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When the package had first arrived, its contents were so unassuming as to be a disappointment: a single squat glass jar, packed in straw and sealed with wax. The label bore two lines line of smudged letters and what Cain had deduced, after a moment's consideration, to be an attempt at a stylized honeybee. Of course he knew better than to judge by appearances, but after such a dispiriting first impression it seemed that his tentative plans for this container could easily be put off until tomorrow, or perhaps the day after.
He had absentmindedly shoved it to one side of the cluttered table, between the bill for Merry’s new gloves (1 pr. wrist-length, wht. kid, 3s.4d.) and a battered copy of Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence. Thus, when the furor of Michaela's attack and Riff's illness were all over, the jar was there to bump against his elbow and offer the possibility of an afternoon's occupation.
Really, he could hardly be blamed for considering it. He had been stymied for the past week, trapped in a mire of enforced idleness--he knew now, more than ever, that his father and Delilah must be brought down, yet his knowledge of their movements was too ephemeral and the organization too strong in power and resources to strike at directly. There would no benefit in movement or even preparation when one had not the slightest idea from where an attack would come; it would only be a waste of energy, flailing in the dark. He could only sit and turn over what facts he knew, and hope for a flash of insight.
Even the weather was against him. The sky had been smudged grey and threatening rain all week. Every so often a spot of brightness would appear between the clouds, only to disappear back into drabness once again. Not the sort of clouds that would have the courtesy to deluge you with rain the minute you stepped outside, either, so that you could abandon your excursion at once; these would wait until you were at some unsheltered point between house and destination before spilling over and leaving you drenched. It was not weather for hunting down rumors or ruffians.
In other words, there was nothing to do but stoke up the fire, turn up the lamps, and wait for the clouds to empty themselves out or blow over.
So he had laid long abed this morning, lingered over breakfast, and used up a handful of hours half-attentively reading and watching the dark clouds drift listlessly past the window. Now the afternoon was coming on, and he was at a loss as to how to fill it, unless he wanted to play with Merry--but having been cooped up in the house by that threatening sky over the past few days, Merry's usual exuberance had reached a boiling point, and might easily turn overbearing. It might be better to stay here, and brood on recent events, and fret over whether Riff's chalk-white skin and hollowed eyes were returning to a more healthy hue.
Riff had assured him, gently and repeatedly, that he was well enough to return to his duties. Yet as he stepped into the room, making just enough noise to announce his presence without being a disturbance, Cain could not help scrutinizing from the corner of his eye to see if Riff's hands wavered or his arms, still a little weak, would struggle to balance the weight of a full tea-tray.
He reached to turn a page as Riff set the tray on the table, and their hands nearly collided.
Cain drew in a breath and held it; there too was a possibility for the afternoon. He could put his hand over Riff's wrist to make him still, and see what happened next.
His hand twitched before he could tell it to move, and he exhaled and turned it into a drumming of his fingers on the tabletop instead. Riff's hand moved away, busy with the tea things.
Another frustration, that. It grated to be so shy of touching Riff; it had been a habit for so long that to refrain from it felt unnatural. Only for the past few days he had the distinct sense that if he reached out for him, this time he would not be able let go.
Yes, he thought, eying the jar. At the moment, this bad idea was looking better all the time.
"Is the honey for your tea, sir?" Riff was regarding the jar, too. "It seems early yet for it to be in season."
"Do you think so?" He flipped another page, going backwards in the book instead of forwards. "It would be, if it were English honey."
"It's French, then?"
"Turkish." Cain held the jar up, considering. In the lamplight the contents were pure gold, not even the slightest spot or reddish tint to suggest anything out of the ordinary. "I thought it might be interesting to see if--do you think all the sunlight they get makes it taste different? Or the heat?" He split the wax sealing around the stopper with his thumbnail.
"I should think it would be traveling two thousand miles in a box, if anything." Riff was looking not at the honey, but at him. "My lord, are you sure it's safe?"
"Safe enough," he said, scooping up a spoon from the tray. "A spoonful won't do any harm."
Riff's expression was dubious. "Will there be anything more?" he said, his words entirely proper but his tone a little pressing.
Yes, I'm about to do something that could be extremely unpleasant and I need you here in case it goes horribly wrong.
"I don't think so," Cain said. If Riff knew, he wouldn't allow it; better then for him not to know at all. The scent, thick and dizzying, had begun to rise from the open jar. "Go finish up the accounts; I'm sure there's still piles of them left. Come back in a few hours."
