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    The Soul Bottles
    The Soul Bottles
    The Soul Bottles
    Ebook33 pages32 minutes

    The Soul Bottles

    By Jay Lake

    ()

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    About this ebook

    "The Soul Bottles" is a story of the City Imperishable, precursor to the novels Trail of Flowers and Madness of Flowers, as well as works ofshort fiction. At the intersection of the New Weird and steampunk, this strange and brutal short story opens up a fictional world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJay Lake
    Release dateDec 27, 2010
    ISBN9781458054036
    The Soul Bottles
    Author

    Jay Lake

    Jay Lake was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an award-winning editor, a popular raconteur and toastmaster, and an excellent teacher at the many writers' workshops he attended. His novels included Tor's publications Mainspring, Escapement, and Pinion, and the trilogy of novels in his Green cycle - Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura. Lake was nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2004, the year after his first professional stories were published. In 2008 Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer, and in the years after he became known outside the sf genre as a powerful and brutally honest blogger about the progression of his disease. Jay Lake died on June 1, 2014.

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      Book preview

      The Soul Bottles - Jay Lake

      The Soul Bottles

      by Jay Lake

      Smashwords Edition by Jay Lake

      Copyright © 2005, 2010 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

      Cover photograph copyright © 2010 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

      Originally published in

      Leviathan 4, ed. Forrest Aguirre, Night Shade Books, 2005.

      This ebook text varies slightly from the original edition.

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      The Soul Bottles

      by Jay Lake

      In my boyhood it was the fashion among the established families of the City Imperishable, much aped by the arrivistes, to believe that one’s soul fled with each exhalation, and was recaptured with every indrawn breath. Lovers eagerly seized yet another excuse to exchange essences, while members of the Glasswright Guild profited handsomely from tiny soul bottles meant to arrest the airy spirit lest it take flight in a strong wind. Parlor magicians compounded spells from the breath of the mighty while scholars in their towers attempted to distill essence of soul.

      Then the City was seized with the bloody panic of the Drover’s Heresy. Amid the chaos of the formal defenestrations and autos-da-fe, the Assemblage of Burgesses issued an interim edict forbidding any further public observance of such irregular practices.

      #

      Damn me for a fool! Father shouted, as he staggered about our apartments, fists pressed against his eyes. Gilt-framed walls paneled in watered silk enclosed antique furniture displayed as carefully as any museum. We knew our status, did our family.

      The dwarf maids had already found business elsewhere – snickering no doubt through their tight-sewn lips – while Bijaz, Father’s household manager and my own tutor, paced behind his employer. Had the older dwarf not been boxed in early childhood to limit his growth, Bijaz would have been a large man. Instead he was merely powerful, with a mane of silver hair and beard, glittering gray eyes and sharp ears that missed little.

      Father spun on his heel, advancing on Bijaz as if the dwarf were some vermin caught scuttling across the kitchen tiles. Every last obol is leveraged, yes? There is nothing in the house accounts?

      Sir, said Bijaz, his voice whistling shrill through the puckered opening between lips stitched shut in the formal and customary

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