To the Dead City

by Alex Bentley

  I am scraping my bowl clean while hers is still almost half full. Other than goat and mushrooms, I don’t recognise any of the flavours. That said, the food is not on my tongue long enough for me to make much of an assessment.

  “When did you last eat?” she asks. “Other than the gesithberries.”

  “Yesterday morning, before we left for the hunt, me and my father.”

  She nods, then says, “Tell me everything.”

  I tell her of the slite, my father’s mortal wound, the Glyst, the scabwolf, Dwynan Furral, the bridge, the straggis wasps and the Hilder brothers.

  By the end of my telling, there is no mistaking the look on her face. Anger. I wonder what I have done to upset her, and as she stands from the hearth, placing her bowl aside, I shrink back into the chair, fearing the worst.

  “Those gedding idiots,” she says. “Ten years I have been gone, and in that time the folk of Gafol have grown no wiser. The Glyst is a danger to nobody. Not while it is scattered about, a few people here and there. The Cwalee came because of the Maradyns and their schools and cities. The Cwalee came because of the dense clusters of Glyst, as a hornwhale is drawn to a shoal of fish but ignores the solitary swimmers. The Glyst is a great blessing, especially a Glyst such as yours. The Jarl could eradicate sickness from the village and trade your gift with other villages, exchanging it for food and tools and garments. Instead, he would put you to the sword. Gedding idiot.”

  She is pacing now, her hands clenched into fists.

  Ten years? I think. She has been gone ten years.

  “Noola Fynn,” I say.

  And Aunty Elsam stops pacing.

  “What?” she says.

  “That was ten years ago. Noola Fynn. I was six. I was six when I first heard the grefa stones and my father came home smelling of blood.”

  She sits at the hearth again and stares down at her hands as they clutch at each other in her lap.

  “I tried to stop him. I tried to tell him about the man with burning hands.”

  “The man with burning hands?” I remember what my father said before we parted in the Freewood:

  I’ll tell them we saw someone in the Freewood, a man. A man making fire with his bare hands. A man with the Glyst. I’ll say we chased him and he escaped, but after that I could not find you. I will make a pretence of searching for you for the rest of my life. And they will believe me, because my face will be a mask of sorrow until I die.

  And then later when I dreamed I was him as I slept in the tree-hollow:

  It is as I told you. We saw a man who made fire with his hands. It was he who set the grefa stones to whistling. We gave chase, and I lost sight of both the man and my Alys.

  “Yes,” my aunty continues. “I saw him on the edge of the Freewood. I was a little younger than you. I shouldn’t really have been that far from home, but where the Freewood meets the fenland, the soil is dark and rich and yields the finest mushrooms. I’d gathered a good sackful and was about to head back because the sun was dropping low, when I saw him. He wasn’t much older than me, but he was grubby looking and ill-fed. He was making a fire, placing the wood and the kindling with the care of a small child trying to build the tallest pebble tower on the shore at Brim. But then, instead of using tinder and a flint, he just… clicked his fingers.” She clicks her own fingers to demonstrate. “And suddenly his hand was gloved in flame. He held his fingers to the kindling until it was burning steadily, then he shook his hand.” She shakes her own hand. “As you would if you were flicking away a beadybug that was crawling across your knuckles. And the fire vanished from his hands.”

  She takes my bowl, fills it with stew, and passes it back to me.

  “I should have run back to Gafol,” she continues. “I should have run back to Gafol and told them there was a Glyster on the edge of the Freewood, too far for the grefa stones to detect. I should have told them because he was dangerous, this young man with his fire hands. His Glyst would have been calling out in a voice that only the Cwalee could hear, and soon they would come. And not just for the Glyster, but for all of us. For the Cwalee, it is said, are driven mad by the presence of Glyst and are indiscriminate when they rampage. I should have told them. But I didn’t. He seemed so pitiful, his clothes not much better than rags, as if life had been nothing but hard and cruel to him for all his days. I felt sorry for him. But more than that, when I had seen him make fire with his hand, it had filled me with… wonder. It had filled me with a great sense of the bigness of things.