Riff's managed to keep his face only slightly fretful, but he was obviously suspicious, as he ought to be. He knew better than anyone why the sugar bowls in the house were only for Merry's tea, not Cain's, and would know better than to think that Cain had all of a sudden decided to try imported honey as an alternate sweetener.
But whatever his thoughts were, he kept them to himself, and withdrew. "Please ring if you need me, my lord," he said, and the door shut with a polite click, and Cain was left to contemplate the slow stretch of the honey dripping off the spoon and back into the jar.
A few months ago it had been a whim, a curiosity to have on his shelf and perhaps experiment with when he ran out of more interesting distractions. A week ago it had been less than nothing, as had been everything else not related to Riff and spider venom and antidotes.
Now, after some contemplation, it had assumed an unexpected air of possibility.
Before Michaela's appearance, there had been that strange visitation: Suzette, begging for her ring; the smell of primroses, and the press of her dainty hands around his. A vivid but coincidental dream? A haunting?
A vision?
There were other, safer ways to go about this, of course. One could learn a good deal from experiments on test subjects and more remote kinds of analysis, and then move onto more direct tests with a better sense of the potential dangers. He might simply drink his tea unsweetened as usual and then take himself off to bed, despite it being mid-afternoon. It was dark enough outside that he might as well call it night.
And an early rest would be welcome, since he'd been sleeping so very ill lately. Nightmares alone were common enough, certainly; nightly horrors that would ruin the mind of any ordinary folk, but now each nightmare that oozed its way into his mind had taken on the horrifying possibility of future truth. Each time he woke it was with the feeling that he was treading along a narrow bridge in total darkness, not knowing when or where the next pitfall would appear under his feet.
Merry's voice echoed faintly from down the hall, trilling a giggle at some amusement.
Merry, her small hands wrapped around the bars of that cage. Uncle Neil, bleeding, a near-dead weight in his arms. And the worst, his own failure, the fluid and shattered glass that should have been Riff's death warrant. That was a barb under his skin that refused to fade, and which stung again and again whenever he thought he saw dark shadows under Riff's eyes or a faint trace of an ill pallor remaining on his skin.
He could not turn away from any chance to protect them them now.
He took up the jar, and into the teacup he measured out one, two--and the third he considered for a moment, then ate straight off the spoon.
He expected some slight difference in the taste, some bitterness or sharpness to hint at what lurked within, but there was only a sudden rush of sweetness, so strong he closed his eyes for a moment from the surprise. There was something of heat in it, of summer warmth and rich greenery and the heavy scent of rhododendrons. Bees buzzing a pleasant drone under a cloudless blue sky. Without quite meaning to he let his tongue linger in the bowl of the spoon to catch the last film of stickiness as he drew it out of his mouth.
Too bad he hadn't kept Riff here after all, and thus lost the chance to point out how wrong he had been about travel diminishing its taste.
He licked the traces of it from his lips, opened his eyes, and considered the spoon dangling from his fingers before letting it drop with a clatter.
Then took up the teacup and downed the contents in one swallow, too fast to taste.
He poured another, sat back, stared at the pages of the book, and waited.
His mood was a little darker when nothing had occurred after another half an hour of desultory page-turning and cloud-watching. Of course, it was entirely possible that the seller had pawned him off with a fake and the honey had come from nowhere more exotic than the hives of some English beekeeper. Well, what had he been expecting? Flashes of light from the heavens? He had more proof of fraud than of legitimacy in these sorts of things; to think that this would have been an exception was foolish. Likely he'd get nothing more than a bit of a stomachache in an hour or two, and that would would be the end of it.
He sighed, and took up the neglected cup of tea. The tea would be closer to cold than hot by now, but that might do well, given that the room was feeling a touch warm--
He stopped, the teacup halfway to his lips. Then he carefully set it down, put his hands on the table, and took stock of himself.
Warm, yes, more so than the fire across the room could account for, and there was a slight heat in his throat that remained after swallowing several times. His breathing was a touch faster, but that could simply be due to combined apprehension and anticipation.
He glanced at the book sitting between his hands, and his gaze fell on a line of text.
--And here a terrible spectacle displayed itself: the women first cast their infants down the cliff, and then they cast themselves after their fallen little ones, and the men likewise--
The black marks of the letters appeared unnaturally dark, and the whiteness of the page too bright. The sharp points of the ls seemed dig their edges into his eyes.
