by Jen Williams
‘What is it?’ Seeing that Vostok was being attended to, Noon went straight to Tor. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I saw it in Bern’s head,’ said Tor. ‘She’s taking them out herself now, actually leading attacks.’
‘Who is? What are you talking about?’
‘Hestillion,’ snapped Tor. ‘My sister. Somehow, she has control of two Behemoths and is heading for a handful of settlements along the Brindlesea coast.’
‘Fire and blood.’ Noon blinked, trying to come to terms with this new information. She could feel Vostok’s impatience to be gone, pressing against her own fear. ‘That’s not far from here, is it?’
‘Nope, and I doubt that’s a coincidence,’ said Bern wearily. ‘It’s a threat, all right. She brings the blade close to us, just to show that she can.’
‘Shit.’ Noon ran her hands through her hair, trying desperately to wake up properly. She had been in the middle of a complicated dream, something about grass and stone, a tomato . . . ‘Bern, are you all right to fly? You—’
‘Look like shit, I know. And aye, I’m fine.’
‘Good.’ She grasped his meaty forearm. ‘Then let’s get up there. Are we ready? Who’s ready?’
She turned to the courtyard to see the war-beasts in their battle finery, the Finneral guard melting back to the walls. As one, the four of them went to their mounts, scrambling up into harnesses and strapping themselves in.
‘Yes, it has been too long!’ thundered Sharrik. The big griffin puffed out the feathers on his neck. ‘I long to fight. My blood clamours for it!’
‘There will be humans there,’ said Jessen, her long pointed ears facing forward as if she could already hear their cries. ‘We must save as many as possible.’
Kirune said nothing, but his head was high and his eyes glowed like lamps. The cat was ready to hunt. Noon could feel it, like a tightness under her ribs.
‘What of the fell-witches?’ Somehow, sitting back in Sharrik’s harness, Bern looked twice as well as he had on the ground. ‘Couldn’t they help us? More of the witches’ fire in combat could be useful.’
‘No,’ said Noon, immediately. ‘They’re frightened and untrained, no use to us. I’d only have to spend my time worrying about them getting themselves killed.’ She slid a final strap through its loop. ‘Besides, winnowfire is mostly useless against the Jure’lia unless it’s fuelled by an Eboran or a war-beast.’
A small silence met her words, which Noon ignored.
‘Vintage should be here at least,’ said Tor. ‘And Helcate. There are so few of us. And I don’t doubt that fucking dragon will be there. The last time we faced it we nearly died. We –’
Tor stopped, and Noon winced at the needle-sharp grief that pierced them all. Eri had been torn to pieces by the war-beast bonded to Tor’s sister. She wondered, distantly, if Vintage could feel their pain through her new and uncertain link to Helcate, and what she made of it.
‘We have to fight,’ she said. ‘It’s what we are, isn’t it? What we are made for.’
‘Bright weapon,’ murmured Vostok.
Tor shook his head slightly. ‘Even so, we are a handful, against two Behemoths.’
‘What choice do we have? Do we just sit here and let your sister throw her weight around?’ Noon shrugged. ‘And as Vintage would probably say, sometimes a handful is just enough.’
Tor glanced at her then, an unmistakable look of surprise on his face. She grinned at him, and then Vostok leapt up into the night sky, followed by her war-beast brethren.
It was a long and silent flight through the dark, lit by the silvery moon and stars. They followed Tor and Kirune, who had seen where the Behemoths were heading, and below them Ebora sped away into nothing, to be replaced by a land of hills and valleys Aldasair had never seen. He looked down over Jessen’s shoulder as much as he was able, trying to absorb what he could about this new country, but he got only fleeting glimpses of grass and forest, all dyed silver and black by the night. When he gave up on that, his gaze wandered back to Bern most often, a hunched shape on the back of Sharrik. Once or twice the moonlight lit the human’s face like a lamp, and then he was gone again. Aldasair gathered each sight to his heart to steel himself against the coming horrors.
