by Jen Williams
‘Vostok, did you see it? What happened?’
Tor spoke. ‘She died. She died right in front of us. Roots be fucking damned forever.’
Vostok shook her head violently. ‘No. No. She did not.’
‘But Vostok –’ Aldasair looked again at the tattered remains of the harness, where Noon had been sitting.
‘She is not dead, she is gone. Which I will not stand for.’ The dragon turned an agitated circle in the sky, dawn light glinting off white scales. ‘I will not stand for it.’
With that she turned her back on them and beat her great feathered wings, speeding away.
‘Vostok!’
The dragon did not reply. Next to them, Tor slumped forward in his harness, his face in his hands. A wave of despair moved through Aldasair like a physical blow, and he turned to Bern to see his own pain reflected in the big man’s face.
‘It’s too much,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Vostok’s rage, Tor’s grief, all the confusion . . . I can barely think.’
There was a wet tearing sound, and off to the right of them a huge glistening maggot, looking oddly metallic in the first blush of sunrise, slithered out of its aperture. Within moments it would be falling onto the settlement – what was left of it. More creatures were gathering all the time, giant burrowers and enormous spider-mothers with elongated bodies, and there were just three of them; three against two Behemoths, and one of them seriously compromised. Aldasair shivered, and felt Jessen shudder beneath him.
‘Roots forgive us, we have to retreat,’ he said. His lips felt numb. ‘We have to get out of here.’
Vintage paused with the bread halfway to her mouth and looked out across the shadowy plains. Curled next to her, Helcate raised his head, his long snout twitching. There was still some residual warmth from the day before – it was always warm on the plains, but in the summer it was an oven, slow to lose its heat – yet Vintage felt abruptly cold. She put the bread down.
‘What is it?’ asked Chenlo. She had been staring into their small fire. ‘Do you see something?’
‘No, I thought . . .’ Vintage turned to the war-beast and stroked his neck. He whined. ‘Helcate, what is it? What’s happened?’
The link between them was still so new, and half the time Vintage wasn’t sure it was there at all. Their situation was unknown in Eboran history; not only was she a human, riding an Eboran war-beast like a hero out of an old book, but Helcate himself had already been bonded once before, a connection that had been brutally severed with the death of Eri. She did not know truly if their bond would ever work as it should, and with Helcate’s peculiarities, she wasn’t sure that it even could. Yet she had felt something as she looked out across the plains, a sudden throb of despair that had not originated with her.
‘Helcate,’ said Helcate. She sensed fear from the war-beast, but also confusion. Whatever was happening, he did not understand it.
‘Well?’ demanded Chenlo.
‘I don’t know. This isn’t a precise science.’ Vintage scratched Helcate behind his ears, then dropped her hand. ‘Whatever it is, it is happening far from here.’ Some way to their left, the Trick river was a reassuring murmur. They had stopped to eat and to get some sleep, but all of them had woken early, dawn just beginning to kiss the horizon. ‘Perhaps we should turn back.’
Chenlo raised her eyebrows, creasing the bat-wing tattoo on her forehead. ‘On a hunch?’
Vintage plucked at her hair; it was especially wild after days of flight. ‘Darling, this isn’t a mere hunch. This is part of the intricate web that binds the war-beasts with their companions, a near mythical connection that is unknown in human society.’
‘But you don’t know what it is.’
‘No.’ Vintage sighed. If one of them had died, I would have felt it. I am sure of it. That, at least, should be unmistakable. She remembered their faces when Eri had been murdered; despite all the differences between them, they had looked oddly similar in grief. It had cut them all deeply, a severing that was as much a physical pain as anything else. I would know. I would. ‘No, I don’t. We’ll go on as we are for now, then. If we can get this war-beast back, it could be the thing that turns the conflict for us. I can’t abandon the attempt before we’ve even reached Jarlsbad.’
Chenlo looked for a moment as though she might reply, but instead she sipped from a small tin cup. The fragrance of it reached Vintage across the fire.
