by Jen Williams
Vintage saw it coming, but only just. Abruptly, Tyranny’s posture changed, and her pointing hand was suddenly flying back in the form of a fist. It connected neatly with Sen-Lord Takor’s jaw, and he went down like a sack of stones – she had knocked him out cold. The man’s soldiers looked around, stunned to see their commander unconscious on the floor, and the two Finneral guards took immediate advantage, knocking the weapon from the hands of one and driving the other two back. Vintage stepped up, carefully keeping her own surprise from her face.
‘Take him back to the rooms we assigned you,’ she barked. She made sure to make eye contact with each of them, and was pleased to see the confusion and indecision on their faces. It was useful. ‘And you can tell Sena-Lord Kivee that we shall be having words about this later. Go!’
Sheepishly, they went, carrying Sen-Lord Takor between them. The two Finneral guards were looking at Tyranny with something like awe, while she was shaking out her hand and wincing.
‘Fuck. Ow. Not done that for a while.’
‘Not that you can tell, my darling.’ Vintage patted her arm. ‘Thank you. Now, we’re going to need extra guards here, I think. Perhaps we should close off this whole corridor. Norri,’ she said, addressing the female guard, ‘could you run—’
‘It’s all right,’ cut in Tyranny. ‘I’ll go.’ The young woman had broken out in a sweat, and was holding her hand awkwardly.
‘My dear, are you quite well?’
She grinned. ‘I just need to get something cold on this. Okaar will have the stuff, and I’ll call in on your people as I go, get a few more warm bodies along here for you.’ She nodded to Norri and the other guard before hurrying away up the corridor.
‘What a punch!’ said the male guard, putting away his sword.
‘What a woman,’ added Norri.
‘Yes, well.’ Vintage adjusted the crutch, and passed a hand over her forehead. ‘Thank you for holding them off. I suspect our future relations with the Yuron-Kai are going to be somewhat strained.’
44
Aldasair could hear Bern screaming from wherever the queen had taken him – somewhere towards the heart of the Behemoth. The human’s agonised yells echoed and shivered around him, seemed almost to bleed from the walls – the hopeless sound of someone suffering terribly.
It had been going on for hours, and at first Aldasair had thrown himself at the barriers, shouted at the eyeball-filled ceiling, bellowed for Hestillion to come and justify herself. Nothing had happened, although he had made his throat raw and painful. Then, as the screaming went on and on and did not stop, he thought of how perhaps he could end his own life, so that he would not hear it anymore. He knew that Hestillion and the Jure’lia queen would come back for him too – it had been decided, they told him, that he and Bern would be bonded first to the worm people, in order to make Jessen and Sharrik more tractable – but this now seemed like the most attractive possibility; after all, if they came for him, they would be finished with Bern.
In the next chamber, separated from him by the clear membrane wall, Sharrik lay on the floor with his head resting on his paws. The big griffin looked strangely small, as though he had somehow shrunk over the last few hours, and his feathers trembled slightly with each breath. Jessen sat with him, gently resting her muzzle on his broad back, and Aldasair could feel her quiet attempts to comfort him.
‘They cannot hope to do the same to you.’ Aldasair got to his feet and approached the membrane. ‘As powerful as they are, you two will be too strong for them.’
Jessen didn’t lift her head, but her eyebrows rose slightly.
‘You saw what they did to Bern. This place isn’t a room or a prison – it is them. We are at their mercy here.’
Aldasair stood very still. He did not want to remember – he wanted the memory to vanish into fog, like so many of his memories of Ebora – but instead he saw Bern again, his stricken face as they had taken him. First, they had thrown up a wall to separate them, clear mucous shimmering across the room like a thrown net, and then a small force of the wizened creatures made of greenish ooze had rushed him. Bern had fought them, tearing the small things to gooey pieces, but the floor had grown soft, trapping his feet and sinking him up to his shins. Then the creatures had swarmed into one thing, swamping him like a suit of supple armour until they had complete control. After that, it had been a simple enough job to take him away.
