Weakness is strength.
Existence was full of the Grafter’s song, thought Jedda. The whole world was shouting it out, for any who would listen. She heard the ground beneath her tell its story as her other faculties dimmed, sensed the shards of the old cities floating like so much jetsam on its surface, unimportant. This loam, this earth as she somehow knew it was called, was no dead thing, nor was it merely the ruined receptacle of an ancient civilisation. It had been blasted by fire, scarred and poisoned, but it endured. It had lain dormant for centuries, until the clouds lifted and the poison drained away. It was miraculous and sacred. As the last bright point of light in her vision winked out, Jedda thought she heard a deep, swelling music, the song of the Sap, rising from every atom and particle of earth, the Earth, her home.
It was music, Tymon realised, the faint strains of voices chanting. It came from outside the Veil but also from within himself, carried by an invisible connection that persisted at his heart. And all at once, he remembered the twining. No wonder he had thought he was hearing the Oracle! He was still tenuously linked to his fellow Grafters in the world of the Sap. The link appeared to be functioning in the Veil, at least in part. He was sure now that Oren and the other young Focals were calling to him.
‘I’m here!’ he cried out joyfully.
But there was a strange echo in reply. Here, here, here, mocked his own voice, reverberating back on him. Tymon shook his head in frustration till the echo faded. As silence surged back into the tomb, he could still hear the Focals singing, distant as the stars. He could not distinguish the words, but the music was so familiar.
‘I’m with you,’ he responded eagerly, straining to be in tune with them.
With you with you with you, came the mocking echo.
It was a hard blow when he finally grasped that the Veil must be permeable in one direction, but not the other. The Focals could not hear him. They did not even know if he were alive. They were only reaching out to him in an act of faith, without hope of an answer. The realisation sent him reeling back into the depths of despair, and he lay speechless in his cramped and icy tomb. The Focals’ voices continued faintly for a while, then faded away. Tymon closed his eyes, forlorn.
Jedda opened her eyes and found herself standing on the beach, blinking down at her own body on the silt. She was in the trance-form, she understood calmly, for the last time. She was leaving the Tree of Being. The music of the Sap welled up about her, within her. The whole world was growing bright with that subtle fire: soon the light would spill over, sweeping her away. Whether she would survive that final disintegration she did not know, but she was content, either way.
As if in response to her contentment, another music welled up through the song of the Sap, a haunting melody that beckoned to her. Voices, it seemed, were summoning her into a well of light. She strained to hear them. Who was calling?
‘Who are you?’ she whispered, stretching up her fingers to the bright sky. She knew she might step into the light, if she liked: she might go home.
Jedda. Her name? Another stray sound snagged at the enveloping light, interfering with the heavenly music that would dissolve her once and for all. Jedda hesitated on the brink of departure. ‘What?’ she murmured in exasperation.
Jedda. The voices of Oren and Noni were crying out to her. She recognised the faint echo. They were trying to reach her through an invisible wall, a thick bank of mist that hid their forms and muffled their words. There was someone they were reminding her of, someone who needed her and was ebbing fast. ‘Who?’ she asked.
But it was the Oracle who answered. ‘You have a choice,’ she said, a brief breath in Jedda’s ear. And then she was gone once more.
Jedda glanced about her. The light and music were in abeyance. She was on the empty beach again, standing over her own unconscious body, though she was sure she had been about to go somewhere else, somewhere she would much rather be. She might yet go, she understood. No one would blame her if she chose the light. Or she could stay here, and help a friend in need. Tymon.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ she muttered aloud. ‘That’s not a choice.’
What are you doing, kneeling in the dust, Juno, oh Juno?
Had he imagined the words? Tymon blinked awake again, through his torpor. He strained to catch the sound that came from above and beyond his prison. Not the Focals this time, but another, very different voice, closer and oddly jaunty in the gloom.
I kneel here only because I must: I seek my Lyla, wherever she roams.
Tymon remembered. It was a popular folk song from the days of his childhood, one of the many based on the fable of Juno and Lyla, a tale as ancient as the Tree. How had the story gone again? The lover had searched the world for his absent beloved, sifting through the dust in his desire to find her. The people had mocked him, calling his devotion mad. Tymon wondered if he were going mad himself, hearing the words of the old tale now, at such a time and in such a place. This version was wonderfully inappropriate to the darkness of the Veil, filled with salty humour.
