The Company of Glass

by Tricia Sullivan

  ‘Who knows?’ Lerien said. ‘Who knows where they came from or how long they lived in this high valley, isolated from all others? Perhaps they sought out this land hoping the Sekk would not find them here. Perhaps they didn’t fight among themselves because they had a greater enemy in the Sekk, who might have been hunting them down the long years. No one knows where the Sekk come from or what their purpose is, but they must have moved among the Everiens like a legion of ghosts. Perhaps the Everiens fled such a hunter.’

  ‘And now it is hunting us,’ Taro said, shuddering.

  ‘The Sekk should hunt the Pharicians!’ Ketar exclaimed. ‘They conquer every people they meet. It is time someone checked their advance.’

  ‘And we have not succeeded in destroying the Sekk with swords,’ Lerien went on as if Ketar hadn’t spoken. ‘They use our weapons against us, and hurl fell beasts at us. The only refuge for us has lain in the Knowledge, for it shelters us in Jai Khalar and the Fire Houses where the Sekk will not come. For they hate and fear the Knowledge.’

  ‘Or crave it,’ said Tarquin. ‘Do not be so sure of your own rhetoric, which has never been tested.’

  Kivi had been growing increasingly fidgety during the discussion. ‘The Sekk are the very embodiment of all that is evil,’ he burst out. ‘By their association with monsters we would have reason enough to hate them, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? What can they possibly gain by using men as tools for killing? That Sekk back there, it destroyed the minds of Dario’s kinsmen; they in turn destroyed their families, and by now they will have probably suicided, unless they’ve found another village to prey on. And for what? The Sekk disappears again and it hasn’t stolen gold, or horses, or women. Why? Tarquin, why?’

  Tarquin said nothing. After a while Jakse pulled out a flask and offered it to Kivi, who shook his head, stood up, and walked away. The others began talking quietly of the weather.

  Lerien was stirring the embers of the fire with a stick, pretending not to watch Tarquin. ‘Would you go back to Jai Pendu,’ the king asked softly, ‘after what you saw today?’

  Tarquin felt the weight of unexpressed emotions dragging at the muscles of his face. ‘No.’

  ‘And you will not say what happened there? Even to Istar, you would not say?’

  ‘Even to Ysse I would not say.’

  ‘Ysse is dead.’

  ‘I know,’ Tarquin said, looking her successor in the eye. ‘Every day I regret it.’

  Anger filled Lerien’s face, but he didn’t remonstrate. Suddenly unable to contain himself, Tarquin rose and left the fire. He crossed the open hillside and wandered through a band of trees until he had emerged into the field beyond. The shadows were long, but night refused to come. A wind crept through the field from the south. No crop was growing, nor had done for some time, as was evidenced by a birch sapling springing crookedly from the grass in the centre of the open space. Tarquin found himself walking slowly towards it. He had become too accustomed to being alone, if he could no longer sit at a fire and be civil to a man who was no enemy of his. Yet he was deeply troubled by this talk of a man who might have been a Sekk, or might have been Enslaved by a Sekk while somehow remaining in possession of his wits. It didn’t ring true. He began to wish he’d questioned Dario further.

  He reached the sapling and stopped, extending a hand absently to touch its leaves.

  And something happened.

  He was somewhere else, lying on the edge of sleep in surroundings he didn’t quite perceive. A woman leaned over him in the half light, her russet hair flooding over her shoulders, her breasts soft and heavy, aureoles dark with motherhood. The curve of her lips was familiar. He experienced a rush of relief; it was the inverse of what usually happened to him on waking, when for a moment of blissful forgetfulness he came to awareness thinking everything was all right, only to remember that nothing would ever be all right as long as his lost men weighed on his conscience. Yet the feeling, now, in the presence of this woman he knew and did not know, was one of wholly unexpected joy. He stretched towards it like a plant towards sun – and it all disappeared.

  ‘Tarquin.’ It was the voice of Kivi who, Tarquin gradually realized, had been saying his name repeatedly for some time. ‘Do you hear me now?’

  ‘What is it?’ He sat up, his hand going reflexively to his sword. The birch sapling cut the sky into sections above his head. ‘What happened?’

