Black Bottle

Taelin gawped toward the sound, trying to see into the netherworld behind them. The shopping bag she lugged drew her fingers down into splotchy white hooks. The bag crinkled and banged against her knees.

Sena knew it was hard for the other woman to breathe here. Even without inhaling, Sena could taste salt and death.

Taelin stumbled.

Sena reached out and steadied her.

“We need to keep moving. They won’t tolerate us here much longer. Are you all right?” Her vocalization was a courtesy, an effort at displaying empathy.

Taelin marveled at the blackness; she was not all right. She pulled away when Sena reached for her. Her face was smeared with horror.

“Taelin?”

With both hands Taelin held up the shopping bag. Offering it to the darkness. A child displaying something she had bought. The bag gushed with light.

“She’s dead,” said Taelin.

Sena grabbed her by the hand. “That’s not true. You saw her blink.”

Taelin started blubbering. Sena was keenly aware of her own guilt in this. This was the cost of advancing her slender margins. Crazy as she was, Taelin managed to glow even here with a kind of radiant innocence. Sena could understand why Caliph found her pretty.

Another shudder squeaked through the cavern, like tons of rubber slipping, slumping somewhere along the far side of the lake. Sena didn’t look. She already knew What was there, What had crawled out of Lewlym’s Navel so many thousand years ago and died here in the dark.

“We need to go,” said Sena. She started walking and Taelin stumbled after. They crossed the flat ash-draped space that had once been a courtyard and entered the fortress.

The vaulted hallways of Jorgill Deep were empty. Whatever tapestries or paintings had decorated them had long turned to ash. Smudges of rust lay here and there, the stains of former objects. Halls of empty night. More dust. Thick gray tendrils choked every room and casement. Taelin’s candle struggled in one hand while the glowing shopping bag cast a soft moving halo in the clouds stirred by her feet.

Sena led the way, her compasses subtracting, narrowing. She guided Taelin from the dripping vaults up a shrunken staircase wracked by catastrophic quakes. Anciently sundered stones overlooked the delirious blackness where something vast and unseen jostled far below.

It was dead. It did not watch them. Flesh so strange, like a mushroom, honeycombed and deep, deep enough to confuse souls. It lacked eyes. Its perception was endemic; superseding organic limitations with an acute hyperawareness. It knew precisely where Sena and Taelin were. It suffered them to be here. It felt the power of Sena’s ambit.

Sena’s eyes tracked It. She maintained her vigil in case It tried to make a grab. She could not hide from It. It “saw” in all directions: a black prehensile god.

“What’s down there?” Taelin was gibbering now. She sensed her own danger.

They had reached the parapets and the shattered remains of an arcade. Sena walked down the center. She drew up when she realized she was leaving Taelin behind.

“The same thing wired to St. Remora. You know? The eleven clocks?”

“Yes. W-what are they for?”

“It’s one of the .24”

“Sekwah-what?”

Sena leapt over a pulverized obsidian window frame in the destroyed hall and repositioned Taelin behind her. She also tried to modify the air for Taelin’s sake but the Yillo’tharnah were pressing too hard, pushing, groping— despite the agreement, they had begun to struggle for the necklace. While Sena pushed back and mentally warned them away, reminding them of the pact, she tried to answer Taelin’s question.

“You remember what you saw that night I came to St. Remora? The shadow bursting out of the wall?”

“Yes…”

“That was one of them.”

“But I thought … everyone knows there are no such things—or if there ever were they were locked away, shut up or entombed or—”

“They were,” said Sena. “But you can still feel Them sometimes. That chill that goes through you? In lonely places? Their thoughts can leak through from the other side, and if They want to, if They need to, They can manifest for short durations even though it costs Them dearly. Which is how I got these—” She gestured to the lines on her body.

“Imagine a wasp’s nest,” said Sena. “Gone wild. Built enormous in every direction. Like the wasps kept building and building. For decades, centuries, millennia. Black papery chambers so deep—so perfect. Except there are no wasps. It’s the cells that are sentient. The pockets. The empty space that’s thinking. And the larvae inside those pockets, those pastel burning maggots—are souls. Little squirming workers stacked in twisted tori, in perfect galleries.

“The Yillo’tharnah have shapes described by numbers. Their ratios, set down in books, were the inspiration for the coriolistic centrifuge, which launched Pneumafuel L.L.C. in 1431 S.K., and Solvitriol Solutions two years later.”

Her words were a hook that pulled Taelin along. “This is about business?” asked Taelin. “I don’t understand.”

“No,” said Sena. “This about numbers, physics. But Solvitriol Solutions discovered that the pneumata in their batteries had inertia. Think of it like money. The more you have the more you can consume. And faster.

“Pneumata are the gravel in Their gizzards. Pneumata are Their currency. They barter in souls.”

“And that’s what’s down there in the dark? Yillo’tharnah?” Taelin’s pronunciation was skewed.

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand what They are.”

“The harder you try to understand, the more inconsistencies you will find. Their bodies are haloed in paper ash you could destroy by breathing. They’re not made of matter. They are holes. They are dead. And when they are sufficiently haunted, They can move.

“Don’t believe most of what I just told you. The language is wrong. The words are…” she touched her upper lip with her tongue, “wrong. Besides.” Sena took the candle back and laced her fingers in Taelin’s. “I don’t really know what They are.”

They had arrived at a small room whose doorway had no portal. The ash at the threshold showed frequent tracks. In one corner, the ruins of what might have once been a bed lay as a crumbled relic. If Arrian had ever slept, or pretended to sleep, she had done it here, under a window that now looked out on a wall of stone.

Sena looked down at a ceramic doll’s head, peering morosely from the gray powder.

*   *   *

TAELIN tried to remember her mission home in the snow-filled streets of Isca but the picture would not focus. She tried to think of people’s names that she knew there. When she thought too hard it always hurt right where the boy had knocked her head against the cement.

Taelin looked down at the crunched doll’s head. Sena was busy, crouched, sifting through the powder with her fingers, holding the candle.

The witch had endlessly outmaneuvered her. She was more powerful than Taelin had ever expected. Subtle yet strong. Like wind orchestrating the shapes of trees. How had this happened? She sat down with her glowing shopping bag and watched Sena dig in the ash.

Everything Taelin had tried to embody was slipping away from her. In this vacuous hole no thought of Nenuln’s golden light could soothe her.

I am not a priestess.

“Are you all right?” Taelin looked into Sena’s concerned face and those horrible, beautiful eyes. The witch’s thumb reached out and stroked her lips, which was precisely the thing her mother would have done when she was a girl. It was terrifying and comforting at the same time. Taelin tasted ashes on her lips.

The candle seemed to float beside them, unattended. This strange fact freed Sena’s other hand, in which she rolled a small spherical object. She must have found it in the powder of the room. Despite the dust, it was black and