Black Bottle

ships.

“They’ve stuck her,” said Sena.

“Lady Rae’s on that ship!” Caliph could see the web of black threads trailing behind, converging toward an obscure origin. “The captain’ll have to kill the engines or he’ll rip her apart.”

Caliph wanted to ask why this was happening, who “they” were and a host of other questions but a horn sounded across the sky. An alarm from the Bulotecus. He left Sena at the railing and bolted for the bridge, running to inform the captain.

Matters, however, seemed to be already in hand and Caliph felt the deck tilt as the rudders cranked. They were turning east.

Other men had begun to hustle around the deck. Orders were shouted. Weapons were dispensed from lockers. Caliph didn’t have to direct them. He went back to his stateroom and rummaged in the closet. Servants had packed his bags. There. He found it behind the second duffle, his chemiostatic sword.

He strapped it on and marched back out to the deck.

But now the Odalisque was slowing. Some hesitation in the chain of command? Caliph could already guess that an argument had erupted on the bridge. One side would be arguing to help the other ships. The other side would be demanding an immediate retreat: concerned only with ferrying the High King to safety. I’m a liability, he thought. “Mother of Mizraim…”

He took off down the deck.

“Your majesty—”

Caliph ran by. He skipped steps and burst from the landing into the tiny bridge. The captain was an implausibly thin man with features at once gentle and fierce. He looked at Caliph as he entered the room. The copilot seemed to be struggling with the ship’s controls.

“Why are we slowing down?” shouted Caliph. “We have to reach the Bulotecus!”

The captain, determined but powerless, turned back to his controls. His voice was thin. “I don’t know.”

Caliph’s gut sank. He whirled, exited the bridge and leapt back down the stairs, but it was too late. Even as he envisioned the holomorphic threads of darkness entangling the Odalisque from below, the attack had already begun.

Something appalling floated up over the starboard side. It was black against the deck lights, bobbing and strange. Caliph could not decipher its shape. He heard his men scream.

Caliph gripped the pommel of his sword and began unscrewing the safety ring that guarded the chemiostatic switch. A moment later the surrounding metal registered with him: stairs, deck, railings. He didn’t know how a beryllium steered bolt would behave under such conditions. Thinking better, he left the sword uncharged, retightened the ring and drew it from its scabbard.

But now the deck was quiet. There were shouts, possibly from starboard or aft. He couldn’t tell. Three bodies littered a blazing white circle flung from overhead magnesium lamps.

Caliph felt terrorized by the impossible alacrity of their deaths.

He looked aft into the murk beyond the cone of light. Where was Sena? How could three men die in an instant without a sound?

Maybe they weren’t dead. He scanned for the floating shape and approached the bodies half-stooped, as if an additional six inches of clearance might offer some protection. The air, the wind, the sounds of the ship had become places of hiding, places that could disgorge improbable death.

Caliph glanced up repeatedly as he checked his men, willfully paranoid of sudden attack. After three hurried inspections he found no wounds and no pulses.

He listened.

The aft observation deck hung fifty feet behind the fore decks, sequestered from the rest of the ship. It projected behind the chemical cells: eight hundred square feet of elegance jutting into space. It was from this rear deck that Caliph thought he heard voices above the chug of the propellers.

He opened the deck’s aft door and slipped down the hallway, past his stateroom, past the parlors and out onto the duralumin rear patio that basked in the glow of the batteries.

Sena stood, cropped red jacket snapping in the wind, holding the book he loathed in one of her hands. She faced the back of the ship.

A body lay like a hump of laundry just a few feet in front of her and to her right four men clutched their weapons, symbols of paralysis. What was wrong with them? They represented his elite staff of bodyguards. They should be moving. Fighting. Doing something—

Caliph could see past their pale faces to where, floating in green effulgence, three ghastly impossibilities threatened. Their exposed lungs swelled, withered and swelled again; their hearts twitched rhythmically.

Caliph could not think. A deep, canonical terror gripped him. One of the heads spoke in a cooing language. He imagined that Sena answered.

All he knew for certain was that her red jacket was snapping. He watched it, felt it crack with petulant regularity. Snap! Snap! A red, protective chant. Its texture, brightness and continual sound cordoned him from the shadowy things floating not quite twenty feet away. On this side of Sena, there were glowing lamps, a doorway and the pounding of his heart. But beyond Sena’s snapping coat, on the other side of her confident stance, there was madness.

Caliph realized he was kneeling on the deck, looking at his sword, which had fallen from his fingers. How had he dropped it? When he looked up, he could barely see his men, standing exactly as they had been before.

Caliph stared at Sena’s flapping jacket. He willed himself to reach for his weapon. Do something! An internal scream.

He tried to speak, to say Sena’s name, but couldn’t.

She didn’t move. He wondered if something was wrong with her in the exact way he might have wondered whether the concrete wall separating him from an inferno was sustaining damage. She was his shelter.

Mizraim, Emolus, Fuck! He tried again to grab his weapon, to get up and power past Sena.

No.

He was still kneeling on the cold metal behind her. He could not move.

Her jacket flapped again and then the sound of something heavy clanged on the metal floor, unbelievably loud, bouncing once before the dark mass of flickering entrails.

He adjusted his focus enough to look, but found he couldn’t move his head. Sena’s jacket was a red blur while the deck resolved into clear patterns of grating. He could see the book she had tossed down in front of them. Was she giving it to them? Some kind of morbid joke bubbled up in his mind; that the heads had no hands nearly made him giggle. And he was giggling, deep inside his chest, nowhere near the surface. It felt like a worm struggling just under his heart, threshing violently. It was the only part of his body that he could feel anymore. Everything else had turned to stone and fear.

He heard Sena’s voice, husky and commanding. “Tekioo otou,” she said.

It had to be a ploy. Sena would never part with that book. Never.

One of the heads jerked, a tethered balloon plucked by the breeze. Its organs flopped against the rough deck. Caliph saw blood ooze over metal. Then the dark, obscured face was whispering, crooning, speaking in the Unknown Tongue.

And the book began to float.

9Willin Droul is a cant term used only by the Shradnae Sisterhood for the Cabal of Wights. The Cabal of Wights is a legendary underworld organization consisting of human, partly-human and purportedly nonhuman operatives whose goals are a matter of conjecture.

10A hit squad of three Shradnae Sisters, consisting of one cephal’matris and two ancillas.

11The Shokyule witch queen, born 11,984 O.T.R., vanished 12,874 O.T.R.

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