Black Bottle

Something was wrong here. Very wrong. Duana relented, hands on knees, gasping.

Sena pretended to do the same.

But there had been a change in atmosphere. Sena could feel it too: a feeling like a skittish drop of water, dangling from limestone, reluctant to fall, afraid of the abyss. This passageway had leveled and Sena felt the emotional weight as of some dark foyer to a still darker temple. This was the border, the boundary beneath the Ghalla Peaks, where the ambit of the Yillo’tharnah met the world of the real. It was the sticky surface of the bubble that contained Their dreams.

Nathaniel had never come this way. He had trusted in his tallies and decided against this incalculable risk.

In the walls, fat aberrations burrowed, or at least the illusion of such a nightmare held sway.

Sena stood at the top of a giant chute that wailed up at all of them. Her silver prisms flexed, her diaglyphs adjusted, but this was difficult even for Shradnae holomorphy to parse because there were no things of solidity here. Here, physicality gave way to vertigo.

Duana felt light-headed. Sena felt it too. The waves of power breaking on the edge of the Yillo’tharnah’s monstrous ambit almost forced the qloin to crawl clutching for the wall. Only the numbers trickling through the witches’ eyes kept them oriented with the floor.

Sena had been sure this was the right thing to do. But now she hesitated. Could this be the line she crossed that offered no way back? Had her brazenness finally outstripped all other gifts? After so many months without fear she found the sensation of real panic overwhelming. The Stairs wrung it from her.

And the qloin suffered worse.

Duana felt muscle tremors in her calves and thighs, in her forearms and biceps, in the subtle muscles between her ribs. Her whole body shook. The qloin’s blood-and-fiber bodies, so unlike Sena’s, made this kind of fear essential. Fear so thick, Sena thought, it could keep you alive. Force you to run screaming back through empty passageways from what waited sleepily below.

Sena listened to the mountain.

Duana was fifty yards behind her, hands on knees, terrified that Sena would take another step.

If she only knew, thought Sena, how badly I don’t want to take it.

You feel it, don’t you? Nathaniel asked. I’d not go this way if I were you.

He did not want to lose her. But he also did not want to follow her down where black cribriform deities could extract his residue from the air. Without body, without anchor, he would be lost, drunk up, as easily inhaled as a thread of smoke.

Sena weighed her decision. This could be her mistake, the one that would end all her careful plans.

The numbers are right, said Nathaniel. You don’t need to do this.

Sena listened to the Ghalla Peaks moan, from tubules and passageways, surging with the eternal damp that blundered upward. All the air that moved back and forth through the Halls funneled here. If the Halls were the mouth and nose of the mountain then the Staircase was its trachea and Yoloch was its pneumonic lungs.

Yoloch was the name of the sea, the name of the dreaming grounds, where the Abominations had once spawned during that brief season they had been free, before their time had ended—prematurely.

Sena waited for Duana to decide. She could hear the three of them whispering even so far away.

No more shadow games. No more flanking or misdirection. The geography dictated that there was nowhere to go but straight and down.

“Whuoo osou Muthirou?”15 Sena called in Withil, despite the fact she already knew. She spoke to Duana because she knew the other woman was on the verge of giving up. Sena offered her own voice as encouragement.

“No one.” Duana sounded tired and thin. “Miriam is Sororal Head.” Sena’s stomach somersaulted when she heard the exhaustion in Duana’s voice. A pang of tenderness filled her. A trace of humanity that tempted her to tell Duana to go back.

There was a long pause.

“We can’t let you go, Sienae.”

“I know.”

“We have the book—”

For that instant Sena detected no trepidation in the other witch, which was good. “Do you?” Sena said.

Duana’s heart skipped. Sena sensed the other woman’s tongue rolling a question but, after a moment, Duana decided against it. Doing so wouldn’t be fair to her ancillas. There was no leeway here, at the top of the Stairs, to show any trace of doubt.

Duana whispered to her ancillas. “I’m going to talk to her. See if you can close the gap.”

The ancillas nodded. Then they slit their palms. There was nothing else to steal blood from. They had used up their potions getting this far. From their own hands ran the holojoules that fed their equation: one that hid sweat, location—even the sound of involuntary organs. They did their best to hide from Sena’s diaglyphs and when Duana spoke, they crept forward.

“Tell us what’s in the Chamber, Sienae. None of us know. Megan and Giganalee are both gone. Haidee too.”

“Ofoo Ou tuldoo auyou, auyou’doo leyghou,”16 said Sena.

“I could use a laugh,” said Duana.

Sena stepped onto the Stairs.

15W.: Who is high priestess?

16W.: If I told you, you’d laugh.

CHAPTER

19

It felt like stepping into warm water. There was a murkiness to it, a knowledge that something was there, waiting—at the bottom.

Duana realized that Sena was descending. She lurched forward but when she got neck-deep on the stairs, she stopped again.

Her diaglyphs showed the difference, the way that the stone had changed. Resembling long mounds of congealed grease, the runs were hunched instead of flat, as if they had been built wrong. They lacked the correct angles to classify as stairs. In the walls, there were no coiled jellied limbs yet Duana got the impression of them. She imagined a bizarre rhythm of purpureal-umber shapes that drooled and dribbled toward the world’s core.

While she gawked, Sena slipped farther down over the gray weird translucent material.

“The Chamber’s relics belong to the Sisterhood, Sienae!” Duana called. She couldn’t let her ancillas see that she was afraid.

Sena didn’t answer. Duana’s quarry, that lithe body capped with golden hair, was disappearing quickly. Duana realized she had to make a choice.

She set her teeth and followed.

It was a strange pursuit. A hundred yards of empty staircase separated the qloin from its prey. So many steps. Their eely edges blurred into one vast sick-making pattern. Even her diaglyphs could not discern the limits of this place.

The moan of humid air mixed with the sound of her feet. The scenery rippled like the bottom of a clear, fast-moving brook. Duana squinted. She tried to clear her vision.

Was she dizzy?

Or was she seeing the staircase as it really was?

Space bent as strange immense larvae squirmed just below the world’s skin, under air and stone. Perhaps They could taste the Cisrym Ta’s exudations still clinging to Sena’s skin.