Wealthy buyer of the bottles

The wealthy buyer of the bottles is a nobleman of White City in the Sürgün Günlükleri ("Exile Chronicles") campaign whose name is not given here. By the account of the Horned trader, he paid a high price for every bottle of a rare material on condition of taking all or none, though the Scarred old hunter needed it for his grandchild. The companions wondered whether he truly needed it, merely wanted to be safe, or meant some revenge on the hunter, and whether he had ties to the old Veren cult; the trader gave his name to the hunter in the end.^{1 2 3 4}

The mansion

His mansion stands behind a well-kept stone garden wall about two and a half metres high, with a patrol passing every twenty-five minutes. The garden has a fountain, paths, fragrant plants and small graves marked with the names of animals. Inside are a reading room with a red velvet chair and a great bookcase of costly travel books, guides and envoys' memoirs, mostly manuscripts or first editions, the portraits of moustached men who share a family likeness, a servants' kitchen stair, and a wide, richly furnished bedchamber with a small writing corner behind a screen.^{5 6 7 8 9}

The night questioning

The hunter and the companions slipped into the house by night. A young man was held up in the air by an unseen force, and the master of the house, who looked about sixty, was woken in terror with a hand over his mouth. Questioned about the purchase, he remembered buying two bottles and paying for them, but not why he had bought them or where they were. His strongbox held jewels and ordinary business papers, and his name was not on a secret list of rebels the companions carried. The hunter's threat to cut off a finger was stopped by one of the companions.^{10 11 12 13}

He told them that his wife had died the year before; her things were kept, and his son's old room beside them had become a store-room. His son is twenty-one. Much of his wealth, he said, came through his wife's side, from a marriage tie with a northern family.^{14 15}

In a hidden chest in the old room the companions found two vials and a black stone like black amethyst wrapped in velvet. His wife's diary recorded that some twenty-five years earlier he had behaved strangely and forgetfully for several days. Drawing the hunter aside, the companions argued that The Puppeteer used people's minds and then made them forget, that the stone was his mark, and that the nobleman might be his victim; the hunter lowered his pistol. Asked about a missing volume of the Volumes of the Architect, the nobleman recalled selling, some twenty years before, a rare book he had thought nonsense, and being paid in stones like these.^{16 17 18 19 20}

The companions left the young man silent under threat and slipped out under cover of the storm.²¹