What unnerved him the most about it was the clear sense that it could not have come out of a hole in the ground because now there was no hole visible and because it was far too big for the amount of upheaval it had caused. The impression he was left with in his unmagical senses was one of it emerging simultaneously from below the actual earth and from nowhere. Or off the paper and the mud slinging was accidental damage when it exploded into being.
“I… er…” He found himself talking and stopped almost instantly as it reached out one arm towards him—slowly, cautiously.
He stood, freezing and wet, and made himself stay as the limb extended and a clawed appendage reached out, fingerlike and tentacular at once, its tip revealed by the expiring daylight to be reshaping itself from the hardness of a claw to the nub-end of a finger. It gently tapped the collar of the coat he was holding. Twice. There was a careful patience to it, a kindness, that made him feel it wasn’t here to hunt and slay, but to do something else.
“It’s her coat,” he babbled. “Her coat. Your paper was in it. Something like a ghost or a shadow dog took her underground. Under,” he pointed down with an exaggerated gesture, understanding that where she’d gone and where it had come from could easily be the same place. “She left a note saying I ought to go to, or was it that she had gone to? Anyway, to Nydarrow. Nydarrow. I have to take her the coat. I have to save her from—” But he didn’t dare say “you” and even if he’d wanted to he couldn’t have because at that moment the thing which had been so patient and treelike became faster than thought.
He was grasped in a net of rapidly hardening tentacles which sprang from the palm of its hand and gripped in towards its knobbly, awkward body. It hissed and warbled, the sounds very like speech although they were coming from nothing like a human mouth. “Take you there,” he heard and then they were enveloped in a kind of breath-ripping cold and darkness he’d never experienced before, in which he was convinced he had instantly dissolved like a mote of salt in water.
The symphony of the universe reverberated within him again and for an instant he saw it one more joyful time but before he could make anything of it the protective grasp of the creature was unravelling. He wished it wouldn’t but there was no protection that would work in any case. They were at Nydarrow and all he had to do now was go into its guts, find Tricky and get out.
He looked around. Everything was grey, vague. He was standing on a kind of fine sand. He felt insubstantial and that a light breeze could destroy him and on reflex reached out to grasp the creature’s arm. It was solid and hot, hotter than a moment ago but he held it and gasped his way through the next few painful seconds.
“This place,” Taedakh said as he had to take a pause for a few moments, “is where I am from. When the Kinslayer made you, he brought a part of you here and then kept most of you put. You cannot come here and survive, but also, you cannot leave here. The magic of the Heart Takers is one of separations. They found a way to bind you in both places, through your body.”
He said, “It’s death.”
“It is not death,” Taedakh corrected him with more than a trace of annoyance. “It is my home. The gods made the first hole that connected this place to your world during their joyous creation of your Guardians and in so doing began its end times. The necromancers made many more of them, without noticing at all; hundreds and thousands of tiny holes. And the Kinslayer more still, though he punched with greater intent to draw energy for his magics. None of you did anything to contain what came back the other way. Our life, if you will call it that, is a delicate balance of finely tuned vibrations, most of which was destroyed by the time you were born and most of us with it. The holes allowed order from this world to leak in as the energy that was taken leaked out, and so things that ought to have dissolved remained intact and because they were bodiless and without mind they are constantly driven to seek their original forms. They accrete energy, disrupt the fabric, destroy us merely in passing on their way to search for a route back into your existence. Their struggles amplify the dissonance and the holes expand accordingly in cycle which is ever-speeding to the point where this world and yours will slowly undo each other, order into disorder and so on, until there is only a fragment storm of this sand: a structure of emptiness, without meaning. Together you and I will find your lost companion with our memory of her. Make a song. Music is an incredible power to order. Make an order that defines you against undoing and which makes her seem most real. The dogs are hunting.”
Ralas almost missed the last line, he was so busy trying to understand. He fumbled the coat, dropped it, went to pick it up off the sandy floor as he reached for the case at the same time but his hand never found it. He was grabbed instead by a sharp, acidic tendril of pure pain at the wrist which sent a shattering, terrible thrum up his much-mended arm. He screamed reflexively. Taedakh lunged over him and the grip vanished. He turned to—
“Do not look for that thing,” Taedakh said with finality. It handed him the lute case. “Play.”
“But I…” He was curious, in a grievously foolish way, but since he couldn’t die he didn’t see what harm it would do. At the last moment however, he found he didn’t do it. He took out the lute and began to play the first song that came into his head when he thought of Tricky. After a second he realised with embarrassment that it was a slightly cleaned-up version of ‘Three Farmers of Doubty’ and not something he would ever, ever have chosen if he’d had a minute to think about it.
Immediately the path firmed, shape and form appearing out of nowhere, and Taedakh picked up their pace again, head lolling from side to side as it divined the way. Ralas had started to tire. His fingers, his arms, the coat he’d recovered dragging. He was sore with playing now and lack of practice made him fumble the notes here and there. They turned and he was sure they had been there before. Even in the song he had lost track of what verse he was in. His feet ached, his back was a bent rod. He began to lose sight of everything in a softly blowing hail of sand.