Ah. Well. Apparently the jar wasn't a fake. Rather subtle for the effects to have taken hold so unnoticed, and a little stronger than he had anticipated, too. Being alone for this might not have been the wisest course of action after all.
He pushed back the chair and stood--
--and stopped, for as he began to rise his vision spun, and he had to grab at the edge of the table to keep from toppling. He tried to straighten up his head, but that small movement sent his sense of the room completely askew. His stomach lurched. He managed one wobbling step away from the chair and then sank to floor, his back pressed to the table leg, and clutched the hem of the tablecloth.
He risked another movement and instantly regretted it as the floor and ceiling seemed to dip to the left and then to the right, as though the world were fixed to some point at the top of his head and any motion sent it reeling. The flowers in their vases all smelled--off. Not rotten, but too strong. His stomach turned a sickening loop.
He gripped the tablecloth more tightly and took one breath through his mouth, and then another. The nausea steadied, and did not dissipate but became bearable. A little short of breath, yes, and his heartbeat seemed a touch slow, but not to the point of danger. There seemed to be no dizziness as long as he didn't move.
All right, he would stay here for the moment. There was no reason to embarrass himself by staggering through the halls, or crawling across the floor and trying raise himself high enough to ring the bell-pull for help. Not likely to be one of his more pleasant experiences, but physical discomfort was easy enough to endure--it was simply a matter of letting it wash over him like a wave. He had done more dangerous and more foolish things than this before. He was in his own house, and someone would come by for the tea things sooner or later; he could last until then.
Perhaps he ought to take out his watch and make mental notes as best he could. After roughly thirty minutes, the initial effects...and at forty minutes...fifty minutes--but if he moved even the slightest bit he'd be ill, or his head would fall off. Either would make a dreadful mess of the carpet and he would likely never hear the end of it from Riff. No, he would just sit here quietly, and keep his head as still as possible, and wait.
He felt the world settle around him. It had finally started to rain at last; he could hear the gentle impact of the drops on the window. Too bad he hadn't managed to bring the book down with him as as he fell; he might have been able to pass the time reading if he'd held the book very carefully. He stared at the wall instead, and the pattern of the wallpaper, a rather incomprehensible design of stylized vines climbing in curves and arabesques to the ceiling. He let his eyes follow their pattern from one end of the wall to the other and back again, finally settling somewhere in the middle on a looping curl of vine that ended in a dainty leaf.
The pattering of the rain made a soft and not unpleasant hum under the occasional pop and crack of the fire and his own deliberately measured breathing. The warmth he'd felt earlier had increased; he'd be perspiring in a moment. His heartbeat thumped in his ears, definitely below its normal levels; he must remember to note that when this was all over.
The leaf on the wallpaper twitched.
He blinked. Then, moving quite slowly so as not to touch off another dizzy spell, he leaned forward a little and squinted at the leaf.
It twitched again, and its vine had moved--only the merest fraction of an inch, but it was not where it had been seconds before.
No. He had only been staring at the pattern too long and too intently, and as a result his tired and overworked eyes were unwittingly producing an optical illusion. He held his eyes closed for a moment, then opened them, wincing a little at the shock of light and color after the blackness.
The vine was still moving. He could not--quite--see it move, but from eye-blink to eye-blink it shifted ever so slowly, drooping down toward the wainscoting, while the vine next to it climbed above in a graceful arc and several nearby ones slithered towards each other. It could not be happening, surely, and yet they were moving by fractions across the paper, and he could almost hear the leaves rustle as they pressed together, curled and twined until they looked not like plants, but a shape, a vaguely familiar shape, the outline of a lidded eye, and another next to it--yes, they were two eyes, just on the verge of opening and looking at him--
He jerked his gaze away to the left, to the flat wood of the door. His breaths had sped up; he forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply for a count of ten, and then dared to turn back and look at the wallpaper.
The vines had all returned to their proper place.
He tried for moment to keep his gaze constantly moving around the wall, but flicking his eyes about only made the dizziness return, and each time he looked at a new spot he had the sense that the vines had just ceased their motion, and would move again once he'd looked away.