We’re nearly there. Jessen, a soft voice in his head. I can smell the sea.
Not long after this, Aldasair saw it for himself. A vast stretch of glittering movement, the moon hanging above it fat and round. Below, the land had evened out into a meandering coast, and the light had changed; dawn’s fingers were touching the far horizon, turning the entire landscape a silvery lilac. Something about it filled Aldasair’s heart with foreboding, and he sank his hands into Jessen’s fur, looking for reassurance.
‘What are we flying into?’
What are you afraid of?
Aldasair shook his head. The question was too large. There were thousands of things to be afraid of, and he accepted those as their lot – yet still there was something else. ‘I don’t know.’
Ahead, it was just possible to make out clusters of lights on the edge of the land, and then above them, two enormous bulbous shapes, each alive with a terrible, skittering movement. One of the Behemoths was significantly closer to the ground, and a stream of creatures flowed from it down towards the hapless inhabitants.
‘We’re here!’ called Tor from the front. ‘Get ready.’
Seamlessly, Vostok and Noon took the lead, picking up speed and coming in low. The newly forged link between them all thrummed, suddenly so clear: take the lowest first. Stop that stream of burrowers. Push it away from the settlement.
Jessen and Kirune moved up together to flank Vostok, while Sharrik brought up the rear. As they drew closer, they could hear the sound of panic drifting up from the settlement; screaming, shouting. Aldasair narrowed his eyes, following the stream of spider-mothers drifting down from the lowest Behemoth; they fell with their legs spread, twirling down like the seeds from some nightmarish tree. Once they were on the ground, Aldasair knew, the burrowers they secreted would set about turning the humans into drones, eating them from the inside out.
Unthinkingly, he sent his concerns through the link, and felt them mirrored back at him.
Get on the ground and target what’s already there. We will attack the origin points.
He had time to think that the voice of the link sounded like both Noon and Vostok when the ground rushed up to them. He leaned over Jessen’s neck, focussing where she was; the spider-mothers were landing in what appeared to be a market square, creating a little factory of burrowers. He pulled one of the axes, the Bitter Twins, from his belt, and squeezed the haft, bracing for impact. Above them, he could feel Tor and the others attacking the surface of the Behemoth.
Something is different. This time the voice was that of Bern and Sharrik together, deep and resonant. The queen is not here at all.
Surprise filtered through the link, questions from all of them at once, and then the joined voice came again: Remember, it is the Lady Hestillion. She controls this, I can feel it.
Aldasair barely had time to take this in before Jessen hit the ground and skidded across the smooth flagstones of the market square, her wings thrown wide to slow herself. At a glance it was possible to see what sort of place this had been – wooden stalls closed up ready for the morning, the occasional discarded fruit, and beyond the square, tall neat buildings with shop awnings curled tight for the night – but already it was a space falling to the Jure’lia. Burrowers swarmed underfoot, and a tight mass of spider-mothers seethed over the market’s central well.
‘Do they normally do that?’ said Jessen. ‘Stay together?’
‘I know no more than you.’
Jessen leapt into the midst of the creatures and snapped at the nearest, shredding it between her teeth. Aldasair leaned forward and struck out at them with his axe, cleaving those that met its lethal edge into oozing pieces. Burrowers swarmed them, and once or twice Jessen rose back up into the air, flinging the s
cuttling beetle creatures from her with a violent shake of her fur. More spider-mothers were descending from above, but when Aldasair had a chance to glance up, he saw Sharrik attacking the hole they were emerging from: they would cease soon, surely.
‘Who is that?’
Aldasair turned to see what Jessen was referring to, brushing a pair of burrowers off his leg as he did so. He stopped momentarily, a cold terror seizing his guts as the Jure’lia queen strode forth from a crowd of drones – except it wasn’t, he saw a moment later. This figure was tall and humanoid in appearance, almost Eboran in its height and shape, yet it wore armour fashioned from the black carapaces of Jure’lia creatures. A helmet that made him think of summer beetles cupped the angles of her face, and there was, of all things, a green bird painted on her chest.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Roots save us.’
