44
Noon lay on her back on the enormous bed, staring up at the ceiling. There was a painting there – Eborans were keen on paintings everywhere, it seemed – and if she looked at it, following the lines and guessing at the story it told, she didn’t have to think about Mother Fast, and her missing eye or her melted face. She didn’t have to think about how even the lush grass, full of spring juices, had caught fire, or the look on her mother’s face when she had realised what was happening, or how people smelled when they were burning, the noises they made.
Noon cleared her throat, and narrowed her eyes at the ceiling.
The painting showed tall, elegant figures leaving on a ship, taking a route north, into an unknown sea. The ship had an elegant golden fox at the prow, and the artist had populated the ocean with wild sea monsters; giant squids with grasping tentacles, a thing like a great armoured crab, and women who were half fish, their mouths open to reveal pointy teeth. It was dangerous, their journey, but the artist had painted a tall man with brown skin leading the people, and he looked wise. You looked at him and you believed that he knew the paths around the monsters.
AWAKE.
The voice in her head obliterated all thought, and Noon squirmed on the bed as if she were drowning. She could taste blood in the back of her throat.
‘What is it?’
War, said the voice. It sounded both exulted and afraid. War has come for us again, my friend. Move! Quickly now!
Noon swung her legs off the bed. ‘What are you talking about, war? And where are you expecting me to go? The door is locked.’
But the voice was gone. Noon stood up, feeling warily for the stirring of energy within her. It was still there, banked down to embers now but ready to be called on. She walked over to the door and rattled the handle, just in case, but it was still firmly locked. Leaning against it, she grew still. What was that noise? She held her breath, and it came again: distant screaming. Her skin grew cold all over.
‘What’s happening?’
The voice rushed back into her head, and for the first time it did not sound calm or in control – it was panicked, wild and desperate.
Go! it cried. You have to go now, or you will miss it. You will miss me!
‘You have to tell me what you’re talking about. Talk some sense!’
The Hall of Roots. Please. You must go there, for me.
It was the note of pleading in the normally arrogant voice that got Noon moving. She grabbed her jacket and pulled on her boots, her heart thudding painfully in her chest. The screaming was louder now, and she thought she could hear the thunder of people running. She went back to the door and crashed her fists against it.
‘What’s happening? Let me out!’
There was no reply. Noon turned back to the room. There was a feeling now, a rushing tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the screams outside or even the voice inside her. There was somewhere else she needed to be. This room was all wrong.
‘I’m stuck in here,’ she said aloud. ‘I can’t get out.’
The bitter amusement of the voice spread through her, making the ends of her fingers tingle.
You believe that this place can hold you?
It was a good point. Noon raised her arms in a slow graceful movement, summoning a churning ball of winnowfire between her hands. She swept it back and forth, feeding it the energy it needed to grow slowly, calling on the discipline of the presence inside her to do so. Eventually, the globe of fire hummed between her arms, a pot waiting to boil over. She ran towards the window and threw it. The fireball crashed into the window and it exploded in a shower of wood and glass. Noon covered her head with her arms, an expression on her face caught somewhere between fright and joy as the debris pattered down all around her. There were cuts on her forearms, stings like kisses over her flesh, but she barely noticed them. Now there was a hole in the wall rather than a window, and through it she could see bright daylight and the embers of her own fire. A way out. It seemed she was pretty good at finding those, after all.
As an afterthought, she picked up Tor’s sword before she left.
The distance between Ygseril and the doors had never seemed so far.
Behind Tor, the Jure’lia queen still hung suspended over the tree-god’s roots, held in place by the stringy black material that seemed to be both a part of her and something she could control. Hestillion had dropped to her knees where she stood, but the burrowers were ignoring her, splitting around her still form like the sea around a rock. He had lost track of Aldasair, somewhere in the midst of the panic, and now Tor was climbing over a mass of overturned chairs, pausing to stamp on the burrowers underfoot or brush them from his clothing. Everywhere he looked, humans were falling to the scurrying creatures, and the great hall rang with the sound of their screams as they were eaten alive. A figure lurched in front of him – a man with a trim black beard, now his face was lined with scratches from the busy feet of burrowers, and his eyes were holes lined with the same black substance oozing out from the roots. He grinned at Tor, and reached for him as though they were old friends.
