The Key to Starveldt

by Foz Meadows

  ‘No,’ said the Goth girl, not looking round, but her shoulders twitched in a way that suggested secrecy.

  Solace felt as though her head was floating above her neck, instead of being properly connected to her body. The day had already held so many weird revelations that one more shouldn’t have mattered, but somehow, the idea that Laine knew more than any of them about the Rookery was the most alarming of all. Clearly, Solace wasn’t alone in this perception: Paige swore violently, and when it became apparent that the psychic wasn’t about to turn and explain herself, Evan reached out and grabbed her by the elbow.

  Laine whirled, shocked and angry. ‘Hey!’

  ‘What aren’t you telling us?’ Evan’s voice was frighteningly level. His eyes bored into hers for long seconds, the contrasting blues of their irises like the iridescent shades of a beetle’s shell. Laine’s lips parted, but that was all. Evan waited a moment longer, then dropped his hand and let her go. Laine didn’t move, but somehow, it still felt to Solace as though she’d stumbled. A blush crept up the psychic’s neck.

  ‘We’ll take the risk,’ said Evan. His eyes didn’t leave Laine, but his words were directed at Sylvia. ‘Take us where we need to go.’

  The Rookery guard raised an eyebrow. ‘You are all agreed?’

  Solace braced for Paige’s objection, but nobody spoke. She turned and looked at her friends. Beside her, Manx shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Harper stood tense, while Jess seemed unusually lost, still disoriented by the failure of her Trick. Electra rested one hand on the seer’s shoulder, golden and serene. Paige looked furious, her lips drawn in a tight line, but as though she feared the childishness of her anger, she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the middle distance.

  Only when it became apparent that Sylvia really did want an answer did Solace speak. ‘We are agreed,’ she said.

  The guard inclined her head. ‘Then follow me.’

  6

  Into the Woods

  The Rookery was vast, and to Laine, almost unbearable. Whatever sleeping with Evan had done to her psychic sensitivity showed no signs of dissipating. Despite her wards, the sheer number and variety of nearby minds was overwhelming, such that she could scarcely keep control of herself. Paige’s open hostility wasn’t helping, either. Part of her desperately wanted to collapse, but instead she found herself placing one foot in front of the other, focusing on the deep purple grass and massive white stars as Sylvia led them onwards through the crowds.

  For the first five minutes, nobody spoke to her. It was ridiculous. She could hear their curiosity, a sort of low-pitched, wordless whine that hummed in her awareness like a mosquito. Not for the first time, Laine found herself wishing wearily that people would just be honest with one another, even as she recognised that truth could be equally as problematic as falsehood, if not more so. Which is why, when Solace fell into step beside her, she actually found herself smiling.

  ‘So,’ said the vampire, glancing at Laine from the corner of one ink-black eye. ‘You know many satyrs?’

  ‘I’ve admitted to having secrets. That’s not the same thing as sharing them.’

  ‘I never said it was.’

  Laine sighed. Her head throbbed with thoughtnoise, but despite her sudden proximity to Solace, the other girl’s mind remained blissfully silent. Not unreadable, as her earlier experience had already proven, but somehow mute. Self-contained, as though she were watching a TV show with the sound off, able to read the basic cues as to what was going on, but protected from more detailed chatter. It did nothing to alleviate the ambient roar, of course, but finding such a pocket of quiet was like taking a sip of cool water on a hot day. It calmed her.

  ‘I know one,’ she found herself saying. ‘Feyez. I met him in Newtown.’

  ‘Newtown,’ Solace echoed, her tone a wry mix of amusement and wonder. ‘He sold you the nepenthe?’

  Laine shook her head. ‘Traded, not sold. There’s a difference. But, yes. It came from him. We only ever met a few times, and he didn’t tell me much. Of course –’ she tapped the side of her head, ‘– he didn’t need to.’

  Solace said nothing. Laine found herself studying the vampire, taking in the line of her throat, her thick hair and easy gait. You’re the reason we’re here, she almost said, but held the words back. Solace was still growing into herself, and more trusting in some ways than Laine could comfortably ignore. Although, by way of compensation, she was also strong and unexpectedly kind; maybe even clever. But underneath everything was a loneliness that went so deep it frightened Laine, who knew about isolation. More troubling was the extent to which Solace refused to acknowledge what she felt. Sooner or later, Laine feared, it would cause Solace to do something regrettable, if not downright foolish. Laine had no delusions about her own inner turmoil, but at least she understood where it came from, and could guard against it. Most of the time.

