by Jen Williams
‘So you came here with Micanal and Arnia?’ Noon rubbed a hand across her eyes. ‘I mean, your ancestors did? Why?’
Fallow tucked his chin into his chest. ‘I . . . I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’ Tor shifted, glancing back towards the settlement. ‘Or you don’t want to say?’
‘I can show you. I can show you why we’re here.’ Fallow’s voice was firmer, angrier than it had been. ‘The others, they won’t see it, because they listen to their dreams, but I have other dreams.’
Noon stood up, and turned away. For a moment, her left hand was surrounded by a corona of green fire. She grimaced, and it grew fiercer, and then it sputtered out. When she turned back, she looked rueful.
‘I had to release the energy. Sorry.’
Tor smiled, half amused – he had thought of Lucky Ainsel, burping loudly after a meal – but the effect on Fallow was quite different. The man scrambled to his feet, his mouth hanging open.
‘The fire!’ Tor took hold of the man’s arm, hoping to calm him, but Fallow shook him off. ‘I knew it. It’s the one dream I have over and over, but no one else has ever had it. That one day everything will end in green fire.’
The man was glaring at Noon with a wild expression. Noon shook her head, looking vaguely put out.
‘What is wrong with everyone on this island? Has no one seen a fell-witch before?’
‘They probably haven’t, actually.’ Tor sighed. ‘Put that from your head, Fallow, and show us why you’re all here. I think it might be the piece we’re missing from all this.’
‘I will show you.’ Fallow glanced at Noon’s hands, as if afraid they would burst into flame again. ‘But we will have to go back inside, and they will not like it. I am not welcome.’
‘Don’t worry, we’re with you.’ Noon smiled grimly. ‘And we’re always welcome everywhere.’
They walked up and through the gate, with Fallow walking between them both. There were groups of people inside, all busy with one task or another. Tor saw rows and rows of tanning racks, men and women with buckets of water, crates of fruits and spits with animal carcasses speared on them. Everywhere he saw steam and smoke and he caught multiple scents on the wind – wood smoke, cooking meat, the strong scent of alcohol, of urine from the tanning, of overripe fruit and the sweet scent of bread baking. It was a hive of industry and work. The men and women wiped sweat from their brows absently, and even the children carried bags and pots, or sat with furs on their laps, cleaning or sowing. There was very little talking, even between the children; instead their faces were intent, or absent. Far to their right Tor saw a tall man with broad shoulders carrying a crate of green glass bottles; they clinked together and he shifted his grip – clearly these were precious items, and Tor recognised them as the bottles of sour wine Arnia was so free and easy with.
‘This is where they get it from,’ he said in a low voice. ‘All that food, their wines, all produced here, by these people.’
‘Their own private workforce.’ Noon looked quietly furious, her eyes glittering darkly. ‘Why do they do it, Fallow? What do they get out of it?’
‘It’s what we’ve always done, we’ve . . .’
His words died in his throat as a tall woman with a lined face began to march towards them. At first their entrance into the settlement had been masked by all the activity, but Tor could see many faces turning towards them now. One man dropped the bucket he was carrying, and several children vanished back inside the nearby houses.
‘You are not to come here!’ The woman had short grey hair, bristling close to her scalp, and her face seemed pinned to her cheekbones, the skin stretched thin and delicate, although judging from her voice and her stride, she was not that old. ‘You’ve made your choices, Fallow. There is no place for you in the Poisonless, I won’t . . .’ She stopped, and her arms fell slack to her sides. ‘What . . .? Who . . .?’
Her eyes danced between them. Tor sensed that at first she had taken Noon to be a resident of the settlement – with her black hair and warm skin, she would easily fit in here – but she had had a chance to see him clearly, and there was no mistaking Tor for anything other than an Eboran. Her mouth fell open, and she seemed incapable of speech.
‘You see, Highsun? Change has come here, no matter what you think, or what the dreams say!’ Fallow had drawn himself up to his full height, and he clutched at the stones at his throat. ‘How do you explain this?’ He gestured at Tor. ‘Our lords have lied to us, Highsun.’
