by Jen Williams
‘You’re not going anywhere until you tell me.’
The words fell like knives. Noon took a step backwards. Abruptly, her situation seemed precarious, dangerous even. What was she doing here, with this strange woman who called herself a god? This was not where she was supposed to be.
‘That’s where you’re wrong. I can go where I like, actually.’ She bent down and snatched up the last of the pastries, stuffing them inside her jacket heedless of the grease. When that was done she picked up the jug of water, holding it awkwardly by the neck.
‘If you go into the desert, you will die,’ She Who Laughs said simply.
‘Well? What choice do I have, if you won’t send me back?’
‘Tell me about what happened to your people – your mother – and I will take you back, wherever you want to go.’
Noon turned her back on the woman and walked out of the courtyard. She expected, for a moment, to be turned into a screaming pillar of fire, but She Who Laughs said nothing, and she walked the rest of the way through the glass castle until she came to the arches. The Singing Eye Desert lay beyond, a vast stretch of black sand fading to a brownish white in the distance. The sky was blue and unmarked by clouds, and a shimmering haze lay between the two as the desert slowly baked under the sun. Noon pursed her lips and stepped beyond the threshold. Heat hit her like a physical blow, and she staggered slightly.
‘You’ll die out there,’ said a low voice from behind her. Noon didn’t turn, and instead lifted her head and walked straight out into the desert.
Vintage sat and glared around the finely appointed room. As prisons went, it was difficult to imagine a more pleasant one. It had smooth, cream-coloured walls and a worn embroidered carpet on the floor, and it had a few pieces of annoyingly fine furniture; a low bed in the Jarlsbad style, covered with a thin, plain sheet; a small dresser of dark wood, and a heavy pottery sink, glazed blue and white. There was a jug of sweet-tasting water on the dresser and even two small windows in the adjoining walls. They were criss-crossed with thick pieces of black lead and filled with diamond shards of multi-coloured glass, so thick it warped the view beyond. There was a similar one in the locked door, but squinting out of it had revealed very little, save for a well-lit corridor.
She shuffled over to the window in the easternmost wall and rapped on the glass with her knuckles.
‘Chenlo? You there?’
There was a beat of silence, and then a blurred shape appeared beyond the glass. Vintage could see the woman’s dark hair, and a portion of the eagle tattoo at her throat, twisted and pinched by the window.
‘I am here. What do you want?’ Her voice was muffled but audible.
‘This is going well, don’t you think?’
There was a longer period of silence this time. ‘Is that supposed to be a joke, Lady de Grazon?’
Vintage sighed and drummed her fingers on the glass. ‘You know Tyranny, a little at least. What do you think she will do?’
‘She will not keep us down here forever. This is her showing her strength. Demonstrating that she can have us taken out of the game at will. We’ll be down here just long enough to make us worried, and then there will be something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. She will likely kill me – she won’t want any reminders of the time when she was subordinate to others.’ Agent Chenlo’s voice was flat and unemotional. ‘What she will do with you, I cannot say. You’ve annoyed her, but she also beat you.’ Vintage scowled. ‘She would probably enjoy humiliating you some more.’
‘Well, that’s great news.’ Vintage looked away from the little window and cast her eyes around the room, considering. ‘The situation here isn’t quite what I thought it would be. There are still people going in and out of Tygrish. We saw them on the land bridges. There wasn’t a particularly large military presence in the city, no obvious unrest.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘It doesn’t look like a city that is shivering under the boot of a dictator, is my point. Of course, appearances can be deceptive.’ She tugged at her hair, so wild after days of flying. ‘But there are those flags everywhere too, the green ones emblazoned with the white bat. They’re not just outside the palace, they’re dotted throughout Tygrish.’
‘And?’
‘It’s a time of huge uncertainty for Sarn. We’ve seen the Jure’lia return. We know that Ebora is dead, or as close to it as makes no difference. What if your royal family have never seen a real war? Certainly never a real Rain. What if in your heart of hearts you believe them to be feckless, a bit useless? Perhaps even a liability? Perhaps then a newcomer might seem like a blessing.’