The figure raised one arm, a long pale finger extended towards them, and the horde of drones closed in, following her command.
Noon leaned back in the harness and raised one arm, releasing a barrage of green fireballs over the underside of the Behemoth. A number of small creatures that had been moving there grew stiff and fell to the ground; a short rain of many-jointed legs and shell turned to ash. She could see Sharrik attacking the aperture where the spider-mothers were emerging, and she was pleased to see that it was slowly closing. Tor and Kirune were some distance to her right, fighting some large burrower-like creatures with wings – more of the queen’s new toys, no doubt. Smiling grimly, she siphoned off a touch more energy from Vostok and summoned it into a pair of bright fireballs between her hands. And then her smile faltered. There was a sensation inside her she had never felt before; a painful spasm within her chest, deep in that place where the winnowfire energy curled, waiting to be released.
‘Did you feel that?’ she said aloud, knowing perfectly well that Vostok had not felt anything.
‘What? What are you talking about?’ The dragon sent a stream of violet fire arching over to the giant burrowers. ‘What is it?’
‘I just . . .’ Noon absently dropped the fireballs over the side, and placed one hand against her chest. A hiccup. It was like a hiccup. ‘Something’s not right.’
Tor was close enough when it happened to see everything – everything there was to see, anyway. Close enough, he realised later, for Kirune’s harness to suffer scorch marks and his own cloak to be singed at the edges. Not close enough though, crucially, to do anything about it.
‘What are these bastard things? The queen has been busy.’ He neatly dissected one of the giant burrowers with his sword – a borrowed one, nowhere near as graceful or as swift as the Ninth Rain – and the pieces of it fell away below. Next to them and above, Noon and Vostok were bathing the undersection of the Behemoth in green and violet fire, and sections of its oily green surface were turning black.
‘You have not seen,’ growled Kirune, in between bites. He shook his big blocky head, flinging pieces of burrower everywhere. ‘None of you have.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘How many snakes do we have in the sky with us?’
Tor blinked, and for the first time since seeing the ominous red line on his arm, he broke into a genuine grin. ‘There’s no fucking dragon!’ They had been attacking for some time, certainly long enough to summon a war-beast from its nap, or whatever it was up to, yet the newly dawn-touched sky remained free of that particular monstrosity. He leaned back in his harness and waved his sword at Noon, forgetting, briefly, the link between them all. ‘Hoy! There’s no fucking dragon! Celaphon isn’t here!’
He saw her look down at him, her face caught in the lilac light from the east. She looked, he thought, perplexed, as though she could hear something he could not, and then Noon exploded in an enormous blossom of green fire.
Chapter Eleven
Fell-Tyranny
What a disaster this has been.
I knew as soon as we received the tip that it would be difficult. There was the fact that it came in from a street urchin, a thief, no less, along with the startling information that the fell-witch we needed to take in was a grown adult. This does not happen often. The ability is so obvious, so difficult to control, that it has almost always shown itself in public by the time the girl is sixteen. The fact that this Tyranny O’Keefe had successfully hidden her winnowfire for so long told me that she would not be taken in easily. That she would make us suffer. It is hard, when you have managed to evade capture, to admit that your time of freedom has come to an end. You start to believe you are untouchable. Or so I imagine.
We took her at one of her own warehouses, on the docks of Mushenska’s old town. Under my advisement, we brought twice the numbers we normally would, and it seems I was quite correct (they are beginning to listen to me, at least). It was dawn when we started, yet the sun was at its highest point in the sky by the end of it, and the warehouse itself was a flaming wreck. The crowds that inevitably gather at such things kept well back. Several of the woman’s ‘employees’ were killed in the fight, and that in itself is interesting – who fights on behalf of a fell-witch? Clearly she inspired loyalty in many.
