Black Bottle Read online

  Taelin lifted her eyes from the billboard and found her goal in the darkness, an impressive and ornate house on the edge of the hill. It stood in black counterpoint to the fog. The silhouette of the House of Mywr’Din was tall and grim, much different than styles found in Pandragor. This was her uncle’s house. Taelin trudged the final thirty yards through the swirling snow, lifted the door’s heavy knocker and let it fall.

  It bounced loudly against the brass plate. A few moments later the mascaron swung back, a young man’s face appeared in its place and bid her welcome to Isca City.

  1P: Great Cloud Rift.

  2Pandragonian charm against evil spirits.

  3Not everyone would have wanted High King Caliph Howl raised from the dead.

  CHAPTER

  2

  High King Caliph Howl tapped his fingers on a sheaf of paper. It was one hundred twenty-three pages of fresh print that had nothing to do with the parlor full of cigars and music that twittered just the other side of a twelve-foot cherry wood door. The evening of entertainment was not for him. It was for Nuj Ig’nos and the other diplomats.

  The papers puffed slightly at the edges every time Caliph’s fingers struck them; the desk lamp imposed a sharp, ice-bright rink of light onto sentences filled with names and commerce and promises and threats. He was supposed to be thinking up enigmatic calculations that would transform the stack of Pandragonian demands into something that would serve the Duchy of Stonehold rather than undermine it. But after an hour he felt the hot itch of pressure at the back of his neck. Despite the coolness of the room, heat coursed over his shoulders, under his arms, up into his face.

  He pawed at his chin. The cup of warm milk and honey on his desk—gone cold—had failed to help.

  Finally, he opened a drawer and raked through staplers and gadgetry for a bottle of artificially flavored tablets. After eating two, he tossed the bottle back into the drawer and kicked it shut. The gurgling pain in his stomach subsided.

  Maybe there was no way to satisfy the Pandragonian demands. Apart from turning over the throne and making Stonehold an unincorporated, organized territory of the empire, something like the tragedy that had befallen Bablemum, nothing was going to make Nuj Ig’nos happy.

  You fuckers, he thought. Out there eating Iscan caviar, drinking comets, staring at the ensemble of violinists wearing bare-backed dresses in the middle of Oak just for you! And you hand me this—koan. And you already know how it’s going to end.

  A soft, persistent knocking resonated from the room’s official entrance.

  Caliph picked up the stack of papers, tapped its edge on the leather surface of his desk and took it across the room to the trash. The trash consisted of a black envelope. It would bear the document’s name and date until it merited resurrection. Caliph sealed it and placed it in a wire basket.

  He smiled wanly as the knocking persisted. Only one man knocked in such a fashion. Caliph strode from the bookshelves, over the patterned carpet and cracked the door. A volcanic glow immediately widened and burst across the threshold.

  A thin figure bowed from the waist, shadow streaming into the room. Alani’s head, as always, was shorn and his powder-white goatee was diplomat-perfect. Slender liver-spotted hands folded reverently across his black vest. Stuffing the vest, pleats of white silk had been stamped with an asymmetrical brooch of featureless silver.

  Caliph stepped back and made a theatrical gesture with his arm. The spymaster straightened and walked in.

  As the door shut, Caliph started talking. “The accord is a sham.”

  Alani’s voice, like whisky, came with a warm ripple of corrosion. “Of course it is.”

  “And this conference in Sandren we’re supposed to go to … is starting to feel like a trap,” continued Caliph. He returned slowly to the cold oasis of light on his desk.

  “This came for you.” Alani handed him an envelope.

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Yes.”

  Caliph unsheathed the note and snapped it open.

  “‘King Howl,’” he read aloud. “‘We feel compelled to make it abundantly clear that your speech on the fifteenth is of critical importance. Do not deviate from the clear and narrow dialogue that will lead to warm relations with the Six Kingdoms.’”

  It was not signed. Caliph snarled at the page. The Pandragonians were far from subtle.

  “Do you still plan to go?” asked Alani.

  “Of course.”

