The Poison Song

by Jen Williams

  ‘The tree-god keeps his own prison,’ he said, a shade enigmatically, then, ‘she’ll kill everything there, you know that. How do you even know that you will live when the tree-father is gone?’

  Hestillion did not answer. Since the incident in the caverns, when Celaphon had spent time unsupervised with the human man Bern, he had seemed more likely to question her, to challenge her words. It was extremely annoying. Instead, she urged him forward until they flew just above the enormous shifting mass that was the queen. She moved over the land like a plague, eating up the grasslands and leaving nothing but death.

  ‘My queen!’ Hestillion urged Celaphon lower still, so that they hovered over a simmering mass of black Jure’lia fluid. Shapes and debris moved there; she saw faces in the muck, limbs that reached desperately, sticks and leaves and stones. ‘May I speak with you?’

  The fluid boiled with movement, and many of the shapes and pieces of rubbish moved together, becoming a mouth and an eye. Hestillion fought down the urge to look away. She missed the white shape of the queen’s mask.

  ‘Lady Hestillion Eskt of the corpse moon, born in the year of the green bird. Born again in the year of the Ninth Rain.’ The queen’s voice was a buzz; it was a thousand voices. ‘Our warrior queen. What do you want?’

  ‘To give some advice.’ Hestillion nodded to the line of sea ahead of them, which was growing clearer and brighter all the time. ‘When we cross the Lost Sea, you may wish to think about turning west, towards the island of Corineth. A great human city lies there, called Mushenska.’

  There was a long silence, filled with the wind and the hissing, babbling sound of the Jure’lia on the move.

  ‘Why would we wish to do that?’ said the queen eventually.

  Hestillion bit down her impatience. ‘Remember what I told you before? That to take control of Sarn, you must destroy its infrastructure. Take its allies apart piece by piece, until Ebora has no help at all.’ She leaned forward in Celaphon’s harness. It was cold so high up, but she was warmed by the thought of her victories. ‘I have destroyed so many cities! I have even reduced the kingdoms of Jarlsbad to rubble, and Mushenska is said to be even greater – a place of trade and industry, Sarn’s most modern city. To destroy it would be a devastating blow. You need only turn to the west.’

  The features of the face, such as they were, twisted and flexed.

  ‘Ebora must be destroyed,’ said the queen in her rasping voice. ‘There is no other path, Hestillion of the corpse moon.’

  ‘But –’

  Black fluid boiled again, and the debris flowed away. The face was gone.

  Hestillion urged Celaphon back up into the sky, and for the rest of the day they watched in silence as the queen surged towards the sea. When finally they got to the coast, the light had seeped from the day, leaving a purple night scattered with stars that seemed too close, too interested. The queen did not stop, but flowed directly into the crashing surf, sending up waves that flooded the beach and the grasslands beyond. She shifted as she went, sending up a series of long pole-like fingers above the water while the rest moved below. Several of them, Hestillion noted, sported pale glistening orbs that turned wetly and watched the sea, while other protrusions slid ahead like snakes, feeling their way across the vast ocean. Even for Hestillion, who had largely grown accustomed to the grotesque forms of the Jure’lia, it was a nightmare image – a lively poison seeping out into the water, a thing of serpents and eyes and teeth.

  She and Celaphon flew on, their eyes already looking for land.

  Chapter Fifty

  Bern was certainly right about one thing; when they arrived, they came on fast.

  Their first warning was the panicked shout of one of the fell-witches who had been dispatched to the southern regions of Ebora to keep watch. Vintage was with Aldasair, who was supervising the distribution of the modified Eboran armour to Finneral and Yuron-Kai soldiers. The bat nearly fell out of the sky onto the palace lawn, and the woman jumped out of her harness and ran.

  ‘It’s them! It’s – the fucking worm people are here! Are you listening?’

  Vintage went to her and took her firmly by the shoulders.

  ‘Where? How long ago?’

  ‘I came straight here. They’re coming down through the foothills.’ The woman had gone the colour of chalk, and for a moment she leaned too heavily on Vintage’s arms, her eyelids flickering dangerously.