‘It is worth fighting,’ Aldasair said, too aware that he sounded uncertain. ‘Enough confusion, enough trouble . . . it might give us a chance.’
‘It hurts,’ rumbled Sharrik. ‘It hurts.’
‘I know, brother. You must be strong for him. Send him your strength.’ For a second, Jessen’s long pink tongue whipped out and she fussed at Sharrik’s feathers, grooming him like a mother with her cub, and then abruptly the screaming stopped. Aldasair felt his skin grow cold, a terrible chill circling around his neck like an icy hand. Perhaps no one could suffer that long and live.
‘He lives,’ said Sharrik after a moment. He lifted his shaggy head, his eyes focussed on the section of the wall where an opening most often appeared. ‘My human lives.’
They waited. Aldasair found that he could not sit and wait, so he paced, back and forth, feeling his own anxiety mirrored in the war-beasts. When, finally, the opening peeled back to reveal the queen and a horde of her creatures carrying Bern, he found that he was more angry than frightened. He stood still and waited, watching the queen carefully.
‘Interesting,’ she said. Her mask-face looked oddly brittle; hairline cracks, grey against the white, seemed to bunch around her mouth and eyes, and there was a delicacy to her movements that Aldasair hadn’t noticed before. Was it possible for the worm-queen to grow tired? ‘Such a . . . process. The human did not enjoy it, we fear.’ She gestured with one long finger to where Bern lay, prone on the floor, his golden hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. Aldasair could not see immediately where the crystal had been grafted, but he was sure it must have been – he had seen the rock that now stuck out of the dragon’s forehead, and the matching shard nestling in his cousin’s chest. ‘It will become easier, we believe.’
‘When will you take your next victim?’ The words felt like poison on Aldasair’s lips, hot and bitter. ‘Can you bear to wait to create your next monstrosity?’
The queen tilted her head towards him, as though surprised that he could speak at all.
‘No. The connection is a fine web. Too much weight too quickly, would break it.’ She gestured, and the homunculi seeped into the floor. As she walked away, a new transparent membrane leapt up in her wake, while the one immediately in front of Aldasair dissolved, leaving him in a new cell with the unconscious Bern. ‘You may have him back.’
Aldasair knelt by the unconscious man. He looked gaunt, with purple shadows like bruises under his eyes, and his cheekbones looked too prominent, as though he’d been lost in a wilderness for weeks, not tortured for a few hours. Even his blond hair was darker, soaked in sour-smelling sweat.
‘Bern? Bern, it’s me.’
The big man’s eyelids flickered and he grimaced. He shifted on the floor, and brought one hand up to rub his forehead, and that was when Aldasair saw that the blue crystal had been sunk into the palm of his hand. It looked heavy and awkward, the flesh around it rigid and white like a network of old scars.
‘I keep falling.’ Bern’s voice was ragged from the screaming. ‘Over and over. I think I’ve found something solid, and then it falls away again. Like I’m out . . . on the ice . . . and . . .’
‘Bern!’ Sharrik was up on his feet and standing as close to the membrane wall as he could get, with Jessen at his shoulder. ‘Brother! I am here!’
‘Brother. I know you, I know you . . .’
‘You know us all, Bern.’ Aldasair took his other hand and squeezed it, not liking how cold and clammy it was. ‘We’re all here with you.’
‘By the stones, there is such a darkness, such a huge space . . .’ Bern jer
ked and shuddered, and for a second his face screwed up like a child waking from a nightmare. ‘I keep falling through it, or I’m being dragged through it, from point to point. I can feel it all at once, but it’s too much.’
‘Can you sit up?’
Aldasair pulled him into a sitting position, and was gladdened to see him smile as he saw Sharrik and Jessen.
‘Aldasair, I feel this place too. It’s a living thing, and now it’s like it’s a part of me.’ He grimaced again. ‘I think I’m going to be sick. How long was I gone? Have they done it to the rest of you?’