  Alani reached into his vest. “Good.” He drew out a pipe. “Understanding their motives, you can’t fault them for being unhappy over the reunification. They’d rather you were dead … and all of Stonehold splintered.”

  “Well, I’m not dead,” said Caliph. But the assertion forced him to reflect. At least not anymore.

  It had been what? Twenty months since his failure in the skies over Burt? He wouldn’t allow himself to relive the full tragedy of the war in front of Alani, but he felt it. Enough sour, cold regret to pucker his insides.

  Alani waited quietly, patiently. He had once waited for two days for a man’s head to cross in front of a three-foot pane of glass. Caliph pondered this little-known fact as he watched the emotionless lines in his spymaster’s face.

  Finally Caliph said, “Metholinate has to be a factor.” He moved around behind his desk and leaned against a windowsill that supported enormous slabs of glass.

  Alani made a grunt. “They don’t want gas for Iycestoke, or Pandragor…”

  “No,” said Caliph. “They have solvitriol power and bariothermic. They just want to own us outright. They’ll keep our trade agreements intact but they’ll be inside the government then. They’ll be here, in the north. For the first time. And you know what that means?

  “They’ll control how we use or don’t use solvitriol tech.”

  Alani snicked his tongue against his teeth several times. “Are you sure? Are you sure that’s what this is about?”

  The way Alani asked, Caliph felt as though a drop of melt water had fallen from the great casement behind him and trickled down his neck. “You think it’s something different? Why?”

  The spymaster had not lit his pipe. He folded his arms and relaxed against the desk. “It’s a long way, reaching across the Cloud Rift, through the Healean Range, to this patch of mud and ice; especially when they have enemies grinding at them from next door. Even if we opened the floodgates on solvitriol development, we’re ten years behind them. They don’t need to be pushing so hard. Not now. By all accounts, as the saying goes, they have bigger fish…”

  Caliph pulled his lip. It was true. Why were the Pandragonians willing to extend themselves all the way to the top of the world—to the Glacier Rise? Preventing solvitriol secrets from leaving Stonehold was in the south’s interest. But could they really stop that with broad political maneuvers? No. Alani was right. That sort of thing fell to espionage.

  Why was Pandragor pushing so hard?

  Neither of them spoke.

  Finally Caliph broke the silence. “Maybe the conference on the fifteenth will turn up some answers. I want you to come with me.”

  “I was planning on it,” said Alani. “Did you really think I’d let you go alone? They’re going to try and end this whole thing while you’re there. And I mean end it.”

  The conviction in Alani’s voice gave Caliph pause. “Well, that’s why you’re coming with. If I don’t scratch out some allies while we’re there, it’s not going to matter. Maybe the Stargazers—”

  Alani touched his beard and seemed to wince.

  “What?” asked Caliph. “You don’t think we can win them over?”

  “It’s not that. I’m sure they’re the best chance we have of finding an ally south of the Rift but—”

  “But what?”

  “They don’t have much to offer. Bablemum is a better representation of how the south feels about us, your majesty.”

  Caliph scowled. “Those priests in Gas End demonstrating again?”

  “Yes
.” Alani rolled his pipe in his fingers. “They don’t like Sena.”

  “Well, I don’t like the south.” Caliph felt his face flush. What right was it of theirs to have a say in who he slept with?

  “Along those lines,” Alani shifted gears ever so slightly, “the House of Mywr’Din has a visitor.”

  “From the south, I take it?” Caliph lifted his eyes from the desk lamp. He read the information in Alani’s expression. “Pandragor? Are you serious?”

  “Indeed. She arrived at West Gate and took a cab, which let her off early. She walked the rest of the distance to Salmalin’s house via back streets.”

  “Reeeeally.”

  Alani held up a tiny black gem in his fingers. “What I don’t understand is, if she’s a spy, why is she handing out these … to strangers?”

  “A cruestone?”

  Alani placed it in Caliph’s hand along with something small and white. “Yes, and here’s her card.”

  “‘Church of Nenuln’?” Caliph read.