  Kivi backed away quickly. ‘Put the sword down. Tarquin! Put the sword down. You’re acting like a Slave.’

  Tarquin lurched to his feet, sword still out. ‘Don’t be a fool! What are you doing, sneaking up on me?’

  ‘I went for a walk to clear my mind,’ Kivi said. ‘I didn’t wish to speak with anyone, so when I saw you coming I crouched in the grass. You came here and stood for a long time. Then suddenly you fell over. When I called, you didn’t answer me. I thought you might have been taken. After the village today—’

  ‘Yes, I know. You’re a bundle of nerves, aren’t you, Kivi?’ He put the sword away. ‘Well, leave me now. I am fine. I was meditating.’

  The Seer hesitated.

  ‘If I had been taken,’ Tarquin roared in the tone of a sergeant to a raw boy, ‘I would have had you too, lurking around calling my name as if you’re looking for a lost puppy. Where are your weapons? If I’m a Slave, you’re dead already.’

  ‘I simply—’

  ‘Go! I want to be alone.’

  He watched the Seer pick his way back across the field; by then, he had realized he was shouting because he was frightened, and wondered if Kivi knew it, too. The episode made him think of the Sekk themselves, in that it had been comforting, almost seductive … What was happening to him?

  He stepped away from the imprint his own body had made in the grass and began to swear at himself in every Clan dialect he knew.

  The H’ah’vah

  In the interests of stealth, Kassien and Istar had chosen a route that led over the mountains and ultimately emerged above the sea plateau, which was a flat plain stretching all the way to the cliffs that marked the edge of the continent. The Floating Lands were arrayed on the water beyond, far below their current position and as yet blocked by the jagged white teeth of the eastern spur of the Everien Range.

  Kassien was in his element, passing out ropes and hooks and pulleys that the others knew how to use only dimly, if at all. Pallo made a lasso of his assigned rope and managed to capture a large boulder before being called to task by Istar.

  Kassien squinted into the glare that was coming from the clouded sky and pointed to the first goal of their ascent, a ledge some twenty man-lengths above. It did not look too difficult, but when they approached the base of the climb through a field of boulders, they found a symmetrical black opening in the stone. The edges of the aperture were smooth and rounded as though water had run over them for hundreds of years.

  ‘This tunnel must be ancient,’ Kassien said. ‘It’s been dug by Li’ah’vah, most likely; it’s too big to be a H’ah’vah tunnel.’

  ‘Li’ah’vah are extinct,’ Xiriel observed. ‘Maybe we could use the tunnel to pass underneath this mountain instead of climbing over.’

  ‘It’s a thought,’ Istar agreed, glancing at Kassien for his reaction.

  Xiriel added, ‘There used to be lots of H’ah’vah in the hills where my Clan live, and if you know the tunnels, you can take all kinds of shortcuts.’

  Kassien didn’t say anything. Istar reckoned he would be disappointed if he didn’t get to use his ropes and grappling equipment. He walked a little ahead of the others, climbing until he stood in the mouth of the tunnel. It was pitch black, but as he turned to report, the sun came through the clouds and lit the outline of his figure. Istar’s breath caught in her throat. For a second she forgot who Kassien was or what was happening, and it seemed to her that she looked on a Clan warrior from legend. Kassien was now wearing none of the regalia of Ajiko’s army but rather a bearskin cloak and a dark red tunic over leather trousers and
long furred boots. The colour of his clothes and hair were heated by the sun, and his drawn blade flared.

  He gave her a puzzled glance and she grimaced, caught staring. Then she realized that he was listening. She tried to tune in to what he was hearing, but Xiriel was giving Pallo a little lecture about H’ah’vah.

  ‘The more it digs, the bigger the H’ah’vah gets. They start off as thin slips of creatures that carve razor-thin passages, but the more they carve the larger they grow, until they are huge and can cut great tunnels. There is a legend in the Snake Clan about a chieftain who kept one as a pet and got it to dig him an entire palace underground.’

  ‘Would they dig you a bathing pool?’ asked Pallo.

  Istar heard it now. The sound was pitched so low that her teeth felt it more than her ears. She saw Kassien’s legs flex and he began to creep to his left, away from the opening of the tunnel.

