by Jen Williams
The first thing she felt, thankfully, was Celaphon. His bulk was reassuring, almost seeming to block everything else out. She felt his own wonder, and his confusion, and then a moment later, his joy at being connected with her. She knew, for a handful of seconds, what it was to be a dragon, scales moving over muscles, wings folded carefully away lest they catch on anything. She was him, standing on all fours, the weight and the power, the potential. And there was pain too, a sense of his body warring against itself. Parts of him did not sit well with others, grinding and catching, being in conflict. He was always in pain, she realised. It was a part of him.
Celaphon, I’m sorry.
Go, he said. See all of it.
He pushed her away, gently, and she span out of herself, belatedly recognising the enormous void that was waiting for her. Dimly she was aware that she was still lying in the pool of pale water, her eyes turned up to the ceiling – she could see herself, in fact, could see her hands lying palms up like pale dead fish – she was in the ceiling, she was in the walls, in every strange malformed creature that lined the walls.
‘Be careful.’ The queen’s voice echoed from somewhere distant. ‘Do not lose yourself, Hestillion Eskt.’
How?
Celaphon’s presence, a huge weight of pain and power; the flying men, barely aware of where they were; the homunculi, still and waiting; the breathing flesh of the walls, the teeming multitude that was the corpse moon. She felt every part of it, within herself and outside herself. The queen too, a dark nexus at the heart of it, a part and yet apart. Hestillion felt her essence speeding towards her, as helpless as a leaf heading towards a waterfall, and there was the strangest sense of doubling, of being caught between mirrors . . .
It was too much. When she awoke, she was no longer in the pool but in her own room, lying on her bed with her arms by her sides. Nausea rolled and pitched in her stomach, but she didn’t have the strength to move. With one hand she reached up and tentatively touched the blue crystal protruding from her chest. The corpse moon was heavy with silence.
‘What have I done?’ She swallowed hard, feeling her tongue sticking to the top of her mouth. When had she last had anything to drink? ‘Celaphon?’
He was not with her, but she could feel him nearby. She sensed his warm concern for her, as though she were a baby with a fever.
There is so much to see, he said. But our queen says you are still weak. Rest. My brother and sister will soon receive the gift.
She felt a stab of alarm at that, but already she was sinking back into unconsciousness.
Our queen, she thought. Ourselves. And then she was gone.
42
Noon was, secretly, more than ready to give up. Her head was too hot, her back ached, and her boots were more mud than leather now. The sun glinting off the water seemed to mock her, and when she reached up to push her hair out of her eyes her hair was too hot to touch. Time to get out of the heat. She had just pulled her boots free of the thick river mud, ready to head to the makeshift rope ladder Tor had slung over the side of the cliff face, when a shadow passed over her, moving very fast. She squinted up at the sky, sheltering her eyes with one cupped hand, and she saw Kirune, his wings outspread and banking erratically. He was turning in the air and coming straight for her.
‘Kirune?’
He crashed into the water just ahead of her, sending up a wave big enough to drench her and nearly knock her onto her backside. Spluttering, she waved her arms, attempting to stay upright. The big cat was upset, that was clear enough, and as he bore down on her she had a handful of seconds to wonder if he had just decided he’d had enough, and he was going to eat them all.
‘Kirune? What is it?’
He wasn’t wearing his harness. He shook himself all over, sending drops of water like diamonds scattering all over the crevasse.
‘Tor. He has been attacked. Taken. You have to come with me now. Now!’
‘Taken by who?’
As she stumbled over to him, wading through the warm water, she threw out her awareness to Vostok, hoping that the dragon was nearby.
‘I don’t know,’ snapped Kirune. Then, ‘Monsters. Monsters in a secret part of this place.’
Noon felt her insides turn to ice. Vostok? Where are you?
‘All right.’ She climbed onto Kirune’s back, all too aware that she didn’t have a harness to tie herself into. ‘Take me there. Can you do that?’