‘A few hours. The lights here dimmed, and even went out for a while.’ Aldasair swallowed, deciding not to mention that he’d been afraid that they would be trapped there until they died of hunger and thirst, blind in the dark. ‘The queen has not touched the rest of us yet.’
‘I would not wish this on anyone. I can feel her, crawling around, like rats in my head.’ He held up his hand and peered at the blue crystal erupting from his palm. ‘I will not be able to swing an axe with this.’
‘They will regret injuring you, brother.’ Sharrik’s voice was a low growl. ‘I will shred their guts to pieces. I can feel the poison that is in you, and I will taste their blood for it.’
‘Yes,’ said Jessen, her amber eyes flashing. Aldasair felt a current of outrage from her, and under that, fear, mixing with his own. ‘We will kill them. But first, we must survive this poison.’
The walls were breathing.
Hestillion couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before, because it was deafening. Not that she could hear it. There was no noise, but a sense of pressure in her head; pressure building, pressure releasing. Pressure building, pressure releasing. She glared at the wall of her chamber and willed it to stop, or choke, but the breathing went on, regardless of her. On some level she knew that she could never stop that – it was like willing her own heart to stop, or willing herself blind.
She stood up and crossed to the table that held her basin of water, the jug and her combs – all of which had been looted from a town they had destroyed – and stripped off all her clothes. Methodically, she washed herself with a clean cloth and a small nub of yellow soap, scrubbing her hair with particular violence to remove the smell of the changing pool. Very quickly, the water turned dark grey and silty, and she wished one of the squat homunculus creatures would bring her fresh water, but she was too exhausted to shout, and still squeamish about the things seeing her in the nude – they were undoubtedly spies for the queen, after all.
Squeezing the water from her hair, she was startled when a small greenish creature stepped awkwardly through the opening in the wall, carrying a fat jug full of fresh water. She watched as it set the jug by her feet and then retreated. She listened to the soft patter of its stubby feet disappearing back down the corridor, a crease of puzzlement between her eyebrows.
‘It heard me.’
Hestillion dropped the cloth, her nakedness forgotten, and formed a new thought in her mind.
Run back to me.
Silence. The breathing of the corpse moon again, and behind that, the presence of the human man – his pain and his horror, his disgust at what had been done to him – but she pushed those away hurriedly. She did not want to think about the human, because when she did, she felt uncomfortably close to him, could almost feel what it was to be in his large, short-lived body. Instead, she touched the crystal at her throat and cast her thoughts out towards the corridor.
I said run back to me!
This time the response was instant. A rapid patter of small feet outside, like her father drumming his fingers on a leather chair, and the wizened creature appeared again at the entrance, peering in with its eyeless face. Abruptly, she was disgusted by it, and instead she reached out with her mind and imagined the opening squeezing shut. A second later, it did, hiding the homunculus from view.
‘Ha!’
She grinned, dizzy with triumph, which made her think of Celaphon. Swiftly, she pulled some clothes from the chest that had been provided for her and dressed. Clad in black velvet leggings and a dark-green jerkin tied with a crimson belt, she left her chamber – gesturing the door open with a flick of her hand – and made her way to the vast room that had been allocated to Celaphon. She found him crouched up next to the transparent strip that ran the length of the east wall, his huge head moving steadily back and forth as he tracked their progress over the landscape. Much of the room was filled with the expanse of his wings, which he had spread out behind him like the canopy of some vast tent.
‘Celaphon?’
‘I knew you were coming here,’ he said without looking at her. ‘You are a part of it, this web. I see you like a bird, small and green, so tiny that you fly perched on my horns. Is that strange?’
Hestillion blinked. ‘No, it is apt, my sweet.’
‘And the other, this human,’ he turned to her, his white eyes shining like pearls, ‘I can feel him too, and he is a bright, shining weapon. Powerful, strong. He is strong for a human, I think, and brave. He fought us well, and now he is my brother.’
‘You feel him so clearly?’
‘Yes. You do not?’ He paused, and then, ‘An axe! He is an axe in my mind, silver and . . . stones, too. A great core of stone, not cold, but solid.’
