Black Bottle Read Free Page B

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.”
    *   *   *
    A FTER 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