  ‘Wake up,’ Vintage gave her a sharp shake. ‘Are you with me, darling? Good. Get to your unit. Tell them to get ready. Tell everyone.’

  Helcate was a presence in her mind, and through him she could feel the others.

  It’s time. They’re here.

  She turned to Aldasair, who nodded brusquely. ‘We’re lucky we had even this long to prepare,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ll do what we can. That’s all we can do.’

  Tor and Noon came sprinting across the grass with Kirune, while a dark shadow thrown over them announced Vostok’s presence. From somewhere nearby someone was blowing a horn. The mournful notes floated out across the palace grounds, and Vintage suppressed a shiver.

  ‘We all know what we’re doing?’ Noon was strapping on a short sword as she came. ‘It’s all clear?’

  At that moment Bern arrived on Sharrik’s back. The big griffin was already in his armour. Vintage had the idea he had been wearing it constantly, just in case.

  ‘I’ll be hanging back in the city,’ said Aldasair. ‘Jessen and I will be with the human armies, keeping the worm people from the palace as long as we can.’

  ‘Our last ring of defence,’ said Vintage. ‘Let’s hope you have a very peaceful afternoon, darling.’

  ‘And the rest of us –’ said Bern.

  ‘The rest of us fly into battle!’ bellowed Sharrik.

  ‘We make sure Noon can get to where she needs to be,’ said Tor smoothly. To Vintage’s eye, he looked better than he had done in days. His crimson eyes were bright, and he had brushed his long black hair back into a tail, which was firmly bound with black silk. He wore a tight-fighting suit of leather armour in dusty reds and browns, something easy to move in, and there was a long, graceful sword strapped to his back.

  ‘And then you all have to be as far away from me as possible,’ said Noon. She looked around at them all, her eyes fierce, and Vintage wondered what had happened to the scared young woman she had found in the Shroom Flats. ‘I mean it. I have no control over how big this explosion will be.’

  ‘You all be sure to take care of yourselves though, aye?’ said Bern. He looked worried, and Vintage couldn’t blame him. Sharrik snorted, and Bern ruffled the big griffin’s neck feathers. ‘Tor, if you need help, you call for me. There’s no shame in illness, in needing help. I want to see you all back here when we’ve finished smearing them into paste.’

  Vintage wondered if Tor would be offended by Bern’s obvious concern, but instead he nodded seriously. ‘Thank you, brother.’

  ‘There’s no more time,’ said Vostok sharply. ‘We have to get moving. Now.’

  ‘Wait!’ Vintage held up her hand, despite the hiss of impatience it earned her from the dragon. She had the sudden terrible feeling that they would never again stand together as they did now, and she wanted a few more seconds to feel their closeness, their kinship. She threw her feelings towards the link that they shared, hoping that for once she would come through clearly.

  Stay strong, my bravest, dearest friends. We fly as one.

  She saw Noon and Tor smile, saw Aldasair nod. Bern bowed to her, still atop Sharrik, and Helcate pushed his snout into her shoulder.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vostok. ‘We fly as one, Lady Vintage. You speak well.’

  ‘Helcate,’ said Helcate.

  There were a few last scrambled moments as war-beasts were strapped into armour and weapons were fetched, and then they went, while Aldasair and Jessen ran back to join the human troops.

  Vintage and Helcate flew up a few moments later, meeting Chenlo in mid-air. The Winnowry agent
was on her own bat, her scarlet shirt a fiery note against the blue sky.

  ‘What happens first?’

  ‘First, my love, we go and have a bloody good look at what we’re facing. Bring half of the fell-witches, we may well need them.’

  The nightmare swept down from the mountain’s shadow, turning everything the colour of a bruise.

  Noon pressed her hand against Vostok’s scales for comfort even as she narrowed her eyes against the wind. It wasn’t easy to look at this. They had faced a lot together, had nearly died, had seen friends die, and now this unstoppable doom was coming for them. And to make things worse, it had changed.

  ‘Fuck my old boots,’ shouted Vintage. ‘What is that thing?’

  ‘It is her,’ called back Vostok. ‘Or them. Or it. The being that is the Jure’lia, in all its parts.’

