Black Bottle

The Chamber contained the number she was looking for, the sum of salvation, the hard-to-prove variable Nathaniel had put into his notes. She didn’t doubt that Nathaniel already knew this. His calculations were the ones she had lifted from the margins of the Cisrym Ta. He had never actually entered the Chamber but his sums were exceptionally tight. You’re wasting your time, he thought at her.

Sena ignored him.

Nathaniel’s shade billowed and careened like ash; coughing spiral paths around Sandren’s smokeless chimneys before settling down behind her where she stood momentarily on a flat-top roof. The shade ran its spectral-fingers through her hair and whispered ugly metaphors.

Each time it asked, a different way, if she could ever love it, she tried to fathom whether the entreaty was genuine—a crude and offensive parody of crooning—or whether it simply took pleasure in reminding her of that horrible span when it had gotten inside.

What is your colligation for? asked Nathaniel.

She refused to answer. The voice persisted, scratchy and faint, like an occult recording played back on phonautograph.

What is it for? Tell me.

“Stop it.” Sena applied a measure of tease to her scold, just enough—because she had to be careful. At Nathaniel’s whim, St. Remora could open. Taelin’s vision of the great shadow bursting out of the chancel could come true. Sena was unready for that. “Tell me about St. Remora,” she said, “and I’ll tell you about my colligation.”

Nathaniel momentarily abdicated. He did not like the idea of their two great batteries poised against each other, hers of blood, his of souls.

Sena let it be. She took up position in a bell tower and waited for the qloin.

Sena had seen Duana and her girls walk lines from Mirayhr to arrive near her deserted cottage in the Highlands of Tue. They had killed a behemoth gol quietly ravaging empress trees in the hills. Its carcass had thundered among the blooms and all its blood—two hundred seventy gallons—had been whispered away, holojoules pulled up into the powerful equation that had dartled the three women to Sandren. They had crossed lines to reach her in the mountains.

Sena was impressed.

But she was also waiting for them. She watched as they passed over an avenue with impossible, holomorphic leaps, launching themselves from the rooftops to the north onto the edifices south of Falter Way.

They’re coming, said Nathaniel. As if she had backed into the cobweb of some great barn spider, he clung and brooded on her back.

Sena had to steel herself against his touch as she watched the qloin running along the rooftops.

Duana was the qloin’s cephal’matris. Sena recognized all three women. Even the ancillas were in the Seventh House. Sena felt their carven eyes pluck her from the skyline and so stepped off the bell tower to fall feet-first, wind ruffling over her cheeks. She landed hard on a copper dome thirty feet below. The balls of her feet dented the metal and pitched the weather vane in a new direction. The resulting bang rolled over the surrounding streets and caused a mob of ghouls in a nearby alley to bawl up at her before continuing their pilgrimage toward the bright hospital lights on the palace grounds.

Have you calculated a way into the Chamber? Nathaniel’s glimless eyes clouded the air beside her. Sena looked away. She dropped from a crocket into a street opposite the ghouls and started to run. Her acrobatics felt warm and familiar. A regression. A resonance with mortality.

Have you calculated a way in?

“Yes,” she said. “The same as for opening the Cisrym Ta.”

Mmm. The shade darkened visibly. All Their locks are hungry.

With Nathaniel’s shade dogging her, Sena let her fluid pointers lead the way. Her diaglyphs told her when and where to move, when and where to wait. She saw the world through a lens of her own design, funneled through purposely traceable channels. The flexing, glimmering demarcations etched in her corneas allowed her efforts to look convincing. She did not want to lose the qloin.

Duana followed along a rooftop with one ancilla. The other girl had come down into the streets alongside Sena and was sprinting through an adjacent alley snaked with trash.

Sena felt a tickle of fear. Her instinct was to lose them. Instead, she played by their rules, using only her diaglyphs. Their three sets to her one meant escape would not be possible and only her familiarity with Sandren’s streets kept her ahead of them.

At Litten Street they tried to draw the noose. Sena ran flat out in order to slip through. A near miss. She damped her speed and pretended to gasp for air.

They had no way of knowing that she wasn’t breathing.

Nathaniel maintained his pursuit, which worried Sena. Would he follow her all the way down?

The shade simpered in her head.

He had to be bluffing. He couldn’t follow her. He wouldn’t dare.

Why are you doing this? Nathaniel crooned. I did the math. I told you I can write you in.

Sena tore through knots of Sandrenese dahlias that had settled opportunistic tendrils over casualties of the plague. She leapt bodies, rounded a wheelbarrow and focused on the Great Steps up ahead whose gates lay open —ripped off their hinges: evidence of the horrors that now stalked the City in the Mountain.

Six-foot terraces supported the southern summits of the Ghalla Peaks. It was as if the tops of the mountains had been sawn off and set on a great dais. These steps led up and were difficult to mount. Sena flew over them. She did not dare to relax her pace. The qloin was tight on her back.

As she vaulted the final step, the huge dark archways of Sandren’s infamous Halls rose into view. She could hear the wind already and the sound of her running feet being hurled back at her.

This is unwise, said Nathaniel.

Sena plowed through the nearest archway, forsaking clean night air. She ran headlong into the phlegmy chill of the mountain. Behind her, Sena’s unusual sensory abilities allowed her to keep track of the qloin. She heard them hit the darkness. The rhythm of their feet slowed.

Duana’s thoughts were loud. Sena read them easily. The cephal’matris of the qloin was thinking that this could be a trap. Still, Duana didn’t pause. She didn’t show fear. She led her ancillas straight in, relying on the fact that all of them had carved their eyes. Duana and her girls also bore diaglyphs in their corneas, several layers deep, and the silver dials in them spun as they tracked Sena through the dark.

Sena kept running. She pulled the qloin over fallen columns, past artifacts and pottery that dissolved in vast ponds across the tile floor. Here and there the pools were more than ankle-deep and eyeless things swiveled above clutches of ghostly eggs.

Sena splashed on.

She felt the stone shudder through her as she pounded, footfall after footfall into the Halls, past the place where she had once made rubbings of the Jingsade Runic Script in the walls, past the place where she had killed a man. She had been here. She knew where she was going. Still, it felt as if the entire mountain were counterweighted, designed to tip her imperceptibly past the fulcrum where she could retreat.

The chase rounded corners, crossed intersections and passed through rooms devoid of life and sound. Endlessly, it seemed, the Halls led down. Carvings babbled in the blackness as Sena tore by. They filled the walls and lent a sense of mindless repetition to the chase.

Sena sensed that the marathon had begun to make Duana nervous. There were no more crypts to pass. No more broken and looted sarcophagi. Even the carvings faded until, at last, no signs of human exploration remained.

What could live this deep inside the mountain?

Duana’s chase staggered as the qloin crossed a threshold, as if they had passed through the center of the world and were climbing again, carvings reappeared, boustrophedon and quivering. They were not like the other carvings. These caused Duana’s diaglyphs to jump and stutter, to break and shift when the silver spirals tried to measure them.