  Alani smiled for the first time. “She’s the daughter of Pandragor’s attorney general.” His smile broadened. “We can use this.”

  * * *

  AFTER the spymaster had left, Caliph turned down the gas lamp. The resulting ineffectual ringlet of blue flame allowed moonlight to resurface the room; it rolled from the window over the desk and down the Greymoorian carpet. He noticed patterns moving across the floor and turned to discover that it had started snowing.

  He flipped open the brass latches and pulled the windows in. Icy air gushed over his body. It smelled of smoke and pine: urban and rural mixing here at the edge of the city.

  Sena’s arrival had been delayed by weather. Her airship would dock tomorrow rather than today, a homecoming that carved his internal calendar up with anxiety.

  Theirs had not been a warm intimate coupling, sharing breakfast and mutual goals on the balcony. Rather, Caliph found it discomfiting that scandal sheets like the Varlet’s Pike had mostly gotten it right, painting their relationship as a hot and cold bodice-ripper headed for emotional destitution.

  Maybe it was his fault. He wanted daily rituals with her that somehow fit his impossible schedule. That might have been feasible if she had been a bauble, content with parties and shopping and interior design.

  But Sena showed up for parties only as a favor to him, seldom went shopping and left the look of Isca Castle to designers who marketed their taste as hers and thenceforth made a killing. Sena had her own schedule. And it was rigorous. When it did mesh with his, the outcome was never predictable.

  After a long time Caliph closed the windows and snapped the latches. The Pandragonians had gone to bed.

  He left the room, head floating down the endless cavernous hallways, past the banks of palladian glass and countless twelve-foot doors to other rooms. His tether to his exhausted body felt tenuous. His skin itched. But he knew he wasn’t going to sleep.

  Insomnia had vexed him ever since the wake.

  In the grand scope, his life had remained unchanged by the events of Thay second, Day of Charms. He could remember the taste of the metal sticking through his chest. So strange that he could taste it. The fire. The crash. All slowed to the speed of a parachute seed drifting over Thilwicket Fen. That was the strange part. The part that had changed.

  He could remember, back at college, standing on North Oast Road west of the cemetery, looking out across Thilwicket as dawn hit the trees; standing there, watching the swarm of gossamer seeds float above the fen like a million illuminated insects. For some reason he connected that moment to the moment of his death: that was the subtle way Thay second had changed him. That morning on North Oast Road was important. Had become important. And he didn’t know why.

  Caliph sorted through a ring of keys and tried several before finding the right one. He hadn’t been to the library since Sena had locked it ten months ago and boarded the Odalisque for her trip.

  It felt like trespassing even though she hadn’t explicitly forbidden him from coming here. In fact, she had used only three words to describe her desires concerning the place where she kept all her precious notes and books: “Keep it locked.”

  The key scraped hollowly inside the metal aperture, a sound that traveled through Caliph’s bones. He pushed the door open and paused at the threshold, looking in. It had stopped snowing and a thin, watery band of moonlight ghosted the blackness, streaming from a small upper window. It touched nothing. As if the pillars and bookcases shrouded in midnight were being given deferential treatment. As if the southern moon had decided it was better to leave this dark socket undisturbed.

  Why am I here? He supposed it was prologue to her return, a way of reacquainting himself by standing in the place that very nearly defined her.

  Except that it didn’t feel like Sena.

  His hand nearly trembled. A presence resonated from the blackness. It beat his cheeks as if the darkness itself were trying to push him back. A drapery charged with static. Galvanic waves throbbed against his skin.

  He took a step into the room and stopped: the animal part of him was afraid. Had some tendril drifted? Some shroudlike form? Maybe a cloud brushing the moon?

  Caliph groped for the switch like a child. His pulse fluttered, puerile and timid. While his body cooled, terror gelling around him, his face clenched defiantly. He stared hard into the darkness.

  There was a snap followed by a hiss as the gas lamp bubbled to life and spread rheumy light through the chamber’s wood and leather angles. His heart caught as if a cog had been spinning, out of gear. Now re-engaged, it slowed.