Kirune did not reply, but instead his wings cracked open again like the sails of a ship caught in a storm, and they were in the air. Noon dug her fists into his fur and gripped his torso as well as she could with her thighs. Very swiftly they were above the island, the green canopy falling away below them.
‘Can you tell me what this secret place is? Why you were there?’
The war-beast grumbled low in his throat, as though vexed by so many questions. ‘I was exploring. I found a thing that felt bad. I got Tor to come and see. But . . .’ He trailed off. ‘There were lots of monsters. Tor told me to go, and get you.’
‘Fire and blood.’ Noon leaned forward, trying to get a sense of where they were going by peering over Kirune’s head, when a patch of forest below them shuddered, and Vostok arose from it, feathered wings beating frantically.
‘What is it?’ she called. ‘Do we fly to battle?’
‘It sounds like it!’ Noon called back. ‘Tor has been attacked.’
The dragon came up next to them, her violet eyes winking in the sun.
‘Very well. Lead the way, Brother Kirune.’
As if spurred on by the dragon’s words, Kirune put on a sudden burst of speed, apparently caring little if Noon could keep her precarious seat on his back. With no other choice, she lay fully against his back, pressing her cheek into his dense grey fur. She could smell him, wild and familiar, and the scent of the river mud on her boots. Somewhere beneath his fur, she could feel the thunder of his heart. They flew on for some time, until abruptly he slowed.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘it is the barrier we passed through. This is where we found it.’
Cautiously, Noon sat up. Kirune was descending, with Vostok beside him, but she had time to see the odd flickering wall of lights, and recognised it as the same barrier they had glimpsed when they had first found the island.
‘There is a hole at the bottom,’ continued Kirune. ‘It is where we passed through.’
Once they had landed, Noon gladly hopped from the big cat’s back, trying to ignore how badly her legs were shaking. Vostok was hissing with displeasure; the forest here was thick, and she found herself hemmed in by too many trees.
‘It hides the truth,’ said Kirune, as if this explained everything. The hole was obvious, surrounded as it was with multiple hairline cracks of white light. ‘The monsters are beyond there.’
‘Great. Vostok, can you get through it?’
‘We have to help him,’ said Kirune. He was, Noon realised with growing alarm, becoming panicky again.
‘We will. Vostok?’
The dragon had been grumbling and poking at the edge of the hole with her snout.
‘It will not keep me out.’ She pushed her head and shoulders through, straining against the strange barrier, and then abruptly more pieces of it winked out of existence, as though the violence of Vostok’s passage had shattered them. She was through, and Noon quickly followed with Kirune. Beyond the barrier the forest was much sparser, but Noon barely had time to consider that, as immediately Kirune was racing off ahead, his great paws kicking up clods of black dirt.
‘Climb up,’ said Vostok, ‘we’ll follow.’
Noon scrambled up her side, boots sliding unhelpfully against her slick scales, until she was seated just beyond the dragon’s shoulders. She took a little of the dragon’s life energy, just a touch, more a comfort than anything.
‘If there are monsters, we should approach slowly,’ said Vostok, but she was already thundering after Kirune, and although Noon murmured agreement, in her mind she saw Tor, how he
’d been after the explosion in Esiah Godwort’s enclosure; wounded, helpless, close to death. She had no wish to see that again.
Quickly it became apparent that this part of the island was unlike anything they had seen before. Strange pale green hillocks, as smooth as glass, burst out of the black earth, increasing in frequency until they appeared to be moving through the ruin of a slowly emerging city. But there was nothing there that Noon would have expected to see in a city – no windows or doors, no discarded carts, no wells or roads.
‘What the fuck is all this, then?’
‘I do not know,’ said Vostok. The dragon shuddered under her.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘This place. Can you not feel it? It is like . . . walking through despair.’
Noon blinked. The whole place was eerie, and Kirune’s distress was gnawing at her guts, but she couldn’t have claimed to be sensing anything else from the strange green shapes. She leaned close to the dragon, trying to feel what she felt, and caught a sense of deep wrongness, a horror that was difficult to put into words. Instinctively, she separated herself from it.
