He put one into his mouth and thumbed the bandage he had used as a bookmark. He scowled skeptically at the words on the page.
When I ascended on the syrupy fumes of pimplota blossoms and left the luminous moths behind, my soul went south—searching for a phylactery. Below me, friends and flowers burnt like incense sticks beneath the Rain of Fire. Their smoke carried me. I rose and crossed the sky to float down into the desert, downy as a bit of ash.
Like worms of flame working through a cinder, my grief consumed me. My daughter was gone.
I wanted to die.
But when I alit on the aubergine skin of a woman reclined on a palanquin, I burnt straight in. She was a rani, a princess of the dunes. Not only was she my salvation, but my first entry to the world of dying flesh.
Her clean dark body carried me through beds and temples and pools open to the moons, in and out of silk and cabric and satin by the yard. In the evenings we drenched ourselves in sandalwood winds above the River Ghaan, which has long since been effaced by fifteen thousand years of sand.
Never have I been so rich as when I was with her. The very sheets of tissue kept in the scented box beside our water-throne18 were trimmed with golden thread: an extravagance that pales in comparison to a hundred thousand more.
She was the enemy, a rumor we barely knew at Soth. But her power was magnificent. At dusk she basked in the celestial glow of silent engines, blue-white light that burnt across the river from the temple walls—and so, with the sinking of my Gringling isle, I laid prejudice aside.
I took what I could get.
Because the journey of the tincture, which had brought me to her, was not a certain thing. To permanently transmigrate is a possibility at best, rather than a dependable plan; if a vessel cannot be found, if wind off the sun should turn your flight awry, or if you are bewitched by lights and wander into other lands, there is no coming back. To escape death by shuwt tincture requires that you embrace the very thing. It is a journey that flows from a vial with a fatal dose.
My outcomes have been lucky in each and every case, but the novice should certainly forbear.
In my first vessel, the whip of manipulation proved elusive. Tucked inside my sable princess, I remained a passenger, gazing out the window at the countryside rushing by. Only after several hundred years of absorbing the world through her skin did I obtain a taste of true dominion as her mind began to fail. I can honestly say that I was more responsible than she in fashioning her tomb.
Luck again had found me.
I began my preparations thanks to her endless wealth. Never again would it be so easy. I had but to move her mouth and a nation of slaves obeyed.
I ordered an array of three rubies cut as a trial run and melted all her jewelry into a bobbin of platinum wire. Two of the scarlet stones were large. The third I had chiseled to perfect dimensions so that, were I of a mind to dip it in enamel, it could have passed as one of my teeth.
The wires were fitted to my arms and chest, my lower back and thighs. They traced my throat with preconceived designs. It was a kind of armor made of air. A kind of intricate lie.
It would prove useless in the end.
But it was a start.
In the last days of her life, her slaves accompanied me into her tomb with ten days worth of food. Then I ordered them out and had the portals sealed. I lit the torches and sat in the empty passageways of stone and thought about my daughter, abandoned in the darkness of Soth. I imagined her torches had long run out. I imagined her alone, frightened, wanting an answer, wanting a friendly voice to tell her what had gone wrong.
But that would never come. It was my holomorphy, my math along with the Ublisi’s that had failed her. Her wails would go unanswered. Her pleading prayers would not be heard. She would throw tantrums in the dark. She would scream until her voice left her. She would hunger for the taste of food—but would suffer on without it. It made me sick to think of this and that I had no means to reach her.
I could not even use a tincture to penetrate the depths, lest my untethered soul be lost to the Yillo’tharnah in the dark.
I thought about the rubies. One for me and one for her and the tooth for someone else …
The wires were a failure. The rubies remained undarkened, in their little frames of wood.
A test. This is just a test, I thought. So I ate my last meal and fitted the gems across my eyes. Then I lay back on my bier of stone to give my desert princess some semblance of dignity in death. Then I drank the tincture for a second time. My lovely ancient queen. She may have been the only woman outside my daughter for whom I ever bore a facsimile of love.
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:
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
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
