The Bitter Twins

by Jen Williams

  ‘What is happening?’ asked the small dragon. He shifted in her arms, wanting to get a better view of the window.

  ‘It looks like we might be about to get our dinner.’ Hestillion forced a smile on her face. ‘Won’t that be nice?’

  There were people running in the streets, their faces turned up to the monster above them like tiny moons. Lamps were lit, and points of light burst into life everywhere. Gates were flung open, and the humans living in the small town began to flee. And then, from the outer limit of her vision, other shapes began to appear: terrible, spider-like things with many legs, that floated down towards the town like malignant seeds. Soon, they would birth burrowers, which would start converting the people in the town into drones, while the maggots would start to busily eat everything they could before covering the remains in varnish. Hestillion grimaced and began to turn away from the sight, but Celaphon wriggled in her arms.

  ‘I want to see! Don’t you want to watch, Lady Hestillion?’

  I should watch, she thought, pressing her lips into a thin line. I should see the harvest of what I have sown.

  Reluctantly, she turned back to the window just in time to see other, even stranger shapes falling down towards the town. For a second she was struck with a new horror – was the queen somehow throwing human victims down from the Behemoth? – and then she realised what she was seeing; the queen had released her ‘experiments’ from the vats.

  They looked like huge, pale humans, as white as paper and naked, although there was little human detail to them that Hestillion could see. They were big, heavily muscled things with no hair, and they each had a pair of bony wings sprouting from their backs. She could see the skin stretched between each bone, and how the wind filled and buoyed them like sails, and then they were too far away, flying down towards the houses with arms outstretched.

  ‘New horrors,’ she muttered to herself, feeling cold despite Celaphon’s body curled against her. ‘And we thought they were bad enough as it was.’

  In the end she watched all of it. The town itself was broken into pieces; it went from a neat confection of grey stone and brown slate to a shattered confusion of rubble, people’s belongings strewn here and there like innards leaking from a corpse. Most of the people, she thought, managed to get away, although there were still plenty of human figures staggering around when the maggots descended; these final drones were consumed along with any other organic material. The fruit trees vanished very quickly indeed – watching it was almost fascinating, if you could detach yourself from what it was. The two maggots that had been birthed from the belly of the corpse moon grew fat, and then began to excrete their green ‘varnish’. Eventually, however, Hestillion began to feel a jarring shudder in the hum that moved throughout the Behemoth, and the big ship began to descend, somewhat unsteadily, before landing hard enough to nearly knock her off her feet. She went to the long window then, and had a glimpse of one of the queen’s experiments; the creature was on its knees, its big wings hanging to either side of it, useless or forgotten. And then the window clouded over and she could see nothing.

  ‘What is happening out there?’

  ‘I cannot see,’ piped up Celaphon. She had put him down on the bed, where he lay on his side, panting as though he had been for a run.

  ‘Do you understand what you saw?’ Hestillion looked closely at the small creature. His pearly eyes were half shut now. ‘Do you know what the outside world is? Can you remember that much?’

  The dragon made a strange fluting noise. ‘I know bits. I know that this is strange. That outside is . . . normal.’

  ‘And your old name? Your previous forms? Do you remember Ygseril?’

  ‘The sound . . . of wind in the branches. That’s all.’

  Hestillion was just sighing over this when the corpse moon shuddered violently again. The window flickered back into life and they were rising up over the mess of the town. Almost immediately afterwards the passage to the room slid open, and the queen appeared. She looked, as far as Hestillion could tell from her mask-like face, agitated, and she carried a number of sacks in each long hand. A few of them were soaked through with blood, leaving a crimson smear across the floor as she approached.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Meat.’ She dropped the bloodied sacks on the ground. On the bed, Celaphon sat up, his snout twitching. ‘These also are for you.’ She passed the others sacks to Hestillion; inside were a number of dresses and robes, and a pair of dun-coloured leggings. Hestillion held them up critically. They were obviously not of Eboran standard, but they were clean and in good repair, which was more than could be said for her current dress.

