by Jen Williams
‘I killed the mage,’ she said. ‘As I will kill all of them, eventually. I would have killed you too, but you fell from the mage contraption you travelled in, so I thought I didn’t have to.’ She smiled faintly. ‘But then your companion changed his shape into some other creature and caught you as you fell. You tumbled and rolled around on the ground, and I thought perhaps the impact had killed you anyway.’
‘Where is Oster?’
‘He’s being looked after. Do you know what he is, human?’
Sebastian shifted his weight, trying to think. The sword and the knives were gone from his belt; as little good as they would do him here anyway. Oster had said that the gods did not like each other, that they naturally fought amongst themselves as beings who believed themselves to be above everything else. He had been afraid that they would know him for what he was, but if Y’Gria had him in her power, it was likely she knew what he was now anyway. The question was, what would she decide to do about it?
‘He is my friend,’ he said. Amusement glinted in her eyes.
‘That is all you have to say?’ She came closer, until she stood in front of him. They were of a height, and she peered keenly at his face as though looking for something in particular. Sebastian felt the hairs on the back of his neck and arms stand on end. The sense of danger and threat came off her in waves, and inevitably he was reminded of crouching on the field at Relios, Y’Ruen hanging over the Ynnsmouth knights, their fiery doom boiling at the back of her throat. ‘When I came for you both, this being you call Oster stood over your unconscious body and growled at me.’ She grinned, apparently delighted. ‘I was fascinated. Such as he has no need to feel loyalty to such as you.’
‘Oster is an unusual man.’
‘Man? That is not the form he took as he defended your body. Although, that’s not the whole story either, is it?’ She placed a hand on his arm and leaned closer, as though she would be able to scent the answer to her question.
‘Why are you killing all the mages?’ asked Sebastian, buying time. ‘What is this war really about?’
‘You ask such questions of a god?’ Her tone was imperious now, and she snatched her hand away. Almost immediately, her expression softened. ‘Truly? It is about our mistake. The ancestors of the mages struck down and killed the very first god, and ate her flesh. They carried the Edenier within them. They were young, and we hoped to see them as allies. Can you imagine? You would think the fact that their ancestors were murderers would be sufficient warning, but even gods can be fools. We lifted them up, gave them the Words to better control the power they had. For a time there was peace and growth.’ She paused, gazing across her great throne room. She almost looked wistful. ‘It was my time then. But they grew dissatisfied with what we’d already given them, so they clamoured for more. Demanded more. They sought to be gods themselves.’ She gave Sebastian a rueful look, and for a moment he was shocked by how human it looked. ‘Believe me, I have enough brothers and sisters as it is. They had to be discouraged. When they refused to step away from this destructive path, we resolved to destroy them. Things got out of hand. We are always a step away from fighting, my siblings and I. It is simply our nature. Why just the mages? Why not everyone? Why not each other? Why not the world? Burn it all down and start again.’
Silence rang in the great hall.
‘But they called you the Mother of All Things. Y’Gria the Green, god of growth and new life. How can you do this?’
‘You people have never really understood us.’ Y’Gria laughed. ‘Mother of All Things. Relationships with mothers can be tricky, I think. You see this flower?’ She held out her hands to him to reveal a tiny clump of delicate blue blossoms nestling in her palm. As Sebastian watched, the blooms multiplied until they dripped from her fingers. ‘It’s called Ashwort. Not the prettiest name, but it is a pretty flower, and it’s my favourite. Ashwort grows most abundantly where there have been forest fires. Something about the broken down vegetation really perks them up. New life, in the midst of destruction. It is the oldest cycle.’
Sebastian took a slow breath. ‘This is how you justify the deaths of thousands? Because you want to wipe it all clean and start again? That’s not how life works. You don’t get to just wipe away your mistakes and not deal with the consequences of them. If you know what Oster is, then you know he is part of a cycle. Your cycle.’
