by Jen Williams
‘She did tell me some of it, in a fashion.’ Vintage shook some raindrops from her jacket. ‘She told me all manner of stories.’
‘Some of them were probably partially true. She came to the Winnowry quite late. She had managed to hide herself successfully for some time. This was unfortunate. Most women are brought to us – to the Winnowry – when they are children. They are unable to control their ability, and so they are exposed very early on. More often than not, their own families turn them in.’
‘An ability, you call it. Not a curse, an abomination?’
Chenlo shrugged, as if this did not matter. ‘Tyranny was too used to her freedom, and to being in charge. They had two options: keep her locked up in the strictest conditions, forever, or give her some room on the leash. Make her an agent.’
‘You sound like you didn’t agree?’
‘I wasn’t happy with either option.’ Chenlo sighed. Beyond the circle of the tree cover, the rain grew heavier. ‘There are several paths to becoming a good agent. Fear can keep you obedient, or the need to stay as free as you can. Some even come to see their role as a way of keeping the Winnowry in line.’ Vintage looked up at that, but Chenlo was still gazing out across the gardens. ‘Tyranny was not fearful. She was furious. She had had so much freedom in her life that what the Winnowry offered was a poor shadow of it. She was, in short, impossible to control. So, against my advice, she was not marked with the sigil,’ at this Chenlo touched her own forehead, where the bat-wing tattoo was branded, ‘and she became one of a very select number of secret operatives. Fell-witches who move in the world unseen and unknown, under Winnowry control.’
‘And they trusted her to keep in line?’
Chenlo smiled thinly. ‘I think she was an experiment to them. She had a number of skills, all of which were useless if she was kept in a Winnowry cell. So . . . she was assigned a watcher, someone to keep an eye on her.’
‘Okaar?’
‘He was trained in ways to kill, quietly, quickly. It’s unusual for the Winnowry to use an outsider in this way, but Tyranny had such a hatred for fell-witches, it was impossible to get her to work with a partner. But as it turned out –’
‘She and Okaar became as thick as thieves.’
Chenlo nodded.
‘The stuff she told me about arranging trips across the Wild for rich men and women, about finding the war-beast armour, was any of that true?’
‘No. The war-beast armour she brought here was all purchased by the Winnowry over the centuries, as a kind of investment. Tyranny was given a small portion of it to win your trust.’
‘Fuck my old boots.’ Chenlo raised an eyebrow, and Vintage shook her head. ‘And I did trust her, like the fool I am. I was distracted at the time . . .’ She thought of Nanthema, how she had been so distant, and how the need to believe that she was still the woman she had loved as a teenager had obscured things that should have been obvious. ‘But that’s no excuse.’
A pair of young women, marked as fell-witches by the tattoos on their foreheads, ran across the grass, laughing. The rain had eased off, but the ground underfoot was wet and their feet were bare.
‘Look at that,’ said Vintage, absently. ‘I imagine they thought they would never touch grass again.’ She turned to the taller woman. ‘Agent Chenlo, I fucked up something chronic when it came to Tyranny Munk, and I need to make up for it. If that means retrieving our war-beast, then that’s what I’m going to do. And our concerns about how Ebora is perceived in this aren’t unique to us, you know. How do you imagine Jarlsbad will feel about all these fell-witches running around free when one of them has forcibly taken over Tygrish? If you want these women to live free in Sarn, you have to stop Tyranny just as much as I do.’
Chenlo turned to her. ‘You volunteered me first, and now you are giving me my reasons?’
‘You are an intelligent woman, Agent Chenlo. You would have come to these conclusions yourself, eventually.’ Vintage smiled and shook some water from her boots. ‘All people need, in my experience, is a little push in the right direction. Or a giant kick up the arse. I am always happy to provide either.’
Chapter Seven
Fell-Gianna
The life of a Winnowry agent is a regimented thing. We are at the Winnowry, or we are on a mission: retrieving new fell-witches, selling or moving akaris, or some other Winnowry business. Sometimes it is possible to forget the other dangers of this world, or, at least, to put them from your mind.
