by Jen Williams
‘You look bad,’ the dragon said. ‘Not how you were before. There was colour to you, before. I thought you were a weapon.’
‘Your queen won’t stop until I’m dead. I’m nothing to her but a puzzle to be solved, but she doesn’t have the wit to understand the pieces, let alone the picture.’ He swallowed hard. Speaking too much made his head spin. Increasingly, his sense of where he was felt wrong. Was he back in the dragon chamber, truly? Or was he still languishing in the room of crystals, his mind splayed across the walls? He couldn’t be sure.
‘It is a sad end for a warrior,’ said Celaphon. ‘I should like to have killed you in battle. Instead you will die here, quietly. Alone.’ The dragon sounded genuinely regretful, although still far from sad – rather as though he’d been denied a favourite game.
‘Not alone,’ said Bern. ‘They’re still with me. It’s very dim, the link, in the middle of this pit of arses, but I can feel them. Sharrik and Aldasair, and the others.’ He flexed his sore hand. Each time the queen used the Jure’lia crystal to tear apart his mind, his hand burned with pain. ‘I got to do that, at least. A boy from Finneral rode a griffin, loved an Eboran prince . . .’ His voice trailed off as his mind tried to retreat to happier times, but Celaphon was abruptly much closer, his hot stinking breath blasting over Bern’s face. He grimaced and turned away.
‘They are with you, here? How do you feel them? What is it like?’ He nudged Bern’s arm, almost flipping him onto his front. ‘Tell me.’
Bern groaned. The lack of food and the stench of the dragon’s breath had combined to fill the back of his throat with bile.
‘If you’re not going to feed me or kill me, leave me alone, monster.’
The walls flexed open and the queen stalked back inside, her mask-face set. Celaphon shuffled back, and Bern made half an attempt to get to his feet, but the queen had no patience for such dignities. With a flick of her long arms, loops of the black fluid slid around him like a net, and he was hauled from the chamber.
Hours later he found himself back. He had no memory of the journey from the room of crystals, but at some point he had crawled to the wall and was curled up there, his hands over his head. Gradually, as he came back to himself, he pushed his back against the wall and sat up. Even that small movement caused waves of black spots to burst in front of his eyes.
‘Ah, shit,’ he croaked.
This time the queen had gone back to his earliest memories, ripping from him images and sounds that he could barely process as belonging to him. Some of these had been almost comforting – his mother carrying him back and forth under a wooden-beamed ceiling, singing some nonsense song – while others were just unsettling, such as the memory of a childhood fever where the walls of his room had seemed to liquefy and reach out to him.
The dragon was a dark presence at the far end of the room, but seeing that Bern was awake, Celaphon came forward again, his white eyes wide and eager.
‘You still live,’ he said, sounding pleased.
‘Only just,’ muttered Bern. He lifted up his hand and looked at it. The flesh around the blue crystal was inflamed and pain seemed to radiate out from the thing, coursing down his arm and his fingers with each heartbeat. ‘I knew this would bloody kill me eventually, but I wasn’t brave enough to do what had to be done.’ He thought briefly of his axe, but he had no idea where it was. Had the queen taken it from him when she’d caught him? Regardless, he doubted he had the strength now to chop his own hand off.
‘My siblings,’ said Celaphon, ‘do you feel them still?’ There was, Bern thought, a different energy about the dragon. In so far as it was possible to guess a mood from a face that was covered in scales and horns, the dragon seemed unsettled, excited even.
‘I feel them all the time,’ said Bern. ‘Although I’m not sure you can call them siblings. Not now, anyway.’
‘We were born on the tree together,’ said Celaphon, a trifle indignantly. ‘I’ve been told that. The tree-god birthed us.’
‘And you killed one of us. Remember that? The boy, Eri, who was bonded with Helcate.’ Anger made him sit up straighter, although immediately his head swam. ‘Tore him apart. Not to mention all the others you’ve killed since. You’re a murderer, a traitor.’
Celaphon snorted, shaking his head. A glimmer of blue light danced around his teeth, and Bern wondered if he was about to be blasted with lightning, or simply torn apart.