  “I was always a difficult child. My mother said I asked too many questions. My father said I went looking for strife. They were both right, of course.”

  I glance across at the armoury at the back of the roundhouse, and I think of the ease with which she handled my father’s sword. Strife, I think.

  “The question I was asking then,” she says, following my gaze to the armoury and smiling a little, “was why hadn’t the Cwalee come for him already? It was obvious this wasn’t the first time he had called upon the Glyst. The ease with which he’d clicked his fingers and shook the flames from his hand. He must have done this hundreds of times. There was no chance that he’d outfought the Cwalee. He looked like he would have struggled to best a sapling in combat, even if he’d had the high ground. It was possible he might have outwitted them somehow. There was an intelligence to his brow and in his eyes. But I doubted it. How do you outwit insatiable hunger? Some things cannot be defeated by reasoning and intellect. All of which meant the Cwalee simply hadn’t bothered with him.”

  “Because a hornwhale does not bother with the solitary swimmers,” I said.

  “Yes. Precisely that.” She pokes at the fire with an iron rod. “I returned to the edge of the Freewood the next morning. He was sleeping next to the cooling remnants of his campfire. I held a knife to his throat and tapped him on his forehead.” She grins. “My word, he almost ged himself! I demanded he tell me everything. About himself and about the Glyst and why the Cwalee had not come for him.

  “His name was Madec Teeg. He’d had the Glyst for three years and had been chased from his village near the Leccan Forest. His story shamed me because we had not chased Glysters from our village. We had slain them. Five in my lifetime. He’d been travelling since, one ear always tuned for the whistling of grefa stones. He said he’d met other Glysters during his exile, always in ones and twos, and it was well known among them that the secret to avoiding the attentions of the Cwalee was not to gather in greater numbers than seven. They have a saying, the Glysters. Seven is company, eight a death wish.

  “We met every day for a month. He told me about the Glyst and the Glysters, and what he’d learnt of the Maradyns and their schools and cities. I taught him where to find the best mushrooms and how to make a tasty stew with the very herbs that grew near them. I taught him how to make a snare and how he could clean himself with juicy screthleaves so he didn’t smell quite so much like a scabwolf. I taught him not to eat gesithberries as they cause waking dreams so real you might ged yourself.”

  She gives me a stern look, then winks.

  “He began to look well, strong even. And then, one day, he was gone. And that was that. I didn’t see him again. But from then on, I knew. I knew that the persecution of Glysters was an unnecessary cruelty. That it harmed us more than helped us. That, if we are careful and measured, we could bring back something like the Abundance. I told nobody, though. It was dangerous knowledge that I had. I told nobody until the night of Noola Fynn.

  “I saw your father walk past my roundhouse, sword in one hand, whistling grefa stone in the other. And I grabbed him by the scruff and dragged him aside, as I had once when I’d found him about to jab a straggis wasp nest with a long stick. I tried to tell him about Madec and his burning hands. About hornwhales and solitary swimmers. About the Rule of Seven. I tried to tell him the Abundance could return if we were not so cruel and afraid. But he wouldn’t listen. And Noola Fynn was put to the sword.”

  “My father didn’t
do that,” I say, realising I am speaking too quickly but unable to prevent myself. “He said as much to Mammy. It wasn’t him.”

  “No,” says Aunty Elsam. “True enough. But he killed the man who was protecting her. He hadn’t wanted to, and he was weeping when next he passed my roundhouse. But he cut down Dansk Fynn and so played his part in the death of Noola Fynn.”

  She pokes the fire again, and I imagine my father as a boy about to poke the straggis wasp nest.

  “The next day,” says Aunty Elsam, “I left Gafol. I returned only once, a year or so later, to tell your father where he might find me should he ever have need. I was still his big sister. I had a duty. Even if he was an idiot.”

  She is silent for a while then says, “Right. Let’s get this ankle of yours sorted, shall we? And then you should get some sleep. Tomorrow you will need to decide if you are going to stay with me, and help me with my work, or travel to the Dead City.”

