9
Well, yes, I did ask him about the blood, Marin, but just like Ebora itself and any family he might have there, it is a subject he is very reluctant to discuss. I know that he partakes of it in small doses, and carries small vials around with him in case it is required. When is it required, I hear you ask? Well.
From what I have observed, small amounts of blood act like a kind of pick-me-up. You remember that thick black drink from Reidn you were briefly obsessed with, the one that smelled like burning dog hair and made it impossible for you to sleep? I believe that very minor doses act almost like that on the Eboran system. Over time, the doses stop them aging like we do, and I have seen it written that large amounts can start to heal an injury, although, thankfully, I have not had to witness such. Tormalin is no creature of blood-thirst, ripping open throats and drinking his fill as the Eborans did in those woodcuts from that ancient book in the library – but he takes his doses steadily enough. More often than it is ‘required’, no doubt.
Will he catch the crimson flux? I do not know, my dear. From everything I’ve read, and everything I’ve gleaned from Tor’s tiny hints, I believe the onset of the disease is unpredictable – Eborans who sipped the occasional cup came down with it swiftly and died swifter, and those who drank lakes of the stuff are still living out their days in the city beyond the Bloodless Mountains, waiting for it to catch up with them. Only the handful who never touched a drop seem guaranteed to survive it, but they instead are taken by old age, and more prosaic illnesses. But for my sake, let’s hope he has escaped it – having an Eboran bodyguard has done wonders for my reputation.
Extract from the private letters of Master Marin de Grazon, from Lady Vincenza ‘Vintage’ de Grazon
Vintage peered at the fibrous stalk. She had thought that it was just the shadows in this strange place, but no, it was there – a smear of something thick and glutinous and largely transparent ran across the length of the stalk and then the next one too, as though each of the towering toadstools had been brushed by something as it passed. Small white nodules, like blisters, clustered where the substance was thickest. She took her smallest scalpel and very carefully scraped away some of the affected tissue, pushing the flakes into the glass pot she had waiting. When she attempted to capture one of the nodules, it cracked open and a thin, pinkish fluid ran from it, smelling of old cheese. She wrinkled her nose.
‘How charming,’ said Tormalin. He was standing to one side, leaning against the towering stalk and watching her progress with a beautifully bored expression. ‘I, for one, am more than glad to spend my time watching you root around in the mud.’
‘Darling, will you kindly get out of what little light I have? Take your lanky arse off somewhere else please.’
Tor sighed noisily and moved back to where they had dumped their packs. A few moments later, she heard the unmistakeable noise of him liberating a bottle from her bag.
‘I do not have an inexhaustible supply with me, Tormalin, my dear. You may want to go easy on that for now.’ This time, she managed to lever off a piece of tissue big enough, leaving the nodule intact. She nodded with satisfaction. It was a small thing, but small things could be big clues.
‘When I agreed to work with you, Vintage, you promised me “as much wine as I could drink”. Good wine, too.’
‘Yes, I did say that, didn’t I?’ Vintage stood up, wincing slightly at the ache in her back. Since the double attack on the village, they had been moving constantly, trying to follow the trail before it went cold. In truth, the trail hadn’t been much more than a hunch and a hope for better luck, but here, finally, they had something solid. She had seen matter like this in her own vine forest, and now that she looked, it was clear that this patch of the Wild, with its monstrous fungi, had seen parasite activity. Aside from the glutinous smears and the blisters, the place just didn’t feel right. It felt haunted.
‘There’s definitely something here.’ She returned to the packs, where Tor was now examining packages wrapped in greased paper. ‘We need to head deeper in.’
‘I’m hungry. But the smell of this place makes everything unappetising.’ He put the packages back, frowning slightly. ‘If there’s Behemoth wreckage around here somewhere, then why hasn’t anyone found it before?’
Vintage shrugged and put the specimen jar back into one of the bags. ‘Would you want to spend very long in this place? It’s damp. It smells, as you say, appalling, and unless you have a deep and abiding hankering for mushrooms . . . It could be that the pieces of the Behemoth are very small, wreckage left over from one of the earliest rains, perhaps.’ She smiled to herself. ‘If that is the case, my dear, then this could be one of our best finds. A Behemoth site as yet undiscovered, and with pieces small enough to be studied properly. It might not even be that dangerous.’