Not so today. There is a densely forested region of Triskenteth which is riddled with Wild, and in the midst of all that, a settlement surrounded by high, carefully maintained walls. We were warned in the missive we received that if we must approach by air, we would be advised to land outside the walls and present ourselves to be admitted. If we appeared in the skies directly over the settlement we would likely be shot down.
I can say now I forgive them their caution. We spent only a short time in the Wild-wood, but every sense I have rang with danger, and things moved in the shadows that were much too dark for the time of day. I was quite relieved when the huge wooden gates were finally opened.
This girl was quiet, calm, watchful. It had taken some time for the missive to arrive with us, and some time for us to reply, so she had had a period with which to come to terms with her fate, but more than that, I suspect she has been preparing for this moment for a while. Her name is Gianna, and I think she will be worth watching. When the time comes for me to pick my own trainees, Gianna has every chance of being high on that list.
Some details about the prior life of Gianna of Triskenteth: her small home was full of books. The family had a very elderly dog called Snaps, and I could tell when the girl said goodbye to it that she was thinking of how she would not see it alive again. Before we left she went to the family shrine in the living room of the house and there lit several candles to her ancestors – she lit each one with the end of her finger, and I think this was a demonstration to us of her skill, and her ability to control it. Perhaps she even sees this as an opportunity. I hope so.
Extract from the private records of Agent Chenlo
Hestillion paused to catch her breath, blinking at the sweat running into her eyes. Her hands inside her long leather gloves felt numb, and there was a solid, throbbing ache in her back from bending over the crafting pools.
She’d been working for – hours? Days? She was no longer sure. There were no windows this deep within the corpse moon, and there would be nothing to see through them anyway, save for more Behemoths. It took her a moment to realise why she had stopped, but of course it was Celaphon. The great dragon stood inside the entrance to the crafting chamber, his huge form blocking out the light from the corridor.
‘What are you doing?’
Hestillion stood up straight, wincing at the knots in her back. ‘I have been creating, my sweet. Making new things. As the queen does.’
Celaphon snorted, and lowered his bulky head. ‘What for?’
‘Let me show you them.’ Hestillion walked to the far wall, where three of her creations stood waiting. ‘I’ve made them as helpers for me. Servants who can do as I ask, directly, so I do not need to chase after any of the queen’s dirty little creatures. These ones are mine.’ Hestillion paused as a memory resurfaced. ‘Once, before the Carrion Wars, Ebora had many servants. Humans who happily served us, even lived with us, but of course that all changed.’
‘What were these Carrion Wars?’
‘It . . . does not matter now, Celaphon. It’s the history of a dead world.’
The dragon came closer to the far wall, his great nostrils flexing as he took in the scent of the newly created creatures.
‘They look strange,’ he said eventually.
Hestillion nodded absently. They did.
Her first had been a tall man-shaped thing, his face now sculpted into something sharp and angular and almost familiar. His wings she had strengthened with pieces scavenged from some of the larger burrower creatures, and the
spider-mothers. Once she had hit upon this idea, it had seemed obvious. Her creature would need armour of a sort, something to protect the soft flesh of his body. She had commanded several of the larger burrowers to climb into the changing pools, and then she had slowly taken them to pieces. Useful pieces.
Curiously, they had seemed to resist this, and the strange keening noises they made as Hestillion eased their bodies apart were unnerving at first. Unsettling, almost. But the noise distracted her from the discordant music in her head – that unending broken wail that was the Jure’lia – and besides, when she saw what she could make for her servant, she quickly brushed aside any queasiness.
He stood resplendent in a shining black carapace, the sharply curving shards of spider-mother skin making fine vambraces and pauldrons. His breastplate was a flexible mesh of black scales, each picked from the body of a giant burrower hybrid. His eyes, she had to admit, were a little unnerving; a pair of slippery yellow globes plucked from another anonymous scuttling creature. But they seemed to work. They followed her wetly as she moved, and there was more life in him than in any of the queen’s skittering homunculus creatures.
‘This is the First,’ she said, tapping the man-servant on the shoulder. ‘These two, I have no names for yet.’