  ‘Thank you.’ She put the sacks aside, resolving to go through them properly later, and picked up one of those containing the meat. As she did so, Celaphon wriggled off the bed, and limping slightly on his poorly formed legs, came to join her. ‘What was that place you attacked?’

  ‘A human town.’

  ‘Yes, but which town? Where is it? Somewhere to the east, is it not?’

  The queen tipped her head to one side. ‘It is a human place. It hardly matters what it has been named.’

  ‘And this is . . . this is not human meat?’

  ‘It is from the animals they keep. We assumed that human flesh would be offensive to you, although we do not understand why. It is all the same.’

  ‘Human blood is . . . Never mind.’ Hestillion pulled a chunk of meat from the bag. It was a deep, dark red, and marbled through with thin lines of white fat. Looking at it made her own stomach cramp with hunger, and the smell of blood awoke memories she hadn’t contemplated for some time, but she passed it down to Celaphon who clamped his jaws around it gladly. The sound of his happy chewing filled the room.

  ‘It is still very small,’ said the queen in a considering tone. ‘We remember the war-beasts of old. Are you sure that is what it is?’

  Hestillion ignored this.

  ‘I saw your new toys flying out there,’ she said. ‘What happened to them? What were they there to do?’

  The queen raised her chin. For the first time Hestillion wondered why she had brought the sacks herself when it would have been easier to send a homunculus to do the job.

  ‘They collected your meat and your niceties.’ The queen gestured to the sacks again. ‘They went inside the humans’ houses and dwellings. We saw, through them, what was to be taken. And they carried it back. Some killed humans too – humans that tried to defend their meat and niceties.’

  ‘They carried it all back?’

  The queen paused. She took a few steps further into the room. Her shoulders, Hestillion noted, were draped with a flowing piece of the black fluid, almost as though it were a cloak, and her flesh seemed paler still than when she had seen it last. A dark green, like the leaves of those trees that lived through the winter.

  ‘It’s not finished,’ said the queen eventually. ‘They weaken too easily. Something about the wings . . .’ She turned and looked at Celaphon then, who was taking no notice of either of them. ‘It is curious, making new things. You creatures are all interior framework. It is most vexing.’

  ‘Your new toys could not fly back up by themselves.’

  ‘We collected them instead, and what they were will go back into the pools to be broken down and moulded anew. We have to be careful now, Hestillion Dream-walker, born in the year of the green bird, as we are not completely healed, and the process is a slow one.’

  ‘There was no white dragon,’ Hestillion pointed out. ‘And no other war-beasts came to the town’s defence. Have you been attacked elsewhere? I know you have other ships.’

  The queen looked at her for a long while then, as though considering her answer, but in the end she turned back to the door.

  ‘There is food in the sacks for you also, Hestillion Eskt. We hope it meets with the standards of an ambassador.’

  14

  ‘Your wings! Keep them tense, Helcate. Use the muscles in your shoulders, direct all of your energy there.
Faster now, faster.’

  The small war-beast was trying his best, but it was clear to Vintage that he was tired, and he only managed a short flight of around ten feet before he landed back in the wet grass. Vostok snorted her impatience, but Eri looked pleased, his gaunt face bright with pleasure.

  ‘He has been flying all morning,’ said Vintage, in a carefully musing tone. ‘His enthusiasm certainly never wavers, but I suspect he could do with a brief rest.’

  The dragon turned her violet gaze on Vintage. It was still unnerving to be so close to her, but at the same time, there was such a reality to Vostok that Vintage found herself getting used to her presence all the same. Her scent – sap and apples – and the sheer weight of her; it was impossible to look away, sometimes. And yet, despite all the awe and near-religious terror Vintage felt, she was surprised to find something else – that Vostok could be difficult.

  ‘We have no time to rest. The Jure’lia will not be nursing their wounds forever. Eventually, they will turn their eye back to Ebora, and we must be ready. Even the smallest of us.’

