Black Bottle (27 page)

When the tincture took hold, I tried to lie still so that her body would not be disfigured with the contortions of my undoing. And then, as her heart failed like a worm after rainfall, trapped by its own blindness on that concrete slab, I found myself standing above her. Three hundred years made it hard to say good-bye, but time was short for me to find another vessel. So I started walking.

I left the tomb and the desert behind. I went north, through mountain and jungle, across the Lake of Sky.

Time bent for me—but always forward. My journey seized in a vise, bowed beneath a sledge, perpendicular, until it nearly broke. But just before my tether snapped, I found him, an untold thousand years away: a boy playing with his brother in the sand, teasing scorpions with a stick as if to say:
remember.

I had not yet used tincture to see Corwin on the parapet with the centipede but that was hardly relevant. With time and the tincture, with enough centuries of memory, one learns that everything has happened before. In the moments before I sidestepped my destruction and walked into the boy, I saw many things.

That boy’s name was Arkhyn Hiel.

I crawled up through his bones to roost in his rib cage like a tumor. We played late that night.

Perhaps because his mind was young, I found my way into his brain far more quickly. Though my assimilation was swift, certain inclinations and gentle dispositions that belonged to him ultimately became mine. Toward the end of his use, I broke even those and assumed absolute command. But these permanent journeys, you understand, are only
forward.
It is the temporary ones that lead us most often into the past.

Again, I digress.

Arkhyn was born in Pandragor where the skies sear your eyeballs with blue and the sands are the color of crystallized honey. In a narrow strip of green that grows along the Bainmum River, I grew up inside him, chasing viperflies and moeritherium.

His organs were sound, devoid of fatal flaws. No blueprints for malignance. No sequence ticking down to infirmity and collapse. I would be able to run this body hard.

When my new father moved our family to Iycestoke I found the Cabal for the first time. They were searching for the book. I stayed late at the synagogue under the pretense of prayer but eavesdropped on the priests instead. They spoke in quiet voices behind a purple drape.

I was clumsy. They discovered me. But I confounded their impulse to murder me with my ancient Gringling tongue. They discerned that I was a precocious child, sly and willing to take their secret oaths. They put the Hilid Mark above my navel and I vowed to serve them to the end.

Little could they know the monster they had let into their ranks. I made a banquet of their texts, every rumor they had collected about the book. It was as if their organization had been established for the single purpose of teaching me what had happened since I lost my daughter to the cataclysm at Soth.

As my brain acquired secrets it became tunneled and deep. Paranoia flowed like an eternal hot breath from the priests’ yawning mouths, until I was coated every inch with their talk, their armor and their weapons.

I was soon coated with sweat and blood and the deep fungal grime of the jungle. My toil had turned from collecting knowledge to collecting treasure for the Cabal and finally to quests for less practical spoils. I had already traveled to the markless deserts and, by memory alone, unearthed enough riches from the disintegrated empire of my rani queen to fund a thousand lives.

Between the desert princess and the body of Arkhyn Hiel lay uncounted years. These are the mysteries of the tincture.

In my modern life, the Cabal sent me to Veyden villages, searching for a new kind of gold. In unweeded ruins I pieced together the languages of Khloht and realized the Veydens had discovered our carvings—Gringling carvings—on tumbled slabs of stone. Our secrets had leaked into the tribes. The Veydens had rediscovered the recipe for our tinctures. Such familiarity allowed me to make too swift friends with Veyden elders along the equator.

One sultry winter afternoon when the sky was sliced open like an elongated wound and red light streamed over Bujait Mountain, I made a terrible mistake.

Having grown careless in my observances of village protocol and mistaking myself for a full-fledged member of the tribe, I did the unthinkable.

How can an entity as old as me, so full of accumulated knowledge fall to…? But this is the path of men. To endlessly repeat our errors by sleeping in our flesh. The flesh moves while the mind sleeps and it will justify itself, atop a mound of bodies if need be.

It was hot that day. No hotter than normal, I suppose. But the heat had built up in us, like birds in roasters. The jungle steamed and stank.

I was thrown out of the village near the hot springs at Krom. The mistake I had made was simple. I asked the Hija of the village to let me see the burial ground of his fallen kings, a secret the Veydens kept to prevent demonic possession of the royal bodies. My error cost me eight months’ worth of labor and I could not return to the Cabal empty-handed.

It was becoming critical that I find the gold.

I remember Khloht’s hot whisper sent a shiver through me that afternoon because, as I considered my options … the sweat rolling down my back, I knew there were no laws that reached from Iycestoke. There would be no eyes to see. None that mattered. My men were angry and so was I. We did terrible work under that red-streaked sky.

I remember there was a boy in the village. So beautiful. I wanted to protect him even after I had stilled all his friends. His death seemed to cause it, as if his body was an ember. When he touched the ground the whole village blossomed with fire and reminded me of the beauties of Soth.

I returned with
’s
19
uln. Just as the priests had asked. They did not know I would keep it for myself.

Caliph stared in disbelief at the foreign words. He looked at the three-letter name written in the Unknown Tongue and pronounced it aloud, softly to himself. “Naen.” Naen-uln? Nenuln? But what was uln? It was not a language Caliph had ever seen. Whatever it meant, it seemed too great a coincidence. Maybe Taelin Rae knew who Arkhyn Hiel was. He decided to ask her as soon as the
Odalisque
was ready to fly.

