Black Bottle

Miriam snaps her wrist and pulls the drapery away. For Taelin, the puslet, her night at Newlym: all become paramnesias.

It is almost exactly a month later when Taelin Rae gets her audience with Sena Iilool.

Miriam listens to a symphysis in one of Parliament’s inner sanctums. The symphysis’ hideous amorphous bones have not been osteotomically extracted from any “thing.” They fit together in grotesque irregular ways: malleus, incus, hooded by a yellow tissue-thin shroud of membrane. The collective formation looks like a shattered mollusk, part chitinous ruin, part sun-stiffened mantle: a creature broken open by sea birds perhaps and left to bake in the sun.

The entire grotesquery quivers in the dim light, bones vibrating, membrane singing like scraped catgut. The symphysis speaks.

Or rather, it seems to speak, as its vibrations resonate with Miriam’s eardrum, conveying from across the miles the second-old memories recorded in the puslet’s spongiose cells.

Miriam eavesdrops on Taelin’s audience with Sena.

She is shocked when Sena mentions the smell of apples and then, to Taelin’s great confusion, lays out the itinerary for her trip:

“… Passing over Mirayhr, over Skellum, near midnight on the twelfth of Tes. You will be unable to stop me there and I will proceed to Sandren. Send whomever you want. The Stairs will kill them.”

Sena’s voice echoes in the ears of all the sisters in the sanctum. Their puslet has not gone unnoticed. She is speaking through Taelin, directly to the coven. And she is mocking them.

Miriam is afraid.

She is still afraid on the twelfth, when the three zeppelins pass directly over Parliament, headed for the south. She kneels on the roof, looking up, waiting for Giganalee to give the sign.

What is about to happen has not happened in many years. But Miriam tries not to think about it. She has given herself over to the power of the Eighth House.

Her eyes watch the old crone intently, fearing the signal.

You can cast what you can cut.

This rule is the origin of hemofurtum, of spell-slaves and the legends of vast colligations harvested at Twyrloch by Aglogoth11, countersunk three thousand years into the past. Attempts to exceed the power bottled in a human body.

But Miriam’s mind has wandered. Giganalee is raising her arms now.

Pulse thrumming, Miriam draws her kyru. She sets the crescent-shaped blade against her throat. It requires both hands, one in front, one in back: reaching around behind her head. Already she has cut herself— unintentionally—on the blade’s fabulous edge.

Giganalee’s arms fall.

It is time. Miriam almost waits to see if the others are brave enough to follow through before embarking on this plunge into madness. Instead, she pulls the blade’s handle through a complete three-hundred- sixty-degree orbit, slicing through the skin. As blood rolls down her back and chest and shoulders, Miriam speaks in the Unknown Tongue.

She feels her stomach loosen.

*   *   *

EACH qloin contained a cephal’matris and two ancillas. Sena saw them, some of them newly cursed. The kneeling bodies slumped over, one at a time, arms limp, kyrus clattering from senseless fingers. They did not fall instantly. Some even seemed to levitate for a moment, knees coming off the roof. The only parts of them that scraped against the slate were the toes of their boots. Torsos lifted as the guts in their midsections slid up and bottlenecked; jammed in their throats. Not until the heads finally pulled loose did the knees drop and the decapitated, disemboweled carcasses land like sandbags before rolling to the side.

The Eighth House released the flock of heads from the roof of Parliament like a flight of black balloons into the stinging sky. Space stared down, a mapach with a thousand eyes. There was no wind to speak of. Three times three—a knot of qloins—nine witches pulled free from Parliament’s roof: and flew.

Sena watched them come, dragging kidneys, stomachs, lungs and yards of intestine below them: slick and tangled. Strange dark jellyfish. Luminaries bled from livers and arteries, leaving trails in the blue-black sky: organs twinkling like fireflies.

The witches’ eyes glittered with carvings. Their heaving lungs steamed in the icy air.

This was not minor. This was not a halfhearted attempt. A knot of qloins ascended and Sena felt the hairs on her arms bristle with a facsimile of fear.

“Caliph,” she whispered. “It’s time to wake up.”

*   *   *

FAINT operatic sounds trailed through Taelin’s dreams, pessimal and loathsome. Dream-paint limned a soprano warbling through the upper reaches of terror while the repeated plunge of a knife deflated the sound; the residue was a ragged rhythm of gooey whispers, soft and sick-making.

Heavy boots grumbled in the hall beyond her door. Finally, a guttural yelp propelled her up, through her incubus, and into a forward lurch, eyes wide, hands clenched in her sheets. Her ears were ringing. Had there been another sound? Some kind of thud? She stared at her lap in the dark, listened acutely. Through near-total silence she heard ticking.

Where am I?

But the smell of wood polish and the faint vibration of the propellers reminded her. Her sheets were dewy.

She swung her legs over the side of the berth and dialed down the thermal crank. The ticking slowed. She reached for her bra, dangling on the back of a chair, pulled it off and wrapped it around her waist. Something interrupted the moonlight pouring through her room’s only porthole.

Frightened, she poised mid-fasten. The back of her throat felt tacky and dry. She wanted a glass of water but pulled up her holster, thumbed its straps over her shoulders and sidled toward the window instead. An infinite indigo and silver-specked canopy sloshed around the moons.

The soprano offered up another disquieting gurgle: crossing boundaries from the province of sleep. It was faint, high-pitched and filtered through the hum of the airship. Could it be night birds?

Taelin buttoned up her blouse and tucked her thick cotton pants into her boots before unlocking her door and stepping into the rich paneled hallway, which felt abnormally cold.

She passed a gaslight flickering in a henna sconce. Its red light quavered down the hall and landed on the body of a man. His shoulder and head propped open the door at the end of the passageway that led to one of the fore observation decks. A harsh, freezing wind whined in.

For a moment Taelin stood staring at the slumped figure. A large shadow from the sconce moved horribly over his back like a feeding specter. She recognized it as an illusion conjured by the drafty hallway, but the flapping darkness made the body doubly terrifying. Taelin took a step back then, berating herself, scooted forward and crouched down to see if she could rouse him. He wasn’t breathing.

With some difficulty, she rolled him onto his back. No visible injuries. She screamed for help then pumped his chest with her palms. The wind took the door and folded it back on its hinges. A blast of icy air tore through the hall. The light went out. For a second, she heard the gas continue to hiss, then the safety valve squeaked and Taelin was alone with the wind.

The man’s body seemed to be cooling.

She tried to pull him away from the door, gripping his ankles. He was two hundred pounds of nothing she could move. She screamed again for help.

“Lady Rae?”

Taelin turned around at the voice, instantly relieved. “Mother of Mizraim, thank gods—” But her vision was adjusting to the dark. When she saw the speaker, when she saw the nightmare form that filled the hallway, she lurched sideways over the man, eyes ringent. Her feet kicked at the floor. Taelin gagged and shrieked and pushed herself through the doorway, out onto the deck. Air currents poured over her as the ship barreled south.