  Chapter 10

  The Dead City

  Breakfast consists of honeyed oat cakes and goat’s milk. Outside, the sun is shining, and it is as if yesterday’s torrential rains never fell. My ankle is sore, but I am able to put my weight on it without too much trouble. We have been awake for almost an hour and Aunty Elsam has yet to mention her ‘work’ or ‘the Dead City’. For reasons I cannot fathom, I can’t bring myself to ask. Especially about the Dead City.

  Then, as if she has somehow spied my thoughts, Aunty Elsam says, “My work is a kind of atonement.”

  I am sat at the table and she is on the floor next to me, a stone slab in front of her, skinning the welpa my father shot just two days ago. The meat has turned and would make us sick if we were so foolish as to eat it, but the hide might make a reasonable pouch.

  “I did not have a hand in the death of Noola Fynn. But I didn’t stop it. I don’t think I could have stopped it. But I think I might have been able to convince my brother to play no part in it, and that would have been something. When I went to see him, that last time, I told him again what Madec Teeg had told me. I told him about the days I’d spent with Madec without so much as a whiff of the Cwalee. I wasn’t sure if he was convinced. But here you are, so my words must have had some weight to them. If I’d invested my words with that same weight ten years ago, he would not have had blood on his hands and shame in his heart. And that is my shame, and it is why I do the work.”

  “What work, Aunty Elsam?”

  She scowls up at me, then points the wicked tip of the fleshing knife in my direction.

  “Call me El, for the love of Fryth. Aunty Elsam makes me sound like some dull-eyed frump who thinks only of lost loves and mending socks.”

  “What work… El?”

  She drops the knife, stands and walks over to the collection of earthenware pots off to the side of the table. She takes the lid from the largest pot and begins pulling out old animal skins, worn blankets, torn tunics and trousers, dropping them on the floor. It is only when the pile is half the height of the pot that I hear it. It is dull and seems distant, but it is unmistakable.

  The whistling of a grefa stone.

  Instinctively, I get up from the table and back away.

  Aunty Elsam—El—reaches down into the pot and comes out with a wooden box not much bigger than her hand. It is made of a dark wood and carved with symbols I don’t recognise. The whistling is louder now but still surprisingly muted.

  She opens the box—the whistling gets louder, louder than I have ever heard it—and takes out the stone. She offers it to me.

  I take a few more steps back, shaking my head.

  “I would rather not.”

  “Take it, idiot child.” She strides toward me, grabs my wrist and pushes the stone into my palm.

  I don’t know what I expected to happen, but I certainly did not expect it to fall silent. But that’s precisely what it does. One moment, whistling. The next, silent.

  “I don’t know why they do that,” says El. “But those that hunt Glysters will use it as a final test. ‘When the stone dies,’ they say, ‘then so must the one who silenced it’.”

  I examine the grefa stone.

  It is a pale green colour, with flecks of white, and there is a hole through its middle. It reminds me of the witchstones that are sometimes found on the shore at Brim. But they are a natural thing, given up by the sea. This looks made by man, the hole drilled through with some tool. It is lighter than I thought it would be, too. It has the weight of something carved from wood.

  “You have two options when you hear the whistling of a grefa stone,” says El. “Move away from it quickly until you are out of its sight. Or go to it and seize it by any means necessary. Flee it, or silence it. No other choices.”

  “But why do you have one?”

  “For my work.”

  “Which is?”

  El takes the grefa stone. I expect it to shriek again, but it doesn’t.

  “It will not whistle for you again,” she says and puts it back in its box and the box back in the pot. “For another Glyster, yes. But not for you.” She piles blankets, clothes and rags on top of the box, then places the lid on the pot. For a moment, I think she has either forgotten or chosen to ignore my question. Then she says, “My work? I find Glysters and I help them. I find them, and I take them to places where there are no grefa stones. I teach them what they need to know to fend for themselves. A little of building, a little of hunting, a little of farming, much of fighting.”

  She sits at the table and gestures for me to retake my chair opposite her.

  “Two chairs,” I say, sitting. How had I not noticed?

