Black Bottle

windows were red and seething, a scarlet sunset boiled inside each one.

You can’t be serious, said Nathaniel.

Sena dropped her pack in the snow. She left the book, the supplies for the ink, all of it—sitting in the weeds. “Why? They betrayed our trust.” She walked up into the wind above the yard and passed through one of the windows.

Nathaniel followed.

As I said, you can’t be serious.

“I’m straightening this out.”

You can’t threaten Them. And what about the book—

“You’ll go back and protect it, won’t you?” Nathaniel resonated on a frequency Sena took for hoarse disparagement. “We’re a team now,” said Sena. “You and me.”

Your half is bent on our destruction. Nathaniel had been here before, many times, on the other side of the glass, gathering secrets, collecting numbers. But he had never come this way. The road to the north was closed to him.

Sena looked up at an atmospheric phenomenon that passed for violent thunder. It looked to her like the sunlight was sweating through layers of cherry gelatin and tar: cloud layers bowed around the front of a black and crimson storm.

Gravel crunched under her boots.

The dead world of the Yillo’tharnah was accessible only through Nathaniel’s estate. The house was a cork in the hole that the great holomorph had cut out. He had built imperfect windows, scraped them clean with math. They provided a smudged view of what lay inside.

There were no furnishings here. No ecology. Sena felt like a child setting foot in a haunted place.

“What did you study here?”

Them. Of course. I found where They wait, separated from Their Queen, drowsing until She opens the doors. And there was the matter of wiring St. Remora’s clocks to this place. A tricky business, threading it from the church, then pulling it through from here. I wonder if you are here to sabotage—

“Am not.” She scowled, insulted.

This isn’t the dimension where Naen struggles at the world’s core, you know, with Her luciform brood? But you may have seen that in the Chamber? You’ve never been here before, have you?

Sena didn’t answer, which only gave him cause to continue.

This dead plateau, with its netting of augered crypts, is where They hauled Themselves after the fuel ran out. They designed this place. Now They wait, suspended, gathered at one point, so that Their collective gravity might help to tear the fabric, loosen Their bonds and disgorge Them like slippery fish, following Their Queen from one world to the next, thrashing alien, renewed, reborn and ravenous.

Sena walked north, passing a singular column that stood mightily against the wind. Her diaglyphs measure it precisely: one thousand six hundred eighteen feet tall. “Isn’t that your cue?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you turn back soon?”

But the black gibbet of Nathaniel’s shade continued to follow her, suspended several feet above the plateau, refusing to blow away.

I’m not leaving yet. It’s ridiculous to scold Them for what They did to you at Soth. Your vanity is repugnant. They will not listen to you.

It felt strange to Sena that he was talking about these things rather than still assaulting her over his daughter. He seemed almost to pick up on this thought and abruptly change tack. What made you betray me?

But to Sena, there was something wrong even in this question. His angle did not originate from his daughter. It focused only on him. Why had she betrayed him? Sena stopped and looked at Nathaniel directly, puzzled, letting her thoughts seep out. The shade had no clear features. Only a hint of sharpness both at the place its nose might have been and also at the ends of its hands. Nathaniel’s eyes were terrible black holes. “You care so little about her, do you?”

What’s done is done. Your cruelty exceeds mine. Now that you’ve bottled her up, what will you do? Tell me again that we are a team?

She didn’t believe it. He had not gotten over it so quickly. There was something he wasn’t telling her. Something she couldn’t figure out.

A fleet of shadows passed over the ground, causing Sena to look up firmly into the wind. Grains of sand bounced off her corneas but she did not blink as a legion of dead flyers careened overhead. They fled the great red storm on the horizon with bodies that undulated like tissues caught in wind.

I think I know what you are up to, said Nathaniel.

Sena felt her throat clamp tight. She hoped desperately that he did not. Below her, the hollowness of the plateau flourished with gauzy indigo things. They were many and one at the same time, silent yet moving and enormously cognizant of both her and Nathaniel’s presence.

She did not warn Nathaniel of his danger. If he was undone here, she would be glad. If he was foolish enough to stay a moment longer, she would rejoice.

And he was. He stayed stubbornly, glaring at her while an army of pebbles inched in the wind, making sound as it crossed the vast key bed of solid rock, beneath which stirred the presence he had to fear.

The Yillo’tharnah began to uncoil. They seeped out like carbonic gas and yet he pressed her, hatred ferocious enough to anchor him. I think I know what you are up to …

The huge black pillar behind him moved with shadows. Its lee side held a deeply carved depiction of some hideous creature or agglomeration of creatures and though embossments many feet deep had withstood the sand, they showed nothing more than the badly cratered semblance of a host of eyes and moving fur.

I will protect the book and wait for your return.

Finally, Nathaniel fled.

He was gone in an instant, slipping out between Their claws.

Sena heard the pebbles move. She looked down to where it seemed an entire ocean had once raged like a river for eons and worn the bedrock to a satin finish. Occasional pits, where softer minerals had been hollowed out, harbored little handfuls of gravel. There were whispery designs in the stone. A repetitious pattern of timorous shapes, cast random as dice. Sena’s eyes traced the faint outlines of teeth, sockets and jumbled ribs—not of prehistoric fish—but of men and women.

Fossils of the old world.

With Their only prey gone, the Yillo’tharnah unrolled slowly, lethargic and tired. Sena waited for Them as the clouds thinned above her head and opened on an enormous red star sinking into the valley beyond the plateau. A smaller brighter point of light, dwarfed by the scarlet titan, glimmered and followed its epic descent.

Here at the edge of the plateau, on the brink of a huge vertical miter in the world’s crust, Sena noticed the angles of intersection with the surrounding geography, how they proscribed light and reflected darkness. It was a phenomenon she had never seen before. Darkness cast itself through lit canyons of sky in beams and pillars and gradients. Lovely and terrifying.

And then she realized how the vast valley before her, a megalo-doppelganger of the Great Cloud Rift, resembled a sunken font and how the distant crumbling mountains, High Horn in particular, felt like the worn stumps of non-human caryatids in a row. As if this had once been a continent-sized temple, a building that could tip the world …

At that instant, Something groped skyward through the rock, touching her abstractly, mouthing her with its thoughts. A vague threat rose through the fossilized stone.

Sena was afraid.

A moaning sound coursed through her ears. Her dark trench coat snapped as if clothespinned to a line. How strange! They had inverted the colors.

Her coat had been red. But now it was black and the bandeau underneath had changed to crimson. She tried to change it back, to re-imagine her clothing, but realized that her ambit extended precisely to the limits of her skin, not a fraction more.

You look better in black. Red is your accent.