Why do you look for her in such a place, Juno, oh Juno?
It was all so odd. Tymon shook his head again on the cold ice. He recognised the singer, sensing a connection with her in the world of the trance, as if she were a long-lost friend. Could it be? he wondered. Could it really be?
‘Jedda?’ he whispered, hardly daring to believe.
I only wish for a glimpse of her face: I seek my Lyla, whatever the trace.
‘Jedda!’ called Tymon. He raised his cramped hands once again, pounding against the ice with the dregs of his strength. ‘Jedda! I’m here!’
You won’t find her here, you poor lost soul.
Your love is sublime, this isn’t her home.
Someone was bending over him. He could see the faint light of another trance-form now, gleaming through the translucent roof of the cavity, just an arm’s length away.
‘Ama didn’t say you’d be under the Veil, as well as in it.’ Jedda’s voice sounded amused, though her tone grew serious again as she pressed her palm on the ice above him, a bright smudge. ‘Goodness, it’s hard stuff,’ she said.
‘The Oracle? She’s alive?’ Tymon felt a rush of joy. ‘I feared … Jedda, I’ve been so foolish —’
‘Then that makes two of us. The Oracle’s in grave danger, Tymon. The Envoy’s acolytes have found her body. We might still be able to help, but we have to get you out of here …’ There was a moment of silence as her voice trailed off. Tymon waited, breathless, his eyes fixed on the faint light of her through the ice, a lifeline in the gloom. ‘Have you tried the Grafter words?’ she suggested. ‘These are mental worlds, so they might respond to your concentration.’
‘No, I haven’t!’ What an imbecile he was, he thought, coming to his senses. He kept forgetting that the Veil, despite its tactile qualities, was as subtle a plane as the shining world of the Sap. The branches of the Tree of Being had grown and changed in response to the Grafters’ watchwords: might the Veil not do the same?
He tried. She tried. Both of them repeated every single phrase the Oracle had ever taught Tymon, recited the watchwords, chanted the Grafter’s song, even muttered the names of the individual Leaf Letters over and over again. But it was no use. When Tymon pronounced the word of Union, he thought the ice shuddered a little, the barest tremble. But after repeating the Letter countless times, nothing further happened. The stubborn surface of the Veil did not open for him. Nor did the walls break for Jedda, when she spoke the same phrases from outside his prison.
‘Well,’ she said, after Tymon had cursed the ice roundly, ‘I guess that’s that.’
There was a moment of silence as this fact sank in. ‘What have I done?’ whispered Tymon, miserably trapped in his prison. ‘I just handed the Masters a way to kill Ama …’
‘They were going after her anyway, with or without your body,’ Jedda assured him. ‘They might have been able to help the acolytes without you. Maybe tried a sort of temporary Exchange …�
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He knew she was only trying to comfort him. ‘How did you get involved in all this?’ he asked, in an effort to distract himself. ‘I heard you’d broken with the Envoy. How do you know about the Masters?’
‘I wanted to find you,’ she answered simply, ‘and say I was sorry. It’s a long story. I had Samiha’s testament and wanted to bring it to you. I thought, if I could give it to you, it would make up for everything. Another one of my bad choices, I suppose. The Masters found it anyway, and destroyed it.’
‘Ah.’ He barely had the heart to think about the ramifications of all she was telling him. He closed his eyes again, seeing for a fleeting moment the bleachers, the Jays’ circus, the package slipped behind the seats before the guards came. ‘Tell me what you remember of it,’ he whispered. ‘Let me hear her words.’
If he were going to expire here, he thought, trapped in darkness, then let it be with the memory of Samiha’s voice in his ears.
His companion obliged him, singing. It was not the Kion’s voice, of course: it was Jedda’s. But the sound of Samiha’s words in his fellow student’s husky tones was pleasing in a way Tymon had not expected. And it was also surprisingly powerful.
There is no triumph without loss, no power without weakness. The verse had barely passed Jedda’s lips when the ice shook again, a sudden jolt. Tymon’s eyes flew open as the formerly impassive substance of the Veil trembled beneath him.