  ‘What are you thinking now?’ asked Solace, so suddenly that Laine almost jumped. To cover her surprise, she laughed.

  ‘I was thinking about you, actually. About what you are.’

  ‘Me too.’

  The vampire glanced over her shoulder. After a moment, Laine did likewise. Behind them, the rest of their friends were gawking at the Rookery – not all the curiosity she’d sensed was directed at her, after all. Only Evan noticed their scrutiny: he acknowledged their gazes, unblinking. His thoughts were wrapped closely together, foggy in Laine’s perception, but still potentially readable. She refrained from probing them, struck by the double memory of how he’d looked when washing the blood from Solace’s face, and how quietly the vampire had sat while he did it. Though her conscious mind had registered nothing of the sort, Solace’s whole skin had burned with the need to be held, to be touched, to be comforted. Laine wondered if Evan had sensed it, too, and whether it mattered, or ought to. For any of them.

  Only a few seconds had passed. Both girls returned their gaze to the brightness of Sylvia’s rifle, the solidity of her armour.

  ‘I wish I knew what I was,’ Solace said, so quietly that Laine almost didn’t hear.

  Me too, Laine thought.

  Around them, the Rookery teemed like a ragtag shoal of tropical fish. Sylvia walked with a purposeful stride, her silver rifle slung against one shoulder. Laine jolted out of her reverie and noticed that Manx was chatting with the guard – and more, that Sylvia was smiling. Had they been on Earth, the disparity in their heights would’ve been enough to mark them out in a crowd, never mind Sylvia’s strange appearance or the mismatched colours of Manx’s eyes, but here, amid all the disjunctive pairings of the Rookery, they were entirely unremarkable. Neither had any mechanical or overtly animal parts, and both moved with efficient grace, the relaxed tension of jungle predators evident in every muscle.

  Curiosity got the better of her. Sharing a conspiratorial glance with Solace – the vampire had noticed them, too, and was already eavesdropping – Laine turned her attention to Manx and Sylvia’s conversation. Unlike Solace, however, she had to take care to overhear only what was said out loud.

  ‘– looks so human,’ Manx was saying. ‘Or at least, if human isn’t a good enough word, then similar. We’re all so physically similar, but from such diverse worlds! Doesn’t that seem more than coincidental? As though we’ve all been made that way?’

  Sylvia’s eyes were warm with amusement. ‘Yes, we are similar in some respects. But the brute mechanics of the universe don’t change just because the sun of your world is yellow, or because I was born beneath three moons. Spheres are an efficient shape for bubbles everywhere – that requires no artistry, just adherence to natural law. Why should life be any different?’

  ‘Because of the greater complexity,’ Manx argued.

  Sylvia laughed. ‘True, life is complex. But so are a great many accidents. We are all born so small, we cannot help but look at the vastness of everything else and assume it contains a pattern, that our presence is both necessary and purposeful. Yet other animals manage without a conce
pt of destiny, and are content to do so. Why should we be an exception, simply because our intelligence is greater?’

  Manx considered this. ‘Do you think your own life matters? If nothing higher guides you, if all this –’ he gestured at the Rookery, ‘– is, I don’t know, the equivalent of cosmic noise, just coincidental in the grand life of the universe, why do we bother? Does any of it matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters! As well to argue that there is no joy in existence without an audience. We make our own necessity, forge our own purpose: we need not matter to everyone; just to ourselves, and perhaps an important few.’

  ‘Maybe,’ grudged Manx, ‘but even if we weren’t here to decide what’s important and what isn’t – even if there was no life, just rocks and water and empty worlds – then everything would still matter, I think, even without an audience or a name. A person still matters even if they don’t believe so, even if nobody else agrees.’

  Sylvia smiled. ‘You have a philosopher’s heart, little lion, and a soldier’s eyes. That matters to me.’