‘Fell-Tyranny is a mad woman. A dangerous and cruel witch.’ Through the small warped window, Chenlo shifted on her own bed. ‘She is a criminal, not a queen.’
‘I’m not arguing that she isn’t dangerous. But she’s also clever, and adept at spinning yarns.’ With bitterness Vintage remembered how she had listened, rapt, to Tyranny’s tales of taking rich clients through the Wilds. ‘She might have used force to displace Tygrish’s rulers, but I strongly suspect it isn’t force alone keeping her on that throne.’
‘The war-beast.’
‘Yes. Such an extraordinary creature, and the first they will have seen here. There can hardly be another status symbol like it.’
‘And . . . so? What does all this actually mean?’
Vintage rubbed her hands over her face. Nanthema was here too, apparently in an advisory capacity. That would have leant Tyranny’s cause a fair amount of legitimacy too – an actual, living, breathing Eboran standing at her side. She wondered if Nanthema had simply been bought, or if she had decided she couldn’t abandon the war-beast pod after all; the woman had been desperate to get out of Ebora, but she had always had a taste for the finer things in life. A position in the court of a newly crowned queen would be tempting.
‘It means, darling, that the situation here is vastly more complicated than we initially thought. Tyranny could well have the backing of the people. We came here with the threat of war with Ebora as punishment for stealing their property, but what if Jarlsbad stands behind her? The truth is, Ebora is in no state to fight a war on two fronts. We need Windfall on our side, helping to destroy the worm people.’
Chenlo had no response to this. For some time, they sat in silence, separated by the wall. Vintage reached out for Helcate, and felt a thin thread of confusion and alarm from him. Their connection was still so delicate, so newly forged, that this violent separation had scattered it, like dry leaves blown by autumn winds. With everything she had, she sent him comforting feelings, a reminder that he was not alone.
Stay close, but stay safe, she told him, not knowing if he would hear it or not. Be wary of the long grass beyond the city walls, it hides Wild-touched creatures. And darling, remember your family are still with you. Vostok, Sharrik, Jessen, Kirune. They are all out there somewhere, waiting for us to rejoin them.
‘That other woman who was there. The Eboran.’ Chenlo’s voice was careful now. ‘You had quite the reaction to her. There is a history between the two of you, yes?’
Vintage half laughed, surprised by the sting of pain in her chest at the reminder. ‘Nanthema and I were lovers, once. That all ended rather spectacularly, though, when she helped Tyranny and Okaar rob us blind.’
‘Oh.’ There was another long silence. ‘I see.’
Vintage raised an eyebrow, but before she could say more, a narrow slot in the door rattled open, and a bowl of stew appeared. Vintage jumped off the bed and scrambled to the door to take it, peering out through the slot as she did so. She caught sight of a slim brown hand, a flash of black hair.
‘I wanted to see if it was really you,’ came a cool voice from outside. ‘If you’d really be stupid enough to come here.’
‘Who is that? Jhef?’
The girl dipped into sight, smiling. She wore a silver clip at her ear, studded with blue gems.
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��Why did you come here? She’s quite happy, you know, playing the queen. You’ve just given her another way to demonstrate her power.’
‘Jhef, darling, we had no choice. You know what you stole from us. Did you really think it would be without consequences?’
‘What, consequences like you ending up in a cell?’
Teenagers, thought Vintage, rolling her eyes. ‘You still serve her then? You and your brother?’
It was difficult to see the young girl through the narrow slot, and now she seemed to move away. The corridor was quiet, no sounds of guards talking or marching, and with a lurch Vintage remembered how she had last seen Okaar; badly wounded, barely conscious.
‘Jhef? Is Okaar . . .?’
‘Tyranny is going to kill you both. Maybe not publicly, because these Tygrish people don’t seem to have the taste for it. Quietly, she’ll do it, but not too quietly. You know what she’s like.’
Vintage leaned down closer to the slot, trying to get a proper look at the girl. The Jhef she remembered hadn’t seemed especially bloodthirsty, but then, things changed.
