by Jen Williams
He walked to the next one, and then the next.
‘They are all like this,’ he glanced over to Oster, ‘all save the largest entrance, here. Why is this one clear?’
Oster shrugged extravagantly. It was dark in the bottom of the pit, but small beads of light peeled along his epaulettes.
Sebastian sighed. ‘He is your friend. Do you have any theories?’
Oster scowled at him in the half-light. ‘You have many questions. It was never meant to be my place to answer them.’ He took a breath, and shook his head. ‘The Spinner was not my friend. He was supposed to be here, to serve me,’ he said eventually. ‘But I have not met him.’
The largest doorway led into a large circular chamber lit with small green glowing stones set directly into the wall – Sebastian had never seen anything quite like them, but they made him think of both the Heart-Stone and Prince Dallen’s cold light. There were holes in the walls leading to other, smaller chambers, all empty. Sebastian couldn’t help noticing that some of these chambers were in the ceiling, so high up that no human could have reached them easily. The floor was littered with strange items: Sebastian saw the bones and skulls of small animals; leather-bound books, their pages curled and yellow; clay bowls crusted with old food; brightly coloured beads and glass marbles; knives and forks and spoons, the silver tarnished and turning green; a belt made of gold links with a fat golden beetle as a buckle; and, strangest of all, were several masks – these were all piled together in the same corner. A few of them were simple things – white faces with holes for eyes and mouth – while others were more elaborate, depicting women’s faces with gold and silver lips and eyebrows.
‘What is all this stuff?’ Sebastian bent down and picked up one of the masks. Its blank-eyed stare was unsettling.
‘The Spinner collects things,’ said Oster, as though this were a stamp collection or a rich man’s study full of expensive paintings. ‘Look at this.’ On the biggest wall was another great web, this one apparently made of a thick, silver substance and there were items caught in this web too, small statuettes made from a translucent red stone. Sebastian reached up and touched one, and the whole web vibrated softly.
‘It’s a dragon,’ he said, feeling his throat close up with a fear he didn’t understand. ‘And these two are wolves.’ He walked to the other side of the web to look at the other two, although he already knew what they would be. One was a woman with ribbons of green hair trailing down her back, and the other was a bird with wings spread wide. Next to each statuette was a smear of a thick red substance. To Sebastian it looked like it had bubbled up through the stone itself. ‘What does this mean?’
‘What do you think it means?’
Sebastian looked at Oster, but could read nothing in the man’s face. ‘I think it means that all the old gods are dead.’ Sebastian swallowed hard. ‘Y’Gria, Res’na and Res’ni were eaten by their sister Y’Ruen beneath the Citadel. Y’Ruen herself we pushed from this world. She might still survive there,’ he thought of the terrible hole that had opened in Skaldshollow, and the diseased hulk that had tried to pull itself through, ‘but she is gone from Ede for ever. And I saw O’rin die. I saw Joah Demonsworn cut his throat open with the god-blade. They’re gone, all of them, and your friend the Spinner knew it.’
‘All gone,’ agreed Oster. ‘And the cycle begins again. The Eye of Euriale opens, and new life crawls forth.’ He shook himself abruptly. In the gloom, the dragon shape on his arm was glowing faintly. ‘This is all wrong. I should not have to explain this, it is not my place. I should not even have to speak to you. The Spinner should have been here when I arrived, and then I would have understood it all, but instead I am alone, and the pictures do not make sense.’
They stood in silence for a few moments.
‘If you want help finding this Spinner, you’ll have to put up with talking to me for a while yet,’ said Sebastian, hearing the acid in his voice and not caring. ‘Let’s look around. Perhaps we can get an idea of what happened.’
Oster nodded, his lips pressed tightly closed, and together they combed through the junk on the floor. Sebastian looked closely at each of the statuettes caught in the web, and then at each of the masks. Oster shifted into his dragon form and scuttled up the walls, filling the chamber with golden light, so that he could slip up into a chamber in the ceiling. After a few moments, his human face peered over the lip of the entrance.
