by Jen Williams
‘Oh, but we’ve come such a long way, darling.’ Vintage rested her hand on her crossbow, wondering what would happen if they had to fight their way in. ‘And, well, let’s be frank with each other, your Queen Tyranny stole something incredibly valuable from Ebora, an act that is both an unpardonable insult and an act of war. I could go back to Ebora and tell the rest of Helcate’s brothers and sisters that Tyranny hasn’t got time to see us today, and see how they take it –’ she shrugged extravagantly – ‘or we could have a nice little chat about it before things get out of hand.’ She leaned forward in the harness, composing her face into an expression that suggested rueful sympathy. ‘I know you are very skilled with the winnowfire, ladies, but we have a dragon at home. And just between you and me, she has a temper at the best of times.’
To her surprise, the woman smiled and raised a hand. A glove of green fire flared into existence around it.
‘We’ve asked nicely. Now you need to go.’
‘I don’t want to fight you,’ said Chenlo, her voice tight. ‘We were sisters once, Kreed.’
‘Sisters?’ A strange expression passed over the woman’s face. Vintage looked at the other women, who were still hovering some distance away on their own bats. They were watching their leader closely. ‘Sisterhood? You could have left me in the Targ mountains, but you hunted me down and put me in that prison yourself. All that is over, Chenlo, and I don’t have to do anything you say anymore.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’ Chenlo’s voice was tight, and Vintage felt a fresh surge of alarm as the agent produced her own ball of flame. Beneath her, she felt Helcate murmur with unease. This was all going south quickly. ‘After all I did for you, you don’t trust me?’
‘This isn’t the time or the place for this!’ Vintage raised her voice and urged Helcate into the space between the two women. ‘We’re just here to talk, Agent Kreed. Honestly. Tyranny will want to see me, I promise. She won’t be able to resist. Just tell her who’s here, and we’ll—’
One moment the sky was full of warm light and the sound of wings beating; the next, it was an inferno of green fire. Vintage swore and ducked down against Helcate’s neck even as the war-beast dropped away from the barrage. She didn’t see who had fired first, but when she looked up she saw the three agents coming forward to join their leader, missiles of green fire streaking across the blue sky towards Chenlo, who had surrounded herself with a shield of flame. Each fireball that met it hissed and crackled, and was absorbed, but it was clear to Vintage that the woman couldn’t keep the structure up for long.
‘Shit.’ Vintage raised her crossbow and fired up at Kreed’s bat, taking the creature in the wing. It squealed its outrage, and Vintage winced, but the wound did not seem to slow it. ‘Helcate, darling, we might have need of your talents here.’ Even as she said it, she felt a sinking feeling in her chest. Where would this end? With more dead women, dead bats? Beneath her, Helcate began the odd hiccupping motion that summoned his acid spit. Above them, Chenlo had dissipated her shield of flame and was busily flinging out discs of fire so fierce that they were ringed with white heat. One of the agents at the back cried out and her bat dropped away, wings beating fiercely. A moment later, one of Kreed’s fireballs connected with the flank of Chenlo’s bat and terrifyingly quickly there was a burst of orange fire as the creature’s fur caught. Chenlo leaned down and beat it out with her own gloved hands, the expression on her face stern and determined.
‘Do it, Helcate. Take down Kreed if you can.’
The war-beast stretched out his neck and shuddered, and a glistening stream of translucent liquid flew from his open mouth, striking the underside of Kreed’s bat. There was a fresh barrage of squealing and the thing flew upwards, wings beating frantically. Vintage felt a pang of guilt as a thin, oily smoke bled from the creature’s fur.
‘Stand down!’ called Vintage. ‘Everyone, stop! Please, we have to—’
A shadow fell over them. Vintage blinked, and then gasped. The sky around them had turned abruptly frigid, so cold that the breath in her throat felt like shards of glass. Helcate’s curly blondish fur was turning white, rimmed with frost.
‘Enough!’
The voice thundered down over all of them, and Vintage squinted upwards at the huge shape hovering above. Amazingly, swarms of what appeared to be ice crystals were stinging at her eyes.