Y’Gria looked up sharply. The blossoms vanished from her hands.
‘And that part I do not understand. And you – what are you, little human? You smell like my sister, and you are dragon-kin. Neither of you makes any sense.’
‘What are you going to do with us?’
‘I could kill you, or I could hurt you until you told me what I wanted to know,’ she said firmly, but Sebastian sensed some uncertainty all the same. ‘But this is a confusing time for young Oster, and I do not want to upset him unnecessarily. He is family, after all.’ She smiled. ‘So for now, you are my guests.’
With that she walked back towards the throne and vanished – she simply faded from view and was gone, as though she’d thought of somewhere better to be on the way there. Shortly after that a tall door appeared in the smooth marble wall, and with nowhere else to go, Sebastian stepped through it into a summer’s garden.
He stood for a few moments, blinking in surprise. The place was full of brilliant sunshine, the sky above perfectly blue. There were lush lawns lined with flower beds that had burst their borders, shedding pink and yellow and white blossoms, and petite trees with glossy green leaves, heavy with orange and yellow fruit. When he turned in a circle, he saw that the gardens appeared to be attached to ancient ruins of some sort – graceful arches of pale stone burst from greenery on all sides, and the door through which he’d entered the garden was set into a great crumbling wall. The place was warm, and lazy with the hum of bees. It was impossible not to feel slightly more at ease, with the heat warming the top of his head and the sweet scent of flowers in his nose. He pursed his lips and tried to concentrate.
‘Sebastian?’
Oster was standing underneath one of the taller trees, turning something over and over in his hands. As Sebastian drew closer, he saw that it was a peach.
‘From all the stories I’ve heard, I’m fairly sure it’s a bad idea to eat the fruit of the gods.’
‘You spoke to her, then?’ asked Oster. Then he added, ‘She didn’t kill you.’
‘Y’Gria seems to find me more interesting alive, which I think is at least partly down to you. What, she wonders, does a young god like yourself want with a mere mortal?’ Oster glared at him, and Sebastian looked away, faintly embarrassed for reasons he couldn’t pinpoint. ‘You saved my life,’ he said, in a more solemn voice. ‘Again. Thank you.’
‘If you would just stop falling off things …’ Sebastian looked up sharply, but Oster’s face was as closed as ever. ‘The mage died. I – they are so fragile.’
‘Yes, we are,’ said Sebastian. ‘Y’Gria is dangerous. You were worried that the gods here would find out what you are. She knows, but she hasn’t killed you either.’ He paused. ‘Can she actually kill you?’
Oster ignored the question. ‘She spoke to me. It was not what I expected.’ He took a bite from the peach, and chewed thoughtfully for a moment. ‘She told me she knew my glory for what it was from the moment that she looked at me. That I could never hide what I was.’
‘Flatterer,’ remarked Sebastian.
‘Y’Gria told me I could stay here if I wanted. That I was welcome.’ He shifted from foot to foot. ‘She is not what I expected.’
‘She still killed Silvain,’ pointed out Sebastian. ‘She has killed thousands in this war, and I think she has an agenda of her own.’ He looked around again, wondering if the god was listening to them somehow. ‘We have to get away from here.’
‘Have you seen the edge?’ asked Oster.
Sebastian followed Oster out from under the trees, taking a narrow path of pale blue stones. He expected them to come to a
wall, to see more gardens on a level below this one, or perhaps the roofs of more ruins – they were clearly in a roof garden of some sort – but they reached the edge of the lawn and it dropped away into nothing. Thousands of feet below them was the red-clay land of Relios, made neat and tidy by sheer distance. Sebastian could see the remains of a town, a collection of rubble that looked like little more than a broken goblet from here. He could see a shining ribbon of gold that was a river, and long rows of fruit trees in an orchard, as regular and as small as the stitching on a shirt. As he watched, a white wisp of cloud flew by under them. Whatever they stood on, it was moving, he realised, and a wave of dizziness washed up from his toes. He staggered back a few steps, and Oster snorted with amusement.
