Black Bottle

had tugged her left eye into a teardrop shape. She had smiled and said, “I wish I could have met your uncle.”

18Such were the extravagances of the Yilthid queens living on the cusp of the Rauch Desert.

19U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Nayn.

CHAPTER

21

Sena stood ankle-deep. Phosphorescent currents slurped and swirled in tidal pools within the disintegrating floor. Eddies of foam and sputtering bubbles sprayed from sudden vortices that gurgled throughout the pits.

The Chamber’s floor, like a glassy black coral, contained holes within holes and the Chamber itself was a series of cysts within the pillar’s husk. To Sena, it seemed fitting, an almost beautiful kind of symbol for what this monument contained. While it looked like an accident of tides and stone, this too—all of it—was a softened collop where reality met dream.

Here, golden ovoids seared the cochlear darkness without casting true light.

Sena noticed where Naen’uln’s body had burnt through stone and air. Naen’uln meant Naen’s gold. Where Her massive bulk had brushed and smoldered through the papery skin of here, Her over-embellished shape appeared. The golden ovoids within the Chamber were not physical objects. They were literally Naen’s gold—holes that revealed the color of the God-Thing’s skin.

Defying geometry, Her massive collection of flesh existed everywhere, as if the world of Adummim were a cloth draped mercifully to hide Her holocaust mass, as if She was the planet’s core. Imaginal buds swelled within Her, pushing Her against the dimensions. She sagged atop the hierarchy of all Abominations … Herself, the Daemon-God, enrobed in the wetness of Her delicate mucosa and strung with orbs of star fire that drew cosmic fumes off the sun … She had lain here, synchronous with the tick of stars.

Sena felt the surface of her body prickle, and the cool startling arrival of a tear, which had broken loose to tremble on her cheek. It was a broadcast, even to herself, of her indescribable awe. Her bones resonated with the frequency coming through the membrane until she almost couldn’t stand. She felt a horrible need to get down, to prostrate herself on the slippery floor, to give in, to give up, to die.

The holes in the fabric of the world were several feet across, far larger than what Nathaniel Howl had estimated so many years ago and much larger than what Arkhyn Hiel had found in the jungle. Arkhyn had found and contained his tiny pinhole with blood and math. But these were much too wide for that. These holes could not be sewn up.

Sena stared through the rents and wept. She felt the slackness of her face, the power of the Goddess scouring her mind, scraping out thoughts until she was blank and empty as a bowl. It took energy to think.

The Monstrosity moved. Here was Caliph’s puzzle. Here was the Monster behind the door. It was too large to see, a magnificent septum, a world of deep-pitted flesh. Bigger than the Glacier Rise, It rubbed its corpulence against reality like a streetwalker grinding on her client’s knee. Endless persistence would soon pay off. A carcass the color of palest amber was on the edge of Its spectacular discharge. But Naen’s gyrations held no promise of life—only an inevitable world of wild, baying entropy to come.

Twenty thousand years, Sena thought. Her birthing had been postponed. But now, sooner even than Sena had guessed, Naen would free Herself. And this time— unlike the aftermath at Soth when beings from other worlds had stuffed Her back—there was no way to stop its coming.

The Ublisi’s terrible mistake in the gardens of Jorgill Deep had been undone, but now the Syule were gone and so were the Yilthid. The Pplarians, by their own admission, wielded a fallen and anemic incarnation of their former might. There were no ambits anymore, great enough to hold the Yillo’tharnah back. Soon—soon, They would have Their day.

The Chamber’s floor rippled with green and purple darkness. Green and purple light.

Sena tore her eyes from the widening rents and looked toward an anomaly guttering at the end of a chain. She wiped her eyes and scowled at a lamp, suspended over trunks of burst wood and red iron bands. The lamp illuminated a handful of coins that glittered just beneath the water. There had been troves here, secreted by the Willin Droul when the king of Sandren, prior to the evolution of lord mayor, had worn the Hilid Mark.

“You lit a lamp for me?” Sena said.

Her question was not addressed to Naen. Naen would never answer. But something else did, a hunched up four-foot entity of denigrated splendor. It was a Lua’groc, come up from the depths to greet her, to see her fabled arrival in the cyst.

“Hagh, hagh, haughphssss.” The Lua’groc’s laugh-snort resembled tuberculosis. A shadow of a talon crept across the Chamber wall and pointed toward the flame that screwed thick black filaments of smoke into the draft.

“Is dreamt, Sslia—lamp is dreamt.” Its molestation of human sound did not interfere with Sena’s ability to understand. Its words were irrelevant. She understood that the lamp was fabricated. But why? Why would They dream a light for her? That was the bit she couldn’t fathom. She could not make sense of Yillo’tharnahic logic.

More spasmodic coughing belched from the Lua’groc’s glass-toothed mouth. Sena detected a shimmer covering its body, a cloak of purple silk that had been dreamt dry. She averted her eyes. She did not enjoy this. The burden of seeing everything was often too much, and she felt a touch of felicity for the way that the vapors of Yoloch damped her sight.

“You dun bring the book,” the Lua’groc croaked.

“Would I be Sslia if I were that foolish?”

The click of its interlocking teeth communicated a smile.

Sena looked over its head to where the end of her quest—the origins of the navels of the world—rested on a simple black-glass shrine.

“Come count them,” the fish-priest burped.

Sena walked past him and stood before the shelf.

Two.

Her eyes roamed the tiny space in vain for another moment but, no. It was as she had thought.

She crumpled to her knees and rested her forearm on the shrine’s black edge. It didn’t matter that she had expected this. She rested her head against the cushion of her arm. The sound of water bubbling at her knees, in and out of the holes in the floor, seemed to sob right along with her. It soaked her through and through. With this cruel delivery of the truth, she felt all hope die.

For a long time she knelt, considering the future, letting the sea purl in around her. “That settles it,” she whispered to herself.

Nathaniel’s journals had deceived her. He could not write her in. She had almost dared to believe, not in his promise, but in the number. In a small corner of herself, she had believed—like a little fool.

But there were only two stones on the shelf. She scolded herself viciously for kneeling down here, in front of Them.

Two was the number. How could she have ever believed anything else? The knowledge shook her with its power.

She held her stomach with her hand.

From behind, the Lua’groc brushed her shoulder with a tentative, hunger-driven talon.

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed. She stood up, whirling, wiping her eyes, sodden and uncomfortable below the knees.

“You are the god we eat!” the Lua’groc screamed back.

Sena spoke in the Unknown Tongue, pushed her ambit out into the dream-vapors, and deprived the Lua’groc’s feathery external gills of air. This silenced it. It gurgled and bowed, disappearing beneath its purple cowl. She did not wish to see it.