  ‘He is growing, though, look.’ Vintage nodded to where the small war-beast was trampling the grass with Eri. In the last few days Tor and Noon had brought back a large amount of fresh meat, and Sharrik had done the same, returning with a series of unfortunate deer clasped in his enormous beak. Much of this fresh food had gone directly to the newest war-beast, who had eaten heartily. Some of the human foraging teams had brought baskets of a tuber they had discovered growing out in the grounds now that the dirt wasn’t so hard. Vostok had snorted at these, but Bern had boiled them up with herbs and all the war-beasts had eaten them, along with the still-bloody meat. Helcate’s head nearly reached Eri’s shoulder, which was remarkable progress, and as if in response to his friend, Eri too looked healthier. He had not lost the oddly aged look around his eyes, but his skinny limbs were firmer, his cheeks a little fuller. ‘You must be pleased about that?’

  ‘Pleased?’ If it were possible for a dragon to look perplexed, Vostok was doing a fine job of it. ‘All of this is wrong. A runt war-beast? I am aware this happens to animals and humans, Lady de Grazon, but we have no experience of such things.’

  ‘You mean you don’t.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Vintage cleared her throat. She tried not to think about how impossible this conversation would have seemed a week ago.

  ‘You are being forced into a role you’re unfamiliar with, my lady. You’ve never had to teach anyone before, or watch someone grow. You were all born knowing your purpose and yourselves. There was never any reason to teach anyone anything, when the knowledge was already there, nestled neatly in your beautiful heads. There was just war, and glory. Now, there is teaching.’ Vintage smiled faintly. ‘You find yourself a teacher, and you do not like it.’

  The dragon was quiet for a moment. Helcate and Eri were laughing together over something, the covered bucket quite forgotten under a tree. Looking at it, Vintage felt a twist of unease in her gut.

  ‘Noon respects you greatly,’ said Vostok, after some time. ‘She thinks you very clever, for a human. Just because we are bonded, do not think that I must also respect your opinion, Lady de Grazon. You know nothing of war, or of what we are.’

  Vintage half nodded, half bowed at that. ‘Of course, my lady. But I do find that people are people, wherever I go, and it seems to me that war-beasts are very like people.’

  Vostok snorted at that, and when she did not reply, Vintage sensed that the dragon had deemed her unworthy of a response.

  ‘I would love to see the Nest,’ she said into the chilly silence. ‘Noon gave me some idea of what it was like. It sounds extraordinary.’

  ‘Hmph. There is little point. Much of what was there is lost or has been stolen by humans. Empty spaces, broken things.’

  ‘I have spent much of the last few years looking at empty spaces and broken things, my lady, and I doubt anything I have seen would be as spectacular as the Nest. Noon mentioned a particular missing artefact, something you were especially aggrieved to find gone?’

  Eri and Helcate came wandering over together. The war-beast had his wings folded neatly along his back, and his head held high. Despite Eri’s best efforts, he had yet to say anything other than his own name.

  ‘You may rest,’ Vostok told them graciously. ‘But be ready to fly again once you have your wind back.’ The dragon turned back to Vintage as Eri began to rummage in his pack for their lunch – cold meat pressed between slices of a tough flat bread Bern had introduced them to. ‘The missing item was a special piece by the artist Micanal the Clearsighted.’

  ‘I have heard of him, of course. I’ve even been lucky enough to see some of his works. A painting at the house of a friend of mine, a sculpture in Jarlsbad.’

  ‘This was something else.’ Vostok’s voice had taken on a distant, wistful tone. ‘He was making it just for us, a special commission. Many artists, you must understand, chose to celebrate our glory in many forms, but Micanal was a man of exceptional wisdom. He claimed that capturing our magnificence in a painting or tapestry was insufficient, and he devised a new art form, especially for us.’

  Eri was tucking into his sandwich, handing pieces of it over to Helcate, who had swallowed his down in one gulp.

  ‘That’s extraordinary.’ Vintage glanced under her eyelashes at the dragon. She sensed that while Vostok was reluctant to share war-beast secrets with a mere human, she still could not resist talking of past glories. ‘How did that work exactly?’

