The Bitter Twins

by Jen Williams

  ‘Should we not have gone after them? For the other war-beast pod, I mean.’ Eri was standing next to Helcate, leaning heavily on the beast. ‘It was precious.’ He paused. ‘And I think it was the one most likely to hatch next.’

  Vintage sighed. She could not bring herself to ask the boy how he knew that.

  ‘My dear, we are all injured and exhausted, Helcate most of all. And I’m afraid that if we had another fight, it would be down to him to protect us again.’ She looked up at the beast, who looked back with his luminous blue eyes. ‘How long has he been able to do that, anyway?’

  Eri shrugged. ‘Just now. He woke up and knew we were in trouble. He could feel that I was in the woods, in the dark by myself, so he came for me. When he knew that they were trying to steal our pods, he was angry. And then he just knew how to do it.’

  ‘It is extraordinary.’ Vintage paused. She felt bruised all over, her ankle was aching like a bastard, and her coat was singed. ‘Extraordinary. I’ve never heard of a war-beast that could spit acid, certainly nothing in any book I’ve read, although it could simply be that the etchings we have taken to depict fire are . . . But perhaps we can talk about it when we get home.’

  Although Helcate’s leg had stopped bleeding, he was still limping a little. Vintage went over to the big beast and patted him fondly on the nose.

  ‘What about the thieves, though?’

  ‘Helcate,’ said Helcate.

  ‘I doubt they will be back. And I shall have some interesting correspondence to send to the Winnowry. But for now, let’s get back to the palace and see how much of it has burned down, shall we?’

  49

  The sky was white and heavy with snow. Hestillion narrowed her eyes against the cold and pulled her fur vest a little closer around her neck. In the distance, another Behemoth sat in the air like a fat grub, and the thin black line that joined it to the corpse moon seethed and convulsed. The queen was still close, moving slowly towards her wayward ship – it had, Hestillion suspected, been heavily damaged in the Eighth Rain. There were holes in its side, and a thick band of black fluid around its middle section like a wide stretch of scar tissue where it had tried to put itself back together. There wasn’t much time.

  Trying not to think too closely about what she was doing, Hestillion turned and headed back within the fleshy corridors of the corpse moon, her head down. She moved towards the cells, and as she did so, the lights dimmed, and the constant murmur of life quietened. Grimacing slightly, she broke into a run.

  ‘Cousin!’

  The prisoners still sat within their cells, looking morose. She felt a stab of impatience at this – they clearly had not thought at all on what she had told them in her last visit – and then roughly put it aside. Aldasair had risen to his feet. His hair, unwashed for days, hung in a thick, greasy tail over his shoulder.

  ‘Hest?’

  ‘The time is now. Are you ready?’ She gestured to Bern, who was still sitting with his elbows resting on his knees. ‘You, human, get up. I will need your strength.’

  Her heart beating rapidly in her chest, Hestillion reached out for the corpse moon and pushed against it – the membrane separating them shrunk away. There, it was done; now it was simply a countdown to the moment the queen realised her betrayal.

  A black shape, moving too fast to follow, shot across the room, and Hestillion hit the floor hard enough for all the air to be knocked from her lungs. The wolf brought her long snout down until she could feel Jessen’s hot breath blasting over her face. The weight on her chest was agonising.

  ‘What do you want, betrayer?’

  ‘Aldasair . . .’ Hestillion gasped air back into her lungs, and felt a stab of real panic at the enormous effort that cost her. ‘There isn’t time. Call off your dog.’

  Dimly, she saw her cousin move into view, Bern just behind him.

  ‘Why should we trust you, Hest?’

  ‘Get her off . . . and I will tell you.’

  Jessen jumped away, and Hestillion scrambled to her feet, blinking away black spots at the edge of her vision.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t want you here,’ she said. ‘You exert too much influence over Celaphon and he is mine. And I cannot be joined to you with the crystal. I just cannot. Bad enough that I must know a human so well,’ she nodded to Bern, ‘but you as well? No.’

