by Jen Williams
Noon moved from connection to connection, siphoning it all within herself and feeling the power building there. Each little crawling thing she supped from offered up its strange alien mind so easily – each one so simple, so uncomplicated – and as she leapt from creature to creature, she began to glimpse echoes of their history, stretching so far back into the past it made her dizzy.
There were other worlds; a few were lush and green like Sarn, but most were acrid, hot balls of rock with pools of hissing acid, or storms that lasted for centuries, the only life tiny crawling things with shells like lumps of metal. She saw frozen worlds, places where the ice was miles deep, where history slept in its layers, and worlds that hardly seemed like they were there at all, places of pressure and scent and a strange, violent magic. The Jure’lia had been to all of them, had taken each one and pierced it with eggs before covering it in varnish so that the world became hotter, more stable, until the time of birthing came and they could travel again.
Then there were unimaginable stretches of time, time so stretched and changed it almost became something else, and the Jure’lia revelled in this time of cold and darkness. Here they witnessed a breadth of creation Noon could not fathom; holes of swirling purple light, pulsing stars that grew and died, over and over, and the brittle-bright light of comets. This was where the Jure’lia belonged, in this cold unfeeling nothingness, where beauty came and went with the aeons.
So many different bodies, one continuous mind – born again from the eggs, over and over.
And that mind was noticing her now, she realised. How could it not?
Noon raced towards it.
Aldasair stood over Commander Morota’s body. He had lost his sword somewhere, and his arms ached so much he could barely lift the axe. The Hall of Roots was filling with the tendrils of the queen’s body, a pulsating mass of evil. He could see no way out.
Bern?
Jessen came to him and licked the palm of his hand.
Al! Stay with us. Bern’s voice was like a bell inside his head. Things are happening out here . . .
‘You.’
The queen in her mind was not the creature Noon had seen in battle – not a huge amorphous shape of slime and tentacles, but a more human thing. She stood with two arms and two legs, and the face she wore was a cleverly crafted mask that looked almost real. It looked, Noon realised, a lot like Hestillion.
‘Me,’ agreed Noon. ‘I don’t think I know you, actually.’
‘We saw you in the human’s memories,’ the queen said dismissively. ‘Just another small living thing, another part of the pestilence. You helped to destroy our future.’
‘And I’m going to kill you now, too.’
‘You? You are nothing.’
Noon shrugged at that. The majority of the Jure’lia life force was already within her, a cold and vast energy that longed to burst her apart. Yet here stood the real core of the worm people – the singular mind that powered the rest. She could sense the real shape of it, the iron-hard will and the infinite energy required to build it.
‘This is the end. I’m almost sorry, because this wasn’t where you were supposed to be. Any other world, and you could have carried on as you were, probably forever. But Sarn isn’t here for you to consume and throw away. Do you understand? We won’t be used.’ Noon opened her arms. ‘You’ve come such a long way. But so have I.’
Too late the queen realised the real threat that she was, and for a brief second Noon struggled to consume her. But the weight of the Jure’lia was already within her, and suddenly so was the queen too – her life energy was a hundred thousand stars, living and dying, over and over.
Oh it’s too much, it’s too much.
She reached out along her link to the others.
Vostok?
Bright weapon.
You saved me, Vostok. You brought me out of the dark. Thank you.
You will ever be in my heart, bright weapon. Go and do what you were made for. Be our greatest, and our brightest.
She thought of Tor and the others, hoping that they were far enough away, that they would live through the battle. She had thought her capacity was infinite, but she saw that wasn’t quite the case; the energy inside would need to be released soon, and that would be the end of it after all. Her very last purging. The last flicker of winnowflame.
I can’t keep it. It’s too much.
Then don’t keep it. It was her mother’s voice, or it was Vintage’s; she couldn’t tell. You can let go now, little frog.
Noon let go.