In Jarlsbad? Sarn’s old bones, what is happening?
The shape above became clear. It was a bat, but a bat at least four times the size of those the Winnowry agents were riding, and although her mind automatically scrambled for an explanation – Wild-touched, some new strain of Targus bat – she knew the truth in an instant. It was the war-beast they had come looking for.
Its fur was a silvery white, and the skin stretched between the fine bones in its wings was pale blue, the colour of a songbird’s egg. Its head was bulky and muscled, with a ridged, pointed nose ringed with grey velvet, and its huge ears were lined with rings of flexible muscle. Eyes, huge and blue and shining with intelligence, glared down at them all above a mouth rammed with alarming teeth – and at the back of its throat, it was still possible to see the glittering remains of the icy magic it had summoned. The creature had no harness and no rider, but curiously there was a band of silver across its broad forehead, and this was studded with diamonds, each the size of Vintage’s thumb.
‘Helcate!’ said Helcate.
‘You see?’ Kreed’s voice drifted down from above, exultant. ‘We have no fear of you. Fell-witches don’t need to be afraid of anyone, anymore. Meet our queen – Queen Windfall of Tygrish.’
Chapter Fifteen
Noon sat on the black sand, her arms circled around her knees. After the being calling herself She Who Laughs had vanished, she had spent a couple of agitated hours exploring the strange glass castle. She had ventured up into its battlements, moving as quickly as she dared over the smooth, shadowy surfaces, and had looked out across the desert in all directions. There had been nothing but the softly undulating dunes, little clumps of the fleshy white plants, and the occasional desert animal – no people, no human structures in sight. As the sun sank out of the sky and the stars came out, the sands grew chill and desolate, yet the castle itself seemed to retain heat. It was possible to feel it where she sat, on the very threshold of the thing – if she stretched out her leg to reach the sand not covered by the glass arch, her foot would grow cold. When she brought it back, warmth flowed through her again.
The contents of the castle had not been reassuring. There were lots of strange glass objects, huge glass discs that were distorted in myriad ways so that the dying light of the day was shattered into unsettling shapes and colours, and in one echoing hall, there stood a series of tall greenish grass pillars of varying sizes; when Noon touched them, she thought she could hear music. She had found the yellow chair again, although now it looked old and broken; Noon had dismissed this, assuming it must be a trick of the light. There were a handful of other objects, left in apparently random chambers – a single red slipper, embroidered with black silk; a simple wooden cup, oddly charred around the edges; a hand mirror with a brass handle. On one windowsill, Noon had found a brightly painted string puppet, its limbs lying all about it like it had fallen from a great height. Each wooden piece had been painted with great skill, and inevitably Noon was reminded of Mother Fast’s puppets from when she was a girl. The thought gave her a chill, and she had left that particular room a little faster than the others.
Every now and then she had spotted more of the green lights, but had quickly learned that she could not catch them, or spy their source. They seemed to be a sort of floating sprite, a little like the parasite spirits she had once fled from with Vintage and Tor.
Vintage and Tor. Thinking of them, Noon drew her knees closer to her chin. What would they believe had happened to her? Were they even alive? Her link to them, and to Vostok, felt intact, yet somehow muffled. She was sure that if, for example, Tor had died in the battle at the
settlement, she would have felt it, yet not knowing for sure was an agony. Where was Vostok? Could the dragon sense her? Could she find her? If she didn’t, it seemed likely her fate was to die of thirst out here in the middle of nowhere.
‘Fire and fucking blood.’ Her throat already felt too dry.
The last discovery had been the most unnerving. Just as it was getting too dark to see anything properly, she had stumbled across a small courtyard in the middle of the castle. In this narrow space, open to the sky above, the glass floor relinquished its hold and turned back to black sand, and here were a large collection of charred bones. Curving fragments of skull hinted at empty eye sockets, broken jaws grinned at her, half hidden in the sand. Were these the remains of other people She Who Laughs had summoned? The ones she had become bored with? Or perhaps her intention all along had been to kill Noon, and leave her blackened bones in this lonely place. There was no way to guess at the intentions of a creature like that. After all, she had the power to bring the Aborans across unimaginable distances, and then had happily abandoned them to die slowly, trapped on a distant island.