Not all, though. Afterwards, we met with the child who had given us her location, a tiny scrap of ill-fed muscle and eyes too large for his face, and he showed us some of the other children under the ‘care’ of the Salts. It is a hard start in life for them, and they all look older than their years. They have become skittering and rat-like, living in the alleys and nooks of Mushenska, hiding themselves in the city’s dirt and surviving on its leftovers. This is how Tyranny O’Keefe lived, how she came to adulthood. I think of my own childhood in Yuron-Kai – the horses, the endless blue sky, the scent of our yurt, the taste of salted meat – and I am dizzy with the difference between the two. Yet both Tyranny and I have ended up in the same place: the black towers of the Winnowry.
She fought wildly, with great ferocity. One of our agents died, every part of her exposed skin burned away, her clothes welded to her body. I saw a wildness and a rage in Fell-Tyranny’s eyes I have rarely seen, and I believe she would have killed us all if she could – would have burned down the entire city of Mushenska, if it had allowed her to escape. This one, I have no doubt, will be kept in the darkest, lowest cell of the Winnowry, carefully monitored and controlled for the rest of her natural life. She will not see the sky again.
Details to remember about the life of Fell-Tyranny: she was the leader of a gang called the Salts, who appear to have specialised in the sale of stolen goods and the sale of illegal akaris (Mother Cressin will be glad to hear that this particular line of supply to the city has been stopped); I could glean no information about her family from the other gang members we spoke to, so I must assume she has no living relatives; she had a great love of spicy food, and spent a lot of money at a nearby Reidn restaurant – the owners specifically expressed regret at her incarceration.
Extract from the private records of Agent Chenlo
Aldasair slumped forward in the harness, pushed there by the heat of the explosion above his head. A moment later, he was hit by a wave of confusion and shock, travelling down through his connection to Jessen like the deep, solid note of a struck bell. He looked up in time to see the last glow of the winnowfire before it sank into nothing. He could see Vostok, falling away as though she had been struck a mighty blow, and some distance away Tor on Kirune, half standing in his own harness. As he watched, the sword dropped from his cousin’s hand and twirled away towards the ground.
‘What’s happened? What is it?’
‘A terrible thing,’ said Jessen. They were surrounded by drones, and had been cutting their way through as best they could. The Jure’lia figure with the green bird on her chest had retreated, apparently happy to let the drones detain them. Of the humans they had wished to save they had seen little sign. ‘We have to go to him.’
Aldasair kicked away the nearest drones and they leapt up into the air. Sharrik had also broken off from his attack on
the surface of the Behemoth, and they reached Tor and Kirune at more or less the same moment. Tor’s face had entirely drained of colour, and his hair had come loose, swirling around his head in chaos. He was shouting one word over and over.
‘Noon! Noon!’
‘Where is she?’ Aldasair looked around. Below them, Vostok appeared to have recovered and was flying in frantic circles. It was clear that Noon was not on her back; the harness itself had been reduced to a few tattered and blackened straps.
‘She –’ Tor shook his head. ‘She was there, and then –’
‘The witch exploded,’ said Kirune. Even the great cat sounded distressed, and through the link they all shared Aldasair could feel the growing panic of Tor, and approaching slowly but with deadly force, Vostok’s outrage. All around them the onslaught of the Jure’lia continued, gaining a new speed now that their attacks had ceased. A renewed stream of spider-mothers was floating down towards the settlement, and just above them, a new aperture was opening in the side of the Behemoth. It would be a maggot, he was sure of it, or even Celaphon, finally.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Bern. ‘How can she have just . . . gone?’
‘I saw it!’ cried Tor, and there was an edge of hysteria in his voice that Aldasair did not like. ‘She looked at me, was looking at me, and then—’
‘WHERE IS SHE?’ Abruptly, Vostok was in their air space. ‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER?’
The dragon was furious, pale tongues of lilac flame curling over her teeth as she spoke. Hesitantly, Aldasair reached out to her with everything he had, leaning over in the harness and holding out his hand even as he grasped after the link between them all.