‘He burned me,’ the dragon said. He sounded absurdly sulky, a child accused of some injustice. ‘My face, my eyes. And,’ he added, more confidently, ‘we are at war.’
‘You’ve got that right.’
For a time, they both fell quiet. The ever-present hum of the corpse moon, still slightly discordant, filled the giant chamber. Bern thought of Aldasair and Sharrik, wondered what they were doing, where they were. Underneath the continual interference of the Jure’lia web he could sense them, a distant warmth.
‘I can feel you reaching out to them,’ said Celaphon suddenly. ‘A tiny thread of . . . of gold, runs from you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s so small, and fragile, but it is in me still. Despite what I am, and how I am, the poison song cannot deafen everything. You say I am not their brother, but that gold thread says differently.’
Bern ran a hand over his face. Even in such a brief gesture he could tell that the bones under his skin were becoming more prominent.
‘By the stones, I don’t care, dragon. Think what you like. Any chance you had to be a war-beast with them was lost when you took one of our own from us. You’re a creature of the worm people now.’
Celaphon snorted again, taking more steps until he loomed over Bern.
‘But that thread is still there. Show me. Reach out to them and I will follow it. Let me touch that connection again.’
‘No.’ Bern paused, and laughed, although it hurt his chest to do so. ‘Never.’
‘I will kill you.’
‘So? Do it. I am dying anyway.’ Bern shook his head. ‘You’d be doing me a favour, really, although I reckon it would piss your queen off some.’
Celaphon lowered his head until the end of his huge snout rested on Bern’s chest. After a moment, he pressed down, pushing Bern against the wall with so much strength that the big man could not free himself.
‘Do it,’ the dragon rumbled, ‘or I will go from here, and find them. I will kill the griffin – you know I can do it – by snapping my jaws once. And then I will find the other, the man who was here before, and him I will bite slowly into small pieces. I will eat him. I promise you this.’
Bern pushed at the snout; it was as immovable as a standing stone. Looking up into the dragon’s baleful, silvery eyes, he saw that he meant every word.
‘It makes no difference,’ he said again. ‘You might have come from the same tree, but they won’t have you back.’
Celaphon did not move. Reluctantly, Bern closed his eyes, and sought out the warmth that ran beneath the taint of the worm people. He reached out for them as he hadn’t since he’d been captured, and as he did so his own need to be close to them again took over – Aldasair, Sharrik, Tor, Kirune, Vintage, Helcate, Jessen. Family.
He found them, briefly, and the passenger that travelled with him found them too.
Aldasair scrambled to his feet, half tangling himself in his ragged blanket. The campsite was quiet, the twin fires burning low, yet he had been certain for a moment that they were under attack; the sense of violation was overwhelming. Around him, he could see the others waking up too. Tor sprang up with more grace than Aldasair had, although he looked terribly old in the moonlight, his brow furrowed with worry. He snatched up his sword from where it lay beside him.
‘What was that?’ said Vintage. She was sitting up with her arms wrapped around herself, although it was hardly cold. ‘Did you all feel it?’
Sharrik strutted forward, tossing his head from side to side in agitation. ‘It was Bern! He was with us then, I felt it!
And then –’
‘And then it was the dragon,’ finished Jessen. ‘The poisoned one.’
The fell-witches were waking up, roused by the confusion and fuss.
‘What’s happened?’ Agent Chenlo’s hair was loose over her shoulders. ‘Are we in danger?’
Aldasair ignored her, turning instead to Tor. ‘What does it mean?’
Tor wiped a hand across his mouth, frowning as he did so. ‘I don’t know, Al, but I can still feel him there. Like a bad taste. He was sharing space with us then, and he was closer than he’s ever been.’
‘He seeks to join with us,’ said Kirune. ‘Even after –’
‘Helcate,’ said Helcate. Belatedly, Aldasair realised that the smallest war-beast was trembling all over, and sorrow and fright emanated from him like a slow, thick fog. Vintage got up from her bedroll and went to him, throwing her arms around his neck.
