The Bitter Twins

by Jen Williams

  ‘Why step in? Do you not wish to see what he can become?’ She paused at a section of wall, and slowly it began to bleed back from her touch. A circle of diffuse daylight appeared there, hazy and orange from the oncoming evening. ‘We have lived without change for a long time, Lady Hestillion Eskt, but we begin to see how it could be fascinating. We are interested to see what will become of your runt war-beast.’

  Hestillion did not know what to make of that. The hole was now door-sized, and a blustery wind filled the stuffy corridor, bringing with it the scents of sea salt and wood smoke and even grass – all scents Hestillion didn’t realise she missed. Tears sprang to her eyes, and angrily she wiped them away with the back of her hand. Outside, she could see a sky bruised orange and purple and daubed with darkening clouds. Hanging in the midst of it was a mirror version of the corpse moon: a fat, oily green grub. She couldn’t see the ground without hanging out the door.

  ‘Look,’ the queen gestured to the other Behemoth. ‘It is hard to feel them, so rotten are our connections, but we tasted them on the wind as we passed over this land, and we moved without thinking, searching for that taste. Do you have a word for such things?’

  ‘Instinct, I suppose?’ Hestillion frowned. After the musty warmth of her rooms, the wind pushing back her hair and gusting around her skirts was cold. ‘What must you do to . . . reconnect with them?’

  The queen grinned as though she had been waiting for Hestillion to ask.

  ‘We will show you. Here.’

  Stretching out one overly long arm, the queen reached out for the Behemoth, and just as though it were a beloved pet being called for dinner, the huge thing began to grow closer to them, gradually blotting out the fiery colours of the sunset sky. Hestillion’s stomach turned over at the sight of it – guest here she might be, but it was impossible to shake the sense of a monster looming over her. She looked up into the queen’s face. All the animation that had been there previously had seeped away, smoothing the lines from the corners of her eyes and her mouth and making her look far from human. Instead, her eyes were wide and glassy, like lumps of polished black rock, and her thin lips were moving slightly, murmuring things Hestillion couldn’t hear. And then the surface of the approaching Behemoth split open like a wound.

  ‘Show us your heart,’ muttered the queen. ‘So that we may beat as one again.’

  The wound became a tunnel, a deep hole lit with bunches of the strange fronds Hestillion had seen all over the corpse moon. The floor below them shifted, causing Hestillion to stumble, and then they were moving towards the approaching Behemoth, propelled on a platform of shifting black ooze outside of the corpse moon. Without really thinking about what she was doing, Hestillion glanced over the side of the small platform to see the ground far below; they were at the coast somewhere, a wide strip of golden sand below them kissing the darkening sea. There were no settlements she could see, but she had smelled the wood smoke, and so there must be people somewhere. With some difficulty she dragged her eyes away from the distant ground just in time for them to be swallowed up by the new Behemoth.

  ‘When you are not inside the corpse moon, what happens to it? Does it all . . . die?’ She imagined all the squat little creatures that tended Celaphon dropping to the floor, their questing limbs and oozing bodies still.

  For the first time in a while the queen turned to look at her, a genuine expression of puzzlement flitting over the simple features of her face. ‘Of course not. We are still there. It merely grows quiet. The heart of its memories is still with us. And, soon, we will be here fully too.’

  Ahead of them, the tunnel was coming to an end, funnelling into a wide and vaguely familiar chamber. At the heart of it was an immense crystal, a deep yellow in colour. The queen stepped down off the platform and Hestillion followed. The floor was soft underfoot.

  ‘Here it is, another piece of our history. It holds us together, you see.’ The queen approached the crystal, her arms held out before her as though she were greeting an old friend, and indeed her face was creased in what appeared to be genuine pleasure. ‘For so long we have been apart, shattered into separate pieces . . .’ Her voice wavered. ‘You cannot know what that is like, Hestillion Eskt, born in the year of the green bird. To be suddenly alone when all you have ever known is connection. To be alone in the dark while you felt the distant pieces of yourself decay.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I think you would be surprised what I could know about such things. I have watched my people die, because of the Jure’lia, and what you did to us.’

