led in every direction but Caliph stuck to one, following the Veydens sack of netting, which cradled three glass balls—analogous to the city’s lamppost globes. As with the streetlamps, these too were filled with an oily liquid that emitted a cadaverous luminosity.

They had been stored in separate niches at the bottom of the access point. The man had taken them out and slid each, clanking against the other, into the sack of netting. As he eased the last one in, some kind of proximal reaction had taken place and all three orbs began to bubble and glow.

Without the language barrier Caliph would have asked what they were and how they worked. Instead, he said nothing.

The sewer did not smell as bad anymore. The initial blast of fumes must have been lurking, trapped against the hatch. Down here, there was a breeze, cool and almost refreshing and Caliph realized that with such regular rain and no fresh waste being introduced, much of the sewage had already been flushed from Bablemum’s system.

“I don’t believe they’re taking us to dinner,” said Baufent.

“Me neither.”

The man had given Taelin to one of the other Veydens, leaving one hand for the sack of lights and the other for his spear. It was bizarre. This man in fine clothes, carrying a spear through the tunnel.

They passed beneath occasional grates that sluiced in streetlight and sound. Caliph heard trees shush- shushing. Then the narrow slits to the upper world disappeared and he felt himself sucked into another sagging archway.

Finally, after tramping some way, the man’s oily light burst out over an uncertain precipice. The man held the netting high, revealing a dam of sorts that dropped off on the left into churlish reeking darkness. The air here was stirred by a never-ending gray waterfall, which poured from higher up on the right, over a series of smaller flumes that stepped through a vast angled tunnel. Caliph smelled minerals here and thought of Bablemum’s infamous mines. Maybe this was part of them, carrying out the dregs and sediment from what had once been constant digging.

The man was crossing the dam, dragging the light with him. Caliph let Baufent go first, watching over her not only from the darkness that quickly converged behind them but from the possibility of a fall.

Their path was furnished by a questionable catwalk that straddled a narrow viaduct. The viaduct was in turn supported by a series of pillars through which jetted the great cataract from the mines. Unlike the textured metal of the Bulotecus, the floor panels of this catwalk were poorly designed. Though they were grilled and therefore porous, they were also smooth and extremely slippery. Caliph kept a ready hand in the event Baufent lost her footing.

Unintentionally, he tasted the mist before clamping his lips shut.

The man with the lights used his single word again in an effort to coax Baufent along.

“I’m coming, you oversized toad!” She said.

“Take your time,” said Caliph. “They’ll wait.”

“Of course they’ll wait! Do you think I’m a damned fool?” Her voice was angry but her arms shook a bit at the slender and overly rusted rail.

“Take my hand.”

“So you can drag me down too?”

“Take it.”

Baufent snapped her fingers around Caliph’s wrist. She looked at him meaningfully and said, “All right, hero. Get me out of here.”

Caliph pivoted around her and took the lead. He adjusted her grip, reciprocating her wrist-lock, then, slowly, he began guiding her toward the Veydens.

They reached the end with only one close call and stepped from the catwalk back onto solid stone.

“Thank you,” said Baufent.

“Wouldn’t have to thank me if I hadn’t dragged you fourteen hundred miles,” said Caliph. He turned his hands upside down and pushed at the cushion of air between him and the Veydens, ushering them impatiently to get on with this ridiculous and dangerous excursion.

They did, guiding him through a pointed archway into a nondescript and sloppy cellar that echoed with some dolorous mechanism laboring far above.

A series of low, flat steps offered access to a strangely domestic-looking but dingy hallway. The floor had