Tor pushed him away, and then, thinking better of it, punched him solidly in the jaw. The man went down like a sack of potatoes but as Tor stepped over him, he saw that he was still grinning. Tor remembered something from Vintage’s many notes: it was difficult to knock a drone unconscious, because they had no brain left to damage.
‘I need to get my damn sword.’
Ahead of him he saw a pair of drones – they were easier to identify than he’d ever have imagined because they all moved in the same slick and boneless way – standing over a human, an older woman with a red scarf over her hair. The drones were holding her down while the burrowers flowed all over her, seeking their way in, and the poor woman was screaming and kicking. Tor vaulted over the fallen chairs, in the grip of a horror so great that it seemed to fill his throat with a painful heat, but as he reached them he saw two burrowers busily forcing their way down the woman’s throat, and her screams were abruptly muffled. He turned away. There was nothing he could do.
There was another woman on the floor ahead, struggling to get to her feet, and he recognised Mother Fast, the representative of the plains people who had so unsettled Noon. For now, the burrowers had missed her, and he scooped her up by her elbow. She met his eyes with her one working eye.
‘I believe it is time for us to leave, Mother Fast.’
‘And go where, boy? The worm people are back, and there are a handful of Eborans left to face them. We may as well lie down here, and have an end to it.’
‘You’re a barrel of laughs, aren’t you?’ Tor steered her round a pile of chairs, while all around them the screaming went on. ‘I have no intention of dying today, so if you’ll just—’
Ahead of them, the doors to the Hall of Roots blew off their hinges in a crash of green fire. Noon stepped into view, her black hair a corkscrewed mess and a teeming glove of green fire around her right arm. Next to him, Tor felt Mother Fast recoil.
‘That’s it, she’s come to kill us all now.’ Her voice was breathy, on the verge of hysteria. ‘I should have known, should have known that’s how it would end.’
‘Oh, do get a grip.’ Tor stamped heavily on a pair of burrowers skirting around Mother Fast’s feet. At the sight of Noon he had felt his heart lighten, and now he waved at her. ‘Noon!’ And she had his sword.
They met each other by a pile of broken chairs. Most of the audience had fled, with the remainder either drones or in the process of being made into them.
‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ he said quickly, although he suspected that wasn’t entirely true. Hadn’t it always been a mystery, what had happened to the Jure’lia at the end of the Eighth Rain? Hadn’t the question now been answered? ‘We have to get out of here.’
Noon pushed his sword into his hand. There was no confusion on her face now, no uncertainty. She didn’t even appear to be upset by the presence of Mother Fast; she gave the old woman one appraising glance and looked away.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ she said. Around them everything was terror and chaos, with the screaming of the people being eaten alive, the desperate scrabble for escape, and, underneath it all somewhere, the quiet and impossible sound of his sister weeping. But he looked into Noon’s face and he saw quiet amusement, and something else: a challenge. ‘Tor, if we can kill her here, all of this will end, now. Don’t you see?’
With the familiar weight of the Ninth Rain in his hands, he did see. ‘Will you cover me?’
Noon grinned, and he remembered the sweet taste of her blood.
Noon ran ahead of Tor, letting her instincts take over. The voice within her was a steadying presence, keeping her focussed, while a deeper inner voice moved her body. Spinning and sweeping her right hand down towards the floor, her fingertips brushing the marble surface, she built a great swathe of winnowfire around her, a bright green tunnel of vertical light powered by the alien energy inside. When she had been very small, the plains had once witnessed violent storms that looked like her tunnel of fire. Mother Fast – whom Tor had carefully pushed towards the door – had called them ‘gods’ fingers’, tall wavering columns of darkness that would eat up the land. Now Noon was her very own storm, and outside of it she could sense the figures of those already consumed by the Jure’lia, and beyond them the towering shape of the queen.