  Manx grinned, dropping his gaze to the purple grass. Laine had bigger things to worry about than a blue-armoured guard flirting with a man who changed into a housecat, but just at that moment, she found herself at a loss to remember them. Stifling the urge to laugh, she glanced over her shoulder, curious as to whether anyone else had noticed the exchange, and found that Evan, at least, was not entirely oblivious. He winked broadly in acknowledgement of her raised eyebrow, then feigned ignorance when Jess demanded an explanation.

  Before any damage could be done, Sylvia came to a halt, effectively putting an end to conversation. Above them, the sky was the same as ever, but the slope of the ground had altered, flattening out to a circular plain at the base of a long hill.

  For the first time, Laine caught a glimpse of what might reasonably be termed the horizon, and was startled to realise that, aside from those animals for sale in the Rookery markets, the dimension boasted wildlife of its own. Birds hovered in the skyline, thick-winged, legless and queerly featherless, beautiful only by grace of their slender swan necks and fluid, prehensile tails. Beside her, Solace laughed out loud as one such creature, roughly the size of a cat, swooped low overhead, displaying wide blue eyes and a pinkish bat-skin complexion mottled with purple lines – perfect camouflage for a dusk and twilit world. Its cry was like the echo of a bell. Laine opened her mouth to ask Sylvia what they were called, then stopped, staring: one of the creatures had winked out of existence with a tacit pop, only to reappear some fifteen metres away, hovering.

  ‘Quetzals,’ said Sylvia, answering the unasked question. Evidently, Solace and Laine weren’t the only ones staring. ‘I cannot think of a comparable Earth species that still exists. A distant fifth cousin of your prehistoric dinosaur birds, perhaps? In any case, they are native to this place.’ She waited a moment, allowing them all one last look. ‘But we did not come here to sightsee. Look.’

  Ahead and slightly to the left was a rising slope of grass, dotted with clumps of white flowers and crowned with a thicket of tall, pale-wooded trees, their blue-green foliage rippling softly. From where they stood, it wasn’t possible to see where the grove eventually ended: only where it began. Through her Trick, Laine knew that it was inhabited, but not by whom. She shivered.

  ‘The satyrs’ grove,’ said Sylvia, tilting her chin. ‘Gateway to the Castalian spring.’

  ‘You won’t come in with us?’ asked Paige, her hazel eyes wide as a child’s.

  ‘No. The journey is yours from here.’

  ‘Well, thank you for bringing us, anyway,’ said Manx, earning himself a small smile. Sylvia turned to go.

  ‘Wait,’ said Jess, surprising everyone except Laine. ‘Please. The Castalian spring. Why have I heard of it?’

  The guard stopped, but didn’t move her head. ‘On your world, there is a story about the spring, an old story. They say a winged horse born from the splash of demon’s blood on sea-foam created it to slake his thirst. His hooves struck open the stone of a sacred mountain, and liquid truth flowed out like water. Now it is both here and not-here, protected by the custodianship of the Rookery. The spring is beautiful, but I do not advise you to drink from it – not undiluted, anyway. Mortal flesh is not strong enough for the purity of truth.’

  And then she was gone, striding away as though her words held no more weight than ordinary air, her silver rifle winking like a trickster’s eye. It wasn’t until the guard was almost gone from sight that Laine realised she hadn’t caught a single thought of Sylvia’s. That, too, was something to wonder about.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Evan, breaking the silence. He looked at Laine, his face unreadable. ‘You’re the one who knows this place.’

  ‘I’ve never been here before,’ she said softly. ‘I met one satyr. I learned some names, and traded for nepenthe. That’s it.’

  She knew she was stalling, but even with the others staring at her, she couldn’t make herself walk forward. Then she felt Solace brush a hand against her elbow. The vampire’s eyes were dark and strong, like pools of swirling oil.

  ‘Lead on, Laine,’ she murmured.

  Whatever Solace had intended, the words came out a command. Helpless to do otherwise, Laine obeyed.

  For the first few minutes, the satyrs’ grove proved conspicuously absent of satyrs – or, indeed, of anything other than eeriness. Except for the nervous tramping of their own unsteady group, Solace saw no sign of life. Should I be reassured, or worried? she wondered. For once, the Vampire Cynic had nothing to offer.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Paige muttered, stumbling over an awkwardly angled tree root.

  ‘Luckily, I don’t care,’ Laine shot back. She was slightly ahead of everyone, apparently having taken Solace’s suggestion of leadership to heart.

