Fermented Mól blood-wine

Squat old bottles of a vile, vinegary liquor, near enough seven hundred years old, sealed away in the keeps of the Mól Empire. It is drinkable, barely. It is not wine. What is in it is blood (not pure blood, but blood cut with something nobody has since named), and the blood is Peren, taken from the people the Empire held as slaves. Both names it goes by are true at once: the work is Mól, the substance is Peren, and there was never any tension between the two.

They turn up three at a time, always in a keep’s map-room and always hidden. Under a loose slab beneath the map-table in the mountains of the Valley of Doom. In a concealed compartment at the Twisted Grove, where the roots had grown around them and changed their color. In a Mól nook at Wraithblade Keep. Whether one set has traveled with the party all along or each keep was stocked with its own was never settled.

Aldo drank the first before anyone knew what it was. Koa and Mikhail, standing by, began to hear the Elder speaking in their own perfect dialects, every word landing in the tongue each had been born to. Then Mikhail put his nose to the bottle and worked out what Aldo had swallowed, and Aldo ran the length of the hall and was sick into a giant bird’s nest. His breath was a matter of comment for some time afterwards.

What the bottles were made for has never been fully answered. Asked outright, the Elder could not recall. Later, unprompted, he spoke of those who had known how to communicate on behalf of those who could not but must, and of bottles. Then he did not recognize the word blood when it was put back to him. The effect is not in doubt: a mouthful opens the drinker to the Elder, who is bound in each of the keeps. That makes these bottles the only thing resembling a line of communication between one keep and another: leave one with an ally holding a keep already brought down, and the timing of the next can be kept without anybody crossing the distance. The plan was argued at length and has never been carried out.

Mikhail carries them.