Black Bottle

nonplussed. A perfect ring formed the pendant portion. On the back side, a disc of gold turned beneath her fingers, riding a bearing-lined groove. The disc was engraved with a deep glyph:

Taelin tugged it from her cleavage. The front of it blazed with an exquisite golden mote. As she rubbed it, it moved like a stirring chrysalis, almost too bright to look at, which was curious since it produced no visible light, failing even to illuminate her fingers. No one had been able to tell her what it was. Not even her father. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it bore Nenuln’s mark; that it was beautiful and that it calmed her.

Nenuln’s sacred light could free this land; bleach the journalists’ profane ink from north-south periodicals. Taelin tried to focus on this bright thought as she passed deep ditches that crepitated in the wind, stirring fitfully with the zombies of summer bog hemp.

Nenuln would keep her safe.

Rain sprinkled her shoulders and cheeks. As she trudged, she thought about her aunt and uncle. Years since the last family reunion, all she knew about them was that they had little love for the Stonehavian government. Tonight they were leaving the light on for her.

Their letter had mentioned that seeking an audience tomorrow on the Funeral of the Leaves—a fitting holiday for such a dank, dripping land—would be her best chance at a face-to-face with Sena Iilool. Neither of them had expressed much optimism in her chances, but Taelin felt differently. Sena would not be able to ignore her. Taelin held political status in the south. Sooner or later, the government of Stonehold would have to acknowledge her.

The caramel mud of the road reared up before the vast dark walls of the city, crowned with ancient cobbles now and patched with snow and modern cement. The pooling ditches gave way to gushing culverts. Stone and metal supplanted dusk and fog-draped fields. Streetlamps buzzed. Gargoyles threatened. Dogs clucked in the shadows.

She entered the tenebrous bulk of West Gate with its acres of bricks arching overhead. Her fingers were cold. Her hands and arms throbbed from the burden of her suitcase. She smelled greasy food and heard laughter, saw that there were pubs and restaurants inside the gate. Her stomach growled but she would wait until she reached her destination. It took her only moments to secure a cabbie. The vehicle’s windows glittered with purple lights amid the chaos of the gate.

She got in.

The cabbie took her into the city, along a street labeled Sedge Way into the borough of Three Cats. Even after she smeared it with her sleeve, the window fogged quickly thanks to a bulky black heater that cramped her feet. She couldn’t see out. Inside the lantern-shaped cab, it was warm at least, but the leather seats were sticky and exuded a cocktail of sour odors.

Her driver remained silent.

She glanced at the address on a slip of paper.

She had told him to drop her at Heath Street.

“I’m starting a church here,” she said.

For a moment, he glared over his shoulder. Then his face returned to the windshield, lit wildly by a glowing purple cat that swung from his mirror.

“If you’re wondering why you go to the same job, the same bar or tavern every day. If you feel like you want to talk about … anything. Well, we don’t have a chapel yet. But we will soon. In the meantime, you can reach me by air.”

She pushed a card over his shoulder. He took it and glanced at it.

CHURCH OF NENULN

LADY TAELIN RAE

Taelin looked proudly at the small gem, affixed in the center of the card with a dollop of rubber cement.

She saw him raise his eyebrows in the rearview, probably thinking of the huge cost and risk of handing cruestones out to strangers.

“Ticky,” he said. Then he tossed the card on the dashboard amid sandwich wrappers and mini Pink Nymph Whisky bottles—all of them empty.

Taelin didn’t sulk. He wasn’t ready for her message. That was all. After several more minutes of silence and bouncing on the ice-crusted roads, they arrived.

She handed him the fare and watched politely as he counted the coins and logged the trip on a clipboard. When he jumped out, freezing fresh air rushed into the cab. He dragged her suitcase from the trunk and set it in the snow.

Taelin climbed out into the foreign cityscape and maintained her smile until he and his bad-smelling contraption had coughed into the night. She opened her pocket watch. The skeleton gears flickered with ghostly, pastel lights.

Nearly midnight. And still a mile from her destination. But her aunt and uncle had warned against taking the cab all the way to their address. “The High King is watching us. Make sure you come on foot…”

There were other instructions as well. It felt vaguely criminal, but Taelin understood precautions had to be taken. This was a dispiriting town with a violent government—unlike Pandragor.

She followed the leprous masonry of Heath Street south, out of Os Sacrum’s foggy desertion and toward the upscale twinkle of Lampfire Hills. At the corner of Knife Street she thought she saw something gaunt and exaggerated standing under a streetlamp but when she looked at it directly, there was nothing there. An old man perhaps. That had been her impression. Stooped and dark.

She stood for a moment with her heart pounding. She pulled her goggles down to double-check. Nothing stirred across the street. She imagined spies and worse but after half a minute, she adjusted her grip on the suitcase and trudged on.

The streets of Heath and Mark met in a sullen quadrangle where Taelin found the beginning of a lane that ascended a hill lined with barren trees. She climbed to a point that gave her a broad view of the sea and the alleys between what looked like thin brown tenements brooding beyond an empty field to the south. Across the field, small golden windows flared in some of the floors but mostly they were dark. A shout caused the air to quaver spontaneously, as if someone had dropped a street sign off a distant roof.

“Keep me and protect me,” she whispered and made Nenuln’s sign in the air.

Isca scintillated; some of the humidity was turning to snow. Even the slush above the sewer grates was beginning to crunch underfoot when abruptly, glowing in the icy haze, Taelin met the High King’s witch in the gloom.

Sena Iilool’s eyes burnt up at her from a billboard that topped a clutch of buildings below the hill. So blue. They were wicked, sultry eyes, lined with black. Golden curls splashed together with white downy fur. A Niloran cocktail. Liqueur splashing into cream. The mix cascaded over her naked shoulders. JESUEXE FURRIER! 1319 S. OCTUL BOX. The letters wavered in reflective gold.

Magazines as far south as Iycestoke and Waythloo had printed articles about this carpetbagging beauty. Her history had thickened like something delicious that periodicals then whipped with sweetened words and ambiguity into a theosophic meringue that sold faster than it could be printed. All stories shouted the same cock-and-bull fabrication: there is a demigod in Stonehold!

No one really believed it. But when lithos snapped by dressmakers hit the papers, black-and-whites revealed the woman was a peri: shivering demonian eyes and an ecdysiast’s smile. Iycestoke the political entity, with its gruesome history of witch executions, officially snubbed her but the populace roared for more. Especially the gentlemen’s periodicals. Pandragor was equally guilty. The whole of the south couldn’t get enough of Sena Iilool.

Taelin had bought papers and magazines. She had heard the street preachers shouting, decrying the sins of Stonehold, indistinguishable at first from political propaganda.

They claimed that High King Caliph Howl’s enemies had been crushed at the end of his civil war by the most outlandish phenomenon ever reported, some kind of holomorphic weather system. The event had been so widespread and so devastating that it had obliterated entire towns. Caliph Howl himself had wound up a casualty, which should have allowed Emperor Junnu and the rest of Pandragor to finally exhale.

Except for one thing.