‘I’m not feeling what you are, that’s for certain. What is it, Vostok? Have you felt anything like it before?’
‘No,’ the dragon replied immediately.
Ahead of them, Kirune had stopped. The green structures had completely replaced the trees, and some of the towers and walls were so tall they couldn’t see beyond them. The big cat was looking around slowly, his shoulders hunched.
‘This is where they were,’ he said. ‘Monsters, white things. And they took Tor inside there.’
Noon looked at the smooth green tower he indicated, expecting to finally see a door or a window of some sort, but there was just more of the smooth green material.
‘Are you sure?’
Kirune bared his teeth in a hiss. ‘Yes. I am no idiot.’
She climbed down from Vostok’s back and clambered up a slope towards the smooth lump of green rock that Kirune had indicated. She pressed her fingertips to it cautiously, half fearing that she might sink through it, or it might burn her, but there was nothing. It was unpleasantly slick, but she still did not feel any of the unsettling horror that Vostok was experiencing. There were no birds singing. There were no noises here at all, save for their own breathing. Again she thought of how alone she was on this island.
‘Well. Let’s look around and see what we can find.’
It was the scent that Tor noticed first.
The smell was overwhelming. Sharp and yellow-green, coating his tongue and stinging his nose. It was like being inside a large, unripe fruit.
He opened his eyes. He was standing pressed against a slightly inclined smooth green wall, while below him the floor sloped away vertically out of sight. His thigh and his shoulder were throbbing steadily, but at least there didn’t appear to be any of the awful white monsters in here with him. The walls around him were smooth and rounded as well, and he had just enough time to realise that there was nothing below his feet and that he was somehow stuck to the wall, when, slowly, he began to peel away from it. There was tacky stuff there, like glue, adhering to his coat and the back of his head, sticking them to the smooth surface.
He panicked, scrambling at the wall, but despite the unpleasant stickiness there was nothing for him to get a purchase on and within seconds he was sliding down the sloping wall, pitching forward into a long tube lit from within by green light. Tor rammed the heels of his boots ahead of him, attempting to arrest his progress, but only succeeded in turning himself around and sending him rolling down the tube horizontally. There was a breathless sense of falling, of crashing, and then he hit a pool of lukewarm water with a tremendous splash. He rose up gasping, half convinced he would drown – the water was somehow thick, and it sought to clog his mouth and nostrils – and then he sat back. He was in around three feet of water, sitting in the bottom of some sort of huge, featureless cavern. It was not dark in the chamber, but lit with a warm, yellow-green light, like that of sunshine passing through spring’s first leaves. Further up the faintly glowing walls were large round holes, clearly similar to the one he had just fallen out of.
‘Ygseril’s balls,’ he murmured to himself, before swiping his wet hair back from his face. ‘I’m inside the island. Or under it. Or some bastard thing.’
Tentatively, he poked at his leg. The white monster had easily punctured the leather of his trousers, and now his flesh oozed black blood from several deep wounds. From the feel of his shoulder, it was in more or less the same state, which was not good news. Awkwardly, he stood, swearing repeatedly as his black blood swirled amid the silvery water, like ink on moonlight . . .
He stopped, barely daring to breathe. A memory, something from his earliest childhood, suddenly rose as clear and as painful as a knife under the ribs. He remembered his mother holding him in her arms, a fine cup in her other hand. It had been painted with shining red dragons, and they caught the light and glimmered and flashed, like living things. He had wanted to hold the cup for himself and had reached out for it, but his mother had just shaken her head before pushing the lip of the cup towards his mouth.
Did he remember what it tasted like? He thought not. Centuries of absence, and centuries of human blood had gradually eroded it, but he thought that he would know if he tasted it again.