Her next creations had been largely female in aspect. They were smaller than the man-servant, and more encrusted in the makeshift Jure’lia armour. The top halves of their heads were covered in spiky helmets made from pieces of burrower skin, neatly doing away with the need for eyes.
‘What are they for?’ Celaphon asked again, and he looked slowly around the chamber. Hestillion could see him looking at the discarded remains of so many Jure’lia creatures, and she felt a sudden stab of irritation.
‘They are for me,’ she said firmly. ‘You cannot understand, Celaphon, since you were born and raised here, but I need company. I need shapes like me, or I fear I will lose my mind. You cannot know what it is like.’
Celaphon snorted. ‘I do not know what it is like to crave the company of my own kind?’ He rounded on her, his silvery eyes full of an intelligence she hadn’t guessed at. ‘Have you forgotten that you chased my brother and sister away from here? When I wanted them to stay and be joined with us.’
‘It was the wrong path, my sweet.’ Hestillion walked away from the dragon back towards the crafting pools. Another figure awaited her there, similar to the others. She would have to make them distinct somehow, she realised. Amongst the connectedness and anonymity of the Jure’lia, she had a sudden craving for individuality. ‘I know it hurts now, but you will come to see it as clearly as I did. We do not need the others. They let us down.’ Unbidden, a memory of the Eboran boy Celaphon had dismembered again floated through her mind; his pale hand upturned in the dirt, black blood running into gritty snow. In response to that, she plunged her arms back into the steaming pool. ‘We will make our own family now.’
Tor sat alone in his chamber, nursing a glass of wine. Through the tall windows he could see that it was very late already – he seemed to be losing track of time these days – yet the full moon was hidden behind a dense bank of clouds, turning them grey and somehow ghostly. The garden beyond was a place of flat silvery light, just as it had been when he was a child. If he closed his eyes and peeked only through his eyelashes, if he sat very still and very carefully thought of nothing – not Noon, or Kirune, or the worm people – it was almost possible to imagine that he were back there, in the time before the crimson flux had left its bloody footprints through the corridors of the palace. If he sat very still.
He picked up the glass and drained it off, quickly pouring another to replace it. There was an intermittent prickling pain in his left arm, but he did not lift his sleeve to examine it.
‘Who’d have thought,’ he said aloud to the empty room, ‘that I would end up back here after all? In this state. I thought I was running away from it all, but actually I was just getting up speed. Making sure I had enough momentum to properly land in the shit.’
The wine was rich and full-bodied, a select bottle from one of the many human travellers that arrived at their gates these days. He took a few more large swallows, wondering if it would help him sleep, when an agonised scream scattered the silence into pieces. Tor winced, swallowing hard, and waited, but the screams didn’t stop – they only grew louder. Along his link to Kirune and the other war-beasts, he felt a shiver of their worry and discomfort, and so he stood up, putting the glass back on the table. He knew there was no use, that he could be of no help, but it was one thing to know that, and quite another to stand in the dark listening to a human bellowing with pain and fear.
He left his room and headed down the corridor, walking stiffly and without thought. When he arrived at his cousin’s chambers he let himself in without knocking and abruptly wished he had brought the bottle of wine with him.
‘Al, is he awake?’
Bern was lying rigid on the bed, his eyes open but unseeing even as he let loose one hoarse scream after another. The cords in his neck were rigid, his hands curled into fists at his side. Even in the gloomy starlight coming through the window Tor could see that he was covered in sweat, the loose strands of blond hair stuck to his cheeks and his forehead. Aldasair was kneeling next to him, his hands on the human man’s shoulders. He did not look up as Tor came in.
‘Bern, it’s me! It’s Aldasair. You are safe, you are home. This is just another nightmare.’
Bern screamed again, a terrible sound of horror and sorrow, and then some of the energy seemed to go out of him. He sank back into the bed as his muscles relaxed, but still his head thrashed back and forth, and he began moaning, murmuring disconnected words and phrases.
‘Tearing it all apart . . . water rushing . . . the burns . . . new faces . . . the eyes!’
