Black Bottle

It was not so different from being insane. Indeed, she still wondered if that wasn’t a more elegant solution. It was impossible to relate to anyone anymore. In the sunlight that slipped around her season-to-season, melting away her days, the busy milling throngs had become high-speed patterns. People were predictable static. Background noise. Faint chemical-electrical residues in air. She had little patience for them: self-absorbed and oblivious under the racing cycles of the sky.

Only the Pplarians understood.

In her hand she held a crumpled letter from Yul, her “humble servant.” It contained numbers important only to her. A key to the chambers. Chambers inside of chambers. The numbers were soaked in blood. She had read the letter without looking at it. She would always be reading it.

Yul was Pplarian. He did not worship her. But like the rest of the Pplarian nation, he understood the gravity of her situation. Once, the Pplarians had come here, out of the dripping blackness. They had distilled on the mountains, seventeen thousand years ago. Because of their origins, they recognized the markings on her skin, and took pity on her. They had seen this before.

*   *   *

SENA scooped herself a cup of melting ice cream and looked around the room.

The presence that had been here with Caliph had burnt numerical anomalies into the air, like the trace of cigarettes hours after the smoker had left. It troubled her.

She watched over Caliph’s sleep with involuntary math, hexing and double-hexing the doors and windows to the parlor without blood, making sure they were secure at the same time she concentrated on finding the intruder. Her brain no longer focused on only one thing at a time. She stepped across the hall, into the ballroom. Her eyes, cut with tiny sigils, sorted through the glitter of New Market beyond a terrace of three walls.

Out in the darkness, she discerned people talking, journalists finishing up articles for tomorrow’s editions, digging through her affairs with spade-like tongues. She collected all kinds of information, most of which she already knew.

As she searched for the specter she exhaled softly on the windowpane and drew a flower-like shape in the glass, something habitual and only tangentially related to her current concerns. She looked through the shape. Out amid the pale sizzle of Isca’s blackened streets she found it.

It had departed from the parlor in haste, low and ebeneous. He—it—knew she was furious that it had dared to speak to Caliph. Now it thought to hide, hanging away, between the upright fingers of buildings, levisomnous and horrid.

Why was it here, bothering Caliph? A charade of affection? Trying to fool her into believing that it could care for anything outside itself? Or did it know?

She whispered to it—the thing—miles away, warning it not to come again. She threatened it softly, carefully, telling it that she could change her mind. She reminded it that she was not obligated to do its bidding.

The thing dislodged itself from the district of Maruchine. Unafraid, it sneered and exited the city, billowing out through West Gate. It skirred beneath winter trees that clutched over Howl Lane. In an instant it had vanished, not into, but through the house on Isca Hill.

“Soon,” Sena whispered. The word fogged her drawing. “Soon—soon.” Then she left the ballroom and wandered through the hallways until dawn.

CHAPTER

7

In less than a week, Taelin resigned herself to the fact that snow and ice made new construction an absurd proposition. Men in the business simply laughed at her when she suggested breaking ground in Phisku—or the month of Tes as they called it in the north. Laying foundations was simply not plausible in the Duchy of Stonehold at this time of year. Taelin fretted a whole day before making up her mind. On Day of Whispers she packed it in and bought St. Remora instead.

What she got in place of a church built to her specifications was a dark ruined hulk in Lampfire Hills and a hundred thousand beks in savings.

As part of the break with her father, she had transferred her entire portion of the family’s wealth to Isca’s Crullington Bank. She knew many people would see it as a half-witted purchase: Saint Remora’s time-blackened facade of leaping creatures had melted from centuries of sour rain. It had been boarded up where Knife Street met Mark and squatters and worm gangs had taken up residence in it despite legends that pervaded the area.

Taelin discovered most of the bad history after she had signed the title, never hearing from the bank about the murders or the whore’s guild that had installed the crimson glass. Prostitution candles still littered the building. Taelin didn’t even know what they were until one of the squatters explained fast burners.

There had been drugs and violence and profiteering here, not to mention the questionable myth of the bortghast. Some urban specter the homeless siffilated about.

To the positive, St. Remora lay only ten minutes’ walk from her aunt and uncle’s house. And she had successfully filed for the city to patch the building’s circulatory system on the basis that the church qualified as an historical landmark. Happy to trade the ancient foreclosure for a public record with his name stamped on the building’s promising new future, Mayor Kneads quickly capitulated, pulling down the last board and handing her the key (a moment captured by litho which subsequently made front page). Only when they flipped the power back on did she notice that the cathedral’s facade had not flared with oily orange and brown-green light.

Rather it had glowed dimly all along.

“Yeah,” the man from the city had said with something between boredom and condescension. “We don’t really know where those draw juice from. There’s a file on ’em down at public. You can check it out for yourself if you want.”

The story behind the garish colors was that two decades ago, some eccentric investor had installed the dials asymmetrically across the building’s front before letting the loan lapse. He had replaced the rose window with a cluster of glowing clocks that didn’t seem to have much to do with telling time. The metholinate boilers in the basement did siphon some of their power into turbines that charged chemiostatic anomalies at the front of the building. Every time the boiler fired, the eleven large hermetic dials flickered with a slight surge of luminosity. But boilers or not … the dials never dimmed completely.

Taelin hated them. Come spring, if she could spare the money, she would have them torn out.

On the second of Tes, she bought detergent and wire brushes and put the squatters to work. Those who wanted could stay, with the provision that they earned their keep and followed her rules. Grinning dutifully, several bedraggled souls helped her scrape candle wax from the floor and scrub where campfires had blackened the frescoed ceiling.

In the afternoon, Taelin caught Palmer smoking beggary seeds on the postern steps.

When she scolded him, he handed them over with nothing more than a tilt of the head and a shrug of the shoulders. She was surprised by his acquiescence but pleased as she slipped them into her pocket and guided him back inside.

The two of them spent the next couple days bringing some of the original polish back to the front doors. None of the imagery related to Nenuln, but Taelin didn’t care. The carvings and paint offered bright alternatives to worm gang graffiti and soot. All she needed was a warm, relatively clean place to shelter her flock.

The flock consisted of nine people, three of which had been squatters. Taelin fed them twice a day so that, with the boilers restored and the windows replaced, the comfort of their former haunt far surpassed what it had previously been.

On the sixth, Taelin woke up to the smell of Palmer’s body, right next to hers. He smelled of beggary smoke and was difficult to rouse. Her room didn’t have a lock, a detail she knew she would have to remedy later that day.

When she finally got Palmer awake, he smiled sheepishly. She frowned and told him kindly but clearly that this was her space and that he couldn’t just plop down and sleep wherever he wanted. He looked confused with the sunlight blasting his bright blue eyes, pale skin and orange hair in a mad snarl on top of his head. A scrawny Naneman, wasted by the streets, but with a decentness and a sincerity still present in his eyes. He didn’t argue,