“Tell me about her,” Taedakh said. “Quickly. Tell me everything.” The urgency in its tone made him frightened. It had grown as they went. In one stride it covered enough ground for ten of his, hop-picking its way like an ungainly crane through the grey world where all that existed was a thinning strip of rock-strewn path, turning around and back and down, earth falling away on either side of it into a dark that seethed. He was dragged with it as though attached by an invisible cord, the sand abrading everything, filling the lute until it became nearly silent.
“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know anything about her. She’s always lying. Or not lying but not telling the truth. Her hair…curls… at the ends.” The vibration in his arm felt like a running current flowing out of him and as it did so his thoughts began to jumble. He started babbling in a panic, “It’s dark. I used to think it was black but really it’s more like a very dark red, you know like that wine the Kelicerati value so highly, the legendary one made from the envenomed blood of living prey combined with the juice of the shadeberry; a single thimbleful is enough to kill an octilant but it makes the Kelicerati have visions and enables them to see far away to other bands or what are they called, a group of Kelicerati? Is it a host? A brawl? No, too disorganised.” He was so busy naming thoughts to try to pin them down that he had stopped playing, and found that he was plucking the same string over and over again, barely moving.
“A skitter,” said a voice from the grey haze in front of him, beginning to resolve into a form he had started to think he would never see again. “A skitter of Kelicerati. Quick, pass me my coat.”
Ralas watched as her hand was the first thing to take shape, fingers emerging from a general hand, then the nails, a little broken and grubby beneath their chipped paint thanks to the journeying, then the soft ochre colour of her skin coming in over the strange grey of Vadakh’s primal substance like sunlight moving across a statue. Movement of the fingers triggered the appearance of fine lines at the knuckles, then a texture of t
he skin and suddenly it was her hand, in its fullest, attached to an arm that stretched backward into the nearly-nothing ghost form of something that might have been a woman or a man.
He held out the coat, almost falling down with exhaustion. The hand took it and in doing so brushed his fingers. An electric sensation of cool running flowed out of him and into her. The rest of her stepped free from the fog and with both hands she gripped the coat at the collar and swirled it around to put it on her—but the coat spanned suddenly more than her small body. Its sweeping wing was cast over and around Ralas too, and around and over the towering stick insect that Taedakh had become. It spun him around as his knees gave way and beneath its flowing hem for a moment he glimpsed behind him and saw the light of it shine off her face and the points of her daggers, the gold of her rings. It was only a split second, not enough to understand it, only enough to save it for later. Then the coat was around them and the mass of Vadakh rushed around them as it closed. He heard a violent banging and saw the brilliant white flash of firecrackers, smelled the harsh sulphur of their smoke as it cut the air in half.
The coat lifted off and Tricky shrugged it onto her shoulders. “You did well. You remembered me,” she said, looking herself over and then reaching down to help him back to his feet. She was smiling.
THEY STOOD IN the murky dank filth of Nydarrow’s dungeon lanes but it was a vast improvement to Ralas with its solid, dependable, everyday horror. He never thought he could have been grateful to be back inside his old cell but the sweet relief of solid floors and massive iron bars which couldn’t be thought out of existence was so enormous that he clutched the cold metal and hugged them to him for a second.
“Steady on,” Tricky said, eyeing him. “She’s not that into you.”
He realised they were back to business as usual and let go, easing back into his pains and aches. The two of them were alone, no sign of Taedakh or any hint that there could be another reality. The air held a fetid odour of rot and fermentation so thick it was almost edible. In the feeble light of the globs of glowing, snot-like secretions on the lichens which festooned the walls, they both looked like animated corpses. Echoing around them a constant threnody of shrieks, hoots and rumblings made a background soup of inhuman noise: the rumble of a sinister and hungry jungle.
The delight was quickly wearing off.
“Where’s Taedakh?” Tricky asked, patting her pockets. “Do you have the paper?”
“I lost it,” Ralas confessed as a cold breeze swept briefly over them. It bore a sulphurous stench and a hint of barbecued flesh. “Back in Tzark near the border.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Well, I suppose I’d outplayed him anyway. He was due for a rest. In that case the only way out of here is going to be in disguise.” She slipped a hand into one of the jacket’s inner linings. “We’d better be something everything else fears. Our scent won’t change but I think that’ll hardly be noticeable.” She produced a silver half disk, rather like a coin that had been clipped, but it was unmarked and completely smooth. The flatter side was thick and the rounded edge was thin and sharp. “Elder Dragonscale,” she said. “Prismatic magic.”
Ralas touched it. The surface was as smooth as glass and mirrored. “What’s it do?”
“By itself, not a lot, but with the Galick’s Mirror, which is a mindsight mirror, it will change how we appear, as long as I am awake—” She held up a small bamboo hoop, covered with what looked like a piece of skin, stretched out so thinly it was translucent. Red and blue veins in it seemed to pulse and he didn’t look closely enough to see if they really were doing that.