He let his gaze fall to the carpet on which he'd sprawled instead; the incomprehensible pattern seemed at once better and worse to look at. The body of it was a red so dark as to be nearly black, with the pattern picked out in in pale green and cream. His hand had fallen on a swathe of red, and the longer he watched it red the larger it seemed to grow, until it was enough to envelop his hand entirely. If he exerted the slightest pressure it would give way and be not cloth but blood, sticky and slightly warm.
He felt his hand begin to turn, and managed with a great effort to lift it instead, and moved it carefully to rest in his lap.
But--no, the space of the carpet wasn't wasn't blood after all. The red was black; it was the black of some pit, so deep there was nothing in it but darkness. The swirls of the carpet's pattern were the only thing that kept him from falling into that void, and the longer he stared at them, the thinner they grew.
Seeing those lines grow smaller and smaller was unpleasant, he thought, with an odd sort of calmness, so he decided to look at the hand in his lap instead. His other hand still clutched at the tablecloth; the rasp of the embroidered hem against his fingers seemed to be the only real thing. The humming of the rain had become a low sort buzz he could feel in the deepest part of his ears.
He drew one long breath, and then another. The room was stifling; between the heavy scent of the flowers and the temperature he could not seem to get enough air. That slight warmth earlier had grown far too hot. He risked a look up at the wall, and saw that the edges of the wallpaper had begun to blacken and peel, as though licked by a flame, and the vines were shifting again to move away from the smoldering edges. His shirt was damp and sticking; his hand almost on its own rose to his collar to draw it loose, but he couldn't get a decent grip on it.
He persisted, trying to get hold of it, until he felt a dull sort of pain at his neck, and tilted his head down just a bit to see that he was trying to dig his fingers into his own throat.
With an effort he made the fingers still, then let the hand drop back into has lap. What to look at? Not the wall, where the vines were tying themselves into furious knots as they burned; not the carpet, where the pattern-lines had grown as thin as thread. He tried staring forward at the toes of his shoes. There was a tiny mark, just at tip of the left shoe, where Riff had rubbed out a scuff earlier that morning.
Something tickled faintly across the back of the hand in his lap. He glanced back and saw, just disappearing under the tablecloth, the furry legs of a tarantula.
Someone was murmuring--a girl's voice, followed by a giggle that rang like badly made glass bells, close by. Close enough for her to be just on the other side of the table, and--above him? Sitting on the table? If he tilted his head, would he see her face?
He felt his head beginning to roll backwards. With a great effort he managed to halt it, then drove it against the table-leg instead. The movement made his vision reel sickeningly, but the pain was only a dull and distant sort, and it brought him back to himself a little.
He could find nowhere to look that did not seem likely hold something horrible; the corners were full of shadows and the blankness of the ceiling was so pale it seemed to burn itself into his retinas. Yet the thought of closing his eyes and keeping them was worse; who knew what sort of horror he would see when he opened them again? What ghastly thing might creep up to his feet, while he was unaware--
"Sir?"
He had not heard the door open or shut at all, but that was Riff's voice, and when he turned his head, slowly, cautiously, that was Riff standing across the room.
It couldn't be, though. That was why he hadn't have heard the door, because this wasn't happening--Riff was on the other side of the house poring over the account books. Perhaps Cain had slipped into unconsciousness without realizing it, and was dreaming of more pleasant things. Or perhaps he hadn't, and the hallucinations had taken a crueler turn.
Now he did shut his eyes. Whatever might happen with them closed was far better than seeing whatever horror this imagined Riff might become--if Cain had looked for a second longer, Riff's skin would have begin slough off and reveal something underneath, something rotted and horrible, or clawed hands would have appeared from between his lips and begin to crack his skull and jaw apart from the inside...
"Sir," he heard, and between one long breath and the next, Riff was next to him, kneeling, reaching out to press his hands to Cain's shoulders.
He could not keep his eyes closed now. "No, don't," he said, peering up at Riff's worried expression. "You..." His mouth didn't seem to work properly; every word felt as though it had to be pushed out. "Someone's in the room," he managed through a sluggish tongue. "I heard her laughing."
Riff's glanced around, and back to him. "There's no one here."
"Not even you?" He let go of the tablecloth and--too quickly, his head swam with even that small movement--touched his fingertips to Riff's face.
Riff froze, hands tensed. "Sir?"