‘Yuron-Kai tea?’
‘You have a nose for scents.’
Vintage snorted. ‘Darling, I used to run a vinery. The grapes, the fermentation, the bouquet, the taste . . .’ Her voice trailed off. The despair she had briefly felt had left a residue, and it wasn’t helped by the thought of the vine forest and Catalen. She had written to her nephew Marin many times, and never received a reply. Even Ezion hadn’t replied, and he should be safe at the House. Surely the House was safe? But when she thought of that, she thought of the scattered pieces of Behemoth remains that had always haunted the vine forest, turning the woods around them strange and Wild. Nowhere in Sarn was truly safe. She should know that by now. She dragged her thoughts back to the conversation at hand. ‘I know much less about tea, of course. Have you been home? Since you were taken, I mean.’
Chenlo put the cup down and laced her fingers in her lap. In the firelight her face was a beautiful mask, all the lines by the corners of her eyes smoothed into nothing.
‘It is an unofficial rule of the Winnowry that agents are to avoid missions that take them back to anything that might be considered home. The last thing they would want is for a fell-witch with some small freedoms to start feeling homesick, to start thinking that perhaps they might just return to their old lives. I have not been back.’
‘Not since the Winnowry fell?’
‘There has hardly been time, Lady de Grazon. But I did stop and buy some tea in Mushenska. A little taste of home.’
‘But you were a very high-ranking agent, were you not? And still they did not trust you?’
‘The Winnowry did not survive by being trusting. It was a needless concern of theirs, anyway. There is nothing for me in Yuron-Kai. Besides more tea.’
‘But you must have family there, people who knew you before . . .’
‘As I say, nothing.’
Vintage picked up her piece of bread and chewed on it. What she knew of the Yuron-Kai suggested that there was more to the story; they generally lived in close family units, each member marked with the family sigil. Orphans and outcasts were given a special mark that replaced or covered up a family tattoo – something that marked them as the extended family of the tribal horselord – yet Agent Chenlo did not have that. There had been a family once, at least, and their sigil had been an eagle.
Vintage was just trying to think of a way of asking her about this when the other woman stood up on the far side of the fire. Behind her, her bat snuffled and raised his head, black eyes as wet as ink.
‘What is it?’
‘I think I see movement.’ Chenlo narrowed her eyes. ‘Something is out there.’
Vintage slipped her seeing-glass from her pack and stood up to join her. When she pressed the cold brass to her eye, though, she could see very little. The grasses of the plains looked ghostly in the half-light and they shivered constantly with the winds, but it was still too dark to make out much else.
‘Where are you seeing it? All I’m seeing is a lot of bloody grass.’
‘May I?’
With only a moment’s hesitation, Vintage handed the glass over. Chenlo looked through it, twisted it a little to adjust the lens, then peered through again. Her mouth turned down at the edges.
‘There are lots of people on these plains, yes?’
‘Oh many,’ said Vintage brightly. ‘A remarkable variety, really.’
‘How many keep worm-touched giants with them?’
When Vintage looked at her, she passed her the glass back. ‘There. Where I point. Just up from that stunted tree.’
This
time when Vintage lifted the glass to her eye, she saw something immediately. She couldn’t make out details, but there was certainly a group of dark shapes moving, something in the long grass. She might almost think them a herd of fleeten or some other plains animal, but the way they moved was so familiar as to be unmistakable. In their midst, something even bigger moved; a huge, confusing mass. There appeared to be a lamp on top of it.
‘Sarn’s bones, what is that?’ She bit her lip, willing the shape to resolve itself into something knowable. ‘It could be a very large caravan? A mobile tent?’
Chenlo sniffed. ‘One giant tent? Keep watching it.’
‘You never know. Perhaps they think it’s safer to travel that way.’ Vintage turned the eye-glass slightly, following the group’s progress. They were heading west, as far as she could tell, yet also appeared to be bending south towards the river. She squinted, wishing for just a touch more light, and the huge mound at the centre of the movement shook itself all over, just like a dog would. A tent could not move that way. ‘Ah. Yes. I think I see what you mean.’ She lowered the glass.
