Black Bottle (5 page)

But Arrian is staring at the ship. The prow, covered with beaten copper and silver studs, seems to burn its reflection into the dock waters. At the center of one of the sail’s moons, a silver eye is painted. Arrian can see a dark-skinned woman in white silk stepping gracefully near the landing while bare-chested albinos flex their muscles to get the moorings tight. Their shoulders are red from the sun.

It is a delicious scene.

The woman wears a copper carcanet with red jewels, anklets and bracelets that explode in the sunlight. Part of her face is lined with a curious black design—even darker than her skin—which seems to hold her eye like a diamond in a claw.

The drums fade and Cendrion harps fill the air with soft music. Arrian notices green and blue veils hanging in the gate. They bloom fatly in the wind while the woman and her servants seem to float toward her father.

Caliph checked the time with bleary eyes. The soothing aroma pouring from the lanthorn was a natural stimulant but he closed the book across his stomach. His head ached. He didn’t understand why Sena must have been reading this particular account, for long hours, locked away in this freezing chamber just before she left.

He turned his thoughts toward her return. The possibility of sex and quiet conversation made him long for her. Fire and wine would warm the moment of her arrival. He had already informed the staff of their duties, he had orchestrated everything.

She would tell him all about her trip, what she had done, where she had been. He in turn would tell her about the problem with the Pandragonians. They would sit close together, feet touching.

As the High King, he was forced to keep certain secrets. Maybe that was why he didn’t begrudge her a handful of locked doors; or judge her based on the books she read. In fact, her secrets were part of the allure, part of her intractable luster. The unfathomable still looked out at him from behind her mirror-like eyes.

Caliph felt his lids droop despite the lanthorn’s light. He turned into the bow of the chair and barely heard the journal clatter to the floor.

4
O.S.: A stringed instrument with a woodwind built into the neck. It is held vertically in front of the body and played by blowing and plucking at the same time.

5
A possible transliteration of Jingsade (or Gringling script) into Mallic (or the language of the Lua’groc) and a word whose meaning is generally described in Trade as “deliverer/rescuer” but contextually
often carries
the connotation of “forerunner.”

6
O.S.: A Gringling princess.

CHAPTER

4

In Octul Box, the infamous witch’s skin up-welled with a fantasy of jewels that beaded from her very pores. Dark and dazzling, both the expression on her face and the diamonds, like droplets of night sweat, seemed products of wild ecstasy. Taelin could see flexuous clones of precise lamplight in each gem, positioned by the jewelers who had engrailed her body, snapped lithos and presumably left her with the treasures.

The posters were everywhere: I
NDULGE YOURSELF.
G
ET
T
ICKY!

She passed Jesuexe Furrier where Sena’s pavonine eyes stared back at her.

Taelin shivered.

A letter had come from her father by bird that asked her to do things she didn’t want to do—that she had no intention of doing. She wandered the streets to clear her head.

The morning had remained dismal. Clouds grazed single-story structures, astonishingly low.

While she browsed the upscale streets where ice had been salted away, people passed her with ostentatiously manicured creatures on glittering leashes. In shape, the small faceless monsters resembled furred maggots with bizarre haircuts. Stubby legs propelled them around while drool flowed from gaping holes at the front of their bodies.

Taelin sat down under one of the smooth patinated bronze dragons whose sinuous body made a shape like lightning over Octul Box’s fountained mall. Lily white spatters had put the sculpture in a sour mood. Its eyes indicated it wanted to tear something apart. Taelin could relate.

She had tried to console herself with a bottle of Pandragonian perfume. Sena’s return had been delayed by weather and no new audiences were being granted. Nevertheless, Taelin put her name down for an appointment at the earliest convenience and left a cruestone.

She glanced toward Isca Castle. Even from Octul Box, the blue-black carrion birds played an evil game: leading her gaze repetitiously toward cages made hazy by two hundred yards of intervening mist.

Assuming the Iscan staff (or Sena) granted her an audience she couldn’t help morbidly envisioning herself suspended there, left to rot, while the castle’s mythic spindles marked her grave. Would even her father be able to save her if she wound up on the witch’s bad side?