Tor woke up on the mountainside, lying in a patch of earth and grass. Kirune was sitting next to him, and his sister lay a few feet away, still unconscious. He had time to see that the corpse moon was some distance away, looming by the furthest of the Tarah-hut Mountains, and then he was thrown back into the dirt by a flash of light and sound that briefly turned everything white.
‘Noon . . .’
A flash of heat kissed his face, as though she were saying goodbye, and a roaring noise filled his ears. When he could look up again it was to see a landscape utterly changed. A good portion of the mountain was gone, and the sky was dark with smoke and dust as the vaporised rock seethed up through the air. Of the Behemoth itself there was no sign, although already he could see pieces of molten debris falling back to earth, livid points of orange light trailing black, oily smoke.
She was gone. A presence in the connection between them all had been severed, and the absence was an agony. Tor rolled over onto his side, a sob lodged in his throat. The pain was unbearable, unlike anything he had ever felt.
‘Ah no. Please, no.’
A weight on his side let him know that Kirune was there; the big cat was resting his head on him, and Tor could feel his own sorrow reflected back at him – reflected back at him multiple times.
‘She did it,’ Kirune said softly. When Tor didn’t answer, the war-beast nudged him, nearly rolling him down the hill. ‘She has destroyed them, where we couldn’t. Get up and look. She would want you to see.’
Reluctantly, Tor uncurled himself and stood up shakily. The city was painful to look at. Already a collection of ruins, it now looked like it was covered in a giant, virulent mould, a grasping poisonous plant of black tendrils that had seeped into every building and up every street. Even the palace was covered in it, and Ygseril – he felt his stomach turn over – Ygseril’s great silvery branches were entangled in it too.
But something was happening there. The slippery stretches of greenish-black were growing fuzzy at the edges, less defined. As he watched, a dark smoke began to rise off the ruins of Ebora. And there was Vostok. The great white dragon was flying in a wide circle, her rage and sorrow a terrible thing – hot and endless like the sun, it was impossible to look at for long.
‘Come on.’ A fragment of melted moon-metal struck the ground some feet away from them, setting the grass alight briefly. Kirune nudged him again. ‘It’s not safe here, brother. The mountains are broken. Let us go.’
Standing on the roof of the palace with her feet firmly planted on the glass, Vintage felt the loss of Noon like a sudden aching dizziness. She dropped her crossbow and fell to her knees, blinking rapidly to keep from passing out. Next to her, Helcate gave a low mournful cry.
‘What is it?’ Chenlo grabbed her elbow and tried to pull her back to her feet. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Noon . . .’ Vintage raised her head. She suddenly felt more tired than she ever had. ‘She did it. But . . .’
The black tendrils of the Jure’lia queen, surrounding them like a great pulsating cage, shivered violently, and then began to turn an odd, rusty black. The shimmering oil colours vanished and instead the surface took on an old, cracked look, like an elderly woman’s face covered with too much powder. And then they all began to fall apart, turning to a fibrous dust in front of their eyes.
‘Sarn’s bastard bones, what . . .?’
Vintage scrambled to the edge of the glass, to the place where Ygseril�
�s enormous trunk erupted up into the daylight. All around them, the remains of the Jure’lia queen fell on them like a strange, dry rain. She could feel it sticking in her hair and covering her skin, and she felt a weird spike of combined joy and revulsion.
‘Aldasair?’
She peered down into the Hall of Roots below. The whole place was awash with the dark dust, making it difficult to see, but she caught sight of Aldasair’s pale face looking up at her. Already the tear tracks on his face were dirty smudges.
‘I’m alive,’ he called, his voice breaking. ‘So are Bern and Tor, I can feel them. But –’
‘I know, darling.’ Vintage sat back on the glass. She could feel them all too, their sorrow like thorns in her heart. All around them, the cheering was starting, the celebrations – the fell-witches who had lived, the handful of men and women who had managed to fight to the end, were calling out with joy. The worm people are dead! We’ve won!
Very quietly, Vintage began to cry.
‘I know.’