The woman looked utterly bewildered, and Tor felt a stab of sympathy for her. She was seeing the bones of her world exposed, and they were fragile things.
‘There is no reason to be afraid,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘We’re not going to hurt anyone. We just want to know what’s been going on here.’
‘Where did you come from?’ asked Highsun. ‘What are you?’
A small crowd had gathered by this point. Tor swallowed down his unease, and forced himself to smile. ‘We come from Ebora. You must have heard of it?’
‘Ebora is no more.’ This came from a young man to Tor’s left. He was handsome, with a spare, wiry frame and a dark matt of hair across his chest, and he glared at them with open hostility. ‘Everyone there died, save for our lords, who escaped because they were chosen. This is a test!’ He turned to the others in the crowd. ‘You are a fool if you cannot see it! Our lords are testing the Poisonless, to see who will fall for false dreams and lies.’ He laughed, an ugly, short sound. ‘This is just a dream, to test us.’
‘I am no dream,’ said Noon sharply. ‘Why do you call yourselves the Poisonless? Don’t you understand there is a whole world out there? Have you forgotten about it?’
‘Highsun, I want to show them the temple.’ Fallow was pointedly ignoring the young man. ‘They must see it.’
‘No! It is our most sacred place.’ The young man pushed past the people he stood with to square up to them. Tor was a good head taller than he was, but his open aggression made the skin on the back of his neck tingle. He did not want to get into a fight with these people. ‘Fallow has always been a blight, a rotten branch of the Poisonless. We should throw him out again, or kill him.’
‘Whiterun is right,’ said the woman called Highsun, although she sounded uncertain, and still she could not look away from Tor. ‘The rites of the temple are the very core of who we are. It is not something to be gawked at.’
‘Look at him!’ Fallow gestured at Tor again. ‘He is one of them. Can you deny him what he asks? We have spent our whole lives giving them everything. If there are other answers, we should know them.’
The small crowd were growing all the time, and an angry murmur was bubbling up from within them. Tor caught snatches of their conversations, none of it reassuring.
‘This one.’ Fallow grabbed Noon’s arm this time. ‘This one brings the green fire I told you of, in the dreams you dismissed.’ Noon, seeming to sense that some sort of demonstration was needed, produced a tiny fireball with her free hand, letting it float there. The noise from the crowd increased. ‘Are you so sure that you can just dismiss it?’ said Fallow. ‘I told you! I told you all.’
‘Fine.’ Highsun seemed to crumple somehow, growing thinner and weaker with a single word. ‘Come with me.’
She led them deeper into the village. Everywhere they looked Tor could see abandoned tasks, men and woman standing next to their churning buckets and cooking fires, eyes wide and shocked. Eventually, Highsun brought them to a tunnel leading into the ground – immediately Tor was struck by the resemblance to the place where he had so recently spoken to Noon, and where he had first seen the strange green roots of the Seed Carrier, only this place was much better cared for. The wooden jambs had all been carved with images of foxes and hands, and there were lamps burning all around it, even in the midst of the day. The carvings were not as fine as Micanal’s, he could see that at a glance, but they were numerous, and the black earth had been flattened with carefully placed pieces of grey slate, creating
a proper floor. A woman stood by the entrance, a bucket filled with wet cloths in her arms, and she staggered back as they approached.
‘Here,’ said Highsun, as they crossed the threshold. ‘These are the sacred mysteries of the Poisonless.’
Within the tunnel it was surprisingly well lit, with lamps and short candles wedged into the walls every few feet. There was also a powerful scent, pungent and somehow thick; the scent of unwashed bodies, of urine and shit and old food. As if sensing his disgust, Highsun glanced up at Tor defiantly.
‘We care for them,’ she said fiercely. ‘We care for them every day of their lives.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Noon. To anyone else the fell-witch would have sounded angry, Tor was sure of it, but he could hear the fear in her voice – the expectation that they were about to witness something terrible.