‘Something that large must be worm-touched,’ said Chenlo. ‘Do plains people generally travel with worm-touched animals?’
‘Well, darling, there’s a question.’ Vintage seated herself back at the fire, ignoring the faintly startled look on Agent Chenlo’s face. ‘Almost all wild animals have been ever so slightly worm-touched, I believe. The poisons this world has had to bear have seeped out all over. The Priat people of the Singing Eye Desert farm a kind of over-sized rodent for its meat and its coat. The kings and queens of Finneral ride giant bears. Not everything worm-touched is lethal, or at least, it can be tamed.’ She thought of the giant grapes in the vine forest, sweltering under the Catalen sun. ‘It’s the human way, to try and make use of all things.’
‘That thing looks too big to be tamed,’ said Chenlo. She was still standing and looking out across the grasslands. ‘I don’t trust it.’
‘You may be right,’ said Vintage. ‘Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.’
Hestillion stepped down onto the smooth green surface, her boots slipping slightly. It was hard already, this stuff, yet she had seen it pumped from the rear end of a maggot only moments before.
‘It must harden on contact with the air,’ she said, and next to her the First nodded slightly. Around them, the settlement that had once sat on the coast of Brindlesea had almost completely vanished; in its place were great sloping acres of the Jure’lia’s green resin, and the occasional broken piece of masonry or wood. There were darker lumps under the varnish in places where some humans, or their livestock, had failed to get away quickly enough, and a handful of drones still stumbled around, their eyes empty black holes. On the very edges, the Jure’lia creatures continued their work, breaking down the remains of people and homes, and feeding them to the maggots. Where there had been such noise and panic only hours before, there was now an eerie silence.
‘Did we kill them all?’
The First turned to her, a touch awkwardly, and she smiled slightly at his face. She thought they had very likely killed all the humans here, or so many that it made no real difference. There was a water-road leading away to the sea, and perhaps some of them had escaped that way, on fast little boats, or perhaps some had been close enough to the settlement gates at the time to get away before the killing started. Here, today, she had killed more humans than any single Eboran had since the Carrion Wars. She took a few more steps on the green varnish, letting that sink in.
‘We were delayed a little, by my brother and his cohorts,’ she said. Some distance to their right, there was a shack half standing, and in its shadows, there was movement. She began to walk towards it. ‘They can cause plenty of trouble when they wish. Yet they didn’t stay. I wonder what happened?’
The First had no answer for that. They walked on. It was curious that Tormalin and the others had vanished, but then was she really surprised? He had always been weak. It was inevitable that he would not be able to handle the responsibility of bonding with a war-beast; it was a wonder he had lasted as long as he had. Hestillion lifted a hand to her head and rubbed at her temples. Controlling the circle, and therefore both the Behemoths at the same time, had been exhausting – a balancing act of putting herself in several places at once whilst carefully ignoring the general chatter of the Jure’lia at large. It was a matter of focus, of pinpointing one mind amongst many. Green Bird, who had been on board the Behemoth taking part in the initial attack, had controlled it, yet Hestillion had controlled her. The Jure’lia creature’s mind had been familiar and easy to find, because in some way, Hestillion had formed it. Despite the headache, she smiled again. Her talent for dream-walking had made it easier, she was sure of it. And, gradually, she would get better at it.
‘With the circle I have created so far, I could control five Behemoths at once. Eventually.’
They had reached the shack. A cluster of giant spider-mothers skittered outside it, weeping burrowers onto the floor, while a human man crouched inside the remains of something that looked like it had once been a shed for smoking fish. His face was dark with soot, and he was shaking all over. When he looked up at Hestillion, the shaking grew worse.
‘What – what are you?’