  ‘We did not kill your god.’ The queen narrowed her black eyes. ‘He killed himself, to trap us. But we did not come here to talk about our old prison. We intend to show you what these crystals mean, if we can. No one has ever been given this honour. Do you feel honoured?’

  Hestillion held herself still. All at once it seemed as though the queen was very brittle, as though she was a thing made of hollow grass pods that could be blown away on the breeze at any moment. Whatever this was, it was important to the Jure’lia, and it made her vulnerable somehow.

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I will be very glad to learn more about you.’

  ‘Here then, look. A memory in a great chain of memories, linking us each to the other.’

  The queen snatched up Hestillion’s hand, her elongated fingers closing and melting, shifting into one immovable fist. And then she laid the other hand gently against the crystal.

  The effect was immediate. Instead of being in the crystal chamber, Hestillion stood in another landscape, one that was so alien to her it seemed an insult somehow, something crafted to upset and disorientate her. The sky was red – not the red of a sunset or even the early morning, but a deep, dusty blood-red, created by a continually roiling bank of murderous clouds. They passed overhead, too fast, and it was possible to see pockets of storms boiling in their midst – forks of lightning licked and flickered in too many places to count, and there was a low booming, growling noise that seemed to roll back and forth across the landscape.

  And what a landscape it was. Hestillion and the Queen stood on a thin wedge of orange rock, one of the few solid places rising out of a confusion of simmering yellow lakes. Steam rose in neat pillars from places where the water was clear. Mostly, though, the surface of the liquid was teeming with a knitted mass of fibrous yellow material. It looked like algae to Hestillion, except that it was moving, shimmering and vibrating slightly all over. Next to her, the queen let out a long sigh, just as though she had sunk into a hot bath.

  ‘Yes, the connection. It comes back. We are a little larger, and our eyes are many. We remember this place, Lady Hestillion, and now we all do. A world that was acrid and almost familiar. The taste of the colours reminded us of some distant spawning place.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  The queen tipped her head to one side, considering the question. ‘Somewhere very far from the place that birthed you, Lady Hestillion.’

  ‘You hardly need to tell me that. You were here once, then? This is a memory?’

  ‘Yes. We were here. We came and it was so deliciously hot here, so little needed to be done. We ate a little, took back the energy our long journey had taken from us, and then we burrowed, deep and warm and dark. We became our travelling forms again.’ She looked around the red and yellow landscape, as if trying to take it all in. ‘It was a good place. Easy.’ She turned to look at Hestillion, her expression once again unreadable. ‘No resistance.’

  Hestillion smoothed the panel on her dress. A world of endless storms. ‘And how does this connect you to your . . . ship?’

  The queen did not answer immediately. Her head moved slowly, turning from one side to the other as she looked out across the strange landscape. To Hestillion she looked a little like a bird of prey, an owl perhaps. Something with infinite patience. Eventually she said, ‘We do not know how to explain it to you. You have blood connections back in the tree-place? Where we were trapped?’

 
Hestillion blinked at this unexpected line of questioning. ‘A brother. My brother Tormalin was there.’

  ‘Yes, good. Are there things that the two of you experienced together, that no one else did? Memories that belong only to the two of you?’

  So many. She thought of the pair of them sneaking into Father’s study together to look at the sword. The old idiot had kept it in a drawer, wrapped in an ancient oilcloth – he barely even bothered to hide it from them. She remembered how cold the hilt had been, and how unexpectedly heavy in her arms. She remembered Tor grinning at her in the dark, full of mischief. They had heard stories about this sword. And she remembered killing the wine merchant’s boy in sacrifice to Ygseril, the blood seeping into her dress while Tor looked at her solemnly and said, ‘They have already tried that.’ She thought of standing in their mother’s room with him, holding hands even though they were too old for such things by then, and watching their mother cough herself to death. So many.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘They connect you, do they not? A unique bond. Together you are something that you are not, alone. Each memory crystal reminds us who we were and who we are, going back through every new world and every new body. Memories go deeper than your bones.’

  Hestillion shivered. ‘It is . . . quite extraordinary.’