  Noon just shook her head, uncertain what to add to that. The shape moving down through the outskirts of Ebora was huge, taller than Ygseril even, and its form seemed to change all the time; tendrils of blackish green flicked out in front of it as if tasting the air, while things like limbs came and went as it moved. Holes appeared in its oozing body, then filled up, and every now and then she thought she could make out a larger shape to it; a spine perhaps, a long, conical shaped head. Above it hung three intact Behemoths, like terrible obedient moons.

  ‘Look below!’ called Bern. Noon leaned out over Vostok’s pearly wing and saw movement; hundreds of scurrying burrowers, making their busy way into the outer ruins of the Eboran city.

  ‘Blood and fire.’ She swallowed hard, her stomach turning over. From behind her she could hear a few of the fell-witches cry out in horror. ‘All the people in the city, the soldiers . . .’

  ‘They know how to fight,’ said Vostok. And then in a quieter tone, ‘It is what it is, bright weapon. All we can do is what we were made to do.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Noon sat up in the harness and reached for the connection that held them all together.

  Aldasair, there are burrowers in the city, perhaps worse. Be ready.

  She felt his grim acknowledgement and imagined him informing the human soldiers. They wouldn’t be taken by surprise at least.

  ‘So,’ she said aloud. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one furthest to the back,’ said Bern. ‘It’ll be the least distance to push.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Noon turned and waved to the fell-witches, who were clustered on their bats behind Chenlo. ‘Ladies, take your heartbright and follow me! We’re going to need your firepower.’

  Vostok flew up and around, meaning to avoid the queen as much as possible, and that was the beginning of it. Noon waved at Vintage and Bern as they passed, taking a small moment to savour the sight of their faces – Vintage looked tense but excited, while Bern looked older somehow, like a grizzled veteran fighter – and then Tor joined her with Kirune, the big cat’s powerful wings cutting through the air.

  ‘Here we go!’ he called.

  ‘You should stay here,’ she shouted back. ‘Help Vintage and Bern distract the queen.’

  He shook his head, and had the cheek to grin at her. ‘I go where you go!’ Noon gave up. They had had this conversation before, more than once, and at no point had Tor come even close to changing his mind. They flew up and around, edging closer to the monstrous queen. Noon pressed herself to Vostok’s back, peering down over the dragon’s shoulder. The ubiquitous ooze of the worm people that made up her shifting form looked oily and strange, catching other colours in its reflected light and polluting them.

  They passed beyond the creature and shot up towards the Behemoth lingering at the back of the formation. It looked much the same as the other two, although there were some dents and scorch marks in its shining skin, and Noon took this to be a good sign; they had clearly met it in battle before.

  ‘There!’ she shouted to the fell-witches. ‘Concentrate your fire on its front! Push it away!’

  The fell-witches flew up on their bats, their arms held out in front of them. Tor and Kirune flew up and out of their way just as multiple streams of heartbright-fuelled winnowfire poured forth, crashing against the nose of the Behemoth with a spitting fury. Instantly Noon could see that they had done damage; panels of Behemoth skin were peeling back, blackening at the edges and bleeding a strange, clear fluid.

  ‘That’s it!’ Noon leaned down over Vostok’s neck. ‘Let’s help them, we don’t have any time to waste.’

  Violet and green fire joined the barrage, and soon the front of the ship was lost in a corona of light too bright to look at.

  ‘It’s moving back!’ She glanced up to see Tor and Kirune circling above. ‘You’ve got it on the run.’

  ‘A little further,’ said Vostok. ‘We need to be closer to the mountain and further from the city, to be safe.’

  Noon paused in her own stream to shout to Chenlo. ‘Keep going a little longer, it’s working!’

  The fell-witches doubled their efforts and gradually Noon realised that they were moving. Below them, the scattered ruins of the edge of the city were becoming scrubby grasslands and the rockier outcroppings of the foothills. However, apertures in the sides of the ship were opening up, and things with many legs and eyes were crawling out. Noon heard a shout of alarm from one of the fell-witches, and a few of the streams of fire stopped.

  ‘We’re almost there, keep going!’