‘Why hasn’t she done it already? Why not just kill us in your courtyard, in that case?’
‘Oh, she needs time to think of a really good way.’
And with that Jhef was gone from sight, her footfalls as quiet as a cat’s.
Chapter Eighteen
In the dream, Tor was standing underneath a night sky so huge it was frightening; a terrible black void lit with a multitude of uncaring stars. He was in a vast desert, grey sands stretching away to all sides, and Noon lay at his feet, curled up on one side like a sleeping child. There was a small fire burning low next to her, and she shivered violently in her sleep, as though she were dreaming of something unspeakable.
‘Noon,’ he said. ‘I miss you.’
She had covered herself with her jacket. There was an empty glass jug sitting incongruously by the fire, and several severed pieces of some sort of plant. Odd dream details. The mind was strange, sometimes.
‘I’d burn the bloody tree down myself if I thought it would bring you back,’ he said quietly. ‘Everything is so hopeless anyway, why shouldn’t we be happy for a bit? We could have done that, couldn’t we? I think so. It would have been messy, but . . . Instead my mind gives me this.’ He gestured around at the dream desert, the dream sky. ‘A fucking dream of you. As if that would be enough.’
Far on the horizon, a sinister green glow was bleeding up into the night, like some sort of eldritch sunset, and there was a sense of being watched; as though just out of sight something was observing him, or observing Noon. There were strange fleshy white plants dotted here and there, looking far too much like grasping corpse hands for comfort. Tor could not recall ever travelling across a place like it. His unconscious mind appeared to have crafted its eerie landscape to reflect his mood.
‘What a shit hole.’
Noon shifted again in her sleep, hands grasping at nothing, and suddenly it was just too painful to look at her face, the black hair messy across her forehead and her skin greyish in the starlight . . .
He woke up sprawled in a chair, a half-empty bottle of wine propped in his lap. The surge of anguish in his throat had woken him, almost choking him, and then he realised that it was a real, physical pain, splitting his chest in two.
Crying out, Tor lurched from the chair and fell to the floor, wine bottle spinning away under a table. On his hands and knees the pain spread through him like a fire, searing down his arms and into his stomach. The place on his arm where the red threads had first started to show throbbed with particular agony.
He curled up on his side, much as Noon had been doing in his dream, and waited for it to pass. When finally the agony began to fade, he was covered in a fine sweat, and his muscles were twitching and cramping. There was, he belatedly realised, early morning daylight coming in through the tall windows, and he was not in his own room at all, but the office lately shared by Vintage and Aldasair. The desk was still littered with papers and the faintly glowing amber slabs.
‘Ah. Good. Great.’ He crawled to his feet and pushed his lank hair out of his face with trembling fingers. ‘Exactly where I need to be. Well done me.’
There was a full bottle of wine on the desk, so he opened it and filled a tall goblet, which he stood and drank down in one go. A tonic, he told himself, for my pains. When that was gone he poured a fresh glass, and began to run his free hand over the amber tablets, considering. At first, he had been vaguely methodical about it, trying to figure out if the tablets had been created in any sort of order, taking note of which Rain they depicted, and which war-beasts and Eboran heroes Micanal had taken time to recreate. Vintage and Aldasair had already made notes, and he had read through those too, at first. It was diverting.
But just lately he had found himself picking up the tablets at random, dipping in and out of the crafted memories they contained. He stopped making notes, or even taking much notice of what was happening around him while he dream-walked within the tablets. It was enough to be somewhere else; somewhen else. In this glorified past of Ebora there was no Jure’lia – not one that was a real threat, anyway – and no humans, no dead witches and no crimson flux. The glory of Ebora was real, within Micanal’s vision, and not a sad experiment conducted by beings who didn’t even really care about the results. Within the amber record, the world was as it should be.
‘Why would I ever want to leave it?’
He picked up one of the amber tablets, and took it back to the chair where he’d been sitting before, pausing to set down the glass goblet on a side table. There was a clatter at the door, and Aldasair strode in. He looked preoccupied and his arms were full of the tubes that carried messages from across Sarn, but when he spotted Tor, he stopped, his eyebrows raised.
