Black Bottle

The moist gasses of the deeps poured up around her and with it, her diaglyphs began to fail. Air and stone and moisture flattened before her and the geometry of the steps dimmed. The silver compasses in her eyes no longer moved.

Finally, everything went black.

“Duana?” One of her girls broke the strict silence. “I can’t see.”

Rather than shush her, Duana whispered in Withil, “I know. I can’t either.”

She knew her girls were thirsty. None of them had anything to drink—or eat. As she realized this, her foot came down on something brittle and long, like a bone. It snapped loudly and she felt for it with her hands. Maybe it was a stick of burnt wood? She couldn’t find it. Maybe her thoughts had influenced the dream … created the bone transiently … because this was starting to feel like a dream.

Who would have guessed you could die from walking downstairs? Falling perhaps —especially a fall like this. But Duana wasn’t thinking of a fall. She was thinking that going down was the easy part. The notion of coming back up was what terrified her. To struggle without sufficient food or water, climbing endlessly in the blackness until exhaustion and hopelessness won out? Duana realized that walking down these steps unprepared was a decidedly one-way trip. Still, she couldn’t give up. Miriam had sent her after Sena with a terse command: stop at nothing.

From the deep, something new. Waves of distortion rolled up, ripples from a great stone dropped in still water. Duana felt them slosh against her brain, her skin. Her legs trembled.

“Sena! Wait!”

Her ancillas had already stopped and Duana knew she couldn’t keep this up if Sena didn’t answer. They needed a sign. Damp with perspiration and stress, Duana pulled out her watch. For a moment she held it closed, waiting, not wanting to open the thing and give away her position. What if Sena was there, right in front of her, staring at her in the dark?

“Where is the Chamber?” Duana tempered her voice.

“Deeper.” Sena’s voice sounded from below, many yards at least. It rose to Duana’s ears fragmented and strange as though parceled in a string of bubbles.

Naci, the youngest member of the qloin, finally broke. She called out to Sena in a fit of angry desperation, “Why don’t you just kill us?”

Duana reached out and seized the girl by the arm, squeezing hard in an effort to rein her in. Another wave of distorted ether-that-passed-for-air eructed from below. Sena’s strange voice came with it. “”17 it said. And then again, “.”

Duana thought it was an equation at first. She almost whispered a counter. Then her heart chilled as she realized that, although it was the Unknown Tongue, it had sounded almost exactly like Trade.

It felt like a kind of word game. A puzzle. Each number-letter had a different weight. A different meaning. was a nonphysical six, a three-stroke mark of power linked both to destruction and escape.

Three, seven, six. “Soon.” What did it mean? Prepare, create, destroy? Soon. Soon. Sena had chanted it once, then twice. What did that mean?

Time pulsed. Like a heartbeat now. The bursts coming closer together. The modulation of time rolled up from what Duana hoped was the bottom of the Stairs.

“Qyoitoo,” Duana whispered to her qloin. “We follow her down…”

But she knew their obedience had been secured, not through anything she herself had done. Rather, it was the High King’s witch that had given her girls a reassurance that their quarry was still there, below them, and that they had not crossed some otherworldly border where everything had vanished and all that was left to do was to slip senselessly forever into solitary night.

Sena made a noise. A foot scuff. It had to be Sena. Duana clicked her tongue as if to goad a horse and led her ancillas down.

Time rolled up. A scroll to be put away. Hunger and thirst subsided only to return. Duana’s muscles turned to jerky and then … days or hours later, in the sweeping black eternity, they failed her altogether. She lost her balance and fell into a sitting position on the greasy steps.

It wasn’t really that she couldn’t take another step but rather that she had become disoriented. Her eyes were playing tricks, forming strange polychromatic shapes like when she clenched them too tight. Finally, she made sense of it.

There was light.

Not real light, but dimness rather than blackness, so dim, in fact, that it had fooled her.

Below her, far away, something moved.

Thrum!

Like a sound, a heartbeat, but this pulse outpoured air and its faint reverberation was felt rather than heard. A great wet wind vanished up the steps.

If there was any color at all to the light, Duana decided it was a soft grayish-blue. It ebbed so tenderly, almost imperceptibly. Every so often it flickered. She wondered what she was seeing and why her compasses had not come back. Why were her diaglyphs still not working?

Below her, Sena moved like a polyp, sinking down the esophageal arch. Her shape was lost in the size of the tunnel. Duana gauged it at fifty yards wide and thirty run to crown. It was enormous.

She looked back at her girls. Both of them were pale and silent, lit from below and contrasted against the fathomless blackness that choked the upper reaches of the Stairs. Naci clutched the wall and closed her eyes at the same time Duana felt another of the massive swells roll through her body. This one felt like it had nearly dislodged her soul.

Duana pointed at their quarry.

There was no place to hide. Hunters and hunted were equally visible now, all of them, small specks moving relentlessly into the deep.

With the cover of darkness gone, Duana wasted no time flipping the alabaster cover of her watch. It illuminated her hand like a glowing oyster. They had been on the Stairs all night!

Thrum!

Duana gasped but tried to run some meaningful calculation. She held her watch open and walked down the Stairs, minding her speed, counting her steps, watching the time.

Her estimation reached an average of twenty steps every ten seconds. Despite the absence of her diaglyphs, she gauged each step at ten inches deep. They had been on the Stairs for roughly seven hours with occasional breaks. All of which worked out to … impossible.

She double-checked. Could they really be that deep? Eight miles down? Duana snapped her timepiece shut and stared into the silver-blue gulf below, bounded by concave walls.

Another wave rolled over her. This one succeeded in making her puke.

She wiped the thin string of clear mucus away and steadied herself. Her stomach was still churning. Far below, the Stairs seemed to vanish into thick white mist.

Is it mist?

And what is that roaring sound?

It was not an illusion. Duana heard Naci laugh, airy and voiceless. The Great Stairs of Yoloch had come to their end. They dumped the qloin from the staircase’s massive tunnel out into a realm unlike any Duana had ever seen.

Not mist. Sand. Am I outside? Is it night? Acres of pale moonlit desert confounded Duana’s sight. But it was not moonlight. And it was not desert.

Duana stood on one arm of an enormous crescent beach. The white dunes rolled down to the Seas of Yoloch and standing in the drifts were hideous monuments.

She could see clouds spread out over the sea—weather? underground?—and black waves rolling in, lapping the beach.

Thirst consumed her. Duana ran for the surf.

It was far. Farther than she thought. But when she reached it, she dropped down on all fours and guzzled like a dog. Her ancillas went too. It was fresh water, but it did nothing for her thirst. She drank until her belly felt ready