by Jen Williams
‘It’s not rock though, is it?’ she said to no one in particular.
Eventually, she went over and picked up a piece, holding it up to the light. The queen’s mask-face was pitted and yellowed in places, with fine greyish cracks radiating across it, but it was still perfectly recognisable for what it was. Hestillion touched her fingers to the curved lip that hinted at the edge of an eye socket.
‘You should have been here.’
Celaphon emerged from the far side of the jungle, his huge head lowered. He was not quiet as he moved – the great dragon had never been one for stealth – and she could not figure out how she hadn’t heard him coming.
You’re not paying attention, she told herself fiercely. You need to focus.
‘What happened?’
The dragon crossed the broken crevasse towards her, leaving huge, clawed imprints in the solid black covering. Behind her, Hestillion could hear various Jure’lia creatures exiting the Behemoth that had landed, scuttling out onto the grass and rocks. There was some impulse at work here, something seeded deep within them, to gather and witness.
‘My brothers, my sisters. Their warriors,’ rumbled Celaphon. ‘They came here and destroyed the eggs, setting a fire like the sun. It burned so quick and bright, I think it surprised them.’
‘And you didn’t stop them?’
Celaphon was silent for a moment, rearranging the huge leathery wings on his back. Now that she looked, he was darker in colour than she remembered, as though he were covered in a light covering of soot.
‘The white dragon came suddenly from the sky, and she and the witch burned our queen. So relentless, so angry. I felt a little of their fury and their triumph, I think. Just a little.’
‘Celaphon,’ Hestillion held up the piece of mask, admonishing him with it, ‘why didn’t you stop them? You are the mightiest of all the war-beasts! How could they possibly stand against you?’ Yet even as she said it, Hestillion felt a cold unfurling of guilt in her gut, tangled with the strands of another emotion she wasn’t ready to name. Celaphon watched her, his silvery-white eyes difficult to read. Eventually, he snorted and sank his claws into the mud.
‘When I was small,’ he said, ‘and weak, and dying, you promised me we would go to a great lake, and eat only fresh fish. When I had grown, you thought of flying far with me, to a remote part of Sarn, where we would live for the rest of our days, alone. We never did that, little bird. Why didn’t we?’
Hestillion looked down at the broken piece of mask in her hands.
‘I . . . that was . . .’
There were too many thoughts and images in her head. Celaphon before he was grown, small and wrong, her desperation to save him, and the strange work the Jure’lia growth fluid did on his body; the Eboran boy, lying in the dirt, his face spattered with black blood; flying on the back of Celaphon with the joy of battle surging through her veins, their enemies scattered and dying; the queen’s hand closing around her neck; her circle, standing and listening and obeying – even now.
‘You would not have gone with me,’ she said tersely. ‘One thing or another would have stopped you. Loyalty to the queen, your need to see your brothers and sisters. I would not have been enough.’
Celaphon took a few steps across the remains of the crevasse until he was standing above her, casting her into shadow.
‘And what do we do now? How do we go on, little bird?’
Hestillion shook her head. It’s over, part of her insisted. All of it. And yet, some dark part of her, the same part that had created her own private army in the steaming crafting pools, that had flown Celaphon into combat and thrilled at the power of it, that had taken a blade to the throat of a human child – that part of her did not want it to be over. Not after all her work.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, truthfully enough, and one of the Jure’lia creatures tottered forward into her line of sight. It was one of the larger burrowers, a beetle the size of her fist with jagged serrated plates across its back. As she watched, the thing fell over onto its back, sharp legs scrambling at the air. Hestillion frowned at it. ‘I have to think. I’ve just destroyed a clutch of cities. We’ve had a string of victories.’ My victories, she added silently. That seemed important. ‘We’ve conquered so much of Sarn, we’re on the brink of . . . the brink of taking it.’
The burrower was convulsing violently, its frantic movements leaving marks in the dirt. Hestillion felt an overwhelming desire to crush the thing under her boot, but even as she raised her foot the thing began to pull itself apart.