  “They stay with me a time, the Glysters. Often they are not in a good way. They are in need of fattening and strengthening. Sometimes just in need of kindness. Some have forgotten what kindness is and have to be reintroduced to the phenomena. One Glyster, Shorla, tried to kill me twice in my sleep because she couldn’t conceive of a world where I wouldn’t attempt to do the same thing to her.” El grins. “Shorla Eemah. She could make it rain, even indoors. That was her Glyst. I think of her whenever it rains. I was thinking of her yesterday when I heard you splashing down the road like a drunken goat.”

  I remember my father saying, Your aunty is horrible and loving, and she is also honest. And I think, yes, she is horribly honest.

  “If you stay with me, you will help me with my work,” she says, seemingly oblivious to the insult she has just delivered. “I am responsible for a fifty-mile-wide strip, from here to the Forest of Leccan and the foothills of the Beorstehd Mountains. I travel out daily. Most days I go as far as I can and back again between sunrise and nightfall. Once a month, I travel to the mountains and back, a six-day round trip if I make good progress and there aren’t too many… encounters.”

  “Why just that strip?” I ask. “Why just to the mountains?”

  El smiles and winks at me.

  “You’re not as daft as you look, Alys.”

  “Thanks.” I manage not to roll my eyes. El seems like someone who would not have much patience for such things.

  “There are others,” she says. “Others who cover the areas I do not. We call ourselves the Harbour. And the less you know about us for now, the better for us all.”

  “And what about the Dead City?” I ask.

  El says nothing for a minute. Then, “I’ll make some tea. I have some mamera leaves that should help with your ankle without dulling your wits too much further.”

  She says nothing while she makes the brew. She doesn’t even look at me. It fills me with dread, her reluctance. I am close to telling her I do not wish to hear about the Dead City, that I will help her with her work and do not need to consider any other options, when she sets the cups of tea on the table, pushing mine toward me. It smells sweet and bitter at the same time. I remember that scent, from when I’d asked my mother about the Maddy Things and the Crawlies.

  “The Dead City used to be called Utlath,” El says. “In the old tongue, Utlath means indestructible or
something similar.” She snorts a laugh. “How could they not have known, the architects of that place, that bestowing such a name upon their own endeavour might invite the enmity of the gods? Utlath was the capital of the Glyst in our land of Abegan. There were other Glyst-gathering cities, in the world, beyond Abegan’s shores—Edmod, Dryslic, Frofyr—but Utlath was by far the largest and finest. And it was the first to fall. There are few accounts of the actual order of events because few people survived the onslaught of the Cwalee. Some say the Maradyn assembled an army of Glysters, those who could throw fire from their hands or pull lightning from the sky or could smash castle walls with their fists. Some say this is nonsense because there was no time to assemble such an army, that Utlath fell in just a day. Whether it was a day or a month, whether there was a battle or just a massacre, it doesn’t matter. The Cwalee fed and then they left. What remained was a dead city. The Dead City. A Glystless place.”

  El takes a sip of tea, and I do likewise.

  “Of course,” she continues, “there are many Glystless places. There have always been Glystless places, even during the Abundance. But Utlath had been created by the Glyst. And when the Glyst was gone from it, it was as a sheep’s carcass after even the flies can find no more use for it. Some say the Maradyn were all killed by the Cwalee, that the Feeding was a fatal process. All that was left of a Cwalee victim, they say, was a withered thing, shrunk to the size of a child and quite dead. But that is not true. The Glysters I have met and helped have all been quite adamant about that. Some Maradyn survived the Feeding. They were small and withered, yes, but not dead. In fact, it seems these withered remnants of the Maradyn cannot die. They are called the Hollow. And they are always hungry. Not for food. They have passed beyond the need for physical sustenance. Their appetite is only for the Glyst. Some Glysters, who have grown tired of running and hiding, travel to the Dead City, to Utlath as was, and seek out the Hollow.” Her face pinches in disgust. “They let the Hollow feed upon them until they are drained of every drop of the Glyst. Then they try to go back to their lives.”