“Better give it some water,” she said and looked around, eventually finding a puddle of liquid at the edge of one cell door. She dipped the skin into it and when she brought it up the pulse had quickened. “Nice. Now. You have the scale on you and I will operate the mirror.”
It had, he saw, two ribbons attached to it with hairclips that she put in place so the horrible disk was over her forehead. Immediately it welded itself to her skin, a grisly diadem. She seemed unconcerned as a fresh surge of red lines trailed like new rivers through its damp webbing and tucked the shiny scale into Ralas’ hand. “Put it somewhere you can’t drop it.”
He thought a bit and went to put it in the lute case only to find it was gone. “My lute!”
“Did you leave it in Vadakh?”
“I… I must have dropped it when I fell over under your coat,” he said, miserable beyond measure. “I… yes.”
“That could actually be useful.”
“You wouldn’t be saying that if it was your lute!” he complained, heartbroken in a way he hadn’t expected and angry because that sudden hurt blindsided him. He remembered now, there had been the drop and slide of the case strap slipping off his shoulder and down his arm. He shoved the scale into his shirtfront where it ended up at his waist so he couldn’t lose it. His belt was tight, helping to hold his guts together, and there was no danger of it falling through.
“I might say it and I’d definitely have left it because it would be one way of finding a route back into the damned place and you never know when you need one of those.” She tossed her hair back. “Now, be careful because you’re going to feel as if you’re actually the thing you’re pretending to be in terms of, you know, arms and legs and whatnot, and I’m thinking you definitely won’t be able to talk.”
“Couldn’t we just jump in a puddle or something?” he asked hopefully, suddenly much more keen on yet more magic compared to a few minutes ago.
“Used up all those spells,” she said. “It’s been a very expensive trip.”
“We’ll never catch up with the others,” he said. “We’ve come the wrong direction.”
“We were never going to,” she replied airily but she was cut off by a screaming shrill from behind her and then the sound of running, so fast it took Ralas’ breath away just to hear it. A dark shape came through the end of the hall arch and pounded towards them. It stood up from an all-fours position at the last second and he realised that Taedakh was there. He was smaller than his towering form, barely the size of Ralas, but obviously stronger. He held a bulky, rounded shape over one ‘shoulder’ and set this down as he arrived so that it rolled through the muck and sat up of its own accord, coughing and blinking. It was Dr Catt.
He got up, holding the strap of a large satchel that was around his shoulder as if it were a rope to hold him into life. “I may have tripped a few of the place’s defences,” he said in that half-bumbling way that made Tricky’s teeth grind. “It’s been quite an exploration. Tell me, my dear, if that festering gallery two levels up was the library. Was it?”
“Yeah,” Tricky said. She had her hands on her hips and was looking at him without a lot of love lost, Ralas felt. “What’s it to you?”
“I came merely to see if there were any forgotten little items being used as cutlery and so forth, by the Yoggs, you know, and while I was looking about I came upon… ah… oh!”
The satchel, which had been trembling—and Ralas had thought trembling with Dr Catt’s entirely plausible sense of mortal terror—suddenly exploded at both sides of the cover flap and a brief torrent of small dark forms came scurrying out. They rolled and bounced, balls of blackness that looked both furry and not entirely corporeal, and darted about his feet, tumbling up against Taedakh and even against Ralas’ own feet. He could feel them popping and rolling over him as lightly as dust bunnies, which was strange because he was wearing boots and really should have felt nothing. It was as though they almost passed through him a little bit.
“Ah, no! My dears. My little ones. Back you come!” Dr Catt made a valiant effort to pounce upon the things but they darted nimbly out of the reach of his fingers and circled, gathering and spreading in rapid waves. Ralas kept fancying he saw tiny paws and flashes of tail and whisker but these were only suggestions, rather like the ones that Taedakh had when you looked at him—suggestions of tree and rock, scale and case, skin and features—but
when you looked with your direct focus that suggestion became unfocused, blurred and lost. When he didn’t look at these things they were small, round mice with very long whiskers. They may have had holes for eyes. When he did look at them they were a misty ball, larger, but indefinite. They were a sort of rodent, or a little predatory warm creature, furry, for certain. Their hands were infinitely delicate. They could have made clockworks for gnats with those exquisite fingers and thumbs.
“You took the vholes,” Tricky said with anger and disappointment.
“They were his bookkeepers,” Dr Catt said with a helpless neediness—the weakness of the collector in the presence of a unique find, as if anyone would have done it in his place.
“I trust you still understand they were not here of their own free will,” she said. “And now look, you’ve used something on them. What was it?”
“A little nip and fizzle, some sleepy herbs that work so well on rats. Nothing they won’t soon recover from. But they were so hard to get into the bag, you see…” He stopped because her hands were at his collar, twisting it hard into his neck, her face almost touching his.
“Stupid, greedy old man!” she hissed. “Do you ever care what you’ve done? No. You don’t care. Did you know I could read that damned box? But you thought you would fool me, didn’t you?”
“I… knew you would be safe enough. It’s your nature.”
“And what about him?” She jerked her head in Ralas’ direction.
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