  She couldn’t miss the expression of disappointment that moved over Aldasair’s face. Despite everything, he had still believed she would come back to them. She wanted to laugh, but there was no time.

  ‘Do not give me that sad puppy look, cousin. We have a matter of moments while the queen is distracted. You, human. Help me move these walls.’

  She moved over to the eastern wall, knowing that it was the swiftest path to the outer skin.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The big man was on his feet, with his huge griffin behind him. ‘I have tried my axes against these walls, and Sharrik’s claws. They do nothing.’

  ‘Idiot. You are a part of this ship now.’ She touched the crystal at her heart. ‘And it is a part of you. It is attached to you as your leg is attached to you, or your arm. And you can move your hand, can you not? Flex your toes? Think! This is your one chance to get out, so reach for that power and use it.’

  To his credit, the big man came to join her at the wall, his brow furrowed. Aldasair followed with the two war-beasts. The lights in the room had grown so dim they were almost in darkness.

  ‘You know of what I speak, don’t you? I know it is unpleasant, but you must embrace the connection for a moment. Join me in pulling the walls aside and we might just get you outside in time.’

  Bern looked at the blue crystal in his hand, an unmistakable expression of revulsion creasing his brow, and he placed it gently against the wall. Hestillion joined him and reached out. A good man, a kind man, a risk-taker . . . The teeming dark, busy with webs, a dark intelligence at its heart, but looking away for now . . .

  The wall opened to their touch, revealing a dark corridor beyond.

  ‘Quickly now, follow me, all of you.’ They crossed the corridor and pulled the next wall open, and the next, and the next. Aldasair and the war-beasts followed. With each wall, it grew a little harder, until Hestillion noticed that the lights were gradually coming back on. There was a scuttling noise, somewhere down the corridor where they were, and Bern had broken out into a sweat.

  ‘She’s coming back,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ Hestillion swallowed down her own panic. ‘As fast as we can. We can’t be very far from the outer skin now.’

  They moved on, although now it was like pushing against a wall of treacle, rapidly turning to rock. The small intelligences of the homunculi were tickling whispers against her consciousness, growing stronger, and elsewhere, something bigger was barrelling towards them.

  ‘This is it.’ They stood in front of a curving grey wall, a row of holes behind them. ‘One more push . . .’

  The inner wall to their right exploded, throwing them all to the floor. Hestillion looked up, fearing to see the still visage of the queen, but instead Celaphon was looming over them, the thickly corded fans on his neck standing up in outrage. Something danced around him, some blue light, and then it was gone.

  ‘What are you doing? Where are you taking my family?’

  ‘Bern, keep working on that outer wall.’ Hestillion stepped in front of them. ‘Celaphon, sweet one. This cannot work. We have to get rid of them.’

  ‘What do you mean? The connection works! I feel you and the human man, so clearly, and I am not alone. Together, we will be strong.’

  Next to her, she could feel Bern commanding the wall to part, to split open and admit them to the sky, but the queen’s influence was strengthening with every passing second.

  ‘No. Remember when I told you to listen to me? That you must always listen to me? This gift changes nothing about that, Celaphon. I know what is best for you – for us. And to have you connected to a
human, to these lesser war-beasts . . . it would taint you. Poison what you are. And it would poison me, too.’

  ‘Lesser war-beasts!’ The idiot griffin raised his wings threateningly. ‘Another battle and I will tear the scales from this abomination!’

  In the growing brightness of the corridor, Celaphon’s scales shone a deep, iridescent purple. He tipped his head to one side, his pale eyes narrow.

  ‘Are you not my brother?’

  ‘I do not know what you are,’ said Sharrik.

  An uneasy silence blossomed in the crowded corridor, and for a moment Hestillion found the words lodged in her throat like stones. She had felt, quite keenly, the sliver of misery that had moved through Celaphon like a blade, and knew that Bern had felt it too. Behind her, the big man laid a hand on the griffin’s shoulder.

  ‘Be ready, Sharrik,’ he said. ‘We are almost through here.’

