by Jen Williams
‘You said this man was an assassin.’
‘I did. Drink it.’
‘You want me to drink poison from an assassin?’
‘Yes! No, listen. If he wanted to kill us, he’d have done it then. He has no taste for this drama.’ Vintage gestured around at the burning grasses, the lethal cats. ‘I trust him. Do you trust me?’
Chenlo looked at her then, a direct and appraising look. Something in her eyes changed, a softening Vintage did not understand, and then she nodded once, briskly.
‘I trust you, Vintage.’
She took the vial, popped the cork out with her thumb and downed it. She grimaced, and water ran from her eyes. Vintage watched her closely.
‘Oh Sarn’s bones, please tell me it isn’t poison.’
Chenlo glared at her. ‘It tastes,’ she said tightly, ‘like a horse’s ass.’
Two of the cats leapt at once. Vintage scrambled back, and felt the claw of one rip neatly through her boot and pare her skin open at the shin. The bright shout of pain was not quite enough to distract her from the sight of the creature’s drooling jaws and the bunching of muscles as it prepared to jump again, but then the entire thing was knocked sideways in a blinding blast of fire. Pieces of hot cat rained all around her, spattering and hissing like things left too long on the stove. Chenlo staggered over to her, her mouth turned down at the corners. She held up her hands, which were still ringed with fire, but the green flame was dirty, flickering with black. It hurt Vintage’s eyes to look at it.
‘What did you give me?’
‘Quick! Get the rest of them!’
They were standing now in a blasted section of burning grass, and a few of the cats had retreated; their tough skins were no match for this newly lethal winnowfire. Distantly, Vintage could hear Tyranny shouting something – evidently she was not pleased by this turn of events. Chenlo raised her arms and sent a great arc of fire into the remaining grasses. Watching it, Vintage felt her stomach turn over; it was not the clean eldritch fire she so readily associated with Noon. This fire was wild and chaotic, tinged at the edges with a smoky blackness, and it blasted into the grass and the animals hidden within it with an uncompromising roar. Soon, all the grass was burning, and the enclosure was filled with smoke and burning lumps of flesh. Harlo’s body was revealed, his ribcage open and his guts a pink and yellow collection on his knees. Vintage had a moment’s gratitude that they had been spared that fate, but of course their situation was hardly much better – death by smoke, shortly, or death by arrow when Tyranny lost her patience and had the guards slaughter them.
Helcate! Helcate, my darling, are you there?
The thought of putting the war-beast in any danger stabbed at her heart, but it was clear they would be dead in moments if they didn’t get assistance swiftly. There was more shouting over by the bronze fence, and Vintage looked back to see Tyranny opening the gate, a look of boiling fury on her face. The guards were behind her, their arrows trained on the enclosure now.
‘Where did you get that?’ she shouted as she came out of the gate and stood on the very edge of the wall. ‘I’d know that fire anywhere, and you shouldn’t have it.’
Vintage, still frantically calling Helcate in her head, turned and smiled at the fell-witch.
‘I’m sorry, did we spoil that for you?’ For emphasis she kicked the metal cuff where it was still lying on the ground. The grass and the Wild-cats were a smoking ruin; even the white walls had been blackened with the force of the fire.
‘How did you get it? Who are you working with?’ Tyranny raised her hands, and two balls of green fire whooshed into life around her fists. ‘Tell me now or I will burn you.’
‘Oh make up your bloody mind.’ Vintage rubbed the underside of her wrist across her forehead. Sweat was pouring down her face, stinging her eyes along with the smoke. ‘Burn us to death, feed us to your pets, stick us with arrows. There is such a thing as overdoing it, you know.’
‘It’s Okaar, isn’t it? That sneaky fucking bastard, he can’t just let me have this, he can’t just leave me alone . . .’
Two things happened at once. A shadow fell over them, and there was a flurry of arrows from the guards. Some of them went wild, thumping into the ash and smoke of the burned grass, and some went up, sailing too close to Helcate for Vintage’s comfort. Even so, she felt a lightness in her chest at the sight of him.