Pandragor had not executed anyone in over two hundred years. Not that Pandragor was perfect, Taelin mused, but if some of its values rubbed off on these northern backwater rogue nations of the world … well, maybe things would improve. It was simplistic and imperialist and she knew it. But Pandragor was the freest country north or south of the Tebesh Plateau. She believed in it. She trusted it.

She opened her box and took out the pearlescent bottle, fingering the snowy braided cord and ball: its every detail spoke to her of home. It was indulgent but she couldn’t help herself. She pumped the atomizer once and the crisp spices of the desert infused Isca’s icy air, transporting her over eight hundred miles to the south. She lifted her wrist, closed her eyes and inhaled.

Her choices for the rest of the day remained open to possibility. Her list of “to-dos” included finding an architect (at the top) and applying for a permit that would allow her to stand on street corners and talk about religion (at the bottom). She quickly settled on an item in the middle that had been chewing on her thoughts, bothering her irrepressible curiosity.

Having made up her mind, Taelin repacked her perfume and stood up to hunt Isca for
the abomination
.

She had heard it was monumental, gluttonous and shocking; fed regularly by the city’s eccentric types.

According to her map, purchased earlier at a tobacco shop, the path to its lair was a straight line, by streetcar.

Taelin walked to the nearest stop and waited with a small crowd. A thin Naneman in pinstripes scratched his tatty beard. He stabilized a unicycle in the other hand and stood patiently, trying to ignore a pair of strawberry tufted twins that brawled around his ankles. Taelin smiled and gave him one of her cards.

When the streetcar arrived she boarded and found a seat behind one of the oval windows. With a lurch and a flatus of ozone-smelling gas, the car pulled away and soon ducked through a mildew-cankered tunnel where light dwindled under the Hold. They emerged again into sunlight and soon Taelin realized it was time for her to get off. She climbed out onto the tomb-shaded slope of Barrow Hill’s east side, well within view of the startling Avenue of Charms. Startling because of the view.

From the station, framed by decorative wrought iron, Taelin gazed through Temple Hill’s blackened fingers. They groped out of theophanic fog banks, glittering through amethystine piles of smoke. The temples’ myriad spires looked arthritic and lost, floating free of their foundations.

Incense Street broke east from the avenue and snarled with awesome statues and strangely dressed people. Taelin marched down into the morass where vendors sold aspersories and vials of chrism.

Choking-sweet clouds that gushed from thuribles stung her eyes. She pulled her goggles down as she passed a chiseled font depicting a bearded ancient whose mouth let flow a never-ending vomit of cinnabar-colored water. She couldn’t help a second look. His tongue blistered and flagellated with unbelievable growths of rust-colored algae, consuming his lips it seemed with unbridled disease.

People shoved past as she stared.

A pair of giant idols offered her a route between their legs and she took it, raising her palm to a hawker who thrust something like a chicken bone into her face.

She darted out from under the idols, down three marble steps and entered a thicket of black feretories overspread with white latticework. There, between a massive copper cage shaped like a teakettle and an engraver displaying sarcophagi, she found
the abomination
: Sena’s temple.

It welcomed her with blood and screams.

From the tumult of the street, a shriek of pain squealed up into the sky like a firework. A circle opened in the crowd and Taelin found herself on the edge of the ring, watching in horror as four white-robed suffragans from the Church of Kosti Vinish wrestled a group of Nanemen sentries. The southern priests were Ilek, certainly out of Bablemum judging by their purfled hems and shorn heads. The giant red-haired Nanemen opposing them clearly subscribed to Sena’s church.

Taelin flinched as one huge northerner hurled his assailant into a brick wall behind the engraver. The Ilek man’s head gashed open and he fell, bleeding into the gutter. Enraged, the other suffragans drew knives.

But now the city was moving in.

Men in tall rubber boots with dark suits and chrome-blue goggles emerged from the chaos. The cobbles of the ancient street crackled under their feet as chemiostatic swords ripped out into the air and lanced the stones with bolts of lightning. The crowd fell back, instantly cowed. Two of the police drew batons and beat the southerners to the ground.