  But the sound did not come from Kassien’s direction. It came from below them, along the slope they had just climbed. The ground shuddered. Pallo gave a sudden squawk and was silent. No one moved. Istar’s guts clenched.

  Fifty feet below them the rock exploded into powder, revealing a black, shining snakelike body that rippled as it rose above the surface of the ground like a whale breaching. A cone-shaped head on a flexible stalk flowed up and roved to and fro, its white eyes devoid of pupils and glistening with mucus. If it were possible, Istar would have said that the creature’s body was made of metal, for it had that sort of sheen; yet when it moved the H’ah’vah was supple as water. The whole affair was the size of a cottage.

  The eyes fixed on them and the mouth opened slow and deliberate as a drawbridge. The teeth were clear and its throat was full of light. It began to plough towards them, disintegrating the rock where it passed.

  ‘I thought you said the big ones were extinct!’ Pallo shouted at Xiriel, and started running.

  ‘Shut up,’ Xiriel answered. ‘Just shut up. You little Pharician nosebleed.’

  Kassien waved them into the old tunnel, where they stumbled into darkness with the pursuing crunch and shake of rock in their ears. Istar was just getting around to thinking that running from a H’ah’vah inside one of its own tunnels had to be the most categorically stupid idea Kassien had ever had when light greeted them ahead and they emerged into a bowl-shaped formation in the mountain. The noise of the H’ah’vah had subsided, but they had only moved deeper into its territory: more tunnels were visible among the rubble of displaced rock. Kassien burst out of the tunnel last and herded them up one side of the crater.

  ‘It can be very difficult to lose them once they’ve scented you,’ said Kassien. He leaped upon a pile of boulders and shaded his eyes, surveying the area where the H’ah’vah had last appeared.

  ‘How can they smell you through the rock?’ Pallo whispered.

  Istar didn’t know so she didn’t answer. The sight of the sinuous black body had excited her and filled her with awe. There was no way a human opponent could ever arouse this kind of emotion in her. The H’ah’vah was too big, too alien, to be treated as a mere enemy. It was a manifestation of all that was strange and unknowable in the world.

  Yet to fight it you had to try to understand it. Istar could feel herself recoiling from that realization, and she knew this was exactly the means by which most Sekk monsters made their kills. A cocktail of fear and paralysis and ignorance stopped people from fighting intelligently. Istar struggled to quell these feelings in herself.

  Kassien said, ‘We must be near its home tunnel.’

  ‘Let’s get higher up, where there’s more light,’ Istar responded, for the bowl was surrounded by high walls and much of it lay in shadow.

  Kassien nodded in agreement. ‘H’ah’vah dislike sunlight. In fact, it’s unusual to encounter them by day, especially in summer.’

  ‘What of the Sekk?’ Xiriel said. ‘Are H’ah’vah not familiars to Sekk Masters?’

  ‘One problem at a time,’ Istar told him, noticing that Pallo was looking ill. He needed something to do. ‘Hurry up, Pallo. After Kassien. And get ready to shoot. I don’t want that thing near me – better if you kill it from a distance.’

  Pallo swallowed and nocked an arrow. Kassien led them up the side of the bowl and over a shoulder of rock. They found themselves in a fold of land climbing a transverse line between cliffs, bare of vegetation beyond a few wizened, dead trees that stuck out of cracks like claws.

  ‘This way doesn’t look too good,’ Kassien gasped, turning back towards the others. ‘But I’m afraid we’re stuck with it. That face down there is too difficult and we can’t go back the way we came without risking meeting the H’ah’vah. So let’s get up as quick as we can.’

  Xiriel said something under his breath about what good was it having maps if you weren’t going to stay within their borders? but he set off after Kassien at a good pace. His long limbs and lean body made the climbing easy for him; Istar was jealous. Her pack was heavy with medical equipment and several days’ food, and she took two strides to every one of Xiriel’s. By the time they reached the top of the scree field she was breathing hard and spitting. When she had a firm foothold she looked back.

  ‘No sign,’ said Kassien, and consulted the map.

  The others shifted their weight and swigged water, mopped their brows. Flakes of rock stood upright all around them like ornamental trees, wrested from the crack by what force Istar couldn’t guess.

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ Pallo complained.