‘Again. You are always falling.’
‘What is this place?’
‘It is her palace, although more rightly it appears to be a very large and disorganised garden growing on and around the central throne room. I have explored it, climbed up over the walls and the rooms – they are all gardens, every one. Some are indoors, and some have partly fallen away to nothing. Some contain herbs and plants for medicines, some have poisons and mushrooms, or climbing plants that cover the walls so that you can’t see the bricks any more. There was a room that just had thorn bushes inside.’ He turned to Sebastian. ‘I would not go exploring on two legs,’ he said quite seriously. ‘There is much here that is unstable.’
‘And we’re just hanging up here, in the middle of the sky?’
‘That appears to be the case.’
Sebastian dared himself to look over the side again, ignoring how his stomach was trying to crawl up through his throat. He was thinking of O’rin’s Rookery, hidden away at the top of a mountain. He supposed this was another way to avoid visitors.
‘Quite the prison.’
‘There is food, on platters in random places,’ said Oster. He looked as though he were trying to figure something out. ‘And places to sleep. They look quite comfortable. For humans. It is like she’s trying to make it comfortable for us. To make us welcome.’
‘You are wondering why she hasn’t just killed me, when she has killed so many others.’
‘No,’ said Oster. ‘She feels the dragon blood within you, and that perplexes her. She asked me about it, but I didn’t have any answers to give. I am wondering if I was wrong. I know so little of my family, and she knows a great deal of my history. When she was birthed from the Eye of Euriale, the Spinner was there to sing her the songs of the gods.’ He resolutely did not meet Sebastian’s eye. ‘Perhaps she will share that knowledge with me.’
‘In exchange for what? Oster, at this time in history, the gods are killing thousands. Not just mages – they’re tearing entire cities from the map in the midst of their war. Y’Gria herself told me she wishes the world to burn so that they can build it again.’ He lowered his voice. ‘If they are not stopped, humankind will be destroyed.’
‘And why should I care about that?’ Oster turned to him. The bright sunshine gleamed off his tawny skin, and filled his eyes with banked embers. He was impossibly beautiful, and all at once difficult to look at. It was obvious what he was; Sebastian could hardly believe he hadn’t seen it straight away. The silver tattoo that wasn’t a tattoo at all glittered. ‘I am a god. It is not my place to care about how many people Y’Gria has killed.’
‘Your place? Your place isn’t here at all, it’s a thousand years in the future!’ Sebastian took a slow breath. Silvain’s final scream was haunting him. ‘We have to get out of here and away from her, Oster. We have to stop Estenn before she gets to the artefacts.’ When Oster didn’t react, he added, ‘She killed the Spinner, remember. She took your histories from you.’
Oster met his eyes. ‘And this place might be my only chance to regain them. You can always resume your journey without me. You merely need to find a way down.’
Sebastian spent the rest of that day exploring Y’Gria’s garden palace. As Oster had warned him, there was no sensible layout to the place: lawns would end abruptly over empty sky, and sets of stairs led up to nothing. He saw trees that clung to the very edge of their soil, roots hanging out to grasp at empty air, and more than once he came to a halt as the steepness of a hill threatened to encourage him to take a very sudden tumble. It was as if several palatial gardens had collided in mid-air to create this strange confusion of ruins and foliage. The only part of it that seemed to adhere to any sort of plan was the gigantic cold throne room, but he could not find the entrance to that again – he suspected that the great chamber was only accessible when Y’Gria wished it to be.
Gradually, the sun began to set, filling the endless blue sky with pink and orange light. Sebastian explored some of the interior rooms, and as Oster had promised, these were as filled with plants and trees as the rest of the place, and here and there he found platters of food resting on mossy hillocks, as if waiting for him. He picked food off them as he went – sweet, sliced ham and peaches, fat yellow cheeses and ripe red apples.