In the memory, they were in the Hall of Roots. There were lots of other Eborans there, pressed in all around, talking animatedly, laughing and greeting each other, but it had not been a special day. It was just one Sap Day of many – once every moon’s cycle, but when you lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, they seemed to come around so often. Tor, even as a child, small enough to be carried by his mother, had already seen nearly a thousand of them. His sister, Hestillion, had already sipped from her own cup – hers was painted with green birds, of course – and she stood impatiently clutching at their mother’s skirts, anxious to be away again, to find somewhere they could play. The sap had been silvery and thick, coating his throat and burning in his belly, and at the time he had been impatient with it – the same thing, every month, boring old sap.
‘Boring old sap,’ he whispered, looking at the pool of shining liquid around him. Hands shaking, he cupped them together and watched as it pooled between his clasped fingers. Would he remember what it tasted like? Would it heal him, take away his scars and seal up the oozing wounds on his shoulder and thigh? He raised his hands to his mouth; it smelled of nothing in particular, save for a strange mineral coating on the back of his throat. It could equally be poison, but then given there was no obvious way out of the cavern and he was bleeding mortal-blood, it seemed that the risk hardly mattered. He lifted his cupped hands to his lips.
‘It is not what you are seeking, child.’
Tor jumped, the silvery water falling away through his fingers. Standing on the far side of the chamber was a tall figure that hadn’t been there before. It was white, like the monsters that had bitten him, but it was more Eboran in shape – slim and upright, with legs and arms. Too many arms, in fact. With some difficulty, Tor scrambled to his feet, ignoring the roaring pain in his leg.
‘Who . . . what are you?’
The figure came forward, and more details resolved themselves. It was around eight feet tall, much taller even than he was, and it had two long sets of arms, the second positioned just behind and below the first. It had a long, smooth face, with a nose that was a long, flat afterthought, a slash of a mouth, lips pressed tightly closed when it was not speaking, and eyes like a deer’s – large and black and set almost diagonally below its smooth brow. There were marks on its cheeks and forehead, like dabs of crimson paint, and it wore long, thick robes that were decorated in a similar fashion – slashes of colour against white. Tor did not recognise the material; it looked a little like wool, but it was much denser and lined with a faint fuzz. Long pale hair, as white as its robes, was tucked carefully behind a pair of ears that ended in a tapered point.
‘You are not who came before.’
The voice was soft and faintly male. Tor wiped his hands on his trousers, once again wishing he had not left his sword behind.
‘Who came before? Who are you?’ He stopped, trying to think what the most important questions were. ‘How could you know what I’m looking for?’
The strange many-limbed man was peering at him closely, frowning at the wounds on his thigh, and the way his shirt was stuck to his shoulder with blood.
‘It is not the sap you were raised on.’ Before Tor could respond to this, he continued, ‘You bleed black. How strange. I imagine that this is not good?’
Tor raised his eyebrows. ‘You could say that. Enough black blood and you’ll have a corpse rattling around in your big . . . whatever this is. And what are those monsters outside?’
The man clasped all four of his hands together, long fingers interlocking with an eerie grace. Tor realised that the shape of the man, how he moved, should all appear deeply wrong to him, yet it did not – if anything, it felt familiar on some level he did not understand, and that in itself was frightening.
‘They prevent infection. There are tiny animals in your blood that fight infection. Did you know this?’
‘Tiny animals?’ Tor snorted. His leg felt heavy now, even as his head felt lighter and lighter. It was difficult to make sense of what the man was saying, and for an alarming moment he wondered if he were simply caught in a dream created by Arnia, some sort of test or punishment. But as real as dreams could seem, there was never really any mistaking reality for one. ‘You might have tiny . . . cats or dogs in your blood, but I certainly don’t.’
‘Hmm.’ The man bowed his head slightly, the skin around his huge liquid eyes crinkling. ‘Then, meat – you salt meat to keep away rot? And flies?’
‘I can’t say that I’ve ever done it personally, but yes, I suppose we do.’
‘Then the things you encountered outside are like salt. They hold us as we are supposed to be, fight off infections, eat away that which is not needed. They are caretakers.’ He paused, and then huffed. Despite his strange appearance, it was an oddly familiar gesture. ‘It is not a very good analogy, actually.’