‘Every one of them is chosen at birth to be the best and most valued of us,’ said Highsun. Ahead of them the passage grew steeper, diving down into the shadows. There were, Tor noticed, a number of muddy footprints leading both up and down the passage. This was clearly a place that was visited often. ‘They are the heart of the Poisonless.’
‘That isn’t an answer,’ said Noon.
The tunnel ended and they entered a low-ceilinged cavern. It was lit with more candles and lamps, most at ground level, so at first it was difficult to discern what it contained. Tor saw a pair of women, their sleeves rolled up to their elbows, watching them come with wide eyes. They each wore dark furs and a rough sort of cloth that had been dyed black, and each had the shape of a hand painted on one cheek with a green, greasy-looking substance. One of them, he saw, was carrying a jug with a long, thin neck, while the other had a bowl of something that looked like yellow sludge.
‘What is happening?’ one of them asked.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Highsun. ‘Please, go outside.’
The women moved away, but neither of them left – instead they hung at the mouth of the tunnel, clutching the objects they carried possessively. Where they had been, Tor could see that to either side of the cavern the smooth green roots burst through the black walls of dirt, and impaled on them, there were people.
‘Noon,’ he said. ‘Noon, you probably don’t want to see this.’
‘What? What can you see?’ The witch barged passed him, blinking. She didn’t see as well in the dark as he did, and it took her a few moments. She straightened up and took a step backwards. ‘Fire and blood, what is this? What is this?’
‘The Poisonless,’ said Highsun stiffly. ‘We care for them, from birth.’
The nearest person appeared to be a teenage boy. His head lolled awkwardly on his neck, and his eyes rolled in his head, but there was a ghost of a beard on his chin, and his sunken chest had a few scanty hairs across it. The ends of the green roots erupted from his flesh all over, sticking up like barbs through the thin meat of his thighs, his arms and his stomach. Tor even spotted them thrusting up through the boy’s feet. He was pinned on the roots like a bird caught in a briar, though there was no blood. Tor thought of how the roots had burrowed through the flesh of his shoulder and his thigh. There had been no pain, but that hadn’t made it any less horrifying. The boy was pale, the skin on his face grey and stretched. As they stared at him, he turned his head towards them, although this seemed to cost him a great deal of effort.
‘We feed them, and bathe them, and take away their waste.’ Highsun’s voice now was almost tender. ‘There is always someone here with them, from the moment they take up the roots.’
‘Why did you do this to them?’ demanded Noon. Beyond the boy was an older woman, her hair long and grey and her flesh sagging. She did not look up at them; Tor did not think she was capable of it. And there were more. Wasted figures pinned to the walls, around twenty that Tor could see, and some of them, he saw, were very young indeed – children, their bodies riddled with the green barbs. The smell of the place was making it difficult to breathe.
‘The Poisonless are chosen as babies,’ said Highsun. The woman sounded less sure of herself than she had done. ‘And given to the roots.’
‘Take them down,’ said Noon. ‘Take them all down right now, or I swear I will burn this whole fucking village down.’
‘She can’t,’ said Fallow. He had edged to the side of their group with his head down, not quite looking at the figures on the walls. ‘They die if they are pulled away from the roots. Once they are infested they can’t live without it.’ He tugged on his beard. ‘That’s what happened to my sister.’
‘You should not have tried to take her back,’ said Highsun. Even in the dim light, Tor could see that her face was flushed. ‘You killed her, Fallow, not the roots. But you wouldn’t listen, and now you bring more lies here.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Noon moved deeper into the cavern, approaching the roots and the people trapped there. Tor wished that she wouldn’t. He did not want to look any closer at them, but he was drawn there alongside her. ‘Why do this at all? What’s the bloody point of it?’ She paused. ‘Are you telling me these poor bastards have grown up like this?’
‘They are chosen.’
‘It’s the dreams,’ said Fallow. ‘The dreams tell them that this is what they should do. Every one of them hears the same message. Except me.’