‘I don’t think this is truly a nightmare, cousin.’ Tor had joined Aldasair at the side of the bed, and for the first time his cousin glanced up and seemed to take in that he was there. ‘It’s the Jure’lia link. It haunts him.’
‘It’s killing him,’ spat Aldasair. ‘As sure as a poison or a festering wound, it takes a bit of his strength each day.’
Tor looked at the man reluctantly. He had always been one of the most impressive humans he’d ever seen, easily as tall as any Eboran and certainly stronger than most humans he had known, but months of living with half a foot in the worm people’s hive was visibly sapping him. Inevitably, Tor thought of all the Eborans who had gradually died in these rooms, coughing up their last life’s blood onto dusty sheets. He cleared his throat.
‘Look, Al. He’s coming round.’
Little by little, the glazed expression in Bern’s eyes was receding. Eventually, he stopped moaning and began shivering instead. He turned to look at the two Eborans at his bedside, and managed a wry smile.
‘Please don’t tell me Tor is my nursemaid now,’ he said, his voice cracked and weak.
‘You wish,’ said Tor. ‘There are women in Mushenska who would pay good coin for attention like that.’
Bern coughed in place of a laugh and, with Aldasair’s help, sat up so that he was leaning against the headboard.
‘By the fucking stones, I am tired of this.’
‘I will get you water. Can you stand to eat?’ Aldasair brushed some hair from the bigger man’s forehead. ‘I can find soup.’
‘Just water, please.’
Aldasair vanished into the next room, his bare torso briefly outlined in gloomy moonlight from the windows.
‘What was it this time?’ asked Tor, pitching his voice low. ‘It sounded worse.’
‘Worse. It was worse.’ Bern nodded, looking down at his lap. ‘Ah, stones crush me, I can’t take any more of this.’ He glanced up, catching Tor’s eye with a look that was suddenly conspiratorial. ‘You have to do it for me, Tor. I’m not accurate enough with one axe, not at this angle.’
‘Bern . . .’
‘A good sharp sword, take the whole thing off at the wrist. Then I
’ll be free of the bastards.’
‘Bern,’ he gripped the man’s forearm, ‘my cousin would murder me. And Vintage would too. And Sharrik. Fuck, all of them would, probably. And besides . . .’ He bit his lip, not wanting to say it. ‘It might not even work.’
The big man turned his head away, droplets of sweat in his lank hair. ‘You think it could be in me all over, by now. Whatever this taint is.’
‘I don’t know, my friend,’ Tor squeezed the man’s arm, and let it go. ‘I honestly don’t. But I think it’s best we don’t do anything rash.’
Aldasair reappeared with a jug of water and a fat glass, which he passed to Bern. After a few gulps, Bern shook his head.
‘What did you see?’ asked Aldasair. Tor winced, thinking that Bern would hardly want to relive his visions, but the human sat up a little more in the bed and faced Aldasair with an open, trusting look.
‘I saw your cousin.’ He glanced at Tor. ‘Your sister. Just brief glances of her, like pieces of a broken mirror. I think that’s because we broke the Jure’lia’s link to each other when I replaced their crystal memory.’ He frowned, as though talking of such things still seemed like gibberish. ‘Everything is chaotic there. But what I did see – I saw them in pieces, being pulled and stretched, her long sharp hands dipping into their insides, teasing them apart.’
Tor sat back. It was suddenly much colder, as though a window had swung open.
‘What do you mean? Is she killing them?’
‘It’s hard to describe. Because of how this link works,’ Bern briefly held up the hand with its chunk of blue crystal embedded in the palm, ‘I see it all from many directions. I feel her hunger and curiosity, I feel their pain and fear. She sinks her fingers into their guts, and I can feel them moving in mine. She has a great sense of satisfaction, a warm feeling of . . . fulfilment. It doesn’t feel like killing. It’s almost the opposite, somehow. And they are trapped and pulled apart, unable to stop her.’ He looked at Tor almost sheepishly. ‘And I thought I saw your face there, just for a moment.’