Black Bottle

“Where are we?” he mumbled. He looked positively green as his eyes drifted over the stone palace that pawed the sky.

“We crossed lines,” she said. “We’re two thousand miles south of Bablemum.” Sena felt Caliph steady himself beside her on the escarpment. His legs wobbled but he got them working. He scowled at the barren, shadow-raked clefts before panning his eyes, once more across the remnants of the palace then down into the more unusual ruins of Ooil-Uauth.

This was the vista Arkhyn Hiel had once enjoyed from his terraced lawn. The topsy-turvy dirty white and pink annulated stacks of Ooil-Uauth thrust from the valley like the stilled ends of colossal earthworms. They were misaligned with both jungle and sky. What streets might have existed were shrouded by trees.

Caliph stared at the tall narrow domes, traced with day glow. He looked bewildered.

Beyond the blunt ugly crests, which seemed set in frozen upheaval, Naobi trembled above the ocean, flanked by two morning stars. Wind came straight up the face of the hill. It stirred every plant and filled the breeze with slapping sounds.

With it came Nathaniel. He roared out of the north.

Sena braced for impact.

“You see the ruins, Caliph? Not the ones down in the jungle.” She pointed with her whole arm. “The stone house, right there. Go inside. Find his skull. Smash it. I’ll hold him as long as—”

She couldn’t believe the force that struck her. It shook her. It pushed her. Her feet slid back, grinding against the stone. She was surprised because she had thought herself to be immovable. Her ambit shone as she pushed back, gleaming like a star.

Nathaniel’s power struck her so hard that she felt the planet shift. She lost several inches of ground. Then her feet caught. Her willpower anchored her to the spot but Nathaniel’s pressure against her moved the world. Adummim tilted on its axis, into a new direction.

He was moving her, whether she liked it or not.

*   *   *

CALIPH did as he was told not because he felt overly confused or childish but because he believed, for the first time, that she was right.

Nothing had made sense since reality had failed him in the skies over Sandren. That was how he felt. Reality had failed him and it was a personal betrayal.

He was doing this now, which was not founded in reality. Reality had abandoned him and so he abandoned reality. He was doing what Sena said because he trusted her, despite everything.

He believed in her not because she had earned it but because he had always thought himself to be a better- than-average judge of character. That was why he had stuck it out all the months she had been gone. And now, since there were no facts anymore, or courtrooms or juries, he tossed aside the judgments that logic had forced him to levy against her. He went back to what he felt, which was trust in a raw half-buried sparkle of goodness that had managed to survive the brutality of her Shradnae childhood.

Caliph trusted—perhaps too much. He climbed the escarpment, scrambling for the ruined stone house. Behind him, the spectral presence of his uncle filled the sky. He could feel the size and shape of Nathaniel’s power, like something sensed in dream. The gravity of this moment was not delivered by things seen or heard. Caliph heard nothing but the shrill cry of jungle crickets. He saw nothing but the ruined house. But Nathaniel’s existence was something he could sense.

Caliph entered the house through one of many ruined windows. He skidded on tumbled blocks, coated with living green scum. Amid the ubiquitous growth everything looked the same.

He could see what had once been a doorway was now choked with a swollen tumor of roots.

Amid the creepers and moss and dismal predawn light, shapes were hard to separate. The room he had entered was open to the sky.

Caliph felt the ground shudder under him and glanced back through the ruined walls to where Sena stood quietly, faced away from him. He could see nothing beyond her but black trees tossing in the wind. Yet he sensed Nathaniel. And he sensed the wall separating him from his uncle. That wall was Sena. And she was beginning to break. Nathaniel’s might began leaking through the chinks in her defense.

What are you waiting for? Sena’s voice sounded in his head. This is why I brought you here. To be free of him.

Caliph looked across the room, fifteen feet at most, and suddenly he saw it. Dark brown and spongy. Glittering with intricate wires. Where the umber bone was not exposed, a skullcap of green carpeted it. The thing leaned into a pile of corruption that must have been Arkhyn Hiel’s forearms—as if his body had finally given out while resting his head on the desk. As Caliph approached it, he saw a sprinkle of bright pink spore caps quavering in a tiny cluster on the brow.

In that moment that Caliph viewed the skull of this stranger, all the books Sena had given him, all the passages she had marked, broke free from their association with her. They stopped representing her designs, her cryptic research, her plunge into something he could never understand. And instead, suddenly, whether by her design or not, they belonged to him. They were for him. Suddenly what had happened to him as a child had a context. He understood it in a broader theater. It was not his fault. It had never been his fault.

“I don’t want revenge,” said Caliph.

It isn’t revenge, Sena thought at him. It’s your moment to be free. Take it.

Caliph looked at the thing on the desk. Its face was a travesty.

Both sockets had been filled with heavy black jewels and on the upper row of teeth, a third gem replaced one of the incisors. The whole head was wrapped in a thin filigree of platinum wires, delicate as thread. Despite much of them being buried in moss, they reminded Caliph instantly of the lines on Sena’s skin.

Caliph heard Sena cry out with a mixture of surprise and pain.

He didn’t know whether crushing this head would somehow fix everything or whether this was about his own personal salvation but he picked up the skull.

The platinum wires crumpled. Some of the bone had been replaced by a soft, green film. His fingers crushed through this slimy membrane to a slippery jagged interior that swarmed with fat, segmented life. Tiny creatures poured out of every available orifice.

Caliph swore and dropped it.

It disintegrated on the floor into a shattered mess of black and green and wet-gleaming metal.

And then there was only cricket song again.

The sound in the wind lost cohesion and dissolved into something natural: a breeze blowing in from the sea.

He bent down and plucked one of the gems from where it sparkled on the floor. When he did, he felt an immediate chill, then Sena was standing beside him, looking frightened. She was holding out her hand.

*   *   *

TAELIN had trouble hearing. She could still make out amphibian chirps and barks wrapping around the restaurant’s brick-framed windows but she had also noticed that one of her ears was bleeding.

A few moments ago, she had heard Baufent say, “They’re going to find us.” But now the doctor wasn’t talking anymore. In fact she wasn’t even sitting across from her at the table. Baufent had disappeared.

It didn’t matter. Past and present didn’t matter, praise the Omnispecer. All that mattered was the future, which Taelin could see. The future was bright and golden.

Taelin did not fantasize about changing things. The past was the past.

Except maybe for Corwin.

She had that one clear memory of him, before he became High King of the Duchy of Stonehold and got her pregnant. A clear picture of his smiling face as the two of them sat on the cement steps of her grandmother’s house. He held a stick in one hand, that he had been using to play with those tiny red bugs. So simple back then. She couldn’t remember how the house had caught on fire. She supposed that was the one thing she would change. Because it wasn’t fair that she had sent him inside to rescue her box of colors—and the necklace.

She bent the demonifuge back and forth between her fingers, working the soft cool metal with a vengeance.