As night fell, he found himself back in the outer gardens. There was no sign of Oster. He wondered if he had transformed into his dragon form, and was at this moment climbing over the broken roofs, or if Y’Gria had taken him into the throne room again.
To the west, the sky was a purple bruise, shot through with the last streaks of orange light yet to fade from the clouds. He could see a mountain range there, and a distant pall of smoke. Once, when he had been small, he had been required to learn the names of all the mountains in Relios. They weren’t sacred, like Isu and its brethren, but it had been important to know them, all the same. If he wasn’t mistaken, that was Ashbless, the ancient volcano where the mages were keeping half of the Red Echo. They weren’t that far away at all, not really.
‘I will have to find a way off this thing soon,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Or else bring the whole bastard thing down.’
53
Whittenfarne was a place transformed.
When he’d last been there, Frith had spent weeks on the island and had developed a healthy hatred of the place, with its splintered black rocks, stunted trees and shallow pools of foul-smelling water. It had been a desolate landscape of stone and mists, the only brightness the patches of tough blue grass that sprouted here and there. There had been nothing else of note, save for the giant mage statues and O’rin’s little conical huts woven from grass.
The statues were still there – as they approached from the western side of the island, one loomed out of the mists towards them, a woman with her hands held out – and the Nowhere Isles were as foggy as ever, but now there was a small wooden harbour clinging to the edge of the island, and it was busy with boats and people. The wood was shining and well-maintained, and there were several small buildings clustered there and at the foot of the statue. He could see men and women in thickly furred robes, moving crates and sacks back and forth. Selsye’s men brought the little ship into dock neatly enough, and they climbed out onto the sturdy pier. Frith looked around, trying to get his bearings. Had he been to this part of the island? It was impossible to recognise much.
Xinian was already barking orders to the mages present on the dock, who appeared to be officials of some kind. Judging from the expressions on their faces, their hopes for a quiet day had fled at the sight of Xinian’s sour countenance.
‘I want the wards doubled,’ she snapped at the nearest woman, who nodded hurriedly. ‘Keep a closer eye on everyone who comes into the dock, and no unbound is to be let within sight of Lan-Hellis, is that clear?’
‘Lan-Hellis is our stronghold here,’ said Selsye, who was ushering them past the confused mages towards the small buildings. ‘Well, I say stronghold, but it’s actually a place of study and learning. Everywhere is a stronghold these days. Everywhere needs to have walls and wards.’
‘This is where the artefacts are kept?’ asked Wydrin in a low voice.
Selsye nodded once, biting her lip slightly as she did so. ‘It is my, uh, honour, to cu
rate the collection of artefacts. As a crafter of Edeian as well as a mage, I have a particular interest in magical objects.’
‘Selsye is our foremost expert in the field,’ said Xinian. ‘As much as she doesn’t like to boast about it.’
The blonde woman waved a hand at her dismissively. ‘No one else enjoys sitting around and looking at old things quite as much as me, that’s all.’
‘Apart from your little shadow, of course,’ added Xinian, an amused twitch at the corner of her mouth. Frith watched the two mages exchange a look, but could not guess at its meaning, and then they moved beyond the buildings to meet a horse and cart.
‘No magical transportation?’ asked Wydrin innocently.
‘You would like to try falling from the ’pacer again, perhaps?’ asked Xinian. Wydrin rolled her eyes.
The horse and cart was driven by a mage in thickly furred robes, a scarf piled so high around his neck that they could hardly see his face. They followed a path of white gravel that had been cut into the black rock itself, curving and weaving around the bubbling pools of acrid water that Frith remembered so well. The mists came and went, rushing in to festoon their hair and clothes in icy droplets, then slinking away to reveal sections of the desolate island in abrupt tableaux. More than once, Frith spotted mage words carved into the sides of the rocks themselves, or directly into the uneven ground and filled with the same white gravel. These, he suspected, were some of the wards that Xinian had spoken of.