‘Noon, look.’ Despite his own crawling horror, Tor had moved closer to one of the prisoners on the wall. It was a woman in her middle age, although it was not easy to tell; her legs were stick-like, and the face she turned on them was sunken and loose, as though she’d lost her teeth. On her right arm, in a patch of skin clear of bristling root ends, there was a clear, almost surgical cut. It had been covered over with a balm of some sort – he could just about smell it, beneath the other smells in the cavern – but it was obvious enough to anyone who had spent much of his life making similar cuts in flesh. There was also a small clay bowl on the floor, and in it was a slim glass tube, narrower at the top and delicately etched with an interlocking pattern of leaves. At the sight of it all the warmth seemed to drain from the dark space.
‘A cut here in the arm would be an easy place to draw blood from. And this,’ he gestured to the bowl, ‘this is a blood tube. They were very fashionable during the Carrion Wars, and we crafted many ornate ones – it was the graceful way to take blood from a human. Whether they were willing, or constrained somehow. I haven’t seen one in hundreds of years. When the crimson flux came, most of them were smashed or sold.’
He turned to Highsun. ‘Arnia and Micanal come here, don’t they, and feed on these people? They drink their blood.’
Noon frowned. ‘But the crimson flux . . .’
‘The roots clean the blood somehow. Make it safe. That’s why you call yourselves the Poisonless, isn’t it? Because the blood of these hopeless creatures will not poison them.’
‘The Lady Arnia comes most often,’ said Fallow. ‘Every day, if she can. It’s why there are so many of them. She has a large appetite, and they need many Poisonless to let the others recover. The other, Lord Micanal, comes rarely. He takes only a little, and does not stay long.’
Highsun’s mouth twisted. Beyond her, the two attendants were watching with slack, shocked faces.
‘It’s our purpose,’ she said. ‘Through us, the last of the Eborans live on.’
‘They aren’t the last!’ Noon gestured viciously at Tor. ‘Does it look like they’re the last? You’ve been lied to, and you’ve eaten it up. Can these poor people even speak? What lives do they have?’
‘They can’t speak,’ said Fallow. His face had been rigid with anger, but now it softened, his mouth becoming loose under his beard. ‘Something in the roots keeps them from that. When I saw my sister, she looked at me, but she looked through me. It was a cold thing. Something else infests them.’
‘I should kill you all for this. Burn this whole fucking place down.’ There was a flat, dangerous light in Noon’s eyes. Tor almost thought he could see the dragon looking out of them. ‘It’s
a prison, full of innocent people, children, and you let those monsters use them.’
‘Noon—’
‘Their own families have done this to them. At least the Winnowry are cruel strangers. Do you take babies from their mothers? Do they even get to name them?’
‘Noon, these fools aren’t responsible. At least, not entirely.’ He rubbed his hands against his jacket. The place felt grimy, and he too had a strong compulsion to use his sword on the lot of them. ‘I think it’s Arnia. She is a skilled dream-walker, and I believe she has been manipulating them over hundreds of years, over generations. She must have brought the ancestors of these people here in their ships, when the Golden Fox expedition first crossed the sea. It was probably just a fall-back, something to have if this mythical place failed them. But then, they found something else.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Highsun. ‘What do you mean, a dream-walker?’
‘We can’t let this go on, Tor.’ Noon’s hands were balled into fists at her side. He could almost smell the winnowfire waiting to jump from her fingers. ‘This is worse than a prison!’
‘Highsun, when did you last see Arnia and Micanal? Was it recently? Do you know where they might be now?’
The tall woman did not answer immediately. Instead, she was staring at the wall of prisoners behind them. To Tor she looked like a woman standing on black ice, about to plunge into something unknown.
‘Yesterday,’ she said eventually. ‘Lord Micanal has not been here for some months, but Lady Arnia was here yesterday. She . . . she feasted greatly. I do not know where she is now.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Noon tersely. ‘We should stop this, and then leave. Burn the whole island down, for all I care.’
‘No.’ At her furious look, Tor shook his head gently. ‘I need answers, Noon. If they found this method for cleansing human blood of whatever causes the crimson flux, then where are the other Eborans? Arnia and Micanal did not come here alone. And I don’t believe their travelling companions all died of that disease. Which means they lied to us.’