With this on her mind, Noon stood up, brushing black sand from her trousers, and headed cautiously back inside the glass castle. It was a place of dizzying darkness and uncertain walls, but as her eyes adjusted, she started to see soft glimmerings of light in hidden places; bleeding around corners, seeping half-seen across ceilings. It was green, this light, emerald and witchy, and the floating orbs of winnowfire were there too, still moving through the glass corridors. Using this to navigate by, Noon made her way back to the small bone-filled courtyard. Here, starlight left a hard glitter underfoot.
‘You’re not really gone, are you?’ she said aloud, looking around at the slippery walls. ‘A thing like you – a thing as old as you – doesn’t just burn to pieces. Part of you is still here. Well, it’s rude. Why bring me here and then hide from me? What do you want?’
For a long time, there was a great aching silence, broken only by the sound of the winds moving across the desert. Then an ember of green light sparked into life in the centre of the courtyard, glowing hot and quick and then expanding, growing both lighter and darker. As Noon watched, the light took on a shape, and then weight, and soon there was a figure in front of her, bathed in swirling green light.
‘You see,’ said She Who Laughs, ‘you’re good at figuring things out. I knew it.’
The swirling light faded, leaving only the corona of emerald flame at her head, and her burning green eyes. She was younger now, and rounder, with skin the same deep tan as Noon’s. She wore a tunic of grey leather that had been embroidered all over with colourful beads, and there were matching cuffs at her wrists, yet her broad face was creased with pain, and there were dark circles under her eyes.
‘Why are you different now? Where did you go?’
She Who Laughs stepped over the broken bones a little gingerly; her legs did not look stable. When she reached Noon she patted her arm gently.
‘If you are not too afraid of the bones, shall we sit here? I am rather tired.’
Grimacing, Noon nodded, and together they sat down, their backs against the wall.
‘Remember you spoke of the women who used to worship me?’ She Who Laughs folded her hands in her lap, and Noon had the strangest sense of familiarity; it was like sitting at Mother Fast’s knee, waiting to hear a story. ‘Well, they still exist. Not so many as there used to be, but they are still clinging on, in small pockets all over Sarn.’
‘The Winnowry hasn’t found them?’
‘The Winnowry.’ She Who Laughs paused, looking up at the night sky. ‘No. I suspect they think my women are all gone now. Tiny communities hidden away, where my fire is loved and celebrated.’
She turned to Noon and smiled, and Noon found she had to look at the ground under her boots. She wanted, abruptly, to cry, and she couldn’t have said why.
‘It’s hard for them. Keeping themselves hidden, yet still living full lives. I exist here as light and heat, mostly,’ she lifted one arm and gestured around at the walls, ‘but sometimes I will go to them when they are dying, and ask if they will come back with me. It is interesting to walk around in your flesh for a while.’
‘When they are dying?’ asked Noon, startled.
‘Yes. When death is close and certain, I ask if I may borrow them, use up their final energies.’ She brightened, and nodded towards the dusty bones. ‘They see it as a great honour.’
‘Fire and blood. So that woman who was here before . . .?’
‘She was taking her last breaths. And this brave woman . . .’ She patted her own chest. ‘A bad growth inside is eating her away. I can feel it, nasty thing. But now she feels no pain at all, and her bones will rest here with those of her sisters.’
‘That . . . I can hardly believe it. All my life I’ve been told that the winnowfire was an abomination and a curse, that everyone lives in fear of it and that we should be ashamed. But there are places where it’s just accepted.’
‘It is true. Secret places.’
Noon looked at the bones littering the floor, trying to take this in. Everything she had thought was real and solid suddenly seemed insubstantial and temporary; stories told by puppets around a fire at night. The feeling made her think of Tor, and the misery he had suffered since he’d discovered the truth about Ebora.
‘Before. What were you before? You could not have been human when you brought the Aborans here. I saw the Seed Carrier, and the shapes carved into it. I saw how my fire crawled into those shapes . . .’