Tor snorted. ‘I love it when you say things like that, Vintage. It just makes it more delicious when you’re wrong.’ He paused, and put down the bag he was holding. In one smooth movement he pulled his sword free of its scabbard.
‘What is it?’ Vintage moved closer to the Eboran, one hand settling lightly on the crossbow at her hip.
‘There’s something beyond those stalks. Something moving.’
‘A parasite?’
He waved at her to be quiet and moved off to where the shadows were at their thickest. Vintage ghosted along behind him, keeping her tread light. Now that they were closer, she could see it too – something pale moving between the giant stalks; flashes of black and grey.
‘Not a parasite,’ she whispered to Tor. ‘There are no lights.’
‘Could be someone trying to snatch the find out from under our noses,’ he replied. ‘Shall we have a look?’
Still moving silently, they slid themselves up between the stalks and looked down onto a stretch of black soil punctuated here and there with short, fat mushroom caps dotted and spattered with lurid colours, each big enough to sit on. After years of patrolling the vine forest, Vintage was reasonably good at moving quietly through foliage, but she felt their efforts were wasted on the young woman pacing in the clearing below them. She had her arms crossed tightly over her chest, and her short black hair stuck up at all angles. Her head was down, her narrow eyes glaring at the ground as though it had personally insulted her, and she wore thin grey leggings and a ragged long-sleeved top, more akin to nightwear than travel clothes. As Vintage watched, the woman raised her hands to her face and rubbed them across her cheeks, dislodging the remains of what looked like a pale powder. With a jolt, Vintage’s eyes skipped to the woman’s forehead – yes! There was the sigil of a bat’s wing, tattooed onto her smooth olive skin and half hidden by her unruly hair. A fell-witch! What, by the bones of Sarn, was a fell-witch doing in the middle of a parasite-haunted stretch of Wild?
‘What do we have here?’
Before she could snatch him back, Tor was stepping down onto the mud, skirting the thicker toadstools and sliding his sword away. The effect on the young woman was immediate. She scrambled backwards, reaching out for the twisted fungus behind her. Vintage opened her mouth to shout a proper greeting, thinking that the woman was trying to flee, when, abruptly, the space between her and the girl was filled with an enormous emerald fireball.
Vintage flew backwards, rolling awkwardly down a short incline of mud and coming to an abrupt halt at the foot of one of the giant toadstools. She lay there for a few moments, stunned and blinking away the bright after-image the light had left on her vision, while the quiet was shattered by Tormalin and this strange woman shouting at each other. She could smell singed hair. Gingerly, Vintage patted her head. Her hat was missing, but her own thicket of curly hair seemed intact. Groaning slightly, she climbed to her feet and brushed clods of wet mud from her trousers.
‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t cut your throat!’
‘Who are you? Why were you sneaking up on me?’
‘Hold on, hold on,’ Vintage hurried back to the clearing, holding her hands out in front of her. The young woman had her fist raised, a halo of bright green winnowfire dancing around it. The toadstool directly behind her had withered drastically, the pale column of its stalk now so twisted and dark that the fleshy cap had turned to one side as though avoiding a blow. Vintage tore her eyes away from that wonder to see that Tor had his sword out again. ‘Calm down now, my dears. Come along.’
The young woman dragged her eyes from Tor to stare at Vintage instead. She looked like one of the plains folk – Vintage had travelled back and forth over that region in the last few years – but, of course, all sense of identity was supposedly removed at the Winnowry. Vintage forced a bright smile onto her face. ‘There’s no need for fire here, fell-witch. We’re just strangers stumbled onto the same path, isn’t that right?’ She paused to pull an errant twig from her hair. ‘Let’s exchange a few words before anyone kills anyone else.’
‘You are with the Eboran?’ The fell-witch lowered her burning hand a touch, although Vintage suspected it was from confusion rather than trust.
‘Well, he is my employee, yes. Tormalin, my dearest, please put the sword away.’