  The room’s fireplace emitted strangled sighs; breathed on a blackboard smeared with formulae. There was an empty lectern nearby. A stray draft disturbed the powder and a specter of dust spiraled off the chalk rail as Caliph, very slowly, crossed the room.

  Before him, a table with mammoth legs supported a sprawl of books, maps and loose pages. The table’s vast leather surface was further arrayed with colored notes stuck to manuscripts, pages, even the table itself. Gnawed pencils in the lair of an academic fiend seemed to be the only things not in meaningful locations.

  Caliph circled the enormous table, looking at Sena’s meticulous research. Her lanthorn hung above the middle of the sprawl, too far for him to reach, its lenses gray and dark. There was a single chair with comfortable-looking leather upholstery that Caliph tapped thoughtfully. What is the harm, he thought, in seeing what she’s been working on?

  Back in the house on Isca Hill, his uncle had taught him a small obscure word that required no blood. A curiosity that had earned fear-based opprobrium from several college professors. He spoke it now to ignite Sena’s lanthorn, which smoldered into absinthe-colored light, immediately soothing his tired eyes. A warm woody smell of spice and flowers flowed out from it and pushed Caliph down into the chair. The light picked words from the pages more clearly, it seemed, than direct sun.

  Soon, he was following arrows in the notes, reading bracketed paragraphs, flipping to cross-references and devouring a terrifying set of journal entries that fed him ceaselessly into the brilliant ache of a morning unbacked by sleep.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Journal Entry: C. Wind: 492, Y.o.T. Betrayal: E—Black Moon, 24th: Arkhyn Hiel.

  All my servants are dead.

  I watch the nilith ooze across ubiquitous wet jungle stones and banyatha leaves. Gaudy blue and orange-speckled bodies burble across the slabs of my fallen estate, make sucking noises under Naobi’s light and leave trails like alien wine—the last traces of madness, one might think, from dreams of bygone revelry.

  But there were never any parties at this house. Never any guests that surreptitiously made love in the flowering gardens or stumble-danced to the tune of the melikon.4

  As I write in the stifling ruin of my study, I feel little remorse that my fantastic estate has fallen to the slow, quiet suffocation of the jungle and the weird mating rituals of giant slugs.

  I was born in P
andragor where the skies sear your eyeballs with blue and the sands are the color of crystallized honey. I grew like the greenery in a narrow strip along the Bainmum River, but did not stay there long. My people, the Despche, have a saying: a standing man withers like a tree on the dunes.

  I moved with the sand, blowing south and east off the Tebesh Plateau. Beyond the Sea of Grass and the Theocracy of the Stargazers, I went south between the Great Desert Rauch and the Afran Swamp. I have been to the north but most of my life was taken by the jungle.

  Five years ago I turned from exploration and treasure hunting in order to carry something special out of the rain forest. Its aperture was small. We had built a forge around it and ringed it with numbers.

  I was meant to deliver it to the priests in Iycestoke, but decided not to. I knew what I had.

  Tonight is the anniversary of the night in 487 when my indignation for the priests finally boiled over and I achieved my smallest nevertheless most notorious crime. I butchered the conclave. They were more and less than human. I piled them on the altar. Their arms drooled a final offering. After that I fled, bringing half my servants and much of my wealth with me. The journey south took several months but the Iycestokian constables took longer—too much longer—to solve my crime.

  It was after nightfall on the twentieth when I crested the final hill. In the volcanic glow of K’rgas and Jag’Narod I beheld again as I had so many times before, crawling like a cheerless riot of kudzu, the endless expanse of the Khloht Jungles.

  Behind me was the roar of the twin mountains; ahead of me the roar of insects and inside of me the roar of insoluble guilt, not for what I had done, but for what I was about to do.

  Hidden from city detectives by artifices stolen from the Cabal and supported by a host of machetes that flickered in unison from the grips of my pale servants, I cut our path into the ruffling black rib cage of a fungal-smelling shadow of a land, never to return to the sprawling urban sweep that had been my occasional home.