The drones fell back as her flames licked their spiral of destruction around her. Next to her, Tor was a blur, his sword slicing through the air with precise movements; drones fell to the floor, their heads severed from their necks, their happy smiles still in place.
‘Keep moving forward, don’t look back!’
A flood of burrowers swarmed towards them in an arrow-shape, a direct attack from the queen herself, no doubt. In response, Noon released some of the energy from the green storm circling her, and a curl of fire swept across the marble floor. Scores of burrowers exploded with yellow hisses of flame, and a strange, acrid smell filled the Hall of Roots.
Halfway there now. More drones came, their faces full of an empty contentment, and Noon lit them up like tapers, noting as she did so that the smell of burning flesh no longer bothered her.
Because you are a soldier, came the voice in her head. And then, I am close now. Look for me.
She glanced at Tor. He was heading towards his sister who was still sitting in a crumpled heap at the edge of the roots. His face was caught in profile, his fine brows drawn down in an expression of faintly annoyed concentration as he bloodied his sword again and again – although, in truth, it wasn’t blood that spurted from the bodies of the drones, but the same thick black substance that formed the body of the queen. It was likely that they would both die here, she reflected, as a cold sense of calm filled her chest. Too late to tell him anything, too late to express her particular affection for how his face looked right now – angry, indignant, desperate.
Concentrate on your task, soldier.
‘What is this? The very last warriors Ebora has to offer?’ The queen had walked to the edge of roots, and Noon caught a glimpse of her face; masklike and beautiful, it hung suspended in the shifting black matter of her body like a leaf floating downstream. In response, Noon released the energy of the storm surrounding her to swirl across the remainder of the hall, but the queen gestured and a wall of oily black liquid rose in front of her. The fire hissed against it, and Noon sensed rather than saw the queen flinch. The wall of black fluid dropped.
‘The last, and the best,’ called Tor. He met Noon’s eyes briefly, and she grinned at the reckless good humour she saw there. ‘You can crawl back to the dirt if you like, your majesty, and we can all carry on with our day.’
‘Manners, I like that.’ The queen turned her head to address Hestillion. ‘This one is blood to you, yes?’
Noon saw Hestillion’s shoulders move as she answered but within the roaring of the winnowfire she could not make out the words, and then a flower of pain blossomed on her leg, distracting her. She looked down to see a burrower making its way up her boot. Noon reached down and grasped it in her palm, summoning the fire to crush the creature in a short explosive gasp.
‘We’ll rush her,’ Tor was saying, his voice pitched only for her. ‘Throw what you’ve got up there for as long as you can, and I’ll circle around. This sword should do the trick, don’t you think? This is what it was re-forged for, after all.’
‘The Ninth Rain,’ said Noon in agreement, but she was thinking of something else now. There was some other factor, something else they had forgotten about, that they shouldn’t forget about. As if moving by itself, her head tipped up and, far above them, she saw the branches of Ygseril, spreading out over the great glass roof. Nestled there were silver shapes, bulbous and strange, surely too large and heavy to stay where they were. And when they dropped, they would crash onto the glass roof. Perhaps they would break through, lacerated on the way down by shards of glass, or perhaps they would roll away to land elsewhere in the palace grounds.
Noon stopped.
‘What are you doing?’
Ignoring Tor, Noon summoned the winnowfire once more, knowing that now more than ever she needed to be in control, and control had never been her defining trait. Briefly, she thought of Agent Lin, her steely expression of determination as Noon fled, frightened and weak.
That isn’t you any more.
‘I am a weapon.’ Noon thrust her arms up, and with it went a column of green fire that briefly turned the inside of the Hall of Roots as bright as a summer’s midday on the plains. Meeting the ceiling of glass, it blossomed, curling out in all directions.