‘Have you found something?’ asked Sebastian.
In answer, Oster held up his hand. There was a smear there of black and white paint. ‘The Spinner was taken from here, by the same people who attacked me,’ he said.
‘Who attacked both of us,’ Sebastian pointed out, but Oster wasn’t listening. There was a look of black fury on his face.
‘They have taken my past, and I shall tear them apart for it.’
25
Frith opened his eyes to find himself under a close watch.
The previous night, when it had become too dark to follow the path in the sky, he had found a great hollow tree. The hole where the roots met the earth was big enough for him to crawl inside, and the space within was covered with soft, old leaves. He had curled himself into as comfortable a position as he could manage, and then exhaustion took him. With all the noise and dangers of the island Frith would never have believed that sleep could come so easily, but he slept deeply that night, and had no dreams.
Now bright sunshine painted the world outside his hideaway tree, reflecting off the emerald scales of the three creatures that stared at him. They were small, roughly the size of large chickens, but they were lizard in shape, standing on powerful back legs, with their front legs curled in front of their chests. Their long snouts were lined with tiny, needle-like teeth, and their eyes were bright with curiosity.
Frith kicked out at them awkwardly. ‘Shoo! Go away!’
They took a few hurried steps backwards, and then stopped, still watching him. Frith climbed out of the tree hollow, wincing at the stiffness in his back. When they still didn’t move, he picked up a rock from the ground and threw it at them. Finally, the creatures scattered, long flexible tails whipping away into the thick bushes.
Frith watched them go, wondering belatedly if they were edible.
Above him, the sky was a mixture of blue and white as a thick bank of cloud moved in from the south. It was possible to see the path there still; a bruise-like line across the pillowy clouds. Today it curved, heading north and then west, cutting across the island. It was time to move.
Wydrin awoke to shadows. It was difficult to believe that she had slept at all, bound up in a spider’s cocoon and cradled by a giant monster, but the creature had not spoken again; it had simply held her tightly in place, in the dark. It wasn’t, Wydrin had to admit, completely uncomfortable, although the urge to scratch her nose would come and go. She had tried speaking to it, asking it questions, but got nothing in return save for that low keening sound.
She blinked rapidly, trying to wake up fully. There was still an oil lamp in the corner, casting a warm light over the mud walls. The bonds holding her were as firm as ever.
‘You know,’ she said out loud, ‘eventually I will need to pee, and neither of us is going to be very happy about that.’
To her surprise, the creature behind her shifted. First one, then two legs swept down in front of her – covered in black bristles, and here and there a piece of pearly white armour – and picked her up carefully, turning her over and around. Wydrin briefly squeezed her eyes shut, wondering if this was the part where the spider injected her with poison and drank her jellified insides, but when she opened them again she found herself looking at a serene and beautiful face.
‘Forgive me,’ said a quavering voice. ‘I did not have a face to greet you with, so I had to make one. They took all my faces away.’
Wydrin took a slow breath. The face was a finely shaped mask with holes for eyes and a sleek point of a nose, made of the same pearly white substance as the creatu
re’s armour. There was a thin white stick protruding from the chin, and this was held in one bristly claw – a surprisingly dexterous appendage, she noted. She could see some of the bulk of the creature now – a fat purple abdomen, patterned with bright orange spots like eyes – and behind the mask was … Wydrin felt herself go very still. The mask was beautiful, but not big enough. Behind it she could see many sets of bulbous eyes, red and black, and several sets of mandibles, busily working away. The claw tightened its grip on the mask, and the creature’s body shivered all over.
‘Now I have the correct face, we can speak in a civilised manner,’ said the creature. Wydrin couldn’t quite see where the voice was coming from; the mask covered up that part of its head. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ said Wydrin, keeping her voice as neutral as possible. She wished fervently for the weight of Frostling at her side. ‘It is good to, uh, meet you.’
‘I am the Spinner.’ The mask dipped slightly in a parody of a bow. Wydrin wished it hadn’t. ‘What are you?’
