The Bitter Twins

by Jen Williams

  ‘What do you want, Hest?’

  She turned away from him to look at Bern. ‘How are you, human? How are you dealing with this gift?’

  Bern was standing next to Sharrik, the arm with the crystal embedded in it hanging awkwardly at his side. Like Hestillion, he was gaunt, and his eyes were deeply shadowed.

  ‘Can’t you tell?’ he asked gruffly. ‘I can feel you on the other end of this thing, another piece of grit in . . . whatever this is.’ He paused. ‘I have a constant headache, and I feel like I’m falling all the time. I’ve been sick a few times.’ Next to him, Sharrik shook himself all over. ‘We don’t belong in that, you and me. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘There is strength in it,’ she said, although to Aldasair she sounded sick too. ‘If you had any sense, human, you’d grasp that and make of it what you can. That’s what I’ve had to do.’ She drew herself up to her full height. ‘Think about it, if you can. It will be important.’

  ‘By the stones, I’ve no time for riddles.’

  She looked up at the ceiling, and Aldasair thought she was being dramatically exasperated, until he noticed her scanning the black ooze that flowed above them.

  ‘Never mind. Aldasair, when we fought, you moved to destroy the crystal that was half buried in the ground. What do you know about them?’

  ‘Why should I tell you that?’

  Hestillion sighed, a familiar expression of impatience.

  ‘Would you prefer the queen asked you? Or she instructed her creatures to ask you, over and over? Or perhaps I could rip the information from your human’s mind.’

  ‘Bern doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘I could enjoy myself finding out, though, I am sure. Just tell me, little cousin.’

  Jessen was sitting up, her stance tense. Aldasair could feel her anger, simmering under the surface.

  ‘The scholar Lady Vincenza de Grazon discovered one of these giant crystals within the heart of some Behemoth wreckage, and she is very certain that they are important to the worm people. The Jure’lia.’ He glanced at the black ceiling, but there were no eyes watching. ‘I saw the queen heading towards it and if it’s important to them, then it must be destroyed.’

  To his surprise, Hestillion smiled. The smile looked strange on her newly angular face, but something about it hurt his heart a little; it was like glancing up and briefly seeing her as she had been, a little girl with yellow silk slippers.

  ‘Listen to you, Aldasair. You speak like a warrior now. I would never have imagined such a future for you.’ She laughed. ‘But I could say that about any of us, I suppose.’

  ‘Hestillion – Hest – it’s not too late. You can come back, your brother loves you—’

  She held up a hand, cutting him off. ‘Listen to me. The crystals link them all together, each Behemoth to the next. When Tree-father killed them at the end of the Eighth Rain, that link was broken. Now, the queen must renew that connection, with each ship. Do you understand me?’

  ‘That is why she sought out the crystal at the Broken Field.’ Aldasair nodded. ‘Vintage is a very clever woman.’

  ‘Why are you telling us this?’ asked Bern. He looked as serious as Aldasair had ever seen him. ‘You’ve already picked your side.’

  Hestillion ignored him. ‘It is the queen’s highest priority. Until she has done this, she is weak. They are weak, or at least, weaker. The Behemoths can be heavily damaged, they can be in rusted pieces, but if she can make contact with her crystals, then it can be salvaged. This is what I have learned while I am here.’ She paused, fiddling with the fur trim on her tunic. ‘There is a Behemoth nearby, and without its queen it is bumbling and confused. She is heading towards it now, to bring it back to the fold. This little project,’ she touched the shard of blue crystal at her heart, and then gestured to Bern, ‘will be on hold for a while.’

  ‘Well,’ Bern raised his eyebrows and shrugged, ‘that’s . . . nice?’

  ‘Listen to me, human,’ she rounded on him as if suddenly angry, ‘you need to think about this connection, and what it means for you. How it could make you strong. Do you hear me? And be ready.’

  Her last words she delivered in a barely audible hiss, and then she stepped out through the opening, which closed up smoothly behind her.

  ‘What do you imagine that was all about?’

  Bern took a big breath and let it out slowly. He shrugged. ‘Buggered if I know.’