  ‘No!’ Celaphon reared back, his huge blocky head hanging over them all, and the uncertain blue light Hestillion had seen before flickered into being around his jaws, at the ends of his teeth. There was no time; she did not know what Celaphon was about to do next, but she suspected it would be very bad for all of them. She turned quickly to Aldasair, catching his eye.

  ‘Fly quickly, cousin, there will be enemies in the sky.’ Then, looking back up at the dragon, she focussed everything she had on him, picturing him as he had been when he had first hatched from the pod: small, weak, certain to die. She conjured herself as his saviour, as his only friend, and threw it at him with every inch of her connection to him – both forged by the crystals, and the natural link of warrior-bond to war-beast.

  You will do as I say!

  The enormous dragon recoiled from her – again, that blade of misery, of terrible confusion – and in the handful of seconds he was distracted, she joined her own strength to Bern’s. The wall burst open, letting in daylight and a howling wind.

  ‘Go! Quickly!’

  Aldasair was already clinging to Jessen’s back, and Bern scrambled onto Sharrik. The last Hestillion saw of her cousin was his pale face as he looked back, his auburn hair falling over his forehead and clinging to his cheeks. She saw the question he wanted to ask, and she shook her head firmly. With more strength than she thought she had left, she commanded the edges of the hole to seal back together, although it was a poor job; she could still smell the fresh air. It did not matter, though, as the queen was back. Already Hestillion could feel her curiosity, her sense that something was amiss. It would not take long for her to figure it out.

  Celaphon looked down at her.

  ‘You took my family. You forced them to go away.’

  ‘I told you, Celaphon, I am your only family.’ She smoothed her hand over the scales on his knees. They were hot, just as they had been when he was an infant. ‘As you are mine.’

  It was a subdued journey back. Vostok had been full of questions when they had emerged from what Tor referred to as the Seed Carrier, but the Eboran had just looked away from the dragon and shaken his head. The sun had set while they had been looking for him, and they had emerged into a thick jungle night, warm and still and eerily silent. There was no sign of the white monsters.

  ‘I need to think,’ he said. ‘I just need to think for a while.’

  Noon would normally have badgered him for more information than that, and she could feel Vostok’s curiosity tingling in her fingers, but the Eboran looked so distracted and mournful she was willing to let it go. The place itself appeared to have suffered no ill effects despite her filling at least part of it with flames, and as they walked away she noticed that the green lines of fire she had somehow awakened had faded and died. There were, indeed, a lot of questions to be asked.

  When they arrived back at the clearing with the neat little homes and clambered down from their war-beasts, Tor took her arm gently.

  ‘Can I talk to you? Alone.’

  Vostok rounded on them, her jaws open slightly to expose her teeth.

  ‘If you have something to tell us about Ebora, Tormalin the Oathless, I believe I should hear it too.’ She twitched her head slightly in Kirune’s direction. The big cat was crouched silently next to her. ‘We should both hear it.’

  ‘And you will.’ Tor sounded unutterably tired, and to Noon he suddenly looked much older; it wasn’t so difficult to imagine he was four hundred years old, with his lips pressed into a thin line and his brow furrowed. ‘I promise, but I want to get it all straight in my head first, and to do that I want to talk to my . . . I want to talk to Noon about it.’

  ‘You do not trust me.’ It wasn’t quite a question, and in Kirune’s lamp-like eyes there was, Noon suspected, more hurt than anger. ‘You cannot speak to me.’

  ‘Kirune—’

  ‘Go on, the two of you, go and get some rest now. Go hunting or something, I don’t know.’ Noon moved in front of Tor, almost chasing them away as she’d once chased the small herds of fleeten on the plains. ‘There’re a few questions I want to ask our hosts in the morning, and it’s going to go down about as well as a shit in a pond, so go and get some rest. As soon as I know, you will both know. Go.’

  Reluctantly, the war-beasts slunk off. Tor did not wait for them to leave, but instead headed to a small copse of trees, almost immediately vanishing into the dark.

  ‘Here, where are you going? Wait!’

  Noon brushed her fingers against a tree and formed a small ball of green light in her palm, almost entirely without heat.