  ‘So we must find each of our wandering ships, and connect with them again. Gather our memories together, and we will be whole again. Once we are whole, this place will fall to us, and grow warm, as it should.’ The queen’s face filled with a beatific smile, strangely beautiful and frightening, like a forest fire. Hestillion looked away.

  ‘And how do I fit in with all this . . . connection? I do not share your memories. Neither does Celaphon. We are not a part of your great chain.’ Although, as she said it, Hestillion realised that wasn’t true – Celaphon was connected to them. His very flesh was changing to be a part of them. ‘I am not a part of this.’

  The queen turned to look at her, her mask-like face creased in thought as though troubled by the question.

  ‘We will return to the corpse moon,’ she said instead. ‘Our connection here is strong again, and I know you do not like to be away from your runt for long.’

  19

  ‘I am most inordinately put out by this, you know.’

  Tor had to smile. Vintage did look put out; her normal easy confidence and cheery determination had been replaced with what his mother would have called being an utter ratbag. She had insisted on coming with them to the edges of the central city, and riding solemnly on the back of Sharrik for much of a day had put her in an even fouler mood. The big griffin moved gently enough, but with her ankle carefully splinted and wrapped and set sticking out side-saddle, Tor suspected that Vintage’s dignity had taken something of a knock.

  ‘Just look after yourself,’ said Noon. ‘Don’t go jumping down any holes and falling out of buildings. Broken ankles can heal badly.’ She paused. ‘You’re lucky it wasn’t your leg.’

  Vintage tutted. ‘My dear Bern here has wrapped it up quite admirably, don’t you worry about that.’ She patted the beefy arm of Bern, who was standing next to her. Under her other arm she had slotted the crutch the big human had constructed for her – Bern was so useful, Tor reflected, that he could almost come to dislike him. Or at least he would, if he wasn’t so bloody likeable. ‘I am just so distressed that I can’t come with you. I’m sure, you know, given a little more time, Bern could construct some sort of harness that could carry me and my ridiculous foot quite comfortably during flight . . .’

  ‘Vin, we’ll likely not be gone too long.’ Tor patted the satchel at his waist, which contained the amber tablet. Vostok and Kirune had both been carefully laden with bags of supplies, but he had elected to keep the tablet with him at all times, given that it was the source of their map. The dragon and the great cat waited behind them, both pacing and eager to be on their way. For once, Kirune had allowed himself to be saddled and ridden by Tor, who was anxious to get going too, just in case the war-beast changed his mind. ‘A few days maybe, a week – less than that, if we can’t find shelter quickly.’

  Vintage made a low grumbling noise in her throat.

  ‘It will be my honour to help the Lady Vincenza while you are gone,’ said Bern, apparently oblivious to Vintage’s grumbling taking on a more pronounced note. ‘I have seen injuries like this many times in Finneral. Rest, and then gentle exercise are what is required.’

  ‘Rest! Ha. Rest, when the entirety of the Jure’lia could be on us at any moment.’ Vintage shook her head. ‘Sharrik and Jessen can keep up the perimeter patrols while you are gone, and I will keep my ear to the ground for any rumours that come our way. Just because we haven’t seen them for a while doesn’t mean they’ve all decided to take up embroidery instead.’

  ‘Which is exactly why we must be swift,’ said Vostok, stepping forward. She had grown in recent days, Tor realised, and Kirune looked almost small next to her. ‘Enough of these delays – I prefer to fly in daylight, and it is almost all gone.’

  They mounted, carefully strapped themselves in, double-checking that all the baggage was secure. Bern had rustled them up enough water and food for a reasonably long journey – Tor had peeked in the bag and been alarmed to find a lot of it was dried – and Vintage had insisted they take writing materials to make notes on anything they found. What we will find, he thought to himself, is a lot of miserable bloody ocean and not much else. He had, at least, managed to smuggle in a couple of bottles of wine.