‘Darling, be careful!’
Helcate landed, none too gracefully, as the air filled with more fire and arrows. Vintage ran for his back and jumped, scrambling to get a hold of the harness while Chenlo threw up a curtain of the terrible black and green fire to shield them.
‘Get on, quick!’
Chenlo turned, her face streaked with soot, and as soon as she had a hold, Helcate began to beat his leathery wings. A few arrows still came, one piercing the skin between the war-beast’s wing bones, but it passed straight through, and although he grunted with pain, he made it up into the air.
‘Up, up, and away, as fast as you can, darling, we—’
Coldness hit them, silent and lethal. Helcate’s coat turned white with frost and he whined like a kicked dog. Vintage looked up to see Queen Windfall, her fanged mouth still open and glowing blue with the force of her icy breath. She was blindingly white against the blue sky, powerful and enraged. Sunlight glittered off of her jewelled crown.
‘You do not leave,’ she called, imperious. ‘You are our prisoner. A prisoner of Tygrish.’
Vintage opened her mouth, willing breath into her frozen lungs so that she could tell the giant bat to fuck off, when Chenlo leaned forward and pressed her hand to Helcate’s rigidly curled fur. Through her link to him, Vintage felt the sapping of his life force, and then Chenlo unleashed an enormous blast of fire up at Windfall, almost propelling Helcate back down to the ground. There was a scream so high-pitched that Vintage was sure she felt it rather than heard it, and then Windfall was falling past them. Tyranny was screaming again, enraged.
‘Go,’ she urged Helcate, ‘go, while we still can, my darling.’
Helcate flew up into the sky and out across the grasslands, leaving Tygrish and its queens behind.
Chapter Twenty-one
‘Pass me the wine please, brother.’
Hestillion sat at the table and watched as her creation considered this. Was it a request? A command? After a long moment, he picked up the bottle of wine and set it down on the table nearer her. She nodded. He was getting better at this.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ he replied.
She had collected the items for this dinner herself, from the last handful of battle sites. Fresh fruits, taken from trees before they were consumed by the maggots, and freshly slaughtered lambs from a field before the varnish eased its way across the raw earth. With the help of her circle – seeing through their eyes as they searched a variety of homes – she had also found an acceptable set of plates and cutlery. Nothing as fine as what she’d eaten from in Ebora, or even the pieces she’d made herself as a child, but they looked well enough under the frond-lights.
The wine they’d found in an actual cellar, and it was very fine indeed. She watched her worm-brother’s face carefully as he sipped at it, trying to spot if he enjoyed the taste or not, but his face, as finely crafted as it was, was still difficult to read. Twice now she had taken him back to the pools and pushed her fingers back into his flesh, seeking to make him closer to the vision she had in her head. Although the Jure’lia armour was welded directly to his body, for this dinner she had dressed him in loose green robes, and had even attached a long silver earring to one ear. When she had pushed the pin through the solid flesh of his earlobe, he hadn’t moved at all; when she had done the same for Tormalin as a child, he had shrieked like a banshee. For herself she had found a beautiful silk dress, hemmed at the edges with a repeating geometric pattern – from Reidn, no doubt. It was the only place close to Ebora when it came to producing silks, and it felt exquisite aga
inst her skin, yet she found herself plucking at it, pulling at her own sleeves. She felt oddly naked, and missed her leathers and her furs.
‘The wine is exceptional, is it not? Roots only know where humans got something like this, it’s as good as anything we had in Ebora. A shame we could only save a few bottles of it.’ A tiny voice at the back of her mind, almost hidden under the cacophony of the worm people, asked who would continue to make such wine when she had neatly erased all of the human settlements on her map? But it was a small voice, annoyingly concerned with human lives and Eboran history, and she easily ignored it.
‘Wine . . . is good,’ agreed her worm-brother. She smiled, pleased, and cut up a piece of the tender meat. After a moment he copied her movements, muscles bunching in his slender forearms.