‘Go on!’ he cried to Jedda when she stopped in confusion. ‘Sing more,’ he begged her. ‘It works.’
So she began again. Do not fear darkness or defeat. Do not fear loss …
The Veil shrieked and groaned, the ice shuddering to life around Tymon like a waking beast.
The voice in the Veil gave Eblas pause. He felt it like a distant clanging alarm, niggling him even as he wrapped his tendrils about the Focals’ tent. This was no whining of the Grafters in their Sap-world. Someone had entered his own realm while his back was turned: there was an interloper in the kennels. How could it be? The defences were all firmly in place for the battle, debarring the Nurian Grafters from entering the Masters’ domain. No one should have been able to step into the Veil.
No one, except for one of his own acolytes.
It took less than a fleeting moment for the incredible truth to be conceived and admitted. The Envoy gathered himself up; he became dog-like again in his bristling outrage, his vaporous limbs knotting together in the cloud. The howl that escaped from his invisible mouth was a thunderclap, his rage a flash of blue lightning as he raised one smoky talon to tear a hole between the worlds. He was already shrinking, becoming again the dense and four-footed Beast as he leapt into the Veil, leaving nebulous wisps of himself behind. And as Eblas streaked like a ragged black comet back into those realms of ice, the final remnants of the cloud that had so terrorised the Freehold wavered, dissipated and lost cohesion. Fragments of bat wing and bird feather, cobweb and fly spit rolled off the twig-forests of Farhang and disappeared, and sunbeams broke through the smoke over the Freehold. Lace left a startlingly blue sky in his wake.
The songs of victory died on the Argosian soldiers’ lips as they gazed up at the bright heavens in consternation, wondering where the storm that had accompanied them and given them such an advantage could have gone. The harried Freeholders, too, halted and passed their hands over their eyes in astonishment, feeling the fog of panic lift. The village buildings still blazed, smoke rose into the blue sky, and the Argosian fleet was regrouping overhead, recovering from the air-chariots’ attack. The battle was not yet over. But the day had grown ordinary again, its fears and dangers distinctly human.
Gardan rallied the units that had already been chased to the borders of the village, and led them in a coordinated offensive against the enemy foot soldiers, before they were able to close in on the refugee camp. The young Argosians responded in kind, crying out their battle songs with renewed fervour as they prepared to fight the Freeholders close and hard among the twig-thickets. They knew the Saint was always watching over them, after all. It was clear, as Admiral Greenly muttered to Pumble, when the strange cloud had vanished as if it had never been, that a freak storm, no matter how spectacular its effects, could not help you win a proper war.
Although the ice shook spasmodically as Jedda sang, the surface above Tymon did not finally begin to crack open until he, too, took up the chant. It was not hard to repeat the words from Samiha’s testament: he found he half-remembered them, though he had barely glanced at the papers.
Do not fear darkness or defeat.
Do not fear loss, and you and I shall meet in the heart of the world, where all divisions cease …
It took no more than a single verse to break through the ice of the Veil. The tomb cracked abruptly open with a heave, vomiting Tymon out as if the ice itself could not wait to be rid of him. Jedda helped him stand up on the hard floor of the prison world, his trance-form shedding glittering particles of frost.
‘Something’s coming,’ she said, glancing uneasily at the faint unknown canopy of stars.
Tymon could feel it, too: their song had drawn unwanted attention. An invisible malevolence had turned its gaze on them, and was sending its agents to hunt them down at high speed. They would be found, and soon.
‘Quick,’ exclaimed Jedda. She broke into a sprint on the dark plain. ‘My door. Maybe it’s still open.’
‘Door?’ Tymon cried as he ran after her. ‘You know how to make a world-door?’
‘Lace taught us,’ Jedda shouted over her shoulder. ‘Only useful thing he ever did. There, see? The light. But hurry: I can only open it in one direction.’
Tymon could see it now, barely more than a sliver in the gloom. ‘It’s shrunk,’ gasped Jedda as they came to a panting halt by the bright gap. She reached up her hand and gingerly tested out the ragged edges of the hole, bleeding light.