Tor glared at her. ‘This mad woman tried to blow you up!’
‘I tried to blow both of you up.’
‘Just a misunderstanding, I’m sure. Tor, please fetch our packs. This young woman looks like she could do with a glass of wine.’
‘A . . . glass of wine?’ The girl looked faintly stunned.
‘Of course, darling. Meeting new people is always improved with a glass of wine, in my experience. Tor!’
Pausing to shoot one more poisonous look at the fell-witch, Tormalin moved back through the stalks to retrieve their packs. Vintage bustled over to the embers of the woman’s fire, and made a cursory examination. No blankets to sleep on, a single bag of supplies, and now that she looked closer she could see that the young woman was wearing what appeared to be slippers, wet and stained with mud. Stranger and stranger.
‘Now then. I am Lady Vincenza de Grazon, but you can call me Vintage. Tormalin the Oathless there, is, for want of a better phrase, my hired muscle.’ She stopped and looked at the girl, smiling in what she hoped was an encouraging manner. Behind her she could hear Tormalin dragging their packs down to the small camp fire, clearly making more of a hash of it than was necessary. The fell-witch cleared her throat.
‘I am Fell-Noon, an agent of the Winnowry.’ The green flames had winked out of existence, but from the woman’s stance it was clear they could come back at any moment. Vintage sensed that hinged on whether she was prepared to believe such an obviously gigantic lie. ‘I am on a . . . confidential mission.’
‘In the middle of the stinking Wild?’ Tor was now standing by their bags with his arms crossed over his chest. ‘What possible mission could you have out here? Whatever it is, you are woefully underprepared for it.’
‘I could ask what a blood-sucking Eboran is doing outside of your cursed city.’ The girl lifted her chin, on the defensive again, and Vintage silently cursed Tor for it. ‘I didn’t expect to see your kind of monster in this place.’
Tor bared his teeth, clearly preparing to spit another insult, so Vintage stepped neatly in front of him. ‘I do believe I promised you wine, yes? Here we are, look. Not my best, but not the worst we’ve produced either. Come on, I have some tin cups in here somewhere, I know it’s not the same as proper crystal but I think we can make do. My dear Fell-Noon, would you mind perhaps building up the fire a touch? It’s such a lovely trick and, well, you do look like you could do with some warming up.’
She bustled them into sitting around the fire, passing out cups and eventually a bottle of red, along with a broken piece of bread each and some cheese that had been squashed at the bottom of the pack. Fell-Noon still wore a guarded expression, although her obvious hunger had pushed that concern aside for one moment. Tormalin, as ever, looked as outraged as an insulted cat.
‘How long have you been out here, my dear?’
Fell-Noon looked up from her piece of bread, which she was holding firmly in both hands. She had been nibbling the edges of it, as though savouring the texture.
‘A day and a night.’
‘Well. What a place to spend the night! I’m sure I don’t know what the Winnowry’s business could be out here, but there are aspects of Sarn’s history that affect us all, no doubt.’
Fell-Noon kept her eyes on her bread, although Tor was giving Vintage a particularly sardonic look. She cleared her throat.
‘That is to say, that perhaps there is much to learn from recent history, and perhaps this is one of the places where those lessons may be, uh, learned.’
Tor rolled his eyes at Vintage, and waved his cup of wine at the pair of them. ‘What my employer is trying to ask you is, are you out here after the Behemoth remains too?’
‘What?’ The young woman half sat up, her black eyes suddenly full of alarm. ‘A Behemoth, around here? Are we safe?’
‘Well, yes and no.’ Vintage stood up, sighing as the bones in her knees popped. ‘We have reason to believe there are the remains of a Behemoth in the Shroom Flats somewhere – long dead, of course, likely the result of the Eighth Rain or perhaps an even earlier incursion, and therefore hundreds of years old – but thanks to the effects of such remains, no, we are not safe. We have encountered two parasite spirits on our way here, and we expect to encounter more before we find what we need. Here, look, the signs are all around us.’ She walked around the fire to the ring of stalks immediately behind them. There were smears of the translucent substance on the trunks, complete with the clusters of white nodules. ‘Do you see this? Parasite spirits can leave these markings behind when they brush against vegetation. They leave behind so little physical evidence, and we know so little about them.’ Her lips turned down at the corners, recalling the devastation that crouched at the heart of the vine forest. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard the stories, my darling. Parasite spirits are very dangerous indeed, and they are found in the vicinity of Behemoth remains.’