The warmth of Riff's palms felt real--but so had the legs of that tarantula moving across the back of his hand. And if he'd been able to move, had crawled over the wall to touch those eyes made of vines, would it have felt like wallpaper? Or would his fingers have brushed against something wet and slick --
The thought was horrible enough to make him laugh, and it came out too high-pitched. He put his fingers closer to Riff's eyes instead. They looked ordinary, familiar, the blue shot through with flecks of grey. If it was a phantom of his mind, it was well done. If not--
"Come here," Cain said, catching Riff about the neck and pulling him closer. Those blue eyes were wide, and Riff was silent and still under his hands. "It's all right," he said. "None of this is real, is it?"
He could not kiss him properly; there was poison left in his own mouth that should not touch Riff's. Instead he pressed a kiss to the corner of his lips, drew his mouth back along the line of Riff's jaw, and buried his nose into Riff's hair.
There was something spidery crawling on the ceiling over Riff's shoulder; he could see its limbs moving, casting a long shadow, looming over both of them. He turned his face into Riff's neck instead, and murmured into his ear. "If you're not the real Riff, then go find the real one and tell him I need him.
"Ah," he said, and squinted at the ceiling. The crawling thing was gone, but curls of blackness had begun to spring up at the edges of his vision, like flowers on the verge blooming. "That doesn't make any sense, does it?"
He would have laughed again, but the flowers unfurled their petals across his eyes all in an instant, and then he was aware of nothing.
When he came back to himself and cracked his eyes open once more, he was in his own bed. There was a dim light, and the sound of rain had died down to a faint pattering. He felt as though he'd been rolled down the main staircase and then left to parch by the fire. His impressions of the past few hours--or days?--amounted little more than sensations of dizziness and aches, though he had a faint recollection of trying to kick the blankets off to lessen the smothering heat, and a single memory of wide-awake clarity when he had been certain that the room was about to turn upside down and he'd clung to the mattress to keep from rolling out of bed.
"How long?" he said. The words scraped raw against his throat.
"Only a day, my lord." Riff said. Cain turned his head across the pillow; Riff was sitting in the chair at the bedside. The window beyond him was dark. "Or perhaps I should say a day and a night; it's very early in the morning now. But you were quite ill. At one point I even thought I might need to send for a proper doctor."
"It's just as well you didn't. What if the news got out: the Earl of Poisons afflicted by one of his own collection? My reputation would be ruined." He turned his head back and eyed the canopy, but all the lines of the diamond-shaped pattern stayed in place. "Well, am I allowed to sit up?"
He managed, by hanging onto the sheets and with Riff's palm against his back, to hold himself up long enough for Riff to prop up the pillows with his other hand.
"You ought to stay in bed for another day or so," Riff said, giving one pillow a final pat.
"Nonsense. I'm quite recovered already, can't you tell?" Cain let go of his death-grip on the bedclothes and flopped backwards, then sat placidly while Riff brought the lamp closer to check his pupils, and peered down his throat, and pressed his fingers to Cain's wrist to test his pulse.
"It seems you'll make a full recovery, though I doubt Miss Merry will be easily convinced of that. She's been half-frantic." Riff tucked the sheets up around him and set a glass of water into his hand. "I told her you'd eaten something that disagreed with you."
"That's only the truth, isn't it?" Cain let the water roll in his mouth; it was wonderfully cool. "But now she'll be all over me with lectures once you let her in, and scowl at me if I dare to eat anything more than plain toast for days." Though in truth at the moment the thought of anything beyond toast made his stomach quail fearsomely. "And you? I hope you weren't sitting in that chair all this time. That shows a disturbing tendency towards laziness."
Then he snapped his mouth shut, too late to pull the words back--that went too far, he had meant it to be teasing and it had come out as unkindness. Not at all what Riff deserved, not after Cain had piled worry after worry upon him, not after Riff had hauled Cain's delirious self to through the mansion's halls and watched over him for hours. Those faint hollows under Riff's eyes were still there, but they had a different cast now, of fear for another; Cain had seen the effects of it often enough on his own face in the mirror recently. He let his voice grow a little warmer. "Riff. You didn't really think I'd eat something that would kill me that easily, did you?"
"Dosages can be misjudged, sir. Especially when being ingested in such an imprecise substance. And since you were unable to tell me how much you'd eaten--" He paused. "It was only honey?"