  Istar checked Kassien’s expression and saw that he was in doubt about having led them up here. The fold had channelled them into a narrow space where sheer buttresses walled them in and the only way ahead was now through this forest of upturned stone. She was beginning to think they would have been better off fighting the H’ah’vah where they first stood, rather than wearing themselves out trying to elude a creature that Kassien himself had admitted was almost impossible to escape if it decided it wanted you. It could appear without warning from almost anywhere. And there was no shelter nearby if someone got hurt; no view of the rest of the mountain; no knowledge of where they would end up if they kept climbing. All this flashed through her head in a second or two.

  ‘There’s no point going back now,’ she said. ‘Let’s get through this next part and hope that H’ah’vah has lost interest in us.’

  She hadn’t much hope in this; she only knew that they mustn’t start second-guessing themselves, or they’d be wandering in circles.

  They picked their way through a desolation of huge stone blades and columns, many stained with bird droppings – although where the birds could be now was anybody’s guess, so silent and still was the air. Pallo was chewing a lock of his own hair and squeezing the grip of his bow compulsively, and every so often he jumped for no reason. Xiriel kept his head down and glided behind the others, most likely enjoying a good think. Kassien led, glancing around occasionally as if he expected the H’ah’vah to break out of the ground at any second. The stones cast spindly shadows, and it was easy for the eye to believe that it caught a metallic glint from within the darkness, the coiled form of the H’ah’vah preparing to attack.

  At last the rocks to either side opened up to form a bowl, at the bottom of which was a jagged rift where the mountain had been split, its parts uprooted and turned on their sides, forming a sharp spine and a dark cleft below it.

  ‘Has the H’ah’vah eaten all the birds?’ Pallo asked. ‘It’s so still here.’

  ‘I think this must be its home,’ Kassien said. ‘If we were bold, we would look for eggs.’

  ‘We aren’t bold,’ Istar said. ‘We want to live. What’s that opening at the far end of the cutting?’

  ‘It’s symmetrical. Probably one of its main access tunnels. Maybe we can use it to cross over out of this gap in the mountains.’ Xiriel’s eyes were turned slightly skyward, an expression they all recognized as the one he used when recalling sight of maps and texts.

  ‘Maybe it could get us eat
en,’ Pallo added.

  ‘Look,’ Kassien reassured. ‘The H’ah’vah could be right beneath us where we stand now.’

  Pallo jumped to one side and then apologized. Kassien ignored him.

  ‘It can cut through stone to get us anywhere it wants to, so no matter what we do, we aren’t safe. We might as well see if we can use its tunnel to get us across this ridge.’

  ‘All right,’ Pallo sighed. ‘But all this darkness can’t be good for the complexion.’

  ‘Istar, shut up your idiot-boy before I make his complexion black and blue,’ Kassien said with a mock snarl.

  They used Xiriel’s Knowledge-light, which was weak but sufficient, as the tunnel was smooth if not level or straight. It took a wormlike course through the rock, sometimes following some mineral vein in a straight line for a while before suddenly plunging. Sometimes it rose so steeply it was all but impossible to climb, but on the whole the tunnel seemed to lead down. This worried Istar; it gave her the feeling of being trapped far away from light and air. She went from worried to scared when the vibrations started to build.

  ‘It’s digging,’ Kassien said. ‘Not too close yet, but we’d better hurry. It may have forgotten about us, and then again it may not.’

  ‘It may be playing with us,’ Xiriel observed ominously. ‘They are like cats that way, are they not?’

  ‘Shh!’ Istar said, punching his arm. ‘I don’t need to hear forecasts of doom.’

  The vibrations grew louder. They moved as quickly as they could, now down a long slope; Xiriel’s Knowledge-light flickered and bobbed like a firefly, barely showing enough of the way to prevent them from running into a wall.

  Pieces of loose stone began to flake off the ceiling. The H’ah’vah was getting closer.

  Ahead, the tunnel turned a right angle into a grey suggestion of light. It became straight and smooth – almost as if it had been carved by people and not the monster that pursued them, making the mountain pulse. As they ran skidding and slipping along the main passage towards the light that was their only hope, Pallo suddenly turned to fire an arrow at the H’ah’vah.