Fell-Noon looked haunted. ‘Behemoths are dangerous. Why are you out here?’
‘Everything worm-touched is a threat.’ Vintage reached down and plucked up her tin cup. ‘So much of Sarn is poisoned, twisted and strange, thanks to the influence of the Jure’lia. I want to find out why, Fell-Noon, and to stop it, if I can. How can we stop the Wild growing? What are the parasite spirits, and how can we live with them? The Wild, the worm people, the spirits – they’re all linked, somehow, we just can’t see the details. So I must learn as much about them as possible, which is why I spend my time, as Tor so expertly puts it, rooting around in the mud in dangerous places. Where I am from, Fell-Noon, we make wine from grapes that are worm-touched, and part of our land is slowly being consumed by the Wild. People have lost their lives trying to find out the truth.’ She paused, remembering the first Eboran she had ever met: Nanthema with her useless spectacles and her quick mind. ‘It’s . . . a cause that’s very dear to my heart.’
‘And why is the bloodsucker here?’
‘Charming,’ muttered Tor.
‘Your people slaughtered mine, for generations,’ said Noon, her voice flat. Her eyes were bright with an unreadable emotion. ‘What happened to you? Do you all still live in Ebora? Or did the crimson flux wipe you out?’
Tor sat very still. ‘The fate of my people is of no concern to a witch.’
‘Please, there’s no need for us to argue,’ said Vintage smoothly. ‘It gets dark quickly in this place, and really, my dear, you shouldn’t be out here by yourself. We are safer together. Tor, do you think there could be any game around here? Hot food would cheer us up, don’t you think?’
Sighing heavily, Tor headed off into the shadows, his sword at the ready, while Vintage poured them some more wine.
‘This doesn’t look like the sort of place where you can chase down a couple of plump rabbits,’ said Fell-Noon. She sat close to the fire, her arms wrapped around herself, not quite looking at Vintage.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised. All sorts make their home in the Wild. Tor might appear to be little more than a pretty pain in my rear end, but he’s unnaturally fast with that sword, and he sees very well in the dark. Now,’ Vintage swallowed more wine, savouring the warmth it brought to her belly. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s really going on?’
For a long moment the girl did not move. She was so still that Vintage began to think she hadn’t heard the question, but, eventually, she shook herself and touched her fingers, briefly, to the tattoo on her forehead.
‘You shouldn’t ask me questions,’ she said, her voice so quiet it was almost lost under the crackle of the fire. ‘You shouldn’t talk to me at all.’
‘What if I want to help you?’
The girl glanced up. The fire was reflected in her dark eyes, and her mouth was pressed into a thin line. ‘I’m an agent of the Winnowry. Why would I need your help?’
‘How did you get here? You can’t have walked all the way from the Winnowry.’
Fell-Noon reached inside her sleeve and produced a long silver tube, which she held up to Vintage as though this answered the question. ‘I flew here on a bat. That’s how Winnowry agents travel.’ She placed the tube, which was flattened at one end, into her mouth and mimed blowing on it. Then she put the whistle back into her sleeve, not quite meeting Vintage’s eyes. ‘Anyway. It’s hunting at the moment. The bat. I sent it away.’
‘Well.’ Vintage stood up. ‘One thing I do know – you will become ill, if you spend another night in this festering hole dressed as you are. Here.’ Vintage went to Tor’s pack and began pulling things out, holding them up to the firelight for a better look. The daylight, already weak under the canopy of mushroom caps, had turned to a velvet darkness. ‘They will all be too big for you, of course, but you can roll the sleeves up. And I have a spare pair of boots.’
Fell-Noon’s eyebrows shot up, creasing her tattoo.
