Black Bottle

Pale green beams of light shot into the darkness of the utility vault as his men turned on tiny torches. Caliph glanced at Alani who was watching the men at the vault with unbroken concentration. Alani wore a scowl. The other men were waiting patiently at the palace door for the signal to enter.

Caliph saw everything shimmer as if they were standing in the desert, heat waves rippling off the ground. He braced himself against the palace wall, feeling dizzy.

“Go back to the gliders,” Alani whispered. “Wait for us there.”

Caliph felt deep shame associated with the command, shame for demanding to come with—only to inexplicably fall so ill that Alani could see it in his face. His stomach rolled. It was no use. Alani was right. And there was no reason to let pride get in the way.

What is wrong with me?

He squinted back across the grass toward the ciryte platform. It seemed impossibly far away.

His limbs felt wobbly and his head seemed to be floating away from his feet. He set out, stumbling, and heard Alani curse.

The words, “Help him,” came like bubbles in the sunlight-colored air.

Then the pavement’s beautifully fractured and intricately pitted surface raced toward his face. He loved the pavement. Its porous intricacies. The lichens. The stream of ants like grains of hardened molasses rolling two directions at once. He loved the smell of mold.

Someone grabbed him under the arm and pulled him away from the ground, which made him inexplicably sad. His view panned away from the ants, toward green windy shapes and what looked like dancing men.

He saw white lines appear and disappear at crazy angles. Swords reflecting light?

Something had happened. He still had his own sword in his hand. He struggled to unscrew the safety ring. It defied him, a black puzzle in his fingers. Then there was a snap.

Hm?

He felt the weapon hum in his grip. He must have triggered it. The thing was certainly charged. He set his feet far apart, trying to stay balanced, trying to keep the blade away from the ground. A vague understanding that he might kill himself registered enough to demand his full attention.

He pivoted on one foot, trying to aim himself in the general direction of the chaos. The palace walls were so big. They overawed him. He nearly sat down to stare.

Then as if out of an ominous opera performance, where all sounds hushed on the cusp of the starring villain’s appearance, Caliph heard the sound of a great animal walking into a building. Maybe it was into a building. The heavy leather crush of a foot against tile, the muscular shake of its bulk within the harness, and the breathing … Caliph heard it.

Only this wasn’t the pastoral grunt of some deep-chested quadruped. This was the slithering whine of air sucked through gooey vents or gills. It was a slurp mixed with a shudder.

Before his eyes, gigantic feet, frog-like, pulled up from the concrete in formidable pyramids of muscle. They were attached to legs that folded precisely in the way that Caliph would have expected from a giant amphibian- learned-to-walk.

The legs almost hypnotized him. They jackknifed through a graceful, varied gait. The movements of huge muscle packs, stretching fluidly thigh-to-toes, pulled the “heel” up past the monster’s hip. With every step, this “heel” came tantalizingly close to hitting the creature in the back.

Caliph’s dazed eyes followed this jag of bone down to the knee. It was upon the knee that the whole upper portion of the leg and torso seemed to balance.

Each thigh bone nested in the corresponding cup of an atlatl-like sling while the mighty feet and ankles of the beast propelled and kept everything else aloft.

In split seconds, Caliph absorbed the marvelous power and how most of the creature’s weight was clearly in its feet. It could lean and stretch in ways that seemed to defy gravity. But the double-bent legs that powered the ranine body were only the beginning. At roughly eight feet off the ground, Caliph had to crane his neck to see the monster’s head. The skull hung much lower than the shoulders and the tip of its snout, which reminded Caliph of both a catfish and a salamander, was lower than either its neck or the prominent fan of its beefsteak-colored gills.

The whole body was so hunched, so crouched, so incredibly folded up in fact, that Caliph decided it could have easily stood up and reached eighteen feet into the sky.

Eighteen feet with its jaws, that was. Caliph had no way of accounting for the potential length of its many- jointed arms.

The hand of the bodyguard that had pulled Caliph to his feet had been gone ever since the creature’s arrival. There was a large red blur in the periphery, covering the cement, and Caliph heard the monster’s talons drag like plastic strips against the stone. It grabbed a cinder block–sized chunk of the man’s torso. Like a distracted child moving messy candy toward its mouth, it gave no outward sign of enjoyment or even that it was eating. The consumption of Caliph’s bodyguard seemed a reflexive action, unconnected with the movements of its eyes.

Caliph lifted his sword, which felt incredibly heavy. The impression of shouts and desperate actions behind the creature came to him as out of heavy fog.

Where did you come from? Caliph thought.

The crouched shape turned slowly, golden-gray and shimmering. Its empty eyes—like porcelain pie-plates stuffed with pink gelatin—were dead, soulless and without recognizable intelligence. But they were looking at him. Of that, Caliph was sure.

He stumbled backward, away from the crunching mouth. Blood drizzled from the end of its snout, heavy and fast. Around this horror, a clutch of darkened barbels oozed though the air with dissimilar gravity, curling, stretching and swelling like snail eyes.

Even in his dizzy condition, Caliph noticed the asymmetry of the hands that were moving slowly toward him. One was an ungulate horn, which hooked sharply toward the ground; the other was a translucent duck claw banded in tropical brown and white—swaddled in ancient skin and brandishing an array of talons in Caliph’s direction.

He waited for the beast to reach out and take him. It opened its mouth, canyon-wide. He felt like he was leaning over a pit. A strange gravity drew him in. He felt the immense power of the monster’s will and teetered, feet losing traction with the ground. His boots rolled on gravel, then nothing but air.

Before his face, the deep interior of the monster swelled with fatty pink ridges. Caliph heard his name at the back of the python throat where some discreet muscles manipulated air. “Caliph Howl,” it had said.

Or at least he imagined it had spoken to him.

Then the jaws moved forward, propelled half a step. The talons reached out from the end of its impossible five-jointed arm.

Caliph raised his chemiostatic sword. The still-humming black-and-silver blade met it halfway. A blinding flash of light filled the world, accompanied by a sizzling bang: like someone striking an empty metal drum with the flat of their hand.

The creature stopped. Smoke poured off its skin. Caliph dropped to the ground. He backed away as it lost balance. Fabric that had covered the hump on its back smoldered. A low, ugly red flame danced around its skull as the huge body thundered against the concrete.

With his view cleared, he stared over the carcass to where a second creature had one of Alani’s men in its jaws. In mere seconds the man was gone, crushed and tossed down its throat like a springbuck in the throat of a saurian.

Head foggy, Caliph climbed over the sticky, charred carcass that reeked of burnt salmon and stumbled toward the second monster. He thought he might black out but he didn’t. He swung his weapon as hard as he could.

The momentum carried him forward but twisted off the creature’s skin. His blow turned down, dragging his arms with, buckling his body. He couldn’t recover. The sword left his hands and clanged against the ground.

Lazily, the vast duck paw reached out for him, talons spreading.

And then he was on his back in a cot, staring at the ceiling of his stateroom. No. Not his stateroom. He smelled medical supplies and felt nauseous.

The weight of his breasts tugged at the center of his chest, pulling gently to either side. He reached up and cupped them, pushing them back together. They were soft and comforting.

When he opened his mouth, he was screaming. He didn’t know why, but he was screaming.

Dr. Baufent showed up almost immediately, shadowed by several other people. She looked down at Caliph