‘What –?’
A thin thread of black fluid spooled itself out from the body of the bug, touching the dirt tentatively, as if feeling its way, or tasting it. Another thread followed that, and then another. The body of the burrower became a busy, teeming mass, as more and more threads of black fluid leapt from it. Already, the shape of the thing was lost, and instead there was something agonised and frantic, a form that was changing all the time. It grew larger and larger, until Hestillion had to step away from it, concerned she would be caught up in its twisting, snake-like body. Another burrower appeared and ran to it, only to be immediately snatched up and pulled apart, contributing what it was to the pulsating mass.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ Hestillion swallowed hard. ‘You’re still here. Of course you’re still here.’
The thing on the ground rose up, briefly becoming taller than her before collapsing again. Something like a head thrust out of the general mess; something like a mouth opened, gaping and infirm. One flailing appendage scraped across the ground, apparently at random, scooping up the broken pieces of her old mask, some random shards of rock, even the tiny scattered bones of some dead animal. These it pressed into the stringy fluid around the mouth, and those broken pieces formed a face of sorts; nothing as recognisable as her old mask, but the suggestion was enough for Hestillion to need to suppress a shudder. A sharp splinter of grey rock served as a cheekbone, an old piece of the mask had been repurposed as her chin, and the skull of a bird hung crooked over the place where her eye might have been – a sinister eyebrow.
‘While any part of us still exists, we are here,’ said the queen, her voice a thing of buzzes and clicks. There was a light, trickling sound from behind Hestillion, and a swarm of burrowers swept forward to be absorbed by the thing that was the queen. She became larger, almost taking on a humanoid form, but not quite. The thing that she was now was looser, less contained. More pieces were added to her patchwork face.
‘What happened?’ asked Hestillion. The crystal sunk into her chest felt like a blade wedged there.
‘Your people, your brother . . .’
‘They are not my people,’ Hestillion added quickly.
‘They came here and destroyed us, the heart of what we are. Poured fire on – poured fire on –’ The queen shook all over, a violent convulsion that made Hestillion take a step back. ‘They destroyed my eggs. Our future, gone. There will be no travelling form, no leaving this world, not for our future selves. The great unending chain is severed. We thought that change would break us from this prison. You taught us that, Lady Hestillion Eskt, born in the year of the green bird, but it was wrong. You lied.’
Hestillion held her hands up, glancing at Celaphon, who had not moved.
‘This is not my responsibility,’ she said sharply. ‘You have always made your own mind up.’
Long arms of black fluid whipped out from the queen, wrapping around Hestillion before she had a chance to move, holding her tight and pinning her arms at her sides. Moments ago, it had seemed like her life had many paths, and now it seemed there was only one – the same dark path that had always led to this.
‘If you’re going to kill me, hurry up,’ she said.
The queen ignored her. ‘We changed our form, let you take part of us away, brought, for the first time, new shapes forth and shared our memories with flesh that was not ours. This way, we thought, this world would be scoured and warmed, finally. But we opened our
selves to infection.’ The queen lowered her broken face towards Hestillion. ‘The infection that is you, little war-queen. We thought that if we could understand the connection between the false memory in the crystal and the human, we could understand what you have done to us. But knowledge comes too late.’
The coils around her tightened and very quickly it was painful to breathe. Hestillion wondered what would happen if she summoned her circle now. Could she turn them against the Jure’lia queen herself? ‘What are you going to do?’
Next to them, Celaphon snorted, pawing at the ground. The pieces of the queen’s makeshift face trembled; a tarnished ribcage, probably from a large rodent, had given her the suggestion of long, thin teeth.
‘We learned some things from the man when we opened his mind. One of those was the satisfaction of revenge.’
