Ralas sat back, lines of tension and worry all through him as he saw the precious instrument pored over, sniffed, rubbed and flicked. Lysandra tasted the varnish, screwed and unscrewed a peg, twiddled a string, looked into the dark hole behind the strings with one eye, then the other. She rapped its belly with her knuckles, hummed a note some one third higher than the note she strummed and then organised herself so that even with the girl in her lap she made a fair approximation of Ralas’ original and expert hold upon it. She copied him relatively well but scowled as her fumblings produced only a series of strange sounds. Then she stopped and sat for a moment, stroked the lute’s neck and held it out to Ralas.
“You,” she said sadly.
“Thank you,” he said and took it carefully back. He tuned it and then played some slow, easy songs as Heno, Celestaine and Nedlam busied themselves with putting away the remains of the food and making ready for the night.
“There’s something not right about her,” Celestaine said, once they were out of earshot, taking her time with cleaning their knives. Usually she would stab them in the earth and then rub them over but in deference to Horse she was more careful. She paused to grasp Heno’s wrist for a moment and he was grateful.
“She is slow,” Nedlam said. “New.”
“She doesn’t like the look of me,” Heno murmured, pausing to use a chewed birch twig to clean the ornate carving of his tusks and then the rest of his teeth.
“Nobody does,” Nedlam said and he snorted. Fair enough.
“Whose is that child?” Celestaine wondered. “And how have they come to be together?”
“Ask them,” Nedlam said, buckling up her pack and looking around them. The light from the evening sky was nearly gone and the forest bulk was a black bulwark against it now, so that they seemed to be in a solid canyon of darkness.
Heno wondered where this would end but he said nothing. Anyone with the power to undo the Kinslayer’s work could not be a simple idiot walking the woods—and no simple idiot would be decked out miles from anywhere in a king’s ransom. They returned to the fireside. Nedlam tossed her splintered piece of wood into the blaze with a sigh and started slowly on another one.
“What are you making?” Heno asked.
“Worg,” Nedlam said, turning the unidentifiable lump of wood over and starting to gouge it with the point of her knife. “But the legs were too fiddly. Now I do snail.”
CELESTAINE STUDIED THE group and felt that Horse was right. She didn’t like the idea of Horse being right, however, even though it meant that it was likely that Wanderer was involved in setting them up. She hated the idea of being in anyone’s control, even if they had meant well. Her alternative was to leave and never look back—however, that was impossible given her curiosity and present company. It would have to wait for another day.
Ralas was plucking quiet, lullaby chords and the centaur was nodding along, though her spear was across her forelegs and she didn’t look that sleepy. The atmosphere was as mellow as it was likely to get. Heno remained as still and silent as stone, not wanting to cause trouble. Celestaine took her chance and sat down close beside the guest. She made a show of admiring the fancy cloth and gemstones that adorned it. All along the hems fine stitchwork had been ripped out by thorns and shredded on tree roots. The bulk of the mastery in the thing was tucked around legs and the child as if it was nothing more than a blanket.
“Lysandra,” she began, testing the name.
Lysandra looked at her. The centres of her eyes were fathomless dark upon which Celestaine’s pale face was reflected back to her as two strange, watery moons.
“I uh… Do you, that is, we were told…” She indicated the centaur with a gesture. “Told that you took the fire?” But her question vanished into the black depths without a sign of meeting anything.
“It is so,” Horse’s tone cut across the quiet music with a definitive note of offence. “She breathed it in and it was gone.”
Celest meanwhile was not done. “Yes, that’s not what I… I mean. Why did you…? That is, how did you do that?”
The woman stared at her and her lips moved in a faint copy of what Celestaine had said. They were darkened by some kind of stain, almost cherry black against her dusky skin, that strange colour of ripe plums, dusted with the greyish bloom of autumn. Tzarkomen were dark skinned, or rusty. Celestaine had never seen this tone before. Her hair was done up in a great many intricate braids that were bound in fiendish designs, filled with gold and silver charms beneath a fine veil which had perhaps once gone over her face but which now hung lopsided down her back.
