Black Bottle

Instead, she looked at riverbanks, a cloud, a weathervane on a barn. She looked at a pile of silver bodies in a village and the things that were eating them. She had to concentrate on these things, on tractors and naked footprints in the snow. She had to focus on her window in order to keep from turning around.

Something was there. Prickling her skin. Just over her shoulder. Behind the corner of her eye.

“There’s something following us,” said Autumn.

“Don’t look back.” Miriam gasped. She could see Skellum through the window.

“It’s made of gold,” said Anjie. “Gods it’s so beautiful…”

Her back crawling, Miriam stepped through the image and shuddered violently. She stood in Parliament at the great black fireplace. Safe. With a bright blue day pouring in through the windows. A chill went from the crown of her head, all the way down her spine.

“Oh—” Autumn’s voice sounded like she had misplaced something important.

“Don’t worry,” Miriam said. “We have the book. We’ll find a way to open it. We’ll go back for Sena—” She turned around. “I just couldn’t risk it anymore. I couldn’t risk you—” Miriam counted heads. All two of them. Autumn’s face was pale.

“Where is Anjie?”

CHAPTER

39

Caliph heard the screaming but it sounded far away from where he was lying, encased in bandages, tucked in with warm fuzzy pain medication that the Iycestokians had administered. Sena’s pink hair and little black nurse uniform gave him confidence that this was all a dream. Scene two. Act something or other. Invert it. Stir it with a wooden spoon.

He did not feel compelled to investigate the shrieks, which was a nice change, since they were fiction—and he was tired. Nor did he feel compelled to jump up off the bed and grab Sena by the … arm? There was little clothing to grab her by. He could grab her by those two short ponytail bunches or the slender heels on her boots, but doing either would probably steer his reasons for grabbing her in the first place down the wrong road. And that would be terrible given the fact that so many people had died.

He was angry with her. Partly because of what she had done. Partly because the real Sena had ignored him —and only this Sena, the dream Sena, the one he made up, still paid him any mind.

The real Sena evaded him …

In her white flying machine.

The drugs made him think of her as one of the beautiful insects he had pursued with nets and burning fingers, with breathless leaps and desperate eyes—as a child.

He had broken many handles against the headstones, where the insects landed to fan themselves, only to watch them flutter away like silent laughter.

Could he blame them? The only thing to do, if he ever caught one, was stick a pin through its lovely body, drip poison on its head and tape its wings down inside a cigar box until it dried. Sena’s fate would not be so different if he caught her.

He heard another shriek but still didn’t feel compelled to investigate it. That was a relief because he was so tired. His head was thinking in circles.

Everything, the whole world, was a cool intravenous drip and nothing could be expected of him. That was why, instead of jumping off the bed and grabbing Sena by the arm and shaking her when she showed up miraculously in his room; instead of asking her what in Emolus’ name she had been doing, he instead focused on the sparkling tube between her fingers. He didn’t want to drink it. He remembered the pain from before. His bones tearing through his skin. But her expression was quintessentially sincere.

“I just want you to understand,” she said. “Think of me as your Veyden spirit guide.”

This made him laugh. He couldn’t understand what she meant but he smelled the sweet familiar fume around her, which was lovely until the ship pitched and he nearly threw up. “Are you really here?” he asked.

For a moment he determined there was no one in the room. Then she said, “It doesn’t matter.”

“Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just help us? Help me find Sig…” He was deeply interested in what the fictional Sena might say and which of his thoughts his subconscious would choose to impose on her lips: concocted by himself to soothe himself. When she said nothing he took the sparkling tube and swallowed the tincture.

“It’s going to be different this time,” said Sena.

And it was. This time there was little pain.

One eyelid blink and he stood in the house on Isca Hill, feeling the cold at one of the windowpanes and watching the snow come down in the front yard. A cap of white obscured the head of a statue with a broken sword and seraphic wings lost among the trees. “Soon-soon,” he heard himself whisper. But he was not himself. He was not Caliph Howl. He saw his hand come up to the frosted glass, old and roped with purple veins.

His uncle’s hand.

“Soon-.” Three, seven, six. His finger drew a shape in the crystals on the glass. Almost like a flower opening.

But it was not a flower. The Unknown Tongue registered with him even in this crude medium. The symbol was a nonphysical two.

The two represented the only hope Nathaniel had in the world. Caliph realized this. He experienced his uncle’s thoughts directly, without filter, as if they had been his own. He could taste the wetness in the old man’s mouth—so foreign. Feel the frailty of his slender bones and translucent skin.

The numbers rolled through Nathaniel’s skull over and over. They were his mantra, his instructions. Three— seven—six. Prepare the page. Create the ink. Escape the world.

Six. Slippery six. The six’s surfaces curved protectively around that lower curl. As if hiding something. Such a subtle shape. Almost a mistake really. Adjust part of its arc just a little and it would turn into a zero.

Prepare, create, escape. Twice. Once for each of them.

He drew the number two again on the frosted glass.

Caliph laughed a little at the notion of the Yillo’tharnah but even as he laughed he felt something squirm between the lobes, down in the germinal recesses. A sensation he could ignore only if he kept thinking fast, sliding forward quickly and rationally—else the thin crust on which his empirical sledge traveled give way. And whatever squirmed underneath the ice, if he fell through—

Then his uncle’s ice-black eyes cracked. And he did fall through. And all the glass in the long hallway of the house on Isca Hill shattered and Caliph looked out with no barrier between himself and those strange wintery trees that moved their branches like cnidae: a forest of pale hydrae in a murky pond, immortal and silent—

What were they? Were They the Yillo’tharnah?

A floorboard in the hallway creaked and Nathaniel looked down. “What are you doing out of bed?”

Caliph saw himself, his own mirror-haunted eyes. His own small body, tense-fisted, dragging his pillow across the floor. He heard his own asthmatic breathing. He had tears in his eyes.

“I saw something in my room,” said Caliph the child.

“Go to bed.” Nathaniel looked back out the window. Three-seven-six. Three-seven- six.

Caliph could sense his other self. The perfect replica of that small person he had once been, rooted in the carpet as if in deep mud. Stuck. Too afraid to go back to bed, too afraid to speak and risk the consequences.

Nathaniel looked at the child, standing in the hallway with the trembling lip, straight brown hair and—

“Go to bed!” Nathaniel shrieked.

Then he turned and stormed down the hall, leaving the boy in snow-sparked moonlight.

Caliph went with his uncle. He had no choice. He was inside of him, feeling the startling energy of that body as it moved through the house by memory, charging through lightless passageways with confidence. Nathaniel climbed the stairs to his tower room, threw open the trapdoor and clambered into a space set with a canopy bed