‘What have you—?’
Noon threw herself at Tor, knocking him to the floor and into a pile of broken chairs. At almost the very same moment, the glass ceiling above them shattered with an ear-bruising explosion. The noise was extraordinary, and a deadly rain of glass and twisted iron followed it. Pressing her body to Tor’s, she waited for it to be over even as she tensed her body for what had to come next.
‘Did you just destroy the Hall of Roots?’ Tor’s voice was a hot gasp in her ear.
‘Just the glass,’ she replied, ‘not the branches. Can’t touch those.’
‘What?’
But Noon was already moving. Distantly she was aware that, again, she had been cut in various places, but, blotting out everything else was the sense that something was about to happen that she couldn’t miss. A quick glance told her that the queen had retreated behind her wall of ooze again, and that Hestillion was still alive, her slim arms held over her head. They were shaking. Noon looked up. The glass roof was gone, the edges of it smouldering, and Ygseril’s branches were swaying back and forth.
‘What – what did you do that for?’
Tor was by her side again. A piece of glass had caught him and a sheet of transparent blood had slicked his hair to his scalp, but he held his sword as steadily as ever. Noon pointed upwards. The clutch of silver pods were shivering now, high in the branches, nearly ready to fall.
‘It’s their time, Tor.’
She had spoken quietly, but the Jure’lia queen had heard her anyway.
‘You are wrong,’ she said, her colourless lips peeling back from perfect, gumless teeth. ‘It is finally our time.’
The branches of Ygseril were shaking, and the strange silver fruits were beginning to fall.
‘Nothing you’re saying makes any sense, my darling.’
Vintage sat with her legs out in front of her, one hand pressed to the crystal. Next to her Nanthema crouched on the other side of an impossible divide. She was being insufferably calm.
‘Think about it, Vin. Where do they go when they’re not attacking us? They must come from somewhere.’
‘If we knew that . . .’
‘Yes, so many other questions would be answered.’ Nanthema sighed, a short puffing of air between her lips that Vintage remembered very well. It was the sound of her putting a difficult problem to one side. ‘I’m telling you, I hear them, Vin. I can’t make out what they’re saying, of course, it’s like a distant room where a lot of people are talking a language I don’t speak. But every now and then another voice will come, and all the other voices become quiet. Or they all become the same voice.’ Vintage could see her frowning now. ‘But they are not far. Not far at all.’
‘None of this sinister speculation gets us any closer to freeing you.’
‘No, and you will need to go back soon. How much food did you bring with you? How much water?’
Vintage snorted. ‘What do you take me for? Some green-kneed child fresh out of the nursery? My dear, in my pack—’
At that moment the entire chamber shuddered violently. Vintage yelped, falling away from the crystal, and Nanthema’s startled query was cut off mid-sentence.
‘What the . . .?’
At first Vintage thought it must be the wreck finally falling apart – a big wave had loosened it, perhaps, preparing to shake its old bones onto the seabed at last. But the shuddering vibration was too constant, too regular. She turned back to the crystal and pressed her hand to it.
‘Get out now, before it all collapses! You fool, start climbing!’
Vintage shook her head. ‘I’m not leaving here without you, my dear.’ Behind Nanthema the clouds were racing faster across the sky, and a wind began to tug at her hair.
‘It smells like a storm here,’ said Nanthema, her eyes very wide. ‘It has never smelled of anything here before.’
Vintage opened her mouth to reply and a ring of bright white light travelled down the length of the chamber, from the very top to the very bottom. For a few seconds the light burned on the crystal, too bright to look at, and then Nanthema was falling through it, into her arms.
They both screamed.
Vintage recovered herself first. ‘This bloody place is waking up!’ She struggled to her feet, pulling the taller woman with her. She was delightfully solid, warm against her hands.
‘Then I think it’s best we are not here when it stretches its legs.’