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  It turned out to be Micanal’s tunnel. They stood together in a pool of green light, looking at the strange smooth roots, but for a very long time Tor didn’t say anything at all.

  ‘What happened to you in there, Tor? Kirune said that you’d been bitten. Pretty badly, he said, but I can’t see any wounds on you. The blood on your shirt and trousers looks dry to me, and you haven’t moaned about it once, which is a pretty big giveaway that you’re fine.’

  Tor looked down at his shirt and prodded at the stain as though he’d never seen it before. He sighed.

  ‘Best Eboran silk, this was. I have ruined so many good shirts with you, do you realise that? One of them I believe you had to cut off me with a knife.’

  ‘Tor, I did not come down here to talk about your fashion choices.’

  He sighed, and then, haltingly and with several pauses, began to tell her a very strange tale indeed: of being pulled through a solid surface, of waking in a tube-like tunnel; of being healed by roots just like the ones they stood in front of, and of the creature Eeskar, who had talked to him of his people’s origins. Here, the story moved back in time to the impossibly distant past, when Eborans were apparently just humans, and the creatures had grown a tree to change them – to make them what they were now.

  When he was done, Noon rubbed her hands over her eyes – it was as though he had transferred his terrible weariness over to her.

  ‘I’m not sure I understood that,’ she said eventually. ‘You are the children of a people not from this world? Not from Sarn?’

  ‘Nothing as grand as that, Noon. Eborans are simply humans who stumbled over a magical tree.’ He smiled at her, although it looked like it pained him to do so. ‘We are an odd footnote in their history. Not even a particularly interesting or worthy one to them, it seems.’

  ‘Fire and blood. But why tell me? It seems like if anyone should know, it’s Vostok and Kirune. And the rest of the war-beasts.’

  ‘And they will know. Of course, they must know. They also owe their existence to the Aborans, and the seed they planted thousands of years ago. But it is hard for me to take this in – hard to understand that our people are not really the god-touched heroes we have always been told.’ He glanced down at her. ‘Perhaps I simply needed to tell someone who wouldn’t care either way. We are monsters to your people regardless of what our origins were.’

  ‘You are not a monster to me, Tor.’ She took his hand and squeezed it, and he squeezed her
s back. ‘I . . . care about you. And now, with Vostok, I am more linked to Ebora than any other human has ever been, I reckon.’ His life energy lapped at her skin, more powerful and brighter than any other she had tasted; with some effort, she refrained from sampling it. ‘What I want to know is, why didn’t Micanal tell us this? He clearly knew, as did his sister.’ She gestured to the green roots. ‘Part of the truth is down here, in his bloody tunnel. The roots healed you, didn’t they?’

  ‘Eeskar spoke repeatedly of speaking to another of my kind – someone who didn’t take his news well, either. This is why Arnia warned us to stay away from that side of the island.’

  ‘Well. Partly. There’s something else you should know.’ Noon paused, painfully aware that this information was coming to him late, and explained how she had followed Arnia across the crevasse to a hidden human village. Tor stared at her incredulously.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘You wanted to believe they were good, that they wouldn’t lie to us, when that was obviously a steaming pile of horse shit!’ Noon glared at the roots, ignoring the defensiveness in her own voice. ‘I felt like I was on my own here, with you and your little family of Eborans. I mean, didn’t you ever wonder how they were existing out here by themselves? Or was it easier to not look too closely at what they were telling us? You were so taken with them – especially with Arnia.’

  ‘Noon, that is ridiculous.’ But Tor looked away from her as he said it, and she suspected she wasn’t too far wrong. ‘At least you have deemed me worthy of all the facts now. We’ll have to get answers from them. From both of them.’

  They turned to leave the tunnel.

  ‘Do you think those monsters will follow us back? The things from the Aboran ship, I mean. I might have pissed them off.’

  Tor smiled faintly, then shook his head. ‘I don’t know for sure, but I suspect they can’t. Eeskar described them as a sort of animal they use to defend the Seed Carrier, so unless the whole thing comes after us—’