Chapter Fifty-four
Beginnings and endings, flesh and bone, ink and paper. These are what stories are made of. Have we come to the ending yet? I don’t know, my darling. Sarn’s story continues, at least, even as many of us are left behind in dust and blood.
We found Celaphon’s body in the ruins of Ebora. He made quite the impact, I can tell you – that’s one street that will forever bear the scars of this war. No one saw him fall, but it seems likely that his connection to the Jure’lia was too deep for him to survive Noon’s magic. He was mostly their creature, after all, but at the end he did his best to come back to his family. The crystal embedded in his forehead was cracked and grey, the colour of a winter sea.
Hestillion was a trickier prospect, and perhaps it would have been easier for all concerned if she had died along with her adopted worm people. Her crystal turned dark too, and the skin around it became livid and swollen with infection. For some weeks she was feverish and barely conscious, but she held on – Tor commented that she was just too bloody-minded to die – and eventually, made something of a recovery. To my eye, she is a ghost of a woman, a person formed more of regrets and horrors than skin and blood. I look at her and wonder at the dogged persistence of life. The question of what to do with her was left up to Tor, but she left of her own accord, without goodbyes. I imagine she wanders Sarn now, looking at the things she did. I hope it haunts her. Okaar has gone too. He is making his way back to the ruins of Tygrish, to look for any sign of Jhef. There is little chance of finding out what happened to her, and I think he knows that, too, but sometimes the hopeless course of action is the only one open to us.
Speaking of difficult prospects, there is Tor, of course. Much to our surprise, Ygseril appears to have had a new lease of life, growing bright new leaves, as green as emeralds, and it is producing sap again – just a tiny amount, but an extraordinary thing, nonetheless. The handful of remaining Eborans have been healed of the crimson flux, but for a long time Tor refused to be treated. He grieves so deeply, and he is remarkably stubborn – even as stubborn as me, Helcate has somewhat cheekily suggested – but for many nights I watched Kirune talking to him, quietly and persistently, and some days ago Tormalin the Oathless took his first cup of sap in a few hundred years. The marks of the crimson flux left him – and so did the scars on his face and neck. I found him crying over that, and my darling, I sat and cried with him. It’s strange the things you can come to miss.
Bern and Aldasair built a new Hill of Souls together, a place to honour all those we lost in the Ninth Rain: the human soldiers, the fell-witches, and Noon. The Finneral brought their most sacred stones for the foundations of it, and the place has already become a shrine of sorts. Young fell-witches come and lay small stones there, with messages for Noon scratched into them. She would hate it, of course, but a symbol can be a powerful thing. The Winnowry won’t rise again within the lifetimes of these young people, I am sure of that.
And it will not be an easy period for Sarn – I am also sure of that. During her most industrious period, the Lady Hestillion did a very good job of ruining much of the landscape, and those scars, mile-wide trails and splotches of varnish, will be with us forever. The places left untouched by the Jure’lia resin are likely to be poisoned, and we will see more Wild-touched creatures, more strange and dangerous things living amongst us, no doubt. The towns and settlements that were destroyed by her and the queen cannot simply be wished back into being, and the loss of the kingdoms of Jarlsbad is unspeakable.
Still, we are here. And free for the first time in human history. It’s important to remember that.
Chenlo and I intend to go travelling. Yes, what’s so new about that, I hear you asking, but first we must both go home. My love needs to see the Yuron-Kai again to settle her own heart, and I must go back to the vine forests. I need to know what has happened to you all. I am afraid, because I’m not sure that I can bear more grief than what I already carry, but it seems that running from your past can become a rather circular motion. Tor and Noon taught me that.
I hope you will be there to greet me, darling Marin. I hope to see you very soon.
Extract from the private letters of Master Marin de Grazon, from Lady Vincenza ‘Vintage’ de Grazon
She Who Laughs walked out across the plains, enjoying the dry tickle of grass under her bare feet. The desert was very beautiful, but it could also be very boring. And some time ago she had felt her daughter die, that small but fierce light extinguished so entirely, and something about that had made her want to see the place where the girl had been born. The plains were also beautiful, she decided. Like much of this world.