  ‘Perhaps you should,’ Evan said, with an unfamiliar twist in his voice. Laine faltered, but didn’t turn.

  Solace turned and looked at him. ‘Sharp,’ she told him, not quite reproving.

  ‘I know. I’m a very bad man.’ He tried to grin, but failed and ended up sighing. ‘Very bad. Also about nine kinds of an idiot.’

  ‘And this is new, how?’

  ‘It isn’t,’ he admitted. ‘I just felt it needed mentioning.’

  Solace tried to gauge his mood and failed. ‘What the hell is up with you today, anyway?’

  ‘You mean, apart from everything that happened in Sanguisidera’s dungeon and us being in a pocket dimension with quetzals?’

  ‘Oh. Well, yeah. Apart from that.’

  Evan was about to answer when a shriek from Jess cut him off. The group came to a halt, staring at the source of her alarm. Solace gulped, unable to fathom how the creature had snuck up on them. They had been alone, and then he was there, stepping out from behind a crooked tree with no more sound than a shadow. Paige made a noise somewhere between whimpering and laughter.

  ‘Satyr,’ Manx breathed.

  His horns were the colour of old ivory, if ivory could be as iridescent as the inside of a shell, sweeping backwards and round again from either side of his forehead. Large brown eyes devoid of pupils stared imperiously down from above a flat, goatish nose. His skin was the colour of coffee, dark against the startling iron-grey of his dreadlocks. Silvery hair curled on his bare chest, with his navel visible above the point where his human half segued into his goat-jointed legs, their shaggy, black-brown fur liberally marked with grey. His hooves were the size of plates, streaked with green moss and old mud, and his proud gaze was fixed squarely on Jess.

  ‘Seer,’ he said, revealing teeth that were large and uniformly rectangular, like those of a horse. ‘What purpose have you here?’

  ‘No purpose,’ Jess managed. She pushed her shoulders back, but her voice still quivered. ‘Why? Should I have?’

  ‘All creatures have purpose.’ His focus swung to the right, centring on Laine. ‘And you, thought-thief. Did you hear me coming?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Laine replied, �
�but I can hear you now –’ she paused, ‘– Salesian.’

  ‘Hm.’ The satyr’s lip curled. ‘A pretty trick. Our warden here, Liluye, the Singing Hawk, she has a gift with names. I doubt that you share her talent, briefling. Tell me –’ he turned to Solace, ‘– what are you doing here?’

  Solace stared back at the satyr, who Laine had named as Salesian, and realised that she was unafraid.

  ‘We’re looking for some nepenthe,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’ Salesian cocked his head, amused. ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘To find our way forward.’

  ‘But you have a seer,’ the satyr pointed out. ‘And in any case, our brew is a poor substitute. Mostly, it only takes the drinker sideways in time. Rarely does it go back, and forwards even more seldom. Use the tools already at your disposal, blood-daughter, and forget this idea of borrowing ours.’

  ‘I can’t see.’

  The rasped words came from Jess. Salesian’s eyes narrowed as he contemplated her anew.

  ‘Your vision is clouded?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘You are afraid of what it might show you.’

  ‘No!’ said Jess. ‘I just –’

  Salesian waved a hand. ‘Your excuses are of no concern to me.’

  ‘What is, then?’ asked Evan. His jaw was set, clearly angry on Jess’s behalf and tense with the desire to keep his sister safe.

  For a long moment, Salesian stared at the empath, his face motionless. Though the grey of his fur and dreadlocks hinted at an advanced age, the skin of his face and body was olive-smooth.

  ‘The truth of you,’ he said at last. There was an odd light in his eyes. Abruptly, he lifted his head, listening for something. The nape of Solace’s neck tingled with warning as, with a rustle, a dozen more satyrs materialised from nowhere and everywhere, encircling their group. No two of them looked alike. One tall male with a broken horn sneered at them, his blond hair tied into hundreds of thin braids that hung to his hocks, each one strung with what appeared to be microchips. A black-furred female with Asian features wore a leather cuirass studded with thorns, while beside her stood another female, her short hair dyed in vivid stripes of red, blue and purple. She wore an ordinary black singlet, the edge of which reached to the top of her white and tan fur. Though Salesian by himself hadn’t frightened Solace, the sudden, silent arrival of so many of his fellows sent a shudder through her skin.