Black Bottle

FOR

BARNO

&

JADA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WANT to thank Ricardo Bare, Alan Blomquist, Christopher Duden, Joe Houston, Marc Laidlaw, Andrea Lee, Brady Monson, and Gary (William) Webb. I also want to thank Sandy and the Oyster boys for more inspiration than I can shake sticks at.

With regards to other details such as patience, answering my questions, and generally being cool: thanks to Tobias Buckell and Alan Campbell. To my agent, Paula Guran, thank you again. To Paul Stevens in particular: I couldn’t have finished this without you. And the rest of the crew at Tor, also and again: thank you for the opportunity to tell this story. To my girls, I love you.

PART ONE

There is an island paradise

where truth is absolute.

Once you arrive, you cease to exist.

—YACOB SKIE

CHAPTER

1

Love and warmth and family portraits were gone. Taelin had said good-bye to all of her friends. She walked resolutely, powered on disdain and a small cold brightness between her breasts.

Her journey stretched out behind her like a continental seam. She had struggled to get here, clawing out of the south, away from her father, across Eh’Muhruk Muht1 and up through the raw drizzle of the Country of Mirayhr. Her most recent complication had been the bone-jarring twenty-one miles between Clefthollow and the spot where her chemiostatic car had whined to a halt in deep mud. She had left her driver two miles back with half-fare, opting to slog alone with her only suitcase through freezing rain. Now, at last, she stood within eyeshot of this dismal country’s heart: the capital of the Duchy of Stonehold. Huge walls appeared from the weather, hammer and tongs, strung with vapor and steam, like pig iron pulled from its first bath.

Glaring at the towers, Taelin lifted her crimson-lensed goggles back from her eyes and let them snap into brunette shadow. So this is the top of the world? she thought. This is the barbaric Naneman stronghold no one dares touch?

Stonehold had been founded by criminals. In 700 S.K. Felldin Barak had pardoned several thousand Naneman murderers on the condition they explore and settle the north. The ruffians’ progeny had sunk deep into the mountains, turned their backs on the south and—eight hundred years ago, give or take—declared their independence. This cold, rugged land subsisted on fisheries and metholinate gas and a modest export of caviar and other luxury goods. She would have struggled to find it on a map until last year.

Now, being here, wrapped in winter, awash in the legendary ferocity of this place, a chill deeper than weather sank into Taelin. This was what she was up against.

She remembered the day, the place she had been sitting and the cool prickle that had traveled across her forearms when she had heard that the diplomatic vessel Baasha One had been shot down over the Valley of Nifol. That was the summer before last, when the world had changed and the whole south had erupted into a hive of buzzing opinions. It was the day that had brought the Duchy of Stonehold to her attention.

The short, horrible story was that the victims of the crash had been picked over by northerners. Everyone in Pandragor was appalled. Taelin had shared a national sense of disgust.

Then it had leaked that solvitriol blueprints had been in Baasha One’s wreckage. Solvitriol secrets had fallen into the barbarians’ hands!

The papers had kept the drama going, an entire summer of real-life cloak and dagger. Taelin had to admit that despite her fear over Stonehold’s solvitriol program, the daily news had offered a kind of terrible entertainment. Shame had followed her to the newsstand every day where she indulged in Pandragonian accounts of her country’s diplomats: arrested in the far north. The saga of accusations, interrogations and executions had lasted for several weeks. Everyone had assumed that Pandragor would get involved.

Her father had told her that was precisely the articles’ purpose: to whip up public sentiment. Pandragor was going to throw the gauntlet down right in the middle of Stonehold’s brewing civil war.

And it had almost happened.

But one day, all the propaganda, all the support drummed up by the press had fallen flat when a Pandragonian airship full of diplomats had gone down under Stonehavian guns. Not the guns of Caliph Howl, the High King that Pandragor opposed, but the guns of Saergaeth Brindlestrom, the provincial leader Pandragor had been backing.

When the very arm that the emperor had been sponsoring stabbed him in the back, what else could Pandragor do? Emperor Junnu had backed down. He had said in an address that the south would “let the north sort out the north.”

*   *   *

TAELIN looked hard at the walls of Isca City.

Despite her objectives, she had never really trained with a velvet gun or a compression sling. But not all assaults required weapons. Taelin wasn’t going up against the government. She wasn’t going to be a spy like her father wanted her to be. Not exactly. She was here on a mission of famicide, tearing down a reputation rather than a body.

What had driven her here, alone, was not what anyone would have guessed. Her reason for undertaking this crazy personal quest was not related to the diplomats who had died or the possibility that solvitriol weapons were being made in the north.

She didn’t count herself smarter than Emperor Junnu but she did believe that her reasons for being here were above politics.

Weary to the bone, she stumped along, steam escaping her lips with every step.

She imagined Isca City at the center of the deepening cold, the stronghold of the ice-blue eyes that had mocked her from glossy magazines. She had never met Sena Iilool, but lithos and rumors described her well enough.

Taelin reached for the demonifuge2 beneath her jabot. It moved between her breasts like a living thing. The heartbeat of a mouse. Its cool smoothness reassured her.

The demonifuge had not always been a necklace. Discovered in her grandfather’s trunk along with a menagerie of other heirlooms, she had taken it to a jeweler to have the chain affixed. The jeweler had been