Celestaine turned to Horse. “You don’t know who she is?”
“I don’t care who she is. Not in the way that you mean. A name, a lineage—what is important about that?” Horse said with a half shrug. “You’re upset because you don’t know what she is, not who and she already told you all she knows. But what were you all doing here?”
Celestaine said. “We came to the Avenue to make camp here until our companion meets us. When we saw the fire was gone we wanted to see what had happened.”
“Of whom do you speak?”
“A… nobody.” Celestaine said and Nedlam snorted.
Horse looked at them steadily for a moment. It was completely dark now, except for the firelight. “I see. Well, I will surely know them if they walk on forest land. Perhaps a hint might assist their efforts to find you?” The centaur spoke pleasantly enough but there was steel in her voice that suggested someone unknown to her might well walk the woods for eternity looking for someone if she chose.
“We seek news of the Wanderer,” Heno said, tiring of politeness.
“This is your husband?” Horse asked.
“No!” Celestaine said forcefully, then put her hand out towards Heno’s leg and rested it there. “I mean. No, we are not bound in law. We are travelling companions. This is Heno, and the other is Nedlam. I am Celestaine of Fernreame.”
“Kinslayer slayer,” Horse said, nodding. “This chatterer has mentioned it.” Ralas coloured slightly. “Surely it’s no accident you arrive at the same time as these two.”
“I don’t know,” Celestaine replied.
“Many things are left over from the war,” Horse said with cold accusation. “I expect this is not the first or last of them. He says you gave wings back to the Aethani, after a fashion. Is this your business, then—the cleaning up of the field? Have you come to find another about your work?” She glanced at Lysandra, who was softly stroking the little one’s hair.
Cleaning, is that what she was doing? She couldn’t help but grin, thinking of how she had rushed from chores to the more interesting material of horse and sword. “Maybe.”
The centaur grunted and looked away, blinking slowly like a sleepy cat. She seemed amused. “The girl here, Kula, is deaf,” she said. “When she wakes up you must speak only when she looks at you if you want to be heard.”
Celestaine found herself blinking in surprise. She would have asked how the centaur knew this but it seemed foolish. She hadn’t been paying attention herself or she would have known. At least some of the oddity was explained. “And the woman?”
“I cannot say,” Horse said after a moment of thought. “But it is like she doesn’t exist, or, did not until she came here.”
“Lamps lit but nobody home,” Nedlam said with confidence and pleasure at her correct assessment.
“Are there such things as idiot mages?” Celestaine looked at Heno now. She’d never asked to know how his magic worked and he’d never offered to talk of it but now he shook his heavy head.
“No.”
Heno watched as the person they’d been talking about, Lysandra, leaned over from where she sat and clasped Celestaine’s hand in her own. “Good,” she said in her gruff, awkward voice. She seemed to chew the words. “Good. Woman.”
“Good grief,” said Ralas, frozen between one bar and the next. “She’s got a very warped impression of you.”
“Thanks,” Celestaine said. Her
hand was released. Nothing was extended to anyone else.
The moment was broken by a sudden flapping, panicking sound. A quick exploration with a torch revealed the sight of an old man struggling to free himself from a bush. Horse put her spear to his throat.
“Celestaine,” he pleaded meekly. “Tell her who I am!”
Celestaine, up on her elbows, peering, grunted. “Horse, this is Deffo, a badger. Deffo, this is a Draeyad, Horse. She doesn’t like you.”
Horse looked at Celestaine, brow raised as Deffo protested that the badger form was only for theatrical purposes. “But isn’t he a Guardian?”