Abruptly the coils of Jure’lia fluid dropped away, and Hestillion stumbled backwards, only narrowly avoiding falling back into the dirt. The thing that was the queen beckoned, and more creatures oozed from the Behemoth, falling into her coils and disintegrating. There was a strange, strangled noise, like metal being slowly crumpled, and Hestillion turned to see the thick stretch of black tar opening up. A shard of crystal, once the heart of a Behemoth now lost within the broken chasm, was being pushed out like a child spitting out an unwanted cherry stone. The queen reached down for it, and Hestillion got a brief glimpse of the memory it contained, a strange barren world of boiling pink skies.
‘What are you doing?’
The queen turned the memory crystal over and over in her arms, examining it from all angles. She had grown much larger in a matter of moments, Hestillion realised with some alarm.
‘A new memory.’ The queen caressed the crystal, and the imagery within it flickered, becoming something else. The arid grey deserts were gone, and in their place were boiling flames, white and yellow and fiercer than anything Hestillion had ever seen. They spoke of infinite destruction, of an end to everything. The death of all hope. ‘The memory of how we died. It will carry us on to revenge, little war-queen, holding us together until we can taste the death of Ebora in our mouths.’ The queen pushed the shard into her twisted, changing body, making it a part of her.
‘Ebora will fall, finally,’ she said. ‘That is our revenge.’
Chapter Forty-three
Vintage stopped as she reached the summit of the small hill and looked back behind her. It was a fine day, and the central city of Ebora seemed to shine like something polished, while the regal form of Ygseril continued to spread his branches over the sprawling palace. It had been around a week since they had seen the first leaves fall from the tree-god, and in that time Vintage found herself looking at it often, trying to spot a more robust sign of autumn amongst the branches. Out here, on the lonely stretches of untamed countryside, the changing of the season was more apparent. Green was slowly being replaced with yellow, gold, orange and red, and there was a freshening in the air that promised sharper mornings and, eventually, darker nights.
‘It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?’
Chenlo came up beside her, carrying their basket of food under one arm. She was wearing the scarlet shirt Vintage had bought her in Jarlsbad, and her striking hair was tied back into a very loose braid.
‘It is,’ she agreed. ‘Shall we eat here?’
They laid down a blanket and unpacked a series of things Vintage had bought and traded for that morning – a loaf of bread studded with seeds, two small meat pies that were slightly greasy to the touch, two boiled eggs dusted with salt, a punnet of purple berries, a thick slice of a kind of jam tart from the Finneral contingent of the palace guard. To that she added a bottle of wine from her own vine forest, one of the very last she had left. She looked at it for a long moment, turning it over in her hands and staring at the label.
‘Tell me,’ said Chenlo, ‘about your home.’ She nodded to the bottle of wine.
‘Well, I haven’t seen it in so long . . .’ To avoid looking at Chenlo’s face, Vintage began searching in the basket for the carefully wrapped glass goblets.
‘I do not think you’ve forgotten it.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Vintage pulled out the glasses and poured the wine. ‘Catalen is hot, and complicated. We’ve had three revolutions in the last two decades, moving from emperors to kings to republics to, honestly, a general population who no longer really cares who is in charge. My family are, to be blunt, rich, and we’ve made our money from the rich, black soil, and the cheerfully constant sun.’ She sighed. ‘I feel such guilt when I think about it. About home. What’s happened to them all? Are they all right? They have answered none of my letters. My nephew Marin – we were very close when he was little, and once we wrote to each other all the time.’
‘We have heard of no major attacks in Catalen.’
‘None we have heard of, no. Can I tell you something, Chenlo?’
‘Anything you like.’
Vintage glanced up from her glass, surprised by this casual tone from the agent, but Chenlo was carefully cutting the jam tart up into neat pieces.
‘I left my home in the vine forest somewhat . . . abruptly. I had been thinking about it, dreaming about it really, for years, but there were always too many responsibilities, too many reasons not to go. Then, one day, I saw a parasite spirit in our forest – it was, is, a place poisoned by the Wild – and that was it. Something closed inside me, or opened up or . . .’ Vintage placed her glass on the blanket. ‘I felt no regret when I walked away from them, none at all. And I never have. What does that say about me, if I am able to so completely and painlessly sever ties with the place I have lived all my life?’
