Black Bottle

that resembled a black crown surrounded by walls of bare stone into which had been chiseled deep-plaited designs: symbols of dimensions interacting.

He pulled his thick red book out from under a plate of quail bones and opened it to a marked page. The jellyfish glyph!

It was not black like the other glyphs because it had been inked in pure, undiluted blood. Caliph knew this.

“You are my creation,” Nathaniel said to the glyph. “My little island in the dark.”

He stared at the glyph under moonlight until it glowed with a white halo, then lifted his eyes and studied the afterimage that wavered in the air of his room. In that image, more than the image on the page, lived the squirming. The white pieces of the glyph twisted and broke off like ice in black water, drifting into darkness—consumed.

“They’re behind it. Always behind it,” Nathaniel whispered. “Waiting.” He chuckled with absurd glee, took a pencil and clicked the chemiostatic light on his desk. Then he sat down and wrote a small block of text in the margin of the Cisrym Ta:

No answer for the seasons! Prepare or perish! Ha! Plant, harvest, lay up fuel lest we freeze. Or we can travel … Go south! But we must react! We must do something. Because one morning the snow will fall. It is inevitable.

This is obvious, but notice how easily we accept it, like dull beasts. We know it in our bones. Our controls cannot reach the seasons, nor do we believe that they are sentient. So we do not scream at winter as we would scream at an animal for digging up our garden. Or too, when the child (despite scarf and mittens) fails to make it through the snow; the police find her later, stiff and pale in a ditch—they do not organize a search. They do not relentlessly hunt her killer or seek for justice.

It would be absurd.

*   *   *

CALIPH stepped out of Nathaniel’s body, straight through the wall, into the wintry hydrae flailing in the underwater woods, following the sweet smell of the tincture.

Light swelled around him.

The trees darkened. The black sky turned white and the white trees turned black. They looked young and ancient at the same time, well-pruned and snapping, with a summer-sounding profusion of silver leaves. There were shadows in those dreamy trees, of warm comforting umber and purple-dappled reflections moving in their shade.

Silver leaves spiraled from black isentropic branches. Sena waited, one knee knocked against the other as if embarrassed or nervous. She was hiding someone behind her, holding someone’s hand. A little girl stepped out. Sena bent at the waist and whispered encouragingly in her ear.

Caliph began to distrust the vision.

But the girl smiled. She released Sena’s hand and ran in shy uneven steps toward him. Caliph had no idea what to do, but he crouched down instinctively and felt her arms wrap around his neck. She smelled of cold fresh air, sweets and paper glue.

Odd.

Over her shoulder, Caliph looked at Sena. There was a canal of black water beside them that reflected the leaves. Beneath its surface slipped endless schools of ivory fish. The child’s embrace was tight and trembling, as if she was afraid to let go.

While Caliph endured the awkward grasp—her entire body clinging to him—he noticed through the trees that he could see part of a city with nuanced domes perfect as soap bubbles. Like pieces of summer blown by children. But they were not whole and glossy. They were bubbles at the end of their existence, dry and ephemeral as spiderweb. Split seconds from vanishing forever into gold and lilac-colored light.

“Where are we?”

Myths and stilted verses translated out of musty books mumbled from his college days, out of Desdae; about a sweet forever after that stirred the poisoned tissues of his mind. The place to which the Gringlings had tried and failed to return.

Sena answered his thoughts. “This is the jellyfish glyph.”

Did that mean he was in a glyph? Or did that mean this had been a glyph at one time? He thought about the shape. The rusty darkness of that design he had seen in the Cisrym Ta.

“Begun by Nathaniel,” said Sena. “I wrote the rest of it. Now you’re here.”

“But I’m dreaming,” said Caliph with light, musical condescension. “I’m drugged up on some ship in the desert…”

He did not feel compelled to be polite with his own imagination. He stared at Sena as he picked the girl up from the trail and held her easily in one arm. The child’s breath startled him, less restrained than an adult’s. It was loud and raspy in his ear.

“Don’t do this to me,” he said. He was talking to himself of course. But Sena glowed in the raking light through the trees: an icon, an advertisement almost, torn from the foggy streets, from the jumble of Isca’s billboards.

“It’s still hard for you to control,” said Sena. “I’ll help you. Stay with me.”

But a furious blackness erupted from the house on Isca Hill as if an ebon bedsheet had been thrown out one of the tower’s red windows. It flew down over the snowy front yard, casting Caliph in shadow.

Caliph felt the world roll. The yard became a white tablecloth snapped open.

Sena looked into Caliph’s face. “Hold on, Caliph.” The silver-leaved trees became a gleaming array of hoses and saline bags. Window light filled up the place where he was lying on a gurney. “This is a dream!” Caliph shouted. He pointed. “It’s a dream! You’re manipulating me.”

“No.” Sena’s gold hair caught light, white as the sun. It burned like snow. The glow became a halo, too strong to look at. Its aura obscured her whole body. It burned out his entire view of the world. Everything went white.

*   *   *

CALIPH could hear an alarm. He assumed it was an alarm because he could also hear voices shouting beyond the wall of his room. The tincture didn’t want him to get up yet. Sena’s voice was calling him back, down into sleep. He didn’t even know if the tincture was real, or if it might just be some additional element of the dream.

He heard echoes in his head of Sena’s voice, telling him that she had something else to show him. She was begging him to come back. She was pleading for him not to go, but he had seen enough. He was through with self- delusion. He was done with lying here on a bed when Sig’s body was still missing.

“He’s not dead,” Caliph said with a drugged slur.

The alarm sounded strangely animalistic. Certainly not mechanical. A kind of singing.

Caliph got up, head throbbing. The room swung. The room nearly won; almost pulled him down. He steadied himself against the wall and noticed that the Iycestokians had taken remarkable care of him. Near the bed was a window that looked down on the wreck of the Bulotecus. His ribs were wrapped tightly with some kind of elastic. His eyes were swimming. He didn’t remember coming to the window. The smell of the little girl, the light shearing through the bright trees, Sena’s familiar posture on the path—

He shook his head—gently—and regretted it. Sharp pain shot through his neck, all the muscles stiff as taproots.

The room contained medical equipment.

A knock at the door preceded, by only a few seconds, the entry of a man Caliph thought he had seen before, just after his capture. Tall and thin, there was a certain franticness to the man despite his being smoothed down with southern pomade. He looked disheveled and frayed at the edges, like he was barely holding himself together, like his composure was a hard-to-pull-off act. Caliph noticed blood on the man’s sleeve.

“Siavush,” he said.

“Where’s Sigmund?” said Caliph. “The big man. He was wearing a red shirt.”

“We haven’t found anyone that fits that description.”

Caliph decided the tension in the man’s face was linked to the alarm.

“You told Isham you had the book,” said Siavush. He spoke from the periphery of Caliph’s world in a hurried, terse way.