  Vintage waved them off somewhat jerkily, which Tor chose to put down to the pain of her broken ankle rather than any sentimentality on her part, and they rose together into the air, sending leaves and dust and debris whirling in all directions. Sharrik’s feathers were ruffled and pushed back, but the big griffin just watched them leave placidly, and in moments they were high over the outskirts of the city. Tor allowed himself a grin. Noon might be used to flying with Vostok, but Kirune allowed such impositions rarely, and even if they were flying off on a fool’s mission, he intended to enjoy the occasion.

  They rose higher and higher, until the scanty warmth of the afternoon was bitten away by the cold teeth of a chilly wind. The larger buildings of the great city were long gone, and below them passed the parts of Ebora Tor was least familiar with. When he had left all those years ago, he had headed to the south, knowing very well there was nothing of interest to the north of Ebora save for a lot of dangerous forest and the Barren Sea. And it seemed he had been right; in the ensuing years, the northern forests had only grown wilder and denser, with patches of actual Wild dotted here and there like ugly growths on the skin of the world. These, he reminded himself, were more signs of the Jure’lia pestilence – the strange growth fluid they carried within their ships had poisoned Sarn, turning patches of the countryside strange and dangerous. Here and there were glimpses of old road, some paved with flat stones, others just scratches in the dirt. For some reason, the sight of them made Tor uneasy. Where were the people who should be using those roads? Dead, of course, or hiding.

  It was fully dark before they reached the coast. The sea was the roar of a monster in the blackness, and the sight of that flat band of nothing, lit only with intermittent starlight, made Tor sit up a little taller in the harness. The thought of flying over it, towards roots only knew what, suddenly seemed like an incredibly bad idea, and he was glad when Noon gestured that they should land.

  ‘I think Vintage is going to be mad about this forever,’ said Noon when they had landed and made their makeshift camp. A merry little fire was burning, casting long shadows across gritty sand that looked grey in the moonlight. Kirune had stalked off into the darkness the moment Tor had got his bags off him, but Vostok was sitting with them, her long form curling a great circle around the fire so that the worst of the wind was kept off them. ‘Imagine coming through everything she did, including fighting your way off a bastard Behemoth, only to break your bloody ankle in a cave.’


  ‘Humans are so fragile,’ murmured Vostok.

  ‘She has never been particularly cautious.’ Tor opened one of the sacks and eyed a piece of dried beef doubtfully. ‘What happened to the bats, anyway? Are they still in the cave?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Noon was sitting with her arms around her knees, a thick Eboran cloak over her shoulders. It dwarfed her a little, like a child wearing her father’s shirt. ‘It turns out there’s a patch of Wild not that far behind the cave, which is where that ugly cat thing came from.’ She paused, looking around at the lonely beach. In the night, the boom and hiss of the surf sounded like it came from all around them. ‘We could try to move them somewhere else, I suppose, but Vin was worried that might cause them to abandon the baby.’ She made a snorting noise. ‘There’s no way Fulcor would do that, but they’re living their own lives now, and I think we have to let them get on with it. Bern said that he’d keep half an eye on them while we’re gone.’

  ‘Huh. Bern.’ Tor caught Noon giving him a look for that, but he couldn’t think of anything to follow it up with. ‘So do you really think we’re going to find anything out here?’ He gestured to the huge canvas of black that hung to one side of them.

  Noon shrugged. ‘How would I know?’ Then she smiled. ‘Vintage seems pretty convinced. What do you think, Vostok?’

  The dragon turned her head slowly, her violet eyes like jewels in the firelight. ‘The Micanal I knew was a very determined man. If there was something to find in the Barren Sea, I think if anyone was going to find it, it would be him. Once, many centuries ago . . .’ She stopped, staring into the fire, and Tor felt a shiver work its way down his spine. He was used to being the oldest person around, often by a very long way, but he was a child in comparison to Vostok. ‘I was a different shape, of course,’ she continued. ‘I was war, and claws, and power. We all were. A few of us were intrigued by this idea that Ygseril, and, by extension, all of us, came from some place far to the north. I confess, mostly I wished to spread my wings and get some exercise – we were far from the last battle by then, the Jure’lia having scuttled back to their hiding places – but some of my friends were very convinced. We flew out over the sea more than once, looking for anything that seemed likely, but we never found anything.’