‘I’m not sure quite how your digestion works. I suppose you don’t really need food or drink? But I imagine it does you no harm, and—’
A shiver passed through her and the distant hum that was the background noise of the Behemoth changed slightly. Her awareness left the chamber and she was in three Behemoths at once, her circle whispering their information to her through the link they shared. She touched her fingers to the blue crystal in her chest, and came back to the table with a blink.
‘We are here,’ she said simply, and her worm-brother stood up immediately. She followed suit, taking a moment to wipe her hands on a cloth before pulling loose the cords on her silk dress. It dropped noiselessly to the floor and she stepped over it, naked, to reach the clothes she had laid out on a chair, ready for this moment.
‘Go to Celaphon,’ she told her worm-brother, who had also removed his robes. ‘Be ready.’
When he was gone, she dressed quickly, pulling on the worn leather trousers and the fur vest with relish. She strapped on a pair of vambraces and pauldrons made of Jure’lia carapaces, and pulled her hair back into its braid. The thought of letting the wine go to waste tugged at her, so she finished off her own glass, then carefully wedged the cork back into the top of the bottle. She crossed the chamber and pressed her hand lightly to the wall. It flexed away from her touch, and in a few moments she was in the giant space that housed Celaphon.
‘Time to fight!’ he said excitedly, pawing at the ground with his clawed feet. Hestillion’s worm-brother and one of the circle had been readying Hestillion’s weapons for her; a short sword, a long spear. She did not often use them, but it felt wrong to go into battle with no weight at her side. Hestillion took the sword and slipped it into the scabbard at her belt, and climbed up onto Celaphon’s harness. She felt his joy at being with her through both the Jure’lia link and the war-beast bond, and allowed herself to feel some of this joy with him. Poison song indeed, she thought. The queen knows nothing of what we are now. What I am doing is making the Jure’lia stronger, better. She will see that eventually. When she was settled, she held out her hand and her worm-brother passed her the spear.
‘Lady,’ said Yellow Leaf, ‘we await your command.’
Hestillion closed her eyes and reached out to them. Each of her creations stood within their Behemoths, looking through clear walls down at the town below them. There was a delicious sense of doubling, and Hestillion saw the world laid out beneath them through several pairs of eyes. She sent them their instructions and then, still holding the thread of their awareness in her head, flexed the side of the ship open. Wind roared in, a flash of blue sky. Hestillion smiled.
‘This is going to be interesting.’
Celaphon, eager to be outside, thundered forward and out, his wings opening and catching the wind with a crack, like sails on a ship. They were dazzled briefly by sunlight, and then the dragon turned, and the town below them revealed itself.
‘Look at them all,’ said Celaphon, in genuine surprise. ‘What are they doing?’
Hestillion smiled. It was good to be back in her battle-leathers, good to be out under the sun.
‘They are resisting, my sweet.’
This town, according to the maps Hestillion had been poring over, was just south of the Reidn delta – close enough to benefit from the vicinity of that rich city state, but far enough away to not be protected by Reidn’s armies. It was called Stourhands, and it was nestled to the east of a set of rocky hills, within which the people of Stourhands had been mining for generations. They produced metals and ores, and sold them all across Sarn, and now the people were lining up in rows below them, wearing many of their metals as armour, and brandishing a range of pointy weapons. Like most human settlements, it was a walled town, and as they flew lower and closer, Hestillion could see men and women lined up on the tops of the walls, bows lifted and aimed at the incoming threat. There were siege weapons too, mighty wooden trebuchets weighted down and ready to fire, as well as a reasonable number of people on horseback. It was easily the biggest force she had faced so far with her circle. Hestillion grinned with genuine pleasure.
‘The others didn’t do this,’ pointed out Celaphon.
‘Well, they tried, but they weren’t as organised.’ She leaned forward in her harness to speak more directly into the dragon’s ear. ‘We have seen humans rushing with panic, and desperation. These humans, I suspect, have been watching for us, and planning what they will do when we arrive.’
‘And will that help them?’
Hestillion laughed. ‘No, my sweet.’
