Black Bottle

to burst but her mouth and throat still burned.

Silver-blue light licked out from each wave and rolled slowly up the cavern walls. It illuminated great cascades of prehistoric mineral deposits, grotesque mushroom shelves of stone.

Duana gasped. It looked like a storm was coming, blowing in off the cavern’s horizon. She could see rain on the sea.

Her stomach was aching. Her mouth was dry. Duana looked for Sena and found her, moving along the beach, between the three great monuments.

Her eyes struggled to take the full perspective in.

Each monument was a black claw, broad at the base, hooked at the top. Each one’s selcouth dimensions must have exceeded seven hundred feet in diameter alone. Their tips were several times higher: hundreds of thousands of tons of rampant basalt roaring upward.

After many moments of delirium, Duana shouted at her ancillas. Sound barely seemed to travel. Or maybe she was going deaf. Or maybe the sound of the surf crushed everything else. It didn’t make sense how they had gotten separated, but her girls had fallen behind. Two black dots floundered in the sand. She shouted at them again.

They began to run toward her. While Duana waited for them, she scanned the beach for Sena, struggling to see through warped air. She didn’t understand what was happening. She was breathing. It felt like air moving in and out of her lungs, but it was puzzling-hard to catch her breath. In the same way her body had ignored the water, the air had become a kind of pudding made of dream, an egg white riddle that mired her at the edge of this impossible sea and refused to properly oxygenate her blood.

Farther down the beach, she saw Sena moving effortlessly, widening the distance between them. Duana began to panic. The sand was so deep and soft that she could barely move. She lurched forward.

The light sent shadows rolling at incorrect angles. It drew her vision uncontrollably up one of the huge black monuments as she worked her way down the beach. Try as she might to focus on the white-black surf, her eyes tailed up, following the curve of that first great hook of stone. Like a dog’s tooth, corrupted by decay from where the waves had licked it, its far side was pitted and honeycombed with caves. Duana imagined getting lost inside. To think of its origin was to free fall through time.

She could not take her eyes off it. It tore into her head. Every acre of its surface was smothered with designs like those endured upon the Stairs. Millions of semiform shapes. Billions of hours of cutting into stone. But there had never been armies of gibbering slaves, had there? Drooling mad as they worked themselves to death? Not even all the Lua’groc that had ever lived could have carved these things.

The infinite detail, each and every shape unique—the Stairs, the monuments, had not been built.

Images of giant mollusks molding their shells came unbidden to Duana’s mind, a stiffening of dream jellies. The excretions of deities that produced, instead of shells, the fabric of the dimension Duana herself had once called real. Never again would she think this way. This was a spawning ground where giant urchin forms had lashed limbs to mighty hooks of stone and agonized through the throes of unnatural birth. A soft place, still wet and uncured, but perhaps eventually it would harden like the rest of the world, into real places.

How she understood this, or how she imagined this, she didn’t know. It felt like a telepathic bestowal of mercy, an explanation for what was clearly impossible. Epiphany in place of salvation. It felt like Sena was inside her head.

Duana fell, both palms sinking into sand. She looked up where Sena skirted the sea and the surf unwound like a white thread tangling and untangling in the dark.

The light, Duana realized was coming from the sea, many fathoms deep. Everything was in motion, carvings, clouds, and water. It was too much. Naci fell down beside her like a bag of laundry, unable to stand.

Duana watched the waves reflect in long glittering patterns as Sena set out from shore. The wind took the Eighth House’s clothing in great billows of black as the weird light streamed up around her. She walked carefully among the waves, barefoot, moving out, heading for the third great monument whose base was buried in the sea.

Duana could do nothing but watch as the Eighth House moved toward that incredible structure. She had no equation, no strength to follow.

Naci was unconscious, probably from dehydration or lack of air. Duana realized this was it. There was nowhere left for them to go.

*   *   *

SENA felt the temperature drop. The wind changed as her foot came up off the wave and hit the slimy stone below the Chamber’s door. She stepped up onto the broad pitted plinth that jutted from the monument’s shoreward face. In the center stood a single door with a seal instead of a lock: a ring of gold blazoned with a dead eye at center, white and velvety, without iris or pupil.

The fact that there were three monuments here, on the shore, seemed symbolic. It gave her hope that Nathaniel’s sum was right. She faced the seal and waited.

This was not about keys. This was about tokens, ambits and permission. Despite all her power, Sena could go no farther. So she waited for the Yillo’tharnah, who had unfolded all the mysteries, who had written on her skin, to open yet another door. They had invested her with seeing to Their lusts and, to present, she had served Them. So this was an indulgence, but she was still obliged to pay in blood, as she had done with the lock on the book.

She did not look back at the qloin. She did not want to see the gruesome fruit of her decision. But she heard the waves of Yoloch fill with hideous moving shapes, and black curling forms framed the periphery of her terrified eye. The surf heaved, raucous, delighted and strange and Sena imagined on Duana’s lips, a fragment of amateur prayer, spare syllables at most, before the qloin quickened and passed away into mist.

Sena made no move to save them. These were the crimson drops to wet the tumblers. She staved off guilt by telling herself that the Sisterhood had made its choice long ago. All who swore the Sisterhood’s oaths and learned its combinations were part of the Witchocracy that had burned her mother at Juyn Hel.

She would see them dead, all of them, a great bloody figure in her rising formula whose only remaining variable was when.

As the seal on the Chamber cracked, she wondered for an instant if she was just a minion, some small obeisant thing, squirming in a tray, squeezing out predictable results to whatever stimulus They gave her.

“I have forsaken my race,” she said to Nathaniel, then realized, there may have been no black tendrils in the sea at all. She looked down and saw in the vapors of dream that her hands were red and sticky—so perfectly scarlet against the black cyst beyond the open door. Some metaphor of guilt imposed by Them? Or was it her? Was it all her? She couldn’t remember whether she had whispered for their death.

In the end it didn’t matter.

Beyond the doorway gleamed the Cabal’s gold: shimmering beautifully, resplendent as any lucre. But only the insanity of obsession could make this gold shine. And shine it did: golden orbs molten, singing their way through layers of dream.

Is this how you expected it to feel? she thought at Nathaniel.

But the shade did not answer. In the great abyss she realized that she was, for the first time in many months, completely alone.

17U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Soon.

CHAPTER

20

I am not Arkhyn Hiel. And I was never Nathaniel Howl. I am Gringling. I am a Writer and Eater of Time.

*   *   *

CALIPH re-read the passage where he had left off and paused again. It had to be some kind of joke.

He reflected on whether he wanted to keep reading. What reason could Sena have for doing this? Handing him these books? Why was it so important to her? He reached into his pocket for his bottle of tablets. When he shook it, it rattled. There were not many left.