Climbing out of the chamber, with the rope ladder swinging wildly back and forth with the vibrations, was, Vintage would reflect later, the hardest thing she had ever done. Knowing that Nanthema was alive and free, knowing that if she didn’t get her arse up the ladder swiftly enough she would doom them both, made her knees turn to water and her fingers turn into numb sticks. She gulped down air, desperate not to panic, and then they were out of the chamber and in the larger room. All around them, lights behind the fleshy material of the walls were bleeding into life, and the shuddering underfoot went on and on.
‘Can you find the way out, Vin?’
‘Of course I bloody well can.’ Vintage grabbed Nanthema’s hand. ‘Stay close to me.’
They ran.
To her surprise and enormous relief, Vintage found that she did indeed remember the way out. It was her observer’s eye, honed all these years on the strangeness of the Jure’lia artefacts. She could get them out, if the whole place didn’t fall to pieces around them, or they weren’t turned inside out by a stray parasite spirit, or they went too quickly and fell down some unseen chasm.
‘What was that?’ Nanthema squeezed her hand hard, forcing her to stop. They stood together in a darkened corridor, breathing hard.
‘Nanthema, we really need to—’
‘Shhh! Listen.’
Vintage stopped. There was the shuddering all around them, and she could hear the distant hiss of the sea now – they were close. And then, from somewhere deeper within the Behemoth, a soft voice, calling. It was female, that voice, and something about it caused Vintage’s insides to fill with ice.
‘How can that be?’ she hissed at Nanthema. ‘How can there be someone in here?’
‘It’s the voice I heard inside the crystal,’ said Nanthema. There were two points of colour high on her cheeks, and her crimson eyes were too bright in her pale face.
‘Come on, we’re nearly there.’
They heard the voice again and again as they ran, seeming to come from all over the broken Behemoth. It was soft, teasing almost, as though they were playing a game, and Vintage felt as though it was coming after them, seeping through the dark places wherever they ran.
Eventually, they saw a splash of daylight ahead, washed out and dappled with the shifting shape of the water, but as they approached it, a thick black substance began to ooze from the walls there. Nanthema skidded to a stop, and Vintage collided with the wall to her right.
‘What is it doing?’
The black substance appeared to be alive. It reached up with tar fingers and seeped towards the broken ceiling. As they watched, it flowed around the panels and tubes there, gently pushing them back into place. Further down, more of the black ooze was smoothing over the yielding material of the floor, healing it in some way that Vintage couldn’t understand.
‘It’s mending itself.’ Vintage blinked. She had an urge to pinch her own arm, sure that this must be some sort of nightmare – surely she must be back at Esiah Godwort’s compound, unconscious on the dirt, her face scorched with winnowfire – but then she heard the soft, cajoling voice again.
‘I’m not going through it,’ she said firmly, tugging at Nanthema’s arm. ‘Let’s go around.’
Edging around the corner they found another corridor leading to daylight, but it, too, was dripping with the substance. It was growing livelier all the time, as if it were gaining strength at the sound of the strange distant voice. The entire structure was groaning now, creaking as things that had not moved for centuries were shifted and eased into new positions. Vintage and Nanthema moved on, still seeking a clear way out, but the stuff was starting to ooze up from the floor, sticking to their boots and slowing them down.
‘It’s no good, Vin. We’ll just have to force our way out.’
Vintage nodded grimly. She unhooked the crossbow from her belt – although what good that would do against the oozing substance, she did not know – and they moved as quickly as they could down the nearest corridor. Vintage kept her eyes on the circle of weak daylight ahead while the walls to either side teemed with busy life. Once, a tendril of the stuff curled out towards her, exactly like a curious finger, and she had to bite her lip to keep from yelping as it brushed her curly hair. It was like being within the busy bowels of a gigantic creature: all the vital systems that kept it alive were churning on, and Vintage was a small piece of food, waiting to be digested. She pushed the image away hurriedly.
‘There, look!’
