Black Bottle (53 page)

She extracted the liquid with a small wooden herb press. It dribbled through a short spout into a shallow clay mixing vessel. Sena wiped her hands, willing her cells to repel the pigment. They came clean instantly. She sat down and drew out a silver vial. The same silver vial that she had taken to the Howl Mausoleum twenty-three months ago.

She would have used her own if she had any: Hjolk-trull blood. So incredibly rare, like those moths from the steppes, on the verge of extinction … the bacteria in their fur capable of miracles.

In one sense Caliph could be reduced to this vial, stoppered and preserved. Just an ingredient. Just a substance to be manipulated. Sena put the smooth metallic cylinder to her lips. She could smell iron and steel. It made her feel close to him.

She opened it and poured all but the last of his cells into the clay vessel. A few drops she spared. Then she added salts. Together, with the acids and tannins of the pimplota juice, the suspension formed an ink that would not deposit, thicken or mold. It would never fade, crack or flake.

This was the recipe for ulian ink, the ink that had written the
Cisrym Ta.

Sena corked the clay vessel and shook it vigorously, using math to quicken the reaction. It required no heat. She strained the liquid through a hair sieve and poured the resulting colloid off into a glass bottle.

It was time to test the ink.

She took out her gunmetal pen and depressed the beryllium filler. It slurped. Ink glugged from bottle to sac.

She adjusted it. A few test scribbles.

Then she took a sheet of parchment—not one of the three sheets of her skin—and began to draw. As she drew, she felt the sky tremble. The desert below her charged with static. She whispered and the ink called for information, organizing itself quickly, capturing the dimensions, the contents, the structure of her mind. Omniscience was not a passive thing in this process. She could not approximate here. Isomorphism was not enough. The analogous shapes of letters, the property of being legible was meaningless in the creation of Inti’Drou Glyphs. Precision became essential.

The enormous energy required to form the glyph came from her ambit and from what remained of the dwindling, evaporating holojoules she had coiled around the Pplarian ship. There was not much left. Most of the holojoules from the massacre at Sandren had slipped away. But there was still enough—just barely.

She pulled them straight into her pen.

Sena focused on the page until it felt like her eyes might cause it to burst into flame. Far away, the
Cisrym Ta
began to dissolve.

Its form and information, its substance, was reduced, reconstituted. The essence of the thing that it was appeared in the glyph on Sena’s page.

It was simpler than other glyphs, being a compression of a single object—no matter how dense. She looked at it, its shape devoid of the Dark Tongue instructions so familiar in the shadow of every glyph catalogued in the
Cisrym Ta
—she did not need them. In addition to this, its shape unsettled her. Different somehow than she had expected. It threatened vaguely and she associated it instantly—not as her own creation but as a curiologic phenomena—with watery allusions to blossoms, universes and myxozoa.

The image stayed only long enough for her to appreciate it.

Could she do this? Had she gotten it right? But when the sound came out of her mouth, passing over her vocal cords, it was nothing that she could have produced before the Yillo’tharnah had modified her. It was her first enunciation of a complete Inti’Drou Glyph.

As she spoke, the shape on the page disintegrated. The glyph vanished and in its place, defined by coordinates she had written into the page, lay the
Cisrym Ta
.

The book was back.

But its movement from Parliament to her airship was not the miracle of the moment. Teleportation had not been the purpose of her proof. Nor was bypassing the wards in Parliament’s deepest vaults—the most secure vaults in all the north. Yes it pleased her, but this was not about thievery. What this was, she thought, was proof that she could do it.

Metaphorically, she had entered into the lowest scholastic grade of immortal entities that now surrounded her and had proven that she could learn to read and write and yes,
speak
in Their tongue.

She reached out and picked up the book. With the tiny vial—and the last drops of Caliph’s blood—she released the lock, taking shortcuts she had been unable to take a year ago. She was above graveside incantations now. Beyond circles and candles and locks of hair. Because the Yillo’tharnah had granted her immortality. They could not kill her now and so, only the blood was essential.

The latch on the book popped open and the hideous beautiful thing opened beneath her, symbols intact. Even Nathaniel’s handwriting in the margins had been preserved. A perfect copy.
Not
a copy, despite being one. That was a confusion derived from language. This was the book. It
was
the
Cisrym Ta.
Its only difference lay in its coordinates.

She opened it to page eight hundred forty-seven directly, near the end of the book—as if she needed to check—and stared down at the page that still contained the jellyfish glyph.

Its shape was the shape of branes touching. The beautiful violence that embodied the instant of discharge. In this glyph’s heart lived the mad excitement and headlong rush so typical of the processes of production: frozen at the moment in which new creation was released into the universe, ready for love and ridicule, nurturing and abuse. But there were sweepings scribed there too, in the shadows of that burst of energy, bruises and casualties. Sacrifices made to the machinery of creation, remnants discarded on the workshop floor that told of the incredible effort of making something new.

Having succeeded with the
Cisrym Ta,
Sena spoke again. this time her vocal cords strained. The pronouncement was far more difficult but the glyph that Nathaniel had slaved over, the glyph that she had finished, vanished from the page.

She stared at the blank sheet in the book and nearly laughed with joy. It had gone out. It had gone out, gone out, gone out! It was real. It had changed from a possibility, from a dream she had only ever seen in a tincture journey, to a real place, a real island in the stars!

The empty page was a victory and for a moment she allowed herself to smile, to look from the fathomless cosmos, from the creation that the glyph had formed, down into another possibility. A tiny one. The secret dream sleeping in her womb.

*   *   *

W
HAT
if she had never opened the book?

But Sena knew. To look away would avert nothing.

In Their eagerness to break through, lay the makings of the pact. And she had made up her mind, forged her purpose from surprising cruelty, from the feral, animal ferocity of a mother protecting its child. It made her unpredictable. It made her capable of startling things. She would not turn away. This was her decision. She would not change it now. She would see this through.

Sena put the
Cisrym Ta
into her pack along with the three crisp sheets of vellum that she had cut from her back. Then she pressed the rest of the pimplota root into a jar that she sealed and wrapped.

She could see through the walls of the Pplarian ship to the great armada of Iycestoke that had surrounded her. They had not shot her down yet in the event that she had the book with her.

She could hear the armored troops on the craft that had silently positioned itself directly above hers. She watched them release drop ropes, saw the men descend and land on the white skin of the Pplarian balloon.

Atop the great modulating gasbag, they began their search for the hatch, the rungs that would lead them down to the decks, and to her.

Yul had left. She was alone.

The great capacitance of holojoules from the murder below Sandren had now been fully spent and there was little purpose in staying here.

Sena gathered up her designer backpack, with the pimplota juice, the book and her other essentials.

Where are you going?
Nathaniel made her jump. He had returned quietly.

“Come and see,” she said. Then with a bloodless word, she vanished from the ship.

*   *   *

A
FTER
Sena spoke she stood for a moment in front of the Howl Mansion, looking up at the unbroken windows that had always filled her with dread. She waited for Nathaniel to trace her movement and arrive. There was no reason to hide from him. Doing so would only fuel his anger.

Snow buried the yard but brown weeds poked through and hissed at her. The mansion looked black, but the 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.