‘Oh my darling, I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice muffled slightly as she pressed her face to his snout. After a moment, Aldasair joined her, patting the curly fur on the war-beast’s flank.
‘Little brother,’ rumbled Sharrik, ‘you do not need to fear him. He is nothing to us.’
Aldasair nodded, although he could hardly blame Helcate for being afraid. The sense of being violated, of their bonds being soiled somehow, was palpable even as the presence of Celaphon retreated. Kirune shook himself all over, as if trying to throw off the sensation. Aldasair reached out for Bern again, but the sense of him had gone.
‘What does this mean?’
‘It means, cousin, that Bern is still alive, and that he still has the strength to reach us.’ Tor grasped his shoulder and squeezed it, briefly. ‘I suspect it also means that he’s getting desperate.’
Aldasair nodded. ‘As soon as there’s light in the sky, we go. And we don’t stop until we have him safe again.’
Chapter Thirty-five
Hestillion stood over the map, her paintbrush in one hand. They had taken it from the ruins of a sizeable town in Triskenteth, a surprising place of tall stone towers and glass windows. She had been half regretful as the maggots and the spider-mothers had pulled it down into pieces, this town full of libraries and commerce, but there was no real way of stopping the process once it was started. Or at least, that was what she had told herself before putting the matter from her mind again.
She and the First had made their way through the central tower of the town, taking whatever seemed interesting and useful, and that was when she had come across the map. It was the most complete map of Sarn she had ever seen, more detailed and more beautifully inscribed than even the maps her father had owned in Ebora. Now, armed with a pot of green ink, she carefully filled in and covered over all the places she had taken with her circle; great splotches of green for all the varnish. Varnish vomited forth by her maggots.
It made for a pleasing scene. With her methodical plan, she had erased Sarn settlements by the dozen, wiping them from the map and leaving roads that led to nothing but eerie, eldritch graveyards. The next step, of course, was to take the largest cities. The multiple kingdoms of Jarlsbad, the glittering jewel of Reidn, the vital and bustling stink of Mushenska. When they were gone, Sarn – and therefore Ebora – would be brought to its knees.
‘The map turns green,’ murmured the First. Hestillion turned to him, pleased. All of them had started talking now, comments and observations, the occasional question. None of them would ever be giants of wit, that was true, but she was fascinated that they were beginning to learn. Their link to her, to the Jure’lia, her thoughts coursing through them . . . their minds were starting to form around these things, like a river running over rocks.
‘It does. Look, come here, all of you.’ They were all with her in the chamber, her entire circle. The Behemoths they controlled had been drifting for a few days while Hestillion considered their next target. One by one, the circle came over to the table. ‘We are making tremendous progress, much faster than the queen ever managed. It’s because we’re being careful about our targets. Now, this place,’ she tapped the region of Jarlsbad, which was a thick collection of place names and roads, ‘what do we know about it? Green Bird?’
The woman-shaped creature with a bird daubed on her bony chest tipped her head slightly to one side, considering.
‘Many small kingdoms,’ she said. Her voice was thick, as though her throat closed over when she wasn’t speaking. ‘Fruit. Land bridges. Tall towers. Scents. Wild-touched cats. Grass . . .’
‘Yes, that’s all true. Anything else? Grey Root?’
Another of the circle stepped forward. Jure’lia armour flowed across her shoulders and up over her throat. The grey roots of her name were a sprawling pattern across her bald head.
‘The separate kingdoms war,’ she said. ‘They fight. But –’ she looked lost for a moment – ‘it is talking-fighting, mostly.’
‘Politics,’ agreed Hestillion. ‘They’re all prosperous, producing fruits, perfumes, steel – all trade that bolsters Sarn. But it’s this place that interests me in particular at the moment.’ She tapped her finger against the parchment.
‘Tygrish,’ said Red Moth.
‘Tygrish,’ said Hestillion, falling silent for a moment. With the maps and the other loot they had taken from the tower, she had come across a pile of recently opened letters. Whoever lived in the tower had had family in Jarlsbad, and they reported that the royal family in Tygrish had fallen – displaced by a fell-witch. And her war-beast.