Taelin covered her mouth and recoiled as the Nanemen sentries stepped back, allowing the Iscan police to twist the unconscious southerners’ arms behind their backs, cuff them and drag them away. One of the suffragans’ heads hung so low his face bounced along the uneven street, slack-jaw snagging momentarily on a brick. Taelin quailed at the sound of snapping teeth.

The Nanemen sentries were not questioned. The police simply disappeared. Taelin wanted to scream. She wanted justice. But already the scene was being effaced by thronging people and she knew she risked everything if she made another scene. Taelin stood with her fingernails gouging her palms.

She was only a few feet away from where the Nanemen had repositioned themselves on either side of the temple’s entrance. Snowflakes dissolved into fuming columns of steam that poured out of grilles flanking the way in. She half-expected the guards to accost her as she took a tentative step forward.

They did not.

There was no edifice in sight. Rather, a disc embedded in the first of a broad slope of steps decreed in several tongues that this was:
the Fane of Sienae Iilool: Omnispecer.

Omnispecer?

The iron-trimmed disc bore a stunning alabaster relief of Sena at its center, eyes poured from pure blue glass.

Bemused, Taelin ascended the white steps, slowly at first, still cautious of the guards. The steps abutted a massive wall of troglodytic clinker brick, encrusted with city soot and birdlime, far older than the smooth cream of treads below her feet. After several yards she had risen above the feretories and could gaze down into the befuddled warren of Incense Street. With no opposition from the Nanemen, she traveled another hundred steps, which put her around a corner. The ramp now climbed east, still hugging the mountain of ancient brick.
Where can this be going?

Ahead she could see the staircase end against a blazing sheet of clouds. To the left: open sky and the tumble of rooftops that spilled down into Ironside. To the right: the vast pile of masonry ascended. The climb burned into her thighs. She stopped to rest and walked over to the safety chain that served as a railing. Four- and five-story buildings piled up over fifty feet below.

The trauma of seeing the clash in the street still lingered. She felt light-headed. Queasy. But mostly she felt alone. She missed the blue-gold streets of polished marnite, the tittering sands and whispering tea trees. She missed figs and honey cakes and the vast bulrushes beneath Pandragor’s palatial quartz terraces where the Bainmum spread out into the White Marshes and fed the irrigation lines.

She missed warmth.

Inhaling the thick smoke-filled cold of the city and fighting off vertigo as zeppelins wheeled overhead, Taelin started climbing again. By the next corner she had doubled her height above the street. From her new perspective she could see that she stood on one of the edges of an enormous pyramid of brick whose slopes continued to rise above her. The steps led on, traveling south, but she could not yet see the peak. Or could she? She pushed herself up the broad treads toward the next corner.

Reaching it, she found herself on a dizzying precipice with a historical marker that told her she stood two hundred sixty feet above the city. The marker formed the southeast corner of a vast plaza that topped the immense frustum of brick.

From the top of the stairs she overlooked the entire city with the exception of the Hold: Isca Castle reared triumphantly to the north. Everything else spilled away into brown-black spindles of shingle and stone.

From the enormity of the sky, Taelin turned her attention inward, to the objects at the center of the square. A dais of some buttery white mineral seemed to levitate just above the acre-wide surface. It consisted of three layers, or steps, topped with a hypaethral grove of black columns. Although the exact arrangement spread too broadly for her to be certain, she got the impression that the dais formed a huge disc and that the columns spiraled into its center.

Her skin prickled. Tapestries of red silk undulated, effecting a kind of sanctum that seemed to float, cordoned from but flirting with the sky. It felt like the ground was tipping beneath her feet as she caught provocative, dizzying glimpses of people bending amid the black pillars, cradling silver vessels, glancing in her direction before vanishing again into the billowing scarlet canopies.

Everything was in motion. The clouds, the distant zeppelins, the sails of cloth and the people behind them. Even the vast milky dais that supported the columns seemed to bob slightly …