‘There you are! Kirune has been looking for you, cousin.’ Tor saw Aldasair looking at the open wine bottle, the full glass on the side table, the splashes of wine on the floor. It was also possible, he considered, that his cousin was noticing his crumpled clothes and unwashed hair. He straightened up, half hiding the amber tablet behind his back.
‘I’ve been searching through the amber record for useful information,’ he said.
‘Is that what you’ve been doing?’ Aldasair looked doubtfully at the mess on the table, then carefully put the pile of letters in the one unoccupied space. ‘If that were the case, that would be very useful. Because things are bad, Tormalin, very bad, and I need your help.’
‘Everything is bad all the time,’ Tor said, turning away to look out the window instead. It looked to be another bright morning. ‘What can I do about it?’
Aldasair hissed between his teeth, such an unusual gesture for him that Tor turned back, surprised.
‘What can you do? Be ready to fight, to lead. Stop drinking yourself into oblivion and get your head out of those stones. We both know you’re not doing any actual research in there.’
Tor bristled. ‘I’ll have you know I have been very thorough . . .’
‘Nonsense. You are mooning about in there looking at pretty things.’
‘Al . . .’ Tor frowned. His normally placid cousin had two spots of bright colour on his cheeks, and his eyes were too bright. ‘It cost us a lot to find that record, I refuse to just ignore it.’
‘You left us before,’ said Aldasair shortly. ‘Went off into the world because everything was hopeless here, and spent your time drinking and pleasing yourself. Do you think I’ve forgotten that?’ He gestured to the wine bottle. ‘You have lost hope, so you are doing it again.’
‘Hope, cousin, was always something we were in very short supply of.’
‘I am sorry, I should have been more specific. Noon, you have lost Noon, so you are back to your old habits.’
Tor found he had nothing to say to that. Aldasair shook his head, dismissing him, and turned back to the letters. ‘We are getting reports in from all over Sarn of new Jure’lia attacks. The small grace period Bern and Vintage bought u
s with their tricks is over, it seems.’ He scattered pieces of parchment on the table, and then rolled a long map over the top, which he began scratching at with a leaky pen. Despite himself, Tor moved to stand at his shoulder, watching. ‘They are focussing on small settlements and towns, all over – the Reilans and Catalen, the Elru valleys – and each attack features a set of three Behemoths, led by an Eboran woman riding a dark dragon.’ He coughed lightly into his hand. ‘I think we can guess who that is. These aren’t huge losses, but she’s working her way up. Do you see?’ He scratched several crosses on the map, obliterating settlements with unfamiliar names: Boritnor, Dawnhaven, Kotrafen, Hope’s Lease. ‘Small places, but prosperous. Surrounded by successful farms and productive land, even mines and lakes. And all of it, Hestillion covers with varnish. She is very meticulous about it. Here, look.’ He picked up another brush from the table and dipped it in a small pot of dark orange ink. With this he began to daub sprawling shapes across the map. ‘These are the places she has covered with varnish. Do you see what she’s doing?’
Tor pressed his fingers to his temples. The wine had sent a pleasant warmth through his aching limbs but it had also dispatched a couple of daggers to dig behind his eyeballs.
‘I don’t know. Being the worst sister imaginable?’
Aldasair pushed a loose lock of auburn hair back behind his ear. ‘In previous Rains, the Jure’lia attacks were more or less random. They went where they wanted, attacked whatever happened to be there. Sometimes they would concentrate on quite innocuous targets, allowing our armies to gain serious ground.’
‘Have you been at Vintage’s books?’
‘This, however, indicates a pattern. Hestillion is deliberately targeting places she knows she can take, and which provide a great deal of food and supplies for Sarn in general. Tor, these places are far away, yes, but eventually the enormous loss of farmland is going to have an impact on us. At the moment we import almost everything, remember. And when we start to go hungry, we get weak. All of Sarn will become weak, less able to fight. All the people who have come here to help will go hungry too. Which is exactly what she wants.’