The bottle eventually winds up in New Orleans in the 20th century, in the hands of Lily Devalier, caretaker and employer to both V’lu and Priscilla Partido. On the way, an indignant Pan throws the remaining K23 overboard. Desperate, Alobar creates a perfume called K23 using trace amounts of beet pollen extract he travels with Pan to the New World in hopes of meeting Kudra there. Unfortunately, Kudra disappears from the material plane in the attempt, leaving Alobar behind. Failing that, they decide to magically teleport themselves and Pan to America. To hide the god’s supernatural stench for the passage across the Atlantic, they attempt to create a perfume. They decide to go to America, where they assume they will have more freedom to be themselves.
The Age of Reason has taken its toll on Pan and his nymphs, and Alobar and Kudra do what they can to care for the now-invisible god. In the year 1666, in the city of Paris, Alobar and Kudra begin to have doubts. After their studies, the couple go on many adventures and live many lives over the course of centuries. Seven years of study within the caves reveals to them the secrets of immortality, which has to do with the elements of fire, air, water, and earth. They find the Bandaloop caves empty and settle into them. Kudra, now a woman, appears in the monastery and convinces Alobar to give the wise men one more try. He settles in a nearby monastery for 20 years, during which time he barely ages a day. Alobar meets the Bandaloop in the Himalayan mountains but does not find them immediately helpful. Both Pan and Kudra are familiar with death and express a desire for some alternative to it. In his travels East, Alobar meets the Greek god Pan and an eight-year-old Hindu girl named Kudra. With the advice of a shaman, he sets off for the country of the Bandaloop because, he is told, they have discovered the secrets of immortality. Alobar decides that he would prefer never to die. After a year, however, another set of arbitrary norms threaten to cut his life short. This attempt fails, and he escapes with one of the members of his harem, settling down in a distant village.
It is customary to kill and replace the king at the first sign of decline, so Alobar attempts to hide the evidence. Though the book opens on these modern-day characters’ lives, they take second stage in Parts 1 through 3 and return to the narrative’s forefront in Part 4.Ī thousand years in the past, King Alobar, the ruler of a small, proto-Bohemian kingdom, discovers signs that he is aging. They all receive anonymous deliveries of beets. Claude and Marcel, members of the famous LeFever family, run a perfume corporation in Paris. Lily Devalier runs a small parfumerie in New Orleans with the assistance of V’lu. Priscilla Partido, a quick-witted waitress, lives in Seattle. The novel quickly introduces the main characters.
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