‘I have been avoiding him, I think.’ Hestillion smiled slightly, still full of satisfaction over her new mastery of the corpse moon. ‘I do not have the best history with humans. Not many Eborans do.’
Celaphon snorted, blasting her with rotten breath.
‘He is worthy of our glory, I think, even if he is human. He is a weapon, like me.’
Hestillion noticed he did not think of her as a weapon. Hesitantly, with her eyes on the view beyond the window – a vast tract of Wild, twisted trees reaching up for them like the hands of the dying – she reached out for the man her cousin had called Bern. Almost immediately, she found him. His pain and misery made him easy to find, like a broken tooth turned black in the mouth, and she could tell that he was with Aldasair, because there was a narrow line of comfort there, light against sprawling darkness. Curious, she moved towards this, noting as she did so how it was almost like moving through the netherdark.
The surrounding darkness, the vastness of the Jure’lia that held them all within its web, was a busy thing, filled with scuttling movement and ancient thought. It was undoubtedly alien, and yet she was also a part of it. Somewhere within that vastness, she felt the presence of the blue crystal that lay at the heart of the corpse moon, and then linked to that, the other crystals in the hearts of other ships. Together, they created the net that held all of the Jure’lia together. And the queen was all of it, of course, a thrumming essence that changed and shed its shape but never really died.
Hestillion moved away from that and reached out for the line of light that was the connection between Bern and Aldasair. Her cousin was only a faint presence, more an absence than anything else, a darker space in a sky made of night, but that line burned like a comet. She touched it.
And instantly fell back, confused by what she felt there. Love and kinship, deeper than anything she would have believed possible between an Eboran and a human. Of course her brother had his pet witch, with her messy hair and belligerent look, but sex with humans had ever been a popular pastime with her people – they were so disposable, after all. But this was something else. Curious, she turned her attention to Bern himself.
Stone, like the foundation of a building, as Celaphon had said, and honour too. It oozed out of him like the scuttling creatures oozed from the walls of the corpse moon. He was a good man, kind and thoughtful, sometimes rash and impatient, but always thoughtful. She had a flash then, and saw him within in the Hill of Souls, of all places, carefully sweeping away dead leaves and the tiny skeletons of mice and birds, mending the skylight and the door, washing down the stone shelves and . . . In her physical body, Hestillion reached out for Celaphon’s muscled leg and leaned on it, trying to understan
d what she had perceived. Bern, this barbarian from Finneral, had carefully taken each of their old war-beast statues and stored them in a box, handling them delicately, as though they were babies. It was an act of hope, of kindness, of . . . courting. He had done it out of affection for her cousin, as a demonstration of his admiration.
Hestillion broke away. Her stomach was churning.
‘Do you see what he is?’ asked Celaphon cheerily enough. ‘A warrior. He is strong. He will be a great ally for me. All of them will be – my brothers and sisters.’
The landscape below them was terrible and dark, the setting sun leaching the last of the light from the trees.
‘An ally,’ said Hestillion, faintly. Except that wasn’t true. Bern and her cousin, and her brother and even his pet witch – they were all enemies, and forcing this connection on them would not change that. And if they were the enemy – including this good, kind man – what did that make her?
A woman who made a choice.
The queen’s voice was faint in her head, as though she were still exhausted from her efforts with the crystals. Hestillion did not answer, and instead drew as far into herself as possible, holding her thoughts close, like jewels. Because she knew perfectly well that it didn’t matter if they forced the crystal on each of them, if they made them a part of the Jure’lia; they would always be enemies. And she would always be the woman who made a choice – a choice that had doomed her, and possibly doomed all of them. If they were all joined, that would only become more obvious. She also could not ignore the bright interest Celaphon had developed in Bern; she was a bird, and he was a weapon. It was not difficult to see who would be the most important to a beast of war.
‘Sweet one.’ She forced a smile on her face, feeling it pull at the edges of her mouth as though she too wore a mask. ‘I am glad for you.’