They had come to the end of the corridor, and from there she could see the rope she had used to climb up into the belly of the Behemoth, and, bobbing below it, her small boat. It was being tossed back and forth violently, as the waves were teased into action by the simmering movement of the wreck. It was around fifteen feet away, across a section of jagged wall.
‘We’ll have to climb it,’ said Nanthema. As soon as she finished speaking, the whole section they stood on tipped abruptly, nearly dumping them both straight into the water. Just above their heads, a smooth piece of greenish metal was being twisted back into place, and further up, similar parts were moving, the pieces of some giant jigsaw puzzle.
‘And bloody quickly. You go first, go!’
Nanthema scrambled down and across, taking fistfuls of the fleshy material and using it to yank herself along; she moved, if not with grace, then at least with strength. Vintage followed on behind, the muscles in her arms still numb with fright. She gritted her teeth against her panic. It would not do to fall now and drown in the black water below, drowned or crushed in the mysterious shifting of the Behemoth.
Ahead of her, Nanthema cried out. At first Vintage couldn’t see what had caused her to do so, and then a series of bright points of light slid through the wall around a hand’s breadth from Nanthema’s head. They looked like the sharp fingers of a glowing hand, filled with blue light. A parasite spirit – perhaps they were leaving like rats deserting a sinking ship? Nanthema cringed away from it and, holding on with one hand and her boots wedged into the Behemoth’s broad side, Vintage yanked her crossbow from her belt again and fired off a shot without pausing to think about it. The bolt struck the creature and it retreated instantly, the bolt itself snapping off and falling past Nanthema to be lost in the water.
‘Keep moving!’
They made it to the small boat, although it was bucking and dipping so wildly that Vintage felt they should be no drier than in the water. Nanthema took up the oars and began trying to manoeuvre them out of the shadowed space within the wreckage, while Vintage used a small pot to bail them out; the waves were slapping at them, threatening to toss them over as the Behemoth shifted and murmured to all sides, a long sleeping beast now awakening. The black substance was running down the walls, up and down and in all directions, and everywhere it went the skin of the creature repaired itself, pulling its scattered innards back from the corrosive seawater and unkind daylight; an uncanny healing.
As they left the main section of the Behemoth behind, the whole thing started to shift forward, meeting the section that stood stranded from it. Black tendrils reached out for it like grasping hands, and identical limbs met them from the other side. Vintage and Nanthema narrowly avoided both capsizing and being crushed between them, and then they were out, the overcast sky a blessed space over their heads.
‘Careful,’ said Vintage. She was still bailing out the boat, although she could barely tear her eyes away from the Behemoth. ‘There’s wreckage under the sea where we can’t see it, and knowing our luck that’ll be moving too.’
‘Right. Keep an eye out, Vin.’ Nanthema’s black hair was stuck to her cheeks with sweat.
The small boat tossed and lurched, and more than once Vintage was sure that they must be turfed out into the unkind sea, but Nanthema kept them moving and they didn’t stop until the shore was dusting their hull. Then, without speaking, they both turned and looked at the wreck they had just escaped.
‘By the roots,’ murmured Nanthema. ‘By the blessed roots.’
As they watched, the Behemoth – and it was a wreck no longer, there could be no doubt about that – began to rise out of its grave. Water gushed from it, a deafening roar as places that had been waterlogged for centuries were suddenly cleared. Portals opened in the side of it and more seawater was expelled, so much that Vintage thought it would never stop. The whole thing rose, clearing the sea in a great dripping mass. To Vintage, who had never truly expected to see a complete specimen of the things she had studied all her adult life, it looked like an impossibly fat woodlouse, segmented and swollen, covered all over in pulsing pores. Tendrils of the black material were still crawling over it, like flies over – well, flies over something very unpleasant.
The Behemoth, nearly whole and newly alive, rose slowly into the sky.
‘What is happening?’ Vintage took hold of Nanthema’s hand and the Eboran woman covered it with her own. They both stared at the vast creature, eyes wide like frightened children. ‘What is happening?’