“Trust me,” Celestaine said. “Start with total disappointment. That way he can only grow on you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE FORTRESS OF Nydarrow, the Kinslayer’s greatest creation, looked best under glowering cloud cover. Then its fine glass needles pierced the sky and tore it to shreds, lightning surging and striking again and again until the world was shot through with every colour of refracted light amid the thunderous cacophony of celestial rage. But it was no less intimidating on a hazy blue afternoon, Tricky thought, as she approached it and began a wide circle, keeping at least a mile between herself and the outer limits of its span. In the air and beneath the earth tendrils of a more delicate nature, fine as spider silks, stretched out from Nydarrow’s heart into the weft of the world. Their lines reached far beyond the mountain dale where the glass spire struck upwards. She would have to hope that there was nobody left now to read the traces from any of the Kinslayer’s sensitive threads, set to warn him of all that moved for miles, or perhaps everywhere. She avoided them, delicately, but she suspected they stretched beyond the limits of her perception and that the effort was futile. Nonetheless she made it to the walls, with trepidation.
The last time she had been here she was still very much a part of things. He would never have trusted another Guardian, but she didn’t count in that respect. He despised and looked down on her as the runt of the litter. She had been the last to be made and she was left half-baked when the Guardians and whatever impulse had required them were abandoned by the gods. She wasn’t even sure that she had been meant to be at all. He had said she was what happened when you left the mixing bowl to rot in the sun after all the good parts had been baked. But that was the kind of thing he said. It remained a fact that what Guardians could do easily she could only manage with great effort. All her magic required the medium of artifice and objects of power.
In herself she was little more than a few principles stitched together in a human form that was itself no prize; small, weak and of no particular interest whichever way you looked at her. The only reason he’d tolerated her involvement was as another of his amusements—she was the eager little sister, trying, always trying so hard to win his approval. He’d delighted in crushing her whenever she thought she’d really made a difference—or at least that was the game she’d gone for as the one most likely to be believed. She’d done it purely to be able to stick around and see what he was doing. It had backfired somewhat, being true enough in its way: she would have served him very well if only he’d given her a moment of care—and she recalled this with bitterness as she scanned the tower of glass, watching for changes. The trouble with Nydarrow in the end was that just as she had miscalculated the effects her play for the Reckoner’s confidence would have on her, he had miscalculated the effects his actions would have on it. Far beneath the surface he had opened up ways to other places and times and in each he had built Nydarrow using remnants of the divine things that it had been her job to scour from the faces of the world. At some point shortly before his demise Nydarrow had itself baked under strange, distant suns and become, in some way, alive.
This was the extent of her sense of kinship to it and she resented even that, yet she couldn’t shake it.
Around the base of the glass spire a dense, mighty forest was grown to maturity. Higher than a cathedral, its creepers and roots festooned the crystal with dark leaves and lustrous, rich flowers the colours of blood and decay. The canopy itself blotted out all inspection from the air though Tricky knew that beneath it lay large pens and holding yards where the armies of the Yorughan and other underdwellers had massed before they marched out. Otherwise there was not much above the ground: only the spire’s base with its outlying crops of crystal here and there giving a hint of its structure beneath the surface, and the gate.
She made herself land in a tree several miles away from the tips of Nydarrow’s influence, although there was no instinct in her to do anything but put as much distance between herself and it as possible. Cautiously she returned to her human form and wound up her wool, securing it and double checking before she began her progress. Her usual feat was to keep to the shadows. They were easy to employ for the purposes of hiding with only the slightest of tricks, but here that would get her caught faster. Instead she had to move as an ordinary person would, with caution, not too much in the light so that she would lose her darksight, nor too much in the dark that it would rob her daysight, alert for all things. A greater feat was to put herself in a carefree state of being. Fear was a vibration that Nydarrow liked the best. It rattled the web in an unmistakable way. But happiness and simple joy weren’t familiar things in this place and they skipped lightly over traps meant for those already in dread. She found herself having to return to these guerrilla tactics she thought she’d left behind; at every moment so sure of being dead that any seconds scraped out of time were a true and delightful reward. Such was Nydarrow’s presence after all. It was the place where dying was longed for but seldom reached.