‘Is this my brother’s pet, and her dragon? Or someone else? Is my brother there with her? Why would they take a kingdom of Jarlsbad, and by force?’ She sighed. ‘That letter has raised a lot of questions, a lot of questions I wish to have the answers to. It could all be confused gossip, of course – this sort of thing is rife during war, I should think – yet I wanted to take my first piece of Jarlsbad soon. Perhaps this is a sign. Our next step of the journey lies to the west.’
‘We return first?’ asked Grey Root. ‘To the Under. For our dragon.’
Hestillion thinned her lips. Of course Celaphon was a mighty force in their arsenal, but he had also proven to be somewhat unpredictable when it came to the war-beasts. There was a great conflict within him; he was unable to truly decide if they were his blood kin or his enemy. She felt it in him sometimes, as a deep fluttering uncertainty at his very heart. Faced with this other dragon, or even another, unknown war-beast, how would he react? She couldn’t say for sure.
‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘We will let Celaphon rest for a little while longer. My circle, together we can easily take Tygrish, and I’ll have the answers to my questions.’ She smiled at them. ‘It will be our largest victory yet, and our biggest test. Prepare yourselves.’
‘Are you dead yet?’
Bern opened his eyes a crack. The soft light of the vast room was too much for him to take. He closed them again.
‘Not quite.’
The dragon snorted, and stomped around his prone body. It was an unnerving sensation, to know that such an enormous creature was in the same room as you and so close to stamping you into paste, but Bern no longer had the energy or the will to stand.
‘Soon, though, I think.’ Celaphon made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat. ‘When I joined with them, I felt them. They were horrified. They did not want me there.’
Bern said nothing. He did not have to ask who the dragon meant.
‘But even underneath the anger, I felt . . . connected. Like there was a bond that they could not stop. Or deny. Because we are kin.’
‘Family,’ murmured Bern. ‘It’s just like family. Even when you hate them, you still have to – they’re still just there. So hard to stop having the same blood.’
‘I will always be a creature of two worlds,’ said Celaphon. For the first time, the dragon sounded quiet, sad almost. Against his will, Bern found himself opening his eyes again to look at the creature. He was not looking at Bern; instead he had turned towards the wall, his blind-look
ing eyes examining something Bern could not see. ‘I grew too different, too strange. My body hurts,’ he said simply. ‘It hurts all the time.’
Bern lifted his head. ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen to you,’ he said. His mouth was so dry. The rolling weight of hunger in his gut had become one long cramp. He lifted his injured hand off the floor briefly. ‘Or me. You should have been birthed in Ebora, next to your brothers and sisters.’
‘I am mighty,’ said Celaphon, although to Bern the words sounded especially hollow.
Silence fell between them for a while. Bern drifted, the acrid scent of the Jure’lia and the dragon in his nostrils, the discordant murmur of the corpse moon yammering in his ears. He was remembering burying the little clay statues of war-beasts in the black Eboran earth, how Aldasair had told him this was to help their souls return to the roots of the tree-god.
‘What if,’ the words were out before he even knew he was going to speak aloud, ‘what if I die here, with the worm people still in my head and my blood. Will my soul be trapped here?’
Celaphon lowered his head and sent a blast of hot breath across Bern’s face.
‘Your soul?’
‘In Finneral, we believe that when we die, our souls return to the stones of the hearth –’ He coughed. His throat was raw and talking was rapidly becoming very painful. ‘The hearth stone. All families have one. We go back to it when we die, and then when new children are born, we start again. All our – all the –’ He swallowed. ‘All our thoughts and memories gone, the soul all clean, like a pebble in the river . . .’
‘Stones?’ Celaphon did not sound convinced.
‘I never paid much mind to it, but the Stone Talker told us that the hearth stone was the heart of Finneral. If we missed the ones who died, we had to remember they were always there. I didn’t believe in it, but . . .’ An unexpected sob rose up in his throat. ‘What if I can’t go back to the stone? The worm people will keep me here, I know it, because of this.’ He flexed his fingers around the crystal shard in his hand. ‘Even dying won’t get me away from them.’