Chenlo sipped her own wine, considering her answer. When she spoke she looked directly at Vintage, her dark eyes serious.
‘Perhaps it says that you should have been out here all along.’
‘Perhaps.’ Vintage dared herself to hold the other woman’s gaze, but something about her face, caught in the pure sunshine of summer’s slow dwindling, made her look away. She realised that her heart was beating too fast, so she took a breath to slow it. ‘I did always miss my nephew though, Marin. Curious, inquisitive, a trouble-maker. A child after my own heart. The last I heard, he was studying in Reidn, and I must hope he has remained safe behind those thick city walls.’
‘You could visit,’ said Chenlo. ‘Go to Reidn, or back home to Catalen. See for yourself that your home still stands.’
‘I couldn’t leave Ebora, not yet. We don’t know that we are safe, not really, and, well . . .’
She ran out of words, but Chenlo nodded slightly, as if she knew exactly what she was going to say.
‘Sometimes,’ she said quietly, ‘it is not so easy to go home.’
‘Quite.’
They sat for a time together, nibbling at the pies and passing each other pieces of tart. The wine was sweet and golden and silky, and Vintage found she was glad she had brought it after all; it seemed to be made for this golden afternoon, and this company.
‘I’ve brought something for you,’ said Chenlo eventually. Some of the old formality had entered her voice, and Vintage found herself sitting up curiously. ‘After seeing how familiar you were with the gaming houses of Jarlsbad, I thought that you would like it.’
From within her own pack Chenlo pulled out a grey silk bag with a drawstring at its throat, which she passed to Vintage with a slight nod; a ghost of her more formal bows. Inside it, Vintage found a folded wooden board with brass hinges, and a stack of cards made from thin pieces of bone. Each card had been painted with an elaborate figure or scene, surrounded by a number of different symbols, symbols which were reflected on the wooden board.
‘Oh, my darling, it’s a tarak set! And a beautiful one at that. Where did you get it?’
Chenlo smiled, a faint blush colouring the tops of her cheeks. ‘There is a Jarlsbad trader here, with his family. He told me it is one of the most popular games in the kingdoms.’
‘It certainly
is. On a very basic level, it’s essentially a game of matching symbols and images before your opponent does, but you can play different versions depending on how familiar you are with the game, and in places like The Shining Coin the stakes can be very high indeed. The imagery on the cards is fascinating in itself really, all these different figures and symbols. They’re thought to come from bastardisations of myths and stories from all over Sarn, but most significantly, the game itself is thought to be related to the Eboran tarla cards, which I’m sure you must have seen.’
Vintage glanced up to see Chenlo grinning at her, delighted.
‘Have you played before?’ Chenlo shook her head. ‘I will teach you, then. Come on, let’s make some space on the blanket.’
At this Chenlo looked vaguely panicked.
‘I’ve rarely had the chance to play games, Vintage, I’m not sure I will be any fun to play with.’
‘Of course you will.’ Impulsively, Vintage reached over and kissed the woman on the cheek. When she sat back, they were both blushing fiercely, and Vintage found her lips were tingling with the memory of Chenlo’s skin. ‘Here,’ she said, trying not to think about the sudden tension between them. ‘I will show you.’
‘I would like you to show me,’ agreed Chenlo.
Lonefell stood within its tangle of a garden, hot and silent, the windows black and dusty. The home of Eri’s parents looked strange to Noon, with its multiple stories and peaked roofs; another sign, she supposed, that she was starting to feel at home in Ebora. The palace was a sprawling thing of just one level, as were the vast majority of the grand houses that lined the streets of the city, but Eri’s parents had had a fascination with human art and architecture, and had built their own house to reflect this. Hidden within a dense thicket of forest and sheltered from any of the cooling breezes that suggested autumn was on its way, the place felt dreamy and hot, the only sound the dim buzzing of insects.