‘I am a sell-sword. My name is Wydrin Threefellows, the Copper Cat of Crosshaven.’
The Spinner shivered all over, apparently impressed with this. ‘A fine name!’ The legs shifted, and the Spinner held her out further as if for better inspection. ‘A name crafted for adventures, no doubt.’ The voice became lower. ‘I tend to know about these sorts of things.’
‘Well, you’ve got that right.’ Wydrin smiled despite herself. ‘In the last few years I have seen more adventures than any one woman should see. Demons, dragons, giant walking mountains—’
Abruptly the Spinner pulled her closer, so that her face was only a few inches away from the mask, and what the mask concealed. The legs circled her again, squeezing her arms and her chest.
‘Yes, yes, you know, don’t you? You can tell me! You must tell me, now, please. I know the histories and yet I do not, do you see? I hear the songs and I sing them, but I never feel them.’
Wydrin coughed, trying not to panic. If the Spinner squeezed her much harder, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.
‘I can tell you. But I won’t be able to if you crush me to bits.’
The mask quivered, and the pressure eased off a little. ‘That is good, yes? Now you can speak. You must tell me of it all, little adventurer.’ One of the legs descended from above and touched the top of her head, pushing her hair back from her face. ‘You will tell me now.’
‘Of course, no problem.’ Wydrin cleared her throat. ‘Where to begin?’
At midday, the weather had begun to change. A hot wind had blown in from the east, scattering the clouds from the sky and leaving it a pure, blameless blue. Frith had watched it happen half incredulously, as his only clue to Wydrin’s whereabouts was blown to tatters. Without the clouds, the path was invisible.
He had been trudging his way up a seemingly endless hill when the sky cleared, and now he found himself at the foot of a small structure built of black stone. He’d seen many similar ruins on his way; often in the distance there would be a broken spire, or the trees would part to briefly reveal a pile of rocks. For an apparently uninhabited island, it certainly had a great many signs that humans had passed through here. What had Devinia said? That is was an island of gods, and people had built shrines here for them.
‘Crowded with gods and demons and spirits,’ he muttered to himself. ‘The Blackwood truly must be the quietest place on Ede.’
He climbed over the low wall, now mostly fallen into rubble, and walked under the low roof of the temple. It was good to get into the shade for a little while, and besides which, he wasn’t going anywhere until the cloud cover was back.
Inside was a small broken altar, stained and crusted with thick yellow moss, and the floor was broken by crowds of thick thorny bushes. There were fat purple berries on the bushes, some so ripe they had burst onto the floor, and the stones were littered with pips where small animals had feasted.
Frith picked a handful of the berries. They looked very similar to those that grew on a bush in the Blackwood – spinster berries, they were called – and the old cook at Blackwood Keep had been especially fond of making pies from them. Of course, he was half a world away from Litvania now, and there was something off-putting about berries that had grown in the dark.
He popped one in his mouth and chewed cautiously. The fruit burst open, so sweet it was almost sickly. Cook, he remembered, had tempered the sweetness with salt and lemons. He smiled slightly at the memory, and picked a handful, placing the fruits into a corner of his shirt. When he had a decent amount he went back out to the crumbling wall and sat on it, intending to sit there and eat berries until the clouds came back. It was possible the berries were poisonous, of course. It was equally possible he would find nothing else to eat and starve to death out here, hopelessly searching for Wydrin. He ate another berry, and spat out the pip. They certainly tasted like spinster berries.
Thinking of the cook’s pies made him think of his mother. She had died when he was very young, and the thought summoned an image of her bedroom door, open just a crack. Through it he could see the thick gauze curtains that covered her bed, and the suffocating fog of incense. The healer, a tall thin man dressed in black, stood at the back of the room like a shadow. Frith remembered how he had hated the man, with his long pale hands and the silk kerchief he wore over his mouth. Even when his mother had seemed to be getting better, the healer’s eyes were always sad.