Lately, she had found herself returning to what Noon had said to her, during those days in the glass castle, about responsibility, and power, and change. And there was the sacrifice the girl had made: right at the end her bright mind had been full of those she had loved, and those who had loved her. Perhaps there were things to be learned there that she hadn’t considered before. Perhaps there was another way.
With this in mind she had reached out to the last seed of the Aborans, had felt its tired battle to live, and given it something of herself. A little piece of her life to make it grow. It wouldn’t be the same as it had been before – it couldn’t be – but that was as it should be. Change was neither good nor bad, but it was vital. She thought Noon would have been pleased by that. She hoped so.
Presently she came to a place where the grass had been eaten up by a vast greenish sludge, shining hotly under the sun. It was hard to the touch, and reflected the heat back up at her. She Who Laughs grimaced. The stuff felt wrong; it did not belong here. It was a dead thing, and it suffocated the life under it and around it, life that did not need these extra obstacles.
She knelt down next to it – she wore the body of a child of ten or eleven, with raven-black hair and clever brown fingers – and placing her hands flat against it, summoned the purest form of her fire. Presently, the thick green substance began to bubble and melt, breaking down into a watery fluid that sank harmlessly away into the dirt. She Who Laughs smiled, feeling well satisfied with herself, and looked out across the vast stretch of ugly green.
‘It will take a while,’ she said aloud. ‘But I have plenty of time.’
Acknowledgements
So here we are at the end of a trilogy again. How did this happen? It feels like five minutes ago I was scribbling vague ideas about rogue archaeologists and sexy elves who were not really elves. I set out to challenge myself with these books – a decision I have occasionally cursed myself for – and I feel like I’ve learned so much. It’s been hard work; it’s been cheerfully exhausting; it’s been a joy.
And as ever, a brilliant gang of brave souls have guided me through it. Huge thanks first of all to my beloved editors, Frankie Edwards and Claire Baldwin, who made sure that the book sang and kicked you in the feels at exactly the right moment (so you can blame them, really). Enormous thanks to Juliet Mushens, my superst
ar agent – for all the advice, the support, the laughs. My life would be much duller without Juliet.
Thanks also to the fabulous Phoebe Swinburn for being a shining publicity star, and to Patrick Insole and his team for giving The Poison Song an absolutely stonking cover (it’s my mum’s favourite, and not just because she likes cats). Much gratitude and admiration must go to Jot Davies, the brilliant narrator who lends his voice to the audio versions of these books – it was his idea to give the Eborans a slight Welsh accent, and it makes me smile every time I think of it.
I owe a debt, as usual, to all the fantastic writers I also count as friends. Thanks must go to Den Patrick, not just for being a mate, but also for introducing me to Dungeons and Dragons over the last year or so – it’s been a blast! Huge thanks as ever to Andrew Reid, my salt mate bestie and daily source of hilarity. Big thanks to Peter Newman, a friend in all weathers. I still owe Adam Christopher that ginger beer, and love and thanks to Alasdair Stuart and Marguerite Kenner – your support means the world. I would also like to throw out a thanks to Dogshit Justice, a support group that has helped me through the outrageous global trash fire of the last few years, and to Jenni, my oldest friend.
I’d never have gotten anywhere without the help of my mum, of course, who taught me how to make the chocolate chip rock cakes for myself this year. And as usual, big love and thanks to my partner Marty, who is there for me every time I climb back out of these fantasy worlds.
Lastly, thank you to all the readers who came on this journey with me. I’m going to miss Vintage, Noon and Tor an awful lot, but I like to think of them still out there with you, having adventures. Darlings, it’s been emotional.
The adventure begins in
‘Fantasy adventure at its very best’ Starburst
‘Williams excels at eldritch world-building’ Guardian