‘I can’t take his stuff. Not his stuff. What if he—’
‘Nonsense, dear, you’ll freeze to death otherwise. Besides, Tor has an obscene number of shirts in here, I don’t know why he feels the need to carry them around with him everywhere. Here, look, put that on, and this over the top. I know it looks thin, but Eboran silk is remarkably warming.’ She thrust the shirt into the girl’s arms and followed it with a jacket of stiff, black material with a high embroidered collar. While Fell-Noon sat looking at them in confusion, Vintage went to her own pack and yanked out a pair of battered leather boots with laces that went from the ankle right down to the toe. ‘Here, put those on too. I don’t for a moment think your little feet are the same size as mine, my dear, but you can pull the laces tight and here, stuff them with these socks.’
Noon looked at her for a long moment. She reminded Vintage of a half-feral cat that had hung around the House some years ago. Never quite tame enough to come into the kitchens, it would loiter on the broad stone steps outside. The animal would sun itself there, and if you left fish scraps on a plate, it would eat them, but if you tried to edge closer, it would watch you with careful eyes. Too close and it would run, every time.
‘Thank you,’ the young woman said, a little stiffly. She peeled off her sodden slippers and threw them behind her – with more than a touch of satisfaction, Vintage thought – and pulled on Vintage’s big woollen socks.
‘Makes my pack a bit lighter, dear.’
Fell-Noon pulled on the shirt and the jacket, before lacing up the boots.
Vintage sat herself down a couple of feet away from the girl – close, but not too close. She was still thinking of the cat. ‘I haven’t seen many fell-witches in my time, it’s true.’ She kept her voice casual. ‘All those that I have seen wore scarves or hats, and their faces were all heavily powdered.’
She let the unasked question hang in the air. The fell-witch pulled a hand through her hair, not quite meeting her eyes. ‘Customs change.’
‘Well, if you should need a brush, my dear, just let me know.’
Tor appeared at the edge of their fire, moving in the unnervingly silent way that he had. There was something fat and wriggling on the end of his sword, which he tipped onto the dirt by Vintage’s feet.
‘It doesn’t look like much, but it’s actually pretty tasty, if you cook it for long enough. And douse it in wine. And drink lots of wine while you’re eating it. And drink lots of wine afterwards, so you forget what you were just eating.’
Vintage kept her face as still as possible, but she couldn’t help noticing Fell-Noon’s horrified expression. Tor’s catch appeared to be a huge woodlouse, some worm-touched creature that had grown fat and bloated in the crevices of the Shroom Flats. It was pale cream in colour, with an alarming multitude of stiff, grey legs.
‘Is that what Eborans like to eat?’ asked Noon. Her tone was suspiciously innocent, and Vintage opened her mouth to reply, but Tor was already stomping around the fire, his face like thunder.
‘That’s all there is to eat, but of course you are welcome to go hungry.’ He stopped then and turned to Vintage, outrage quivering on every inch of his face. ‘Vintage, I must be imagining things – perhaps my sight was damaged by the fireball this lunatic threw at us earlier – but it looks as though this witch is wearing my clothes. How, by Ygseril’s deepest roots, can that have happened?’
‘Oh, do be quiet and help me spit this monstrosity you’ve brought back. Fell-Noon, I have eaten something like this myself, back when I was travelling across the Reidn delta, it’s really not as bad as it looks—’
From above them came a scrabbling, shifting noise, and a pale shape dropped towards them from the canopy of mushroom caps. Vintage scrambled to her feet, her heart in her mouth, but the shape resolved itself into a pair of leathery wings and a blocky furred head. The bat swooped over their small camp, dropping something from its feet before flying up and away again, scrambling back up through the dark spaces between caps.
‘Fulcor! That was Fulcor.’ Noon was on her feet, and for the first time she was smiling. ‘See? The bat I flew here on. Because I’m a Winnowry agent. And look.’ She stepped around the fire and knelt by what the bat had dropped. It was a small goat-like creature, of the sort Vintage knew roamed in small herds through patches of the southern forests. ‘Here is the dinner I told it to fetch for me.’ The fell-witch stood up, a wild look in her eye. ‘Agents of the Winnowry do not eat giant bugs.’