  Tormalin woke and sat up, wincing at the stiffness in his face and arm. He wouldn’t have believed it possible to sleep after everything he’d been told, but he had, curled on the floor of the strange room Eeskar had left him in. He had even dreamed of Noon, wandering the Shroom Flats alone as he and Vintage had found her, except that in this dream she had been wearing elaborate Eboran armour: silver and shining like the moon, with a violet cape. Her eyes had burned green, and he had been afraid of her. Even so, he’d needed desperately to talk to her, and had been dragging himself through thick black mud to reach the stretch of Wild where she stood. In the way of dreams, he’d had the sense that time was very short for the both of them, but when he’d called her name the flames had escaped her eyes and enveloped her head, giving her a crown of emerald fire. He briefly considered the idea that Arnia had been inside his head, manipulating things, but he had had no sense of her there at all, and why would she give him a dream about Noon? Hestillion was skilled enough to craft such a thing, certainly but . . . He shook his head. He did not want to think about Hestillion.

  ‘You are awake.’

  Eeskar shivered into existence before him. Tor stayed where he was, watching the strange man carefully.

  ‘What do you call yourselves?’ he asked. ‘I don’t even know that, and you are not Eboran.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that is true. Ebora is your very own name and place.’ Eeskar seemed pleased by the question. ‘Our true name would not make much sense to you, so you can call us Aborans. It is what we said to the previous visitor.’

  ‘And who was that?’ Tor paused. ‘It was Micanal, wasn’t it? He found you. He came looking for the origins of Ygseril after all, and that’s what you are.’

  ‘I do not recall what he called himself, but yes. He was not pleased by what he found here. For some reason he found it belittling. Distressing in a way I could not quite fathom.’

  ‘The idea that we, that our entire storied history, is a mistaken experiment by people with no connection or love for us? Yes, I’m sure that was as welcome as a turd in his porridge.’ Tor shook his head. ‘Do you even understand what it means, what you’ve told me? We were random. The random result of humans drinking sap, and being changed by it.’

  ‘It was a very long time ago,’ said Eeskar, in a tone which Tor suspected he thought was reassuring. ‘Thousands and thousands of your years. Your history is still ancient, and valuable.’

  Tor laughed, although he felt a terrible tightness in his throat. ‘You don’t understand. We have . . . the things that we have done to humans, in the belief that we were better than them, when in truth we are the same. We are just like the Wild, a thing changed and corrupted by outside influences. No wonder Micanal was upset by the things he found out. No wonder he and Arnia never came back to Ebora. What would be the point? It was all a lie anyway. And the humans . . .’ He thought of Noon, her untidy hair and her dark eyes. ‘If they knew that their mythical heroes were nothing but a failed experiment . . . What would we be to them, then? At least Vintage will be pleased, I suppose. She loves this sort of thing – all these new questions for her to ponder.’ He paused, thinking of Kirune and his frantic escape from the salt monsters. ‘What of our war-beasts? Are they part of your experiment too?’

  ‘Ah, the other spoke of these also. They do not occur with every seed, nor do they take the precise form you have witnessed – like you, Tormalin, they are a unique result of seed and world together.’

  ‘Unique,’ said Tor, not able to keep the bitterness from his voice.

  ‘I understand t
hat it is a difficult concept. Perhaps if I showed you some of the other beings that have received our influence, it would make more sense to you?’

  Tor looked up at the man, taking in his multiple arms, his strange deer-eyes and narrow frame. ‘Why are you still here? You’ve sent out your, seed, or whatever you want to call it, and you have wrought your changes upon Sarn. What’s the plan now? Why are you all still sitting here, alone on this island? Don’t you have other places you want to manipulate?’

  Eeskar’s bright manner evaporated. ‘That is a less pleasing story.’

  ‘Even so, I would like to hear it.’

  ‘Very well.’ Eeskar sighed, and abruptly seemed much less alien. ‘Follow me.’