He turned from that memory to a happier one. His mother had been inordinately fond of spinster-berry pies, and whenever the cook was making one she would come and find him. They would sneak together into the kitchen, and steal samples of things as the cook prepared them. Now, of course, Frith realised that Cook must have been aware of their game, but his mother had always let it feel like they were being cheeky, just for the sheer delight of it. It had made the pies taste all the sweeter.
Half lost in his thoughts, Frith glanced down to the wall next to him and was alarmed to see one of the green lizard creatures from earlier perched on the rocks next to him. He was just wondering if it truly was one of them, if it had tracked him all the way from the hollow tree, when its long narrow snout shot out and it sank its teeth into his hand.
Frith leapt up, yelping with pain and simultaneously throwing the lizard off. It shot away into the shadows of the broken temple.
‘You little bastard!’ Frith took a deep breath, glaring first at the dark space where the lizard had vanished, and then at his wounded hand. There was a neat V-shape of puncture wounds, both on the fleshy pad of his palm and across the bony ridges on the back of his hand. They were oozing blood freely, and already the skin around the marks was red and inflamed.
‘I need to wash this,’ he said out loud. He looked around. A hole in the ground nearby had caught water from one of the recent storms. He stumbled over to it and plunged his hand in, wincing as the bite marks burned. When he lifted it back out, he had to pick away a dead leaf from between his fingers. The bite marks were still livid, and, if anything, his hand was turning redder. He looked back up to the sky: finally, there were clouds, but they were far to the north. They would be slow in coming.
‘Well, there was no poison in the berries,’ he said, scowling at the clouds. ‘No poison in the berries at all.’
26
‘The entire city, sunk under the sea?’
Wydrin nodded, looking up at the ceiling. She was lying on her back now, still bound up in spider silk. The Spinner had placed her carefully there while she was talking, and now he moved back and forth out of the corner of her eye, rearranging the blankets and furs. It was difficult to see much of the creature, in the gloom and bound as she was, but she caught glimpses of long black legs and a shining white carapace. It was not reassuring.
‘Under the sea, but Res’ni had sealed it over, so I assume that the people of Temerayne slowly starved to death. By the time we were there, no one was in much of a state to answer questions.’
‘Res’n
i, always so wilful,’ said the Spinner. Just out of sight, his arms were working busily. ‘Such a temper. The opposite of her brother in every way. Yes.’
Talking about the gods and the Black Feather Three’s recent adventures seemed to have calmed the Spinner down; the fraught tone had eased from his strange, discordant voice. Wydrin was glad, although she was starting to wonder what would happen when she ran out of things to tell him.
‘You knew Res’ni well, did you?’ It seemed ludicrous to her, but then the last few years had taught her that life was always waiting to drop some new nonsense on her head.
‘I know them all, at the beginning.’ The Spinner scuttled over, suspending his great fat body above her. He still held up the small mask, a serene moon hanging in the dark. ‘I deliver them from the Eye, while it is in flux.’ The giant spider shivered all over. ‘As it must be now, the Eye is open and I am not there, I am trapped here by the ignorant—’
‘Well, Frith had a good idea where the sword was, you see,’ Wydrin said loudly. The Spinner stopped shivering, and the mask dipped once, as if in gratitude. ‘He had seen the fate of the sword in Joah Demonsworn’s memories. We headed across the city, skeletons and dust everywhere you looked. By that time there were things watching us, sea monsters gathering in that mockery of a sky. Frith led us to the tomb where Joah Demonsworn had his final confrontation with Xinian the Battleborn – she was brilliant, by the way, I’ll tell you more about her later – and her lover Selsye. We also found Selsye’s staff in the tomb, dropped when Joah killed her. She was one of the greatest Edeian crafters of the golden age of the mages.’ Wydrin shrugged. ‘Or that’s what Frith tells me. Her staff turned out to be bloody useful – over a thousand years old and Frith managed to get it working. Anyway, I snatched up the god-blade, eager to be out of there, but of course it was a trap, and—’