At her word, the three Behemoths began to convene on the walled town of Stourhands. On the far side of the town it was possible to see a thin line of people moving hurriedly down a distant road; the young and the old, probably, those too sick to fight. They were fleeing the town. Hestillion hoped they knew where they were going – if they were still in open ground in an hour or so, they would face death along with the rest of their people. Hestillion called her commands, and Celaphon swept down towards the first rows of men and women gathered outside the town. There was a shout from somewhere, and a shadow moved up from the walls; hundreds of arrows arching up towards them. They clattered harmlessly against Celaphon’s hide – although he snorted with indignation – and Hestillion herself ducked, feeling a thrill of danger as the lethal arrows shot up through the air and past them. Next, the trebuchets fired, and abruptly they shared the sky with a volley of smoking debris. With a couple of beats of his wings, Celaphon brought himself up above their range.
‘They are shooting at us!’
Hestillion laughed again. ‘Of course, but it will do them no good. It will take them some time to load up again, so why don’t you show them your tricks?’
Celaphon needed no more telling than that. The dragon dropped down through the sky, his jaws wide open. The neatly formed ranks of soldiers below them wavered, and then scattered. Hestillion heard screaming, shouts for order, but it was too late. The enormous muscles beneath her bunched and flexed, and Celaphon spat down a crackling beam of blue lightning onto the army. Those directly under the beam were blown into blackened pieces in an instant, while the fallout spread outwards in a flickering circle; white forks of lightning jumping from one piece of armour to another. As Hestillion watched, men and women jerked and screamed as the electricity filled their bodies and threw them down into the dirt.
‘Excellently done, my sweet,’ she called to Celaphon, who was already coming around for another blast. A fresh hail of arrows flew over them, and Hestillion threw her awareness back to the circle, checking that they were following orders. One Behemoth had positioned itself over the centre of the town, leaking a steady stream of burrowers and spider-mothers down into the market square. The two others had taken up position on the east and west sides of the town wall, and the creatures they released were eating their way through any humans caught fleeing. A crack of thunder, and Celaphon’s lightning blasted a hole through the town gate. More screaming. The shouts for order were both fewer and more desperate. Hestillion smiled.
Later, she stood in one of Stourhands’ towers and leaned over the balcony, watching as a tide of varnish oozed its way down the street below. C
elaphon was away, flying after the people who had fled from the far side of the settlement, and in her head the circle were quietly reporting their successes. Everything was as it should be.
At the front of the tide of varnish there was a shifting foam of debris, items caught and pushed along by the fluid before being overtaken and consumed by it. She saw carts and wooden buckets, heaps of straw, a broom, a sword. All of it eventually fell underneath the varnish, and there it would stay, caught forever. It was neat, really. Tidy.
A figure down the street caught her eye. It was a little human girl – impossible, with their ridiculously short lives, to guess its age, but it was small – and she appeared to have fallen and hit her head on the cobbles. Left behind in the scramble to leave, was Hestillion’s guess; left for dead, probably, but she was coming around, her movements slow and confused, while the tide of varnish inched towards her, smothering everything in its path.
Hestillion felt a tremor of something. A memory was trying to resurface, an image of a young Eboran boy lying on ground turned hard with snow, but she retreated from that and reached for the circle instead. They were there, as they always were, and she sank herself into their certainty and their love for her. In a few moments, the shining green tide overtook the little girl, and she was lost beneath it. Hestillion watched until the small body stopped moving, then nodded. It was neat. Tidy.
Yet again, there had been no sign of Tormalin and his pet witch, no sign of the other war-beasts that caused Celaphon such distress. Even the human man Bern, with his connection to the Jure’lia, felt very distant from her, a tiny seed in the vast jungle that was the worm people. It was harder to find him in their chaos than it had been. Perhaps he was hiding. Perhaps, she mused, her brother and his friends had recognised that with her as their leader, the Jure’lia were more lethal than they had ever been. The thought was a pleasing one.
‘Now. I believe I have a dinner to finish.’
Chapter Twenty-two