  Just as before, the wall split open to emit them, and Tor followed the man down a narrow corridor towards a set of spirals steps leading up. It was darker here, and smelled musty, as though no one had been through there in a very long time. Eventually, though, a soft kind of light began to bleed through the walls until they emerged into a space with a domed roof. The covering was thin and white, and the sun was a bright, almost suffocating presence. On the floor, there were many long indentations, filled with what looked like soft white powder. Eeskar nodded to the nearest one, and Tor bent to examine it. There were larger chunks in there, which crumbled apart when he prodded them with a finger.

  ‘This is where we are now,’ said Eeskar. He cocked his head to one side, as if contemplating some impossible problem. ‘We died a very long time ago, Tormalin the Oathless, and we put our bodies here so that we might still feel the sun on our bones.’

  Tor looked up sharply and wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘What are you talking about? I’m talking to you now, aren’t I?’

  ‘Child, I understand that this will be difficult for you to comprehend.’ Eeskar smiled fondly, and Tor considered punching him in the middle of his strange bulbous eyes, until he remembered that he couldn’t. ‘I am a memory, an echo. When I spoke to your brethren, he told me of an ability your people possess called dream-walking. This was very interesting to me, as I believe it to be a perversion of our own abilities. We were able to leave the essence of ourselves behind, without physical bodies. We are confined by the physical limits of our home, but we are still able to think, to ponder. Many preferred that to oblivion.’

  ‘The faces in the mirrors?’

  ‘All dead, but still here, in a sense.’

  ‘Then why did you die? Why didn’t you just leave?’ He looked around at the graves; there was no scent of decomposition, not even the whiff of old bones. They had clearly been dead a very long time. ‘Was it a disease?’

  ‘What? No. It was simply old age. Like you, we are very long-lived, but . . . we were not meant to stay here.’ The image that was Eeskar shivered and flickered. ‘The truth is, we did not come here alone – we could not have come here at all, or anywhere, in fact, without the partnership of another being from our home. She was a spirit of great energy and vitality. Through her, the Seed Carrier made its impossibly long journeys, over periods of time I doubt you could even comprehend. But then, here, in this place, she left us. And without her, we could not leave. We could not even move the Seed Carrier elsewhere.’

  Tor dipped his toe into one of the graves, coating the end of his boot in a fine white dust. He wondered what Hestillion would make of all this: that Ygseril was an experiment, and they were the results. Not revered, not special or god-touched – just a mildly interesting side effect.

  ‘A spirit?’ He tried to picture it, but could only think of the parasite spirits, with their amorphous transparent bodies. ‘Where did it go?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. She did not come back – that is what matters.’

  ‘So you were left here. And you all died?’

  Eeskar dipped his long head. ‘This world is not friendly to us, although in the early days we tried.’ His face creased, an Aboran version of a grimace. ‘Those were some terrible deaths. So, in the end, we came to accept that we had come to the end of our journey, thanks to the betrayal of our old friend. But,’ he brightened, and touching the wall, produced a new cube made of glass. Images began to flicker across it. ‘We did so much, in our time. Made so many changes. Do you see?’

  Tor looked at the glass, and felt his stomach turn over. Moving across the surface he saw people who were not his people; tall beings with multiple limbs, or many eyes, or tails and wings. Many were a similar dusty white to the Aborans, but a great number were of all different colours and hues, with patterned skins or fur or scales. They ran through forests he barely recognised as such, or lounged on thrones of crystal in rooms taller than Ygseril. He saw buildings of steel and glass, skies of all colours, including one that seemed to contain a permanent orange storm. He saw beings moving through the night sky as easily as swimming in a lake, their bodies encased in strange bulky clothing, and people like giants, reaching down to grassy valleys to scoop up animals, eating them whole. He saw men and women who almost appeared Eboran, their eyes crimson and their bodies tall and strong, yet they each had bony protrusions from their foreheads, like the horns of a ram.

  It was beautiful, and strange, and frightening. It was too much. He turned away.

  ‘You do see,’ said Eeskar, quietly. ‘You understand, I think, why we have done this. Perhaps you will cope better than our first visitor.’