‘Go through, quick,’ Tymon told her, peering in trepidation at the sky. The stars were being blotted out one by one, filled with huge, winged shapes.
‘Not me, you. It’ll take a while to squeeze through: you go first. You have more of a chance of surviving on the other side.’
‘What?’ Tymon stared at her. Her expression was calm, perhaps a little sad. He was struck by how much older and graver she looked than the last time he had seen her, even in the trance-form. ‘Why?’ he objected.
‘Just go!’ she said, gazing anxiously up at the wheeling blots of darkness.
Aware that there was no time to waste on argument, he bowed to her wishes and slipped his arm and shoulder through the opening, wincing as the unpleasant sawing edges of the Veil clamped down around him. He turned his head to one side, looking back at Jedda as he inched his way through the opening. Above her, the winged clouds had spread over the stars of the prison dimension, rapidly approaching. And something else was running over the plain of ice: a blot appeared on the horizon, a thundering black bolt of malevolence. The Beast, thought Tymon grimly.
It took several moments of breathless, struggling labour before he burst through the door and staggered onto one of the loamy beaches of the World Below. His trance-form felt tingling and sore, but otherwise unharmed. The door to the Veil was a shrinking black line in front of him.
‘Quick!’ he cried, extending his hand to Jedda through the opening.
She shook her head, her face pale in the gloom of the Veil. ‘Get out of there!’ she whispered through the gap. ‘The door’s going to close on you!’
‘It will, if you don’t come quickly,’ he said, stubborn.
She hesitated, glancing upwards again. Tymon could hear the raucous shrieks of some horrific creature on the other side of the door, neither bird nor beast but a foul travesty of the Veil. Beyond it echoed the howling, baying cacophony of Eblas. Jedda came to an abrupt decision: she grasped Tymon’s hand, and set her own shoulder to the narrow opening, squeezing through.
‘Push,’ he urged her, as she grimaced with pain, caught between the edges of the door.
‘You can. Push. It’s still big enough.’
‘I’m being torn apart!’
‘You’re strong.’ He smiled encouragingly at her, clasping her arm from the other side of the gap. The touch of her trance-form was a light burr beneath his fingers.
‘It hurts,’ she muttered, as with their combined strength they pulled, yanked, and finally wrenched her through the opening.
Jedda stumbled onto the beach with a strangled cry. Behind her, the edges of the door sucked shut, but not before something heavy blundered against the gap, flapping and shrieking in rage. In the last instant that the door was open, a blue eye stared out at them, full of unblinking hatred. Then the gap closed, and the air above the beach was clean again, suffused with the waning light of afternoon.
‘Are you alright?’ Tymon asked Jedda.
Her flickering trance-form was fading in the daylight, he saw, growing faint and transparent. She gazed at him wordlessly, but did not seem to be in pain any longer. He assumed she was being called back to her physical form, for he felt the faraway tug of his own body, muffled and stymied by the Masters’ influence. It drew him to a location some distance from where he was standing.
‘Goodbye, my friend.’ Jedda’s voice was barely a whisper, as her form wavered and winked out.
It was only then that Tymon noticed Jedda’s body, lying sprawled on the silt to his right. But she was not asleep: she was not in the Grafter’s trance at all. She lay at his feet, pale and rigid. Dead, he realised with a sickening lurch.
‘Jedda!’ he gasped, falling to his knees beside her. He understood, too late, what she meant when she had said he would be the one to survive. ‘Don’t go!’ he cried, bereft.
There was no answer but the lapping of the lake waters and the soft, plaintive murmur of his own body, calling to him in the trance.
Tymon stood up. Fury surged through him, quenching the flood of grief. Slow and potent, he felt the righteous heat of the Sap well up inside him, even as it had faced with the Envoy’s curses. This time, the flame of reckoning was deeper, stronger, burning not only in response to his own need, but on behalf of all those hurt by the Masters. The Sap-waves started at his feet, by Jedda’s body, then travelled up to his chest and arms, running down in rivulets to his fingertips. He raised his right hand to see the old scars throbbing again, a fiery red. Turning away from the corpse of the Nurian girl, grim-faced and burning bright as a torch, he strode towards the tunnel entrance at the foot of the Tree.
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