"Why ask? I'm sure you've had the stuff under the microscope already." He must have, if he'd made any sort of judgment of how much danger Cain had really been in. "Deli bal, they call it in Turkey. Mad honey. The plants the bees take the nectar from are toxic, so it's poisonous from the start." He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. "But not fatal. Not in small doses, anyway, though it might be if you forced a jarful of it down someone's throat. Or if you have a weak heart, but since everyone knows I haven't got one at all--"
"Sir." Riff's brows had drawn together, a look that was near to disappointment. "There were better subjects to test it on, surely? You might have sacrificed one of the chickens."
Cain felt the corner of his mouth quirk up. "Can you imagine trying to feed honey to a chicken? Besides, it wasn't the toxic aspects I was most interested in." He drew in a long breath, and let it out slowly. "There were oracles in Greece that used it to give themselves visions. True visions, if one can handle the terrible things it does to the mind."
"Ah." Riff's expression gentled a little. "And did you find that it worked?"
"Well." He swallowed against the roughness in his throat. "Is there more water?"
Riff went to the table with the water-pitcher, and Cain let his mind turn over what he'd seen, or thought he'd seen, during spell of madness. In his right mind now they all seemed both too hazy and too vivid, as images from a fever-dream. Eyes in the walls. Flames and heat, and spiders, and precariously balancing above a long fall into darkness. And Riff, at the end.
"I can't say that it gave me any grand visions of the future, but it made me..." He let the pause draw out a little. "...rather insensible." He waited until he heard the clink of glass on glass, then turned his head to the side again to watch the line of Riff's shoulders and the movement of his arms as he poured. "You wouldn't believe the things I thought I saw and said."
Nothing. No startlement, not even a moment of stillness at the words. So perhaps it had been a hallucination after all, for all its apparent solidity, and Riff had not found him until he had been well and truly unconscious. He touched his lips, remembered the silky feel of the ends of Riff's hair against them. But he had felt that before, under more innocent circumstances. And Riff had had a day to ponder how he should respond--or not respond at all--to what had happened.
If it had happened.
Well, no answer was answer enough either way. "I suppose it was rubbish. But I couldn't have found that out by feeding the stuff to a chicken or a rat, you see." He sighed. "Now, I'm quite talked out."
Riff brought him the full water-glass.
Cain reached up a hand to take it. His hand hovered by the glass a moment, and then moved further, curving around Riff's forearm, and drew the arm towards himself and the glass to his lips. He kept hold of Riff's arm to keep the glass steady, his fingers against the crispness of his shirt-cuff and his thumb against the roughness of the scar on Riff's wrist, and let the water ease its way down his throat.
When he reached the last swallow he kept it lingering in his mouth for a moment, the pure coldness aching through tongue and teeth. Then his grip loosen, and he settled back with a sigh. "You didn't leave those jars sitting about, of course?"
"I took the liberty of putting them away"--away meaning resealed and shut up safely with the other poisons, as they should be--"in case you might have some need of it later." Riff's mouth turned a little wry. "Though since, to my knowledge, you are neither a Turkish native nor a Greek maiden, do you think it might be best to leave any attempts at seeing the future to Miss Merry and her cards?"
And that sentence, casually said, touched off a spark of an idea deep in his mind. There was the lead he'd been looking for only he'd been too busy chasing his own thoughts to see it. "Ye-es," he said. "Or someone else practiced in that sort of thing.
"All right," he said. "It was poorly planned of me. But I might set it out if Oscar visits around teatime again and makes too much of a nuisance of himself." He let himself smile for Riff, a real smile, and Riff smiled back. "And when I get up, I shall want a bath and something to eat. And money. Cash. A great deal of it." His thoughts were racing ahead a little, making plans; he would need to be ready the minute he could get out of bed. "We're going to see about digging someone up. A live someone, this time."
He folded both hands his hands together over his chest, and let himself sink deeper into the pillows. "Honey keeps forever, you know. That stuff in the jar might outlast us all." That was a pleasant thought, all his other poisons dried into dust and sticky film while the honey remained exactly as it was today. "They say it's a fine thing to preserve corpses in. I can buy a few crates of this and when I die, if there's anything left preserving, you can see to it that I'm embalmed in poison honey."
"It's a thought, my lord." Riff's voice was softer now; he was across the room, turning down the lamps. "But I fear at that time that someone else will need to take over that task in my place."
Nothing Cain could say to that would do justice as a reply, so he merely let the meaning of that sentence warm him as the lights grew dim, and closed his eyes, quite sure that this time his sleep would be gentle and dreamless.