  For a moment, Vostok was silent. They were in a part of the palace gardens that had yet to be infiltrated by the human settlers, and the sun was just edging towards the horizon, turning the sky orange and grey. The only sounds were the calls of the birds in the trees, and the determined sound of Eri chewing, although Vintage occasionally caught the scent of wood smoke on the wind. The cooking fires were not that far away.

  ‘Back when Ygseril lived, in the bloom of his youth, sap was abundant.’ Vostok stretched out her claws in the grass, flexing them like a cat. ‘It fed and nourished the children of Ebora, and some even took it and, through a process that took many years, created nuggets of hard resin.’

  ‘Amber!’ cried Vintage. ‘Your great tree-god produced amber?’

  ‘It was, as you might imagine, beautiful. Light gold in colour, and shining with its own inner light. Artworks of the time often used it, or Eborans would create exquisite jewellery from it. Micanal the Clearsighted discovered a way to store dreams within the amber.’

  Vintage blinked. ‘I am sorry, my lady, I am not sure what you mean.’

  ‘No, I thought you might not.’ Vostok pulled her claws back through the grass, creating neat lines of dark earth against the green. ‘Dream-walking. You know of it?’

  ‘Well, of course. The famous Eboran art of dream-walking, where they can enter and even shape another’s dreams. Tor claims to be quite good at it, although as usual I would take that with a pinch of salt.’

  ‘As well as being an artistic genius, Micanal was a talented dream-walker. And the amber of Ygseril was not like any ordinary lump of tree resin, Lady de Grazon. It had a . . . presence. Micanal was able to store images and sensations inside the amber, to be experienced by us, when we wished.’

  ‘But that’s incredible!’ Vintage looked at the boy, but he was leaning against Helcate, chattering away to the small war-beast about flying, and how they would explore Ebora together one day. ‘I had never even heard of such a thing, not in all my years of studying Ebora.’

  ‘There is no reason that you should,’ sniffed Vostok. ‘The amber record was for us alone.’

  ‘But I have never even seen pieces of this amber, not in any museums or collections.’ She paused. ‘I might have read something, once . . . The old library in Reidn had a catalogue of Eboran artworks, but I must have assumed it was listing ordinary amber. Even so . . .’ A terrible thought formed. ‘Of course, when Ygseril died, or appeared to have died,
I imagine those pieces of ancient sap became incredibly sought after. Not, I assume, that they helped at all.’

  Vostok shifted her huge muscled shoulders: a dragon shrug. ‘And Micanal’s great work is gone. Perhaps you are right, and some Eborans desperate for sap found the amber record and ground it down, or smashed it to pieces. All those dreamscapes, lost.’

  ‘We have one.’

  Eri was sitting with his legs crossed, leaning against Helcate’s back; the war-beast appeared to have gone to sleep. The boy looked up at them with half-hooded eyes, as though he was also sleepy.

  ‘What?’ snapped Vostok. ‘Micanal worked only for us. He swore that this art form would be dedicated to us alone. You could not have possessed anything like it.’

  Eri’s eyes widened slightly, and he glanced at his bucket as if for reassurance – for the first time that afternoon.

  ‘I suppose. My parents have one, though. They keep it hidden and safe. It is one of their most precious things.’

  ‘This isn’t some bauble, child,’ huffed Vostok, drawing herself up to her full height.

  ‘Eri, my darling, is it still there, at your home? At Lonefell?’

  The boy was looking down at the grass now, rubbing his fingers free of crumbs. ‘I don’t see why not. Everything there is . . . everything there should be the same as I left it.’

  ‘Then we must go there immediately!’ At Vostok’s low growl, Vintage turned to the dragon. ‘Do you not see, my lady? It might not be exactly what we need, but it could be a clue!’ She grinned, and in a fit of confidence, pressed her hand to the dragon’s shoulder. ‘I have spent much of my life looking for clues – empty spaces and broken things – and I know a good one when I smell it. Eri, my dear, do you think you could lead us back there?’