Hestillion ignored him. Instead, she frowned at the spider-mothers. While her attention had lapsed, they had fallen back into the confusion that was afflicting the Jure’lia. They had got as far as chasing the human down, and then promptly had forgotten what they were supposed to be doing. The burrowers crawled in confused circles, leaving marks in the dirt with their sharp legs. She would have to try harder to blot out the presence of the larger Jure’lia hive mind.
‘What are you?’ The man stood up. The expression on his face was changing from fearful to a strange kind of outrage. ‘You aren’t worm people.’ His eyes moved to the First standing next to her, then back again. ‘I don’t know what he is, but you’re one of those bloodsuckers. An Eboran.’ He pulled his shoulders back. ‘You’re supposed to fight these things!’
Hestillion touched the crystal at her chest, wondering what the man saw. She no longer wore her Eboran silks or any fine Eboran jewellery, and her feet were clad in functional leather boots instead of delicate slippers. She remembered the room at the palace where she had kept her gowns, which she had spent so long cleaning of dust and mould. With those images came a memory of Aldasair, sitting at a table in a forgotten room, the corpse of a spider long-dead sitting atop his stack of tarla cards. It all seemed like ancient history. And when was the last time she had seen Aldasair? He had been here moments ago, riding his magnificent flying wolf, no longer the lost soul he had been in the Eboran palace.
It was all so long ago, and she had changed so much, yet her eyes were still crimson and she was still taller, stronger. Still more than this human.
‘You,’ she snapped a finger at the nearest spider-mother, reaching out for the piece of the web where its mind dwelt. ‘End this.’
She turned away and walked out across the varnish again, listening absently to the man’s screams as the burrowers pulled him apart. It was easy, really. Just a matter of focus.
‘All of this,’ she said to the Jure’lia at large, letting her mind and her voice echo down through the connections that linked them. ‘I want all of this covered in the resin. When the queen comes, let her only see a giant mirror, free of blemishes.’
Chapter Twelve
I received a letter today.
It is the first I have been sent in the fifteen years I have been at the Winnowry, and it was sealed with a smear of gold wax. I looked at it for some time before opening it. I peeled the wax off and pressed it between my fingers. You learn, in this place, to take advantage of any unusual tactile experience, and that urge does not vanish when you become an agent. I rolled the wax into a little ball and put it on the ledge under my window, in the hope that the sun would eventually make it liquid again.
It was
from my once-sister Shen. In the top right-hand corner was her family sigil, the eagle, drawn in black and red ink, and her handwriting was so familiar that for a moment I could do nothing but attempt to swallow a painful sensation in my throat. It was like hearing a voice from my earliest childhood.
In the letter, she explained that she had married and had children, two little boys, and I felt a surge of happiness for her: two boys, and no chance of the winnowfire touching them. Yet in the letter she also told me that watching her sons together has given her a different perspective on what happened to me. It has taught her that some bonds go beyond horror and disgrace, and that such bonds are only ever severed at a price. She has asked to renew our family ties, and has applied to the Sen-Lord to do so. She wants to come and visit me at the Winnowry. ‘Sisters,’ she writes, ‘should not live as though the other doesn’t exist.’
Later, when I was given my dinner, I took a little of the remaining life energy from the vegetables and saved it hot in my chest until I got back to my room, and there I burned the letter. I’m not certain if I should reply to my once-sister, demanding she not approach the Sen-Lord with such a thing, or if I should pretend I never received it. Likely it is too late anyway.
She cannot know, but it is much easier to be here when I know – I know – there is no yurt for me in Yuron-Kai. No warm welcome or sentimental memories, just flat hatred and banishment. What she has sent me is a kind of torture, and I hope that over time the image of the letter that now hangs in my mind will fade, and I will no longer recall what her handwriting looks like, or even that she had two baby boys. Shen will go back to being my once-sister, a memory from a life that didn’t happen.
Still I find myself touching the ball of wax on the windowsill. It smells a little of once-home.
Extract from the private records of Agent Chenlo
‘What happened?’
Tor looked down at the tin cup Aldasair had pressed into his hand. He could tell from the smell that it wasn’t wine. It was something harsher, stronger.