I arrived in the Six Kingdoms, haunted, broken, gibbering like a fool. But I had it. I had found it and pulled it impossibly out of thin air. That was when I discarded my life. I locked my journals away and put the new gold I had found at the bottom of a box. After arriving in Iycestoke, I sent it away from me, by unmarked courier, to the empire of the west, to family that would keep it safe until I could be sure.

My plan in motion, I exacted my anger on the priests and piled them in a dripping heap across the altar. In the event of capture, I had prepared tincture but took pains to cover my escape. I took my private army of loyal mercenaries south with an escort of Despche visionaries and fled into the heart of Khloht. My servants had no idea what I had done. They built me a house deep in the jungle by this strange ocean and I poisoned them in return so that none would know the way.

These are the tokens of love. What a father is willing to do for a chance to find his daughter in the dark … before it is too late.

I wish you could see how my quill presses the paper, my darling child, so richly. The precious Pandragonian ink I brought with in quantity loops and dashes with a scratching sound too loud for this empty stone house to bear.

What I have done to reach you, you will never know.

My true plans did not even begin until I reached the jungle, when I lived on tincture, moving here and there, not permanently. Rather I went out to a host of chosen bodies, flitting from one to the next. I became a scholar at Desdae riffling through books; an eccentric entrepreneur who bought a church and set about renovations in the north; a Lua’groc fingerling that spread the plague through Isca’s heart so that the north alone could survive the disease’s second run.

And in this way, I have written time. I know what is going to happen. You cannot stop my exquisite, burnished,
platinum
designs …

But if you are lovely to me, I will write you in.

I can still do this, though now, finally, my time of tincture use over. Even Nathan Howl is dead … crushed by his own nightmares (my nightmares) when I threw his body from the sea wall in an attempt to verify Their love. Yes, I was fooled.

They do not love me. They have never loved me. You may take some sadistic pleasure in this. They can only love the Sslia, as I now know, and I am sure They must have laughed in Their alien way as I threw myself into the mist and died against the rocks below.

Wouldn’t you agree, Sslia? Wouldn’t you agree?

I have foreseen your eyes, reading these words as only the Sslia can see. Don’t you see the number is three?

I cut them.

Three rubies in the dark, still resting with my desert queen.

There is room for you. I will write you in. I tell you this from the ruins, while the nilith gurgle like deep-throated birds. Oozing beneath banyatha leaves: they are the song of mated love. I will write you in because I have listened to the jungle. You will belong to me.

I am a voice on a page. You think you can read me. You think you can pick and choose what words to take.

But I am real—a theater of the grotesque. I have become a quiet rustling horror like Khloht itself, flesh the color of the canopy. I dream awake that tarantulas have nested in my eyes. The directions I left to the Chamber were theoretical, you should be advised.

I know your journey. And your task.

I once assumed it would be mine. You should not go to the Chamber.

Do not think that because I am dissolving with my books into food for millipedes that I have no power or insight. I am offering you a chance at escape. All you have to do is heed my words, listen to my advice. I will carry you. I will
write you in
!

When I was a child I wanted to save people. Even before I became Arkhyn Hiel. That is why I welcomed the Ublisi at Soth; why we gathered in the garden on my daughter’s birthday, red book in hand. I wanted to save people: return them to Ahvelle.

Do you see? Omnispecer?
Do you see?

You must leave what you love behind. This is the axiom of life. Go to Soth for me, where I cannot go.

Collect my daughter. If you do this thing for me, I will write you in and you and I will see the world freeze in gorgeous brittle panorama, like desiccated insect wings.

Zylich-a-au-bi, Sslia.

You will find me in the south.

Caliph shut the book. Engrossed as he was, he was wrenched out of the text by one of his men.

“Majesty? Just to inform you, sir. The
Odalisque
is ready. Ready for departure?”

The soldier’s strange tone indicated that Caliph must have looked as dazed as he felt.

He rubbed his eyes and checked his timepiece. His stomach growled, gurgled really, upset by the erratic schedule he was keeping.

But there was no time for breakfast. He had to get down the mountain. He had an important meeting below.

As he stood up and nodded that yes he was ready for departure, he thought about his uncle. At the same time, a particular and disturbing memory of Sena reached out to him from their time at college. She had been lying on the floor of the library with him, propped on pillows, books spread across the deep soft carpet. They had been studying for hours. It was her eighth year and final exams were only a few weeks away. Soon she would be graduating, leaving him behind.

Sena had rolled from her stomach to her side and propped her temple on her palm. The weight of her head had tugged her left eye into a teardrop shape. She had smiled and said, “I wish I could have met your uncle.”

18
Such were the extravagances of the Yilthid queens living on the cusp of the Rauch Desert.

19
U.T. Approximate pronunciation: Nayn.

CHAPTER

21

Sena stood ankle-deep. Phosphorescent currents slurped and swirled in tidal pools within the disintegrating floor. Eddies of foam and sputtering bubbles sprayed from sudden vortices that gurgled throughout the pits.

The Chamber’s floor, like a glassy black coral, contained holes within holes and the Chamber itself was a series of cysts within the pillar’s husk. To Sena, it seemed fitting, an almost beautiful kind of symbol for what this monument contained. While it looked like an accident of tides and stone, this too—all of it—was a softened collop where reality met dream.

Here, golden ovoids seared the cochlear darkness without casting true light.

Sena noticed where Naen’uln’s body had burnt through stone and air. Naen’uln meant
Naen’s gold.
Where Her massive bulk had brushed and smoldered through the papery skin of
here,
Her over-embellished shape appeared. The golden ovoids within the Chamber were not physical objects. They were literally Naen’s gold—holes that revealed the color of the God-Thing’s skin.