  There were a few shouted words from Chenlo that Noon couldn’t hear over the flames, and one or two winnowfire streams started up again, but some of the creatures – things that looked like giant, deformed burrowers – were unfurling glassy wings and drifting down towards the women.

  ‘Tor!’

  ‘I told you you’d need me!’ Tor and Kirune swept down together, a greyish streak against the bulbous shape of the Behemoth. Light flashed along Tor’s sword, and Noon saw pieces of giant burrower falling away to the ground below. Kirune growled, landing on the surface of the ship and disembowelling several more creatures with a sweep from his claws.

  ‘Bright weapon, look!’

  The mountains were much closer, and when Noon looked down all she could see was rock and scree, broken up here and there by patches of thorny bushes. They were at the very foot of the Bloodless Mountains, as far as they could get from the Eboran city without leaving the region entirely or crashing into the mountainside. Briefly she entertained the idea of carrying on, pushing the Behemoth out beyond the mountain range to the plains beyond – a mountain in the way of the explosion wasn’t an entirely bad idea – but there was just no time.

  ‘Chenlo, go! Take them and help Vintage. It looks like they need it!’

  Sharrik’s heart was thundering. Bern could feel it through his legs, through his own chest, and through the connection they shared he could feel the sheer dense power of the griffin’s battle fury. He readjusted his grip on the axe, and grinned.

  ‘My brother!’ bellowed Sharrik. ‘This is the battle we were born for!’

  Below them, the Jure’lia queen was a strange shifting shape, changing and moving in all directions, but always edging forward through the broken streets of the outer city. Where her liquid body met the ground, Bern could see that parts of it were breaking away and becoming other, scuttling things; this was where the wave of burrowers and other creatures were coming from.

  ‘She’s making them as she goes,’ he said, his voice thick with disgust. ‘Until she’s dead, there will be no stopping them.’

  ‘Never mind all that now, darling, our job here is to distract the queen,’ called Vintage from the back of Helcate. She lifted her hand and pointed, and Bern saw that the Winnowry woman was returning, with the fell-witches in formation behind her. ‘And it looks like we’ve got reinforcements!’

  ‘Good.’ The queen herself seemed to be paying them no mind, which Bern didn’t find all that surprising; to her, he supposed, they were no more than annoying gnats. It was time for that to change. ‘Attack the head area, or whatever that’s supposed to be.’ Bern lifted his
remaining axe and pointed. ‘Let’s remind her that the stones of Sarn are not to be trampled over!’

  ‘And try not to get in each other’s way!’ added Vintage. Chenlo nodded solemnly and called out a series of instructions to the fell-witches, who immediately flew off in all directions. In moments, streams of fire were pouring down on the queen from every part of the sky. Bern grinned. He had thought of them as gnats, when in fact they were wasps. Deadly ones.

  ‘Come on. Let’s remind the queen who we are, shall we?’

  Sharrik rumbled his approval and they shot down and across, heading straight for the seething mass of the queen’s spiky back. Sharrik tore across it, razor-sharp beak peeling her oozing flesh into two pieces, and to Bern’s satisfaction there was a series of outraged shrieks from any number of mouths. Once on the other side, the griffin turned and dove again, and this time Bern reached down with his Bitter Twin, cleaving a ragged wound in the queen’s hide alongside the griffin’s.

  ‘Nice work!’ shouted Vintage. Helcate was following on behind, spitting his streams of acid directly into the wounds Sharrik and Bern had caused. Already the queen was healing herself, sending tendrils of black ooze soaring up to stitch herself back together, but with this onslaught and the ministrations of the witch-wasps, she also wasn’t moving forward very quickly or investigating the shapes now attacking one of her Behemoths. It was a rough and dangerous plan, but it was working.

  ‘Let’s try the other side,’ shouted Bern, ‘keep her on her toes!’

  Sharrik swerved and tore through the queen’s flesh again, but this time the bubbling ooze erupted, coming after them in a wave of reaching black tendrils. Bern saw them writhe up and around Sharrik’s rear legs, even felt the pull as they were yanked backwards, and then Chenlo was in the air above them, a series of guttering fireballs crashing into the queen’s oozing flesh. There was a deafening hiss and the tendrils snapped back again. Sharrik was free.