  ‘I don’t understand it at all,’ said Tor, not caring how Eeskar recoiled from his harsh tone. ‘But maybe I don’t care as much as Micanal did. I—’

  The room seemed to thrum. Tor put it down to the heat, or the strangeness of everything he’d heard, but when he glanced down at the graves, the powdery remains were crumbling and shifting, and the bulkier pieces fell about into smaller chunks. A pulse of green light travelled up through the walls.

  ‘No,’ Eeskar’s eyes were bulging so much that Tor thought they might fall out of his head. ‘No! What is this?’

  From somewhere nearby came the crumping roar of an explosion. Although they felt nothing but the soft vibrating hum, Eeskar staggered as though he had suffered a physical blow.

  ‘It can’t be!’

  ‘What are you talking about? What’s happening?’

  Eeskar did not answer but instead blinked out of existence. Tor stared at the space where he’d been for a moment, and then ran down the spiral stairs. When he was back in the corridor he caught sight of Eeskar again, and at the far end of the passage he could see more green light, and a pair of figures emerging from it.

  ‘Noon!’

  The young fell-witch looked annoyed, her cheeks flushed with colour and each fist wreathed in billowing winnowfire. Kirune came on beside her, his head bent away from the flames.

  ‘Tor! Are you all right? What is this bloody place? Who is this bastard?’

  Tor grinned despite himself, his heart inexplicably lighter at the sight of her scowling face.

  ‘I have no chance of explaining it to you without, I don’t know, diagrams or something, but Eeskar here . . .’

  ‘YOU!’

  Eeskar, he belatedly realised, was quivering with rage. As he came alongside the Aboran, he saw that stiff fans of flesh were rising from the back of his head – they appeared to be lined with bone and attached with thin strips of skin, like the wings of a bat. It gave him a strangely reptilian appearance. ‘It cannot be you! After all this time, when all of us are already dead . . .’ Eeskar howled with anguish, a noise of such complete despair that Tor felt his skin go cold. ‘You come back NOW?’

  Noon looked nonplussed. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve come for our friend. According to Kirune, your monsters attacked him and took him away. You can give him back now, or I can burn you all to soot. It’s up to you.’

  ‘Noon, it’s fine. I was attacked, but it’s a long story, and . . . let’s just go. Eeskar isn’t even really here, he can’t do anything.’

  Eeskar reached out and touched the wall. ‘We can’t have much, but perhaps we can have ve
ngeance.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  The walls pulled up like curtains, and beyond them were scores of the long-necked white beasts, their sharp mouths bared to show endless jagged teeth. They swarmed forward, making an odd chittering noise, so loud that Tor almost missed Eeskar’s final words to him.

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand, child, but when you are faced with the extinction of all you know, a little petty revenge becomes an attractive option.’

  And then he flickered out of existence again. Tor ran towards Noon and Kirune, who were looking around at the approaching monsters with twin expressions of confusion.

  ‘So, he wasn’t real, but these ugly bastards are.’ Seized with impulsiveness, he leaned down and kissed Noon forcefully on the cheek. ‘I am very glad to see you both. Did you bring my sword?’

  ‘There wasn’t time.’ Noon shot him a look, although whether she was annoyed about the kiss he couldn’t tell. ‘Get behind me, both of you. I’m not in the mood to be subtle.’

  Hoards of the white monsters were approaching, their heads weaving on the ends of their necks like particularly ugly snakes. Tor did as Noon said, although as he passed she reached out and touched his neck, taking his life energy as she had on the day they had first met. He felt his strength dim, like a candle tattered by the wind, but rather than the outrage and fear he had felt then, a sense of rightness filled his chest instead.

  She is the weapon. It was Kirune, briefly forming a connection that was dazzling in its completeness. The snake is right about that, at least.

  Noon raised her arms, and an ocean of fire flowed from her chest. The monsters with the misfortune to be in the front line of their attack went up like things made of paper and sawdust, their pitiful screams almost instantly silenced. The others, still alive but burning, burning, turned to run. Quickly, Noon’s pure green flame turned an oily yellow as the creatures fell before it. Many more were melting back into the walls, sinking into the smooth green surface as Tor had when they had captured him.