Black Bottle

Poor, beautiful Corwin with his lovely brown skin and cobra eyes. She remembered him nearly making it out of the house as the door frame collapsed on top of him in a salvo of fire and heavy timber.

It had crushed him and simultaneously hurled him down the steps and into the backyard. Then her father had drunk the tincture and disappeared. She had picked the necklace up and noticed the tiny red bugs streaming down the foundation, hurrying from the flames for the safety of the grass.

If she could change anything, that would be it. She would bring her dead king back to life.

“Corwin … Corwin…”

Taelin stared into the demonifuge. Its color was like the inside of a fire barrel in the cold streets of Isca. Palmer stood beside her, looking in.

“Should I do it?” she asked.

Palmer passed her a beggary blunt and shrugged. “You gotta do the right thing,” he said.

“I know. I don’t really think she needs my help. But that’s the brilliant part of being a god I suppose: you give over the handling of things to other people … almost like a gift.”

Palmer looked at her like a devotee with those pure blue eyes.

Then Taelin heard the necklace snap.

The orange-yellow bliss in the fire barrel expanded dramatically.

Taelin stared into her hands at the broken setting. The cold golden light that was not a light swelled between her hands. Like the mouth of a bag opening, she thought. So lovely.

Albescent yellow sea foam glowing at dawn. Lovely cold mountains like radiant thunderheads ballooned through the stretching aperture. A bright batter. A birthing. It moved like lava underwater but did not dim, or crust over, or solidify. It swelled like a storm wall inside the restaurant. Mustard white. A juggernaut coming.

Taelin gave a little cry as her goddess enveloped her.

The magnificent body slobbered through the fully effaced hole. It dragged whimsical, ghastly improbabilities behind it. A necklace of alien placentas.

*   *   *

UNDER churning volcanic blackness, red meteorites plunk the ground. There are screaming people. Some crumple when they are struck. Others catch fire. Taelin can see a man with soft green eyes standing in front of her as the rain comes down. His face brims with regret. His hand reaches out to her …

*   *   *

SENA saw the necklace break.

She watched Nathaniel’s skull, his phylactery, shatter—not at her hands, but at Caliph’s. That had been important to her. That was why he was here. She wanted the victory over his uncle to belong to him. And it did. That part of the ordeal was over. The hurricane of souls devolved into the unfocused milling of the damned. All the dead of Isca floated aimlessly, confused ghosts in the jungles of the south.

There would come a time, as the twisted eons burnt down, that little by little, Taelin’s soul might escape— one particle at a time—over the course of millennia. One day she might reorganize somewhere in the deep cosmic black—along with Nathaniel.

The stars were full of ghosts.

But that time would not come soon.

As the necklace opened Sena heard a crackle in the sky. This was the place Nathaniel had found, at Ooil- Uauth, which had taken lifetimes to solve, to pinpoint the spot where the second door would open. Sena looked up at the two stars that still flanked the moon. So bright. Unconnected with this world’s constellations. This moment was Sena’s chance, but Nathaniel’s assault had interfered with her strict schedule. Naen was free. Naen was ravenous. And Naen was coming.

Huge ruffled pseudopodia uncurled, delicate and beguiling. Naen took no special notice of the souls she absorbed. Taelin had been drawn into the ever-swelling lung-like recesses of her extra-dimensional form. Buildings melted. Streets cratered. In Bablemum, paid with the Sisterhood’s blood to leave the jungles empty, to not be present in the ruins of Ooil-Uauth when the second door opened, the Lua’groc burned as the End of the World was finally born.

They had been unable to resist the blood of their ancient enemies and, as their god came at last, they died in joy to feed her.

Sena saw Naen fill Bablemum, balloon and then abruptly turn, lured by the huge number of souls Nathaniel had brought from the north. Millions of them. They were like a great bait ball in the sky.

But more than them, it was her: the Sslia, standing on the brink of escape. Naen moved toward her automatically, intent on her destruction.

Sena was afraid.

Her eyes, which saw everywhere, witnessed the Chamber under Sandren where the golden holes had stretched and broken. They were dark now. The wet stone made of dreams had fallen away, great pieces dropping into Yoloch’s relentless surf.

Beneath her feet, Sena could feel the fringes of the continent collapsing, the world eaten at a harrowing rate, racing across the steppes, the desert, the jungle, coming toward her. And it made her sad. She felt Caliph’s sorrow, vicariously.

Because the number was only two.

CHAPTER

53

Caliph sees Sena drink from a small steel flask. He knows it is tincture by the smell. Then he sees her toss the flask aside, touch her stomach with one hand as she reaches for him with her other. She looks worried.

Her face is lit by the gray dawn and gathered into tense angles.

Caliph notices how time feels differently now. As if everything has already happened. Maybe it is part of the dream, part of the tincture. He can still feel the poison coursing through him as Sena pulls him along, down the escarpment. Wind is blowing.

“Come on Caliph—”

He cannot feel his feet against the ground. The boulders, the treacherous clefts and snarls of vegetation might as well be paved causeways. Everything is running smoothly now, just the way he likes it.

They enter a desolate quadrangle. The trees cradle the poisonous colors of a new set of ruins.

“It’s a necropolis,” says Sena.

He hears the leaves moan.

These new ruins, the necropolis of Ooil-Uauth, are so striking he knows he must still be dreaming. No real place could look like this. Far above his head, strange jungle foliage rumbles with air currents. Trees like kelp slosh against a dead blue sky.

He makes his way among huge cucullate structures, like beehives, mathematical and sharp, some tumbled down and broken, all organic and contradictorily vague.

For a moment he loses track of Sena and finds himself alone.

Only in dreams can you be so alone, he thinks.

Only in dreams can the entire universe be emptied of your species and leave you to haunt the cosmos, a solitary morsel of meat.

He looks up into heavens the color of paint mixed with ash.

The sky hates him.

He stumbles into the middle of the square, feeling catarrhine, barely capable of balancing without all four feet on the ground. He swaggers, hardly standing. For a moment the heat is incredible, then that whimsical-strong ocean breeze tongues the trees. Stray currents swirl into the square and goose bumps rake his skin.