‘Child, I am the fire.’ She lifted her hand, and as if to prove it, a blossom of emerald flame curled into being above her fingertips. ‘I am the Hunger that Takes, and I am Creation, both at once. I am the act of change itself.’
‘That makes no bloody sense to me.’
‘Well.’ She Who Laughs flexed her fingers, and the green fire began to bend and stretch in strange ways. ‘I once looked like this, when I was home, so long ago. Does this help?’
The flames crawled and stretched until a shape began to emerge, a leaping, lithe thing on the tips of her fingers. To Noon it looked a little like Vostok – there were snapping jaws, a long, tapered body – but there were many whip-like tails, and four pairs of short, scurrying legs. Looking at it made her feel deeply uncomfortable for reasons she didn’t understand.
‘Please,’ she said, looking back at her feet. ‘Stop that. I don’t want to see it.’
She Who Laughs shrugged, and the cavorting creature winked out of existence. Noon cleared her throat.
‘Then what about the Winnowry? Why do they exist?’
‘There’s a question.’ She Who Laughs shrugged. ‘Humans are very strange. They choose to be frightened of something rather than understand it.’
‘No, I mean, why didn’t you stop it?’ Noon turned and looked directly at the woman, trying to ignore her flickering crown of fire. ‘Your women, as you call them, have been suffering for centuries! Locked up, treated like animals, told that they are scum, and worse, and where were you?’
She Who Laughs frowned. ‘I cannot be responsible for every child who bears my flame.’
‘What?’ Noon scrambled to her feet. ‘So you care for the ones who love you, who know about you, but everyone else can get stuffed?’
She Who Laughs shook her head gently, her eyes downcast. ‘I gave this gift, Fell-Noon, only to the strongest of Sarn. Only the strongest. My fire seeks you out when you are in the womb and finds that strength. Only the strong can carry it. I’m not giving them anything they can’t handle.’
Noon felt her breath lodge in her throat. She thought of the sound of a hundred women breathing at night, punctuated by the sobbing of the newly arrived. Of being beaten with a silver-headed cudgel, and eating tasteless gruel, day after day. She thought of reaching her hand down through the grill separating her cell from Fell-Marian’s, forever just out of reach. For a moment she considered draining something of its life force and summon
ing the winnowfire – even if it was pointless, blasting this woman into ash would be satisfying.
Apparently oblivious to Noon’s anger, the woman had continued talking.
‘The Aborans thought that they were so clever, touching each world and making it different.’ The smile that creased her face now was a bitter one. ‘Over and over, they sowed their seeds and stood back, just watching. Observing. Everything was beneath them – even the one who gave them the very ability to travel between worlds. Ungrateful, short-sighted. My gift was to be something else. Something truly unique.’
‘Do you have any idea what you have done?’
The woman looked up, unconcerned. ‘I have done many, many great things and many small kindnesses, Noon. All the terrible things have been done by your weaker brethren. I have imprisoned no one. Persecuted no one.’
Noon shook her head slowly. Her anger seemed to drain away into the dark desert sand.
‘Why? Why have you brought me here?’
The old woman laced her fingers together and smiled. The boiling green light of her eyes smoothed away the creases at their edges.
‘I can help you, I think. There’s something you – and you alone – came very close to understanding, and then you wandered away from it. I felt it,’ she tapped her chest, ‘in here. And I want to help you find it again.’
‘And it was a glorious battle?’
Hestillion smiled, pulling her wet hair back into its now customary braid. She and Celaphon were on top of the Behemoth, carefully sitting in the shard of daylight that made its way down from the crack in the distant ceiling. The great dragon was as attentive as a puppy, his huge blind-looking eyes trained on her constantly.
‘It was, my sweet. We took both settlements, as easily as picking flowers, and my new circle obeyed my every command. They are extensions of me now, like extra bodies I can wear.’ This wasn’t entirely true; although the settlements had been destroyed, their remains sealed over with the greenish resin, commanding the circle and the two Behemoths at once had not been easy at all, and Hestillion’s entire body seemed to thrum with fatigue. As easy as picking flowers, it was not. But the satisfaction she carried in her heart was a balm to those aches and pains. Celaphon snorted.