The trees around here grew vast, their roots and branches tangled, sometimes in ways that seemed to embrace but otherwise in a fight for sustenance and space. Little grew beneath them but the hardiest of small plants. The leaf litter was deep and filled with colonies of fungus. Mushrooms and spore pods sprouted abundantly, mostly small but a few with caps higher than her head. Overhead sticky slime mould was rife. Tendrils of goo dripped like syrup down into the empty air or glistened upon the gnarled bark of trunks in rivulets. What animals had lived here were gone or adapted to the thickening atmosphere of loathing and rot which seeped up from Nydarrow’s heart. Creatures she could not name oozed in soft curls along branches overhead, camouflaged as they tapped the trees. Elsewhere she did hear the croak of gorecrows but these didn’t bother her as much as the sudden change of atmosphere once she reached the border of the fortress and came to the edge of the march.
Tens of thousands had passed along this road daily during the height of the Kinslayer’s rule.It was broad, with a smooth, worn floor some several feet lower than the surrounding earth. An avenue of darkness beneath the forest it originated in the marshalling yards of Nydarrow and led out beyond the vale to the major ways leading north and south across the Unredeemed Lands. Now it was full of weeds and stunted saplings. Somewhere out to her right something large was moving without care, snuffing and snorting, pausing itself, then again moving. It seemed like a feeding behaviour to her, so she was not already running for her life.
She studied the path a while, listening, and then she felt about in one of her myriad pockets and took out a tiny scrap of paper, upon which was written a name: on one side it was in the language of the Darhak—demons for want of a better word—and on the other side it was in the language of Oroneshi, spirits that were beyond the reach of mortal things. She was good with languages, which helped a lot with reading stolen tomes or things that couldn’t be carried, and she had written this herself so she was sure it was right. This paper she turned so that the Oroneshi side was downmost and placed it upon the road, only for a moment—that was all that was needed.
Far down the lane, just visible, a figure appeared.
“Taedakh,” she whispered, to secure its attention on her before something else took it, and ran quickly through the edgewoods towards it, glad.
Taedakh was an old friend. The first friend perhaps, but certainly one th
at had stayed true, the only one. She needed him to get through the gate. As she approached she saw him taking form in the guise he had used for his role as one of the Kinslayer’s guard, a tall and imposing creature with horselike head, massive shoulders, a narrow waist and long legs, also animal rather than human, high at the hocks, his feet like an extended paw at the base. He had no weapons but didn’t need them with hands like that, all razor claws. When he opened his mouth to yawn at her in what passed for his smile she saw rows and rows of needle teeth inside the line of shearing blades that ran the length of his mouth. Ragged furs tied on him with string made his clothing and, as usual, they stank, but she ignored that.
“Taedakh,” she said again in a whisper as they embraced.
“Little Friend,” he said and let her go to peer at her from one large, grey eye on the more attractive side of his head where ratty fur covered the bone up to the rough, beaky edge of his snout. Black and grey feathers on his crest rose a little and then ruffled between his back-facing leaflike ears. “Are we here again?”
Because she had called him on its grounds Taedakh was part of Nydarrow, and this was how she was going to get in, even when she wasn’t wanted. “I need to find out about The Book of All Things. Do you remember it?”
A clattering ruffle overhead interrupted them, then a sharp series of caws, followed by more flapping and fussing: the crows belonging to the Fortress defences had spotted her. Taedakh lifted himself out of his crouched greeting posture and stretched up to his full ten foot height, head high, letting out a series of coughlike calls in response. The birds in the canopy grumbled and then dispersed.
“The Book was destroyed at the outset of the war.”
“I need to find out…” she thought, realising she didn’t need the thing itself. “I need to know what it was for. Can we go to the Library?”
“We can, but you must obey the rules,” Taedakh said, stretching out one massive limb and offering her his hand, of which she held just the outside finger, like a child, so small was she compared to him.
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