Black Bottle

popping the buttons off her jacket. They were so buoyant that they tugged away from her chest painfully, swelling up above her shoulders. Above her head. Bigger than balloons. Zeppelin bags. They pulled her into the air—off the deck, out across the desert toward the Iycestokian craft.

Blue-and-orange patterns splashed below her like paint. The wind howled and the air was full of sand, but she could see. Her goggles cut through the haze. She steered herself toward the oncoming airships gliding under one of the great melon-shaped balloons just as the sandstorm closed in behind her.

One of the soldiers on deck caught her and pulled her down. He wore smooth strange armor. She kicked him in the face.

“Leave Sena alone!” she shouted. “Don’t you understand? You’re going to die anyway! Join the cause, or she will smite you with her mighty hand!”

The soldier removed his helmet, with its glass and metal facets, and looked at her with sad eyes.

Aviv! He had joined the Iycestokian military! But what were the odds that he would be on the deck of the ship she had landed on? How could this be real?

His sweet black face, shining, smiling. His arms around her. And behind him stood their little boy. Five years old, smiling at her. Taelin knelt down on the hard deck. The texture of the metal dug into her knees but she didn’t care. She grabbed her son, pulled him into her, tight against her chest. His body felt so small. Bird bones and slender muscles.

“I love you,” she whispered into his ear. “I love you, I love you, I love you…”

“I love you too Mama.”

Taelin was sobbing, shuddering. It was the happiest she had ever been.

“You don’t feed him enough,” she said.

“I do,” said Aviv. “He’s just small for his age.”

Taelin pulled her son’s face back from her shoulder and held it in both hands. When she did, she noticed the silver spots on her wrist. But it was all right. She would get him vaccinated. His smooth young skin, the color of brown sugar—a perfect blend of her and Aviv. It was flawless aside from a little mole under his right eye. His lashes were long and dark and his eyes were bright brown. There were tears in his eyes but his tender lips were smiling.

How could I have let my father convince me to give you up?

Father will take care of us, said the inside-girl.

“I hate my father.”

Taelin picked her son up off the deck and held him. He cuddled her warmly, quietly, as if they’d never been apart. As if this was normal.

The Bulotecus had disappeared from sight.

“Let’s get out of the wind,” said Aviv.

Taelin beamed with joy and turned to follow him. It was almost dark. The light was purple in the blowing sand. Out in the storm she could see a desaturated stripe of pinkish-blue where the sun must have been setting. Then part of the deck bent strangely and a metallic bang rattled the full length of the railing. Aviv looked unstrung.

Taelin could smell putrefied fat. The stench carried a kind of moisture, so rich and repugnant in contrast to the thin dry air.

“Behind you!” shouted Aviv.

Taelin gazed into a black eye that sat motionless, barely twenty inches from her face. She absorbed the initial impression: that there were two eyes, and a host of serrated teeth, and a large transparent body. It was tangled in the cables that ran up to the gasbag, clinging with spindly crustacean-like legs. It did not appear to see her.

Taelin slowly put her son on the deck and told him to run to his father.

The movement stirred the creature, but only slightly. Its stubby head lolled to one side as a great leg plucked at the cables, trying to find a better grip. The beast seemed drunk.

She had never been so close to a nyaffle. But she reminded herself that they were far south, over Nah’Ngode Ayrom. This was a wild place.

The creature’s glassy carapace hunched up behind its gruesome head, ending in a splayed transparent tail. A host of slender legs acted in unison, clutching at the cables and railing like a clumsy hand. Off its back, the great crystalline wings still hummed, helping to keep it balanced where it had come to rest.

Taelin could see through its transparent armor into its distended gut, as if a plastic bag had been stuffed with fat. The great chunks of white-green blubber it had gouged out with that circular mouth, with those serrated teeth, were already dissolving slowly into milky chowder.

She backed away, watching the sunset convulse within the nyaffle’s glossy chitin, its soulless black eyes stared at her.

It shifted an increment, like a specimen pressing the wall of an aquarium, mouth hinging and unhinging as though focused primarily on breathing.

Taelin looked toward the doorway. Aviv was gone. Another ghostly white shape scudded up along the side of the railing, sounding like a child running with a stick, snapping each metal baluster. A xylophone.

“Aviv?”

Women in dark pants were standing on the deck, staring at her.

“Where is my son?” she shrieked. He was lying on the deck, still, blood pouring from a nyaffle bite.

A short stocky shape in a long red coat lurched up beside her. Some kind of crimson goblin. Taelin felt an iron grip and a stab of pain.

“My son! My son!” Taelin screamed, sobbing.

*   *   *

“SHE’S completely out of her mind,” shouted Baufent.

Specks’ body lay underneath the shrieking woman, where she had picked it up and carried it out and laid it on the textured floor.

“I had him on a gurney,” shouted Baufent.

“We need to get him off the deck before the captain sees this!” Caliph called against the wind. He had just helped Baufent wrestle the priestess to the deck and inject her with a sedative in an effort to keep her from leaping over the railing.

With as much decorum as he could, Caliph picked Specks’ tiny corpse up and cradled it back inside the ship. He held him, head on shoulder, as if the captain’s son had been asleep, as if he was carrying him off to bed.

But no. That wasn’t remotely how it felt. It felt horrific. It felt gruesome both physically and emotionally. The wind howled and with the rotting hylden and the desert grit between his teeth, Caliph could both smell and taste the awfulness of this moment.

He laid Specks gently back on his gurney, then helped Baufent lug Taelin down the narrow hall to her room.

Once she was on her bed Caliph went to the porthole and peered uselessly into the purple-orange haze. All he could make out were the shapes of the scavenger-things, the nyaffle. They were landing on the Bulotecus, taking shelter from the storm, counteracting the weight that everyone had worked so hard to jettison.

Caliph scowled. He smelled sweet mint and lotus blooms in Taelin’s room. He smelled Sena. Caliph glanced around but there was nothing.

“I want you to watch her,” Caliph said to Baufent. “And I mean watch her. She’s your responsibility for the rest of the flight. Tie her down if you need to.”

Baufent’s hard gray face let slip a hint of misgiving. “I’ll do my best,” she said.

Caliph left the two women and headed back to the deck, finding a pair of flight goggles along the way. There was an alarm going off somewhere. His ears popped and his stomach pitched. Too many of the creatures had landed on the railings and rigging. Dozens of them. Many tons of chitin pulling them down.

Caliph hoped the witches were taking advantage of the nyaffle. He hoped they were working their equation. And indeed, the witches were on the starboard deck screaming at the sky. Caliph struggled past them, coughing on the dust and putrefaction in the air. He hoped they were doing some good—late as it seemed to be trying to hide the ship from the Iycestokians. He headed for the cockpit to check on the captain.

When he entered the room he found Viktor Nichols in a knot, clinging to a steel stick with a red ball on its