32
‘Are they winnowfire?’
Tor laughed, and for a wonder, Noon wasn’t annoyed. They were crouched inside the mouth of a dark cave, while outside a rain storm surged and thundered across a murky patch of marshland. The darkness wasn’t complete, however: here and there floated great orbs of pale blue light, apparently unaffected by the rain. They cast eerie glowing patches onto the churning water and mud below them.
‘Not winnowfire, no,’ he said. He was staring out of the cave alongside her, looking pleased with himself. He enjoyed surprising her, she was starting to realise. ‘I tried to poke one with my sword once, and it just skittered away. They’re a type of gas, supposedly, but I met a hermit in this bog who claimed they were ghosts. I ask you, witch, what sort of gas jumps away from a sword?’
‘What sort of ghost does?’ she asked mildly, and he raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Where did you say this was?’
‘In Jarlsbad, some way north of their Broken River. I was here, oh, forty years ago. Isn’t it a sight? I slept in this cave one night, and they all came and gathered at the entrance, like they were seeking an audience.’
As he spoke, the eerie blue orbs floated towards them out of the dark, filling the small cave with a glow that was somewhere between daylight and moonlight.
‘I’m getting good at this.’
‘Why were you out here, in the middle of nowhere? All your fine clothes, soaked. I dread to think what it would do to your hair.’
When he answered he didn’t meet her eyes, looking instead out across the marsh. ‘I was wandering. I wanted to see everything. I had spent so long looking at the same empty corridors, the same empty streets . . .’ His voice trailed off, and then he took her arm, pointing with his other hand out into the dark. ‘Look! There goes the hermit now, do you see?’
An oddly elongated figure was passing by in the distance, a black shape against the teeming rain. It took Noon a moment to realise that it was man on tapering stilts, picking his way across the marshes like a long-legged bird.
‘Sorry,’ Tor let go of her arm, and cleared his throat, ‘I forgot that you prefer not to be touched.’
For a brief second Noon had a vision of crouching over him in the narrow bed, her bare arm pressed to his mouth, his hand pressing at the small of her back. She banished the memory – it was hazardous to think such things here.
‘It’s all right.’ The rain was a soft curtain of sound, almost comforting. She hadn’t thought of it that way in a long time. ‘You have been to so many odd places. I’ve been nowhere.’
‘You’ve been to the Winnowry. You’ve been to the Winnowry a lot, I think.’
She punched him on the arm.
‘Fuck you.’
He cleared his throat again. ‘I would be very curious to see it, actually. Up close. I’ve seen it from Mushenska, of course, ugly great spiky thing that it is, but the inside is a mystery that intrigues me.’
Noon pressed her lips together. There were times when she was sure he was about to mention Vintage, but he never quite managed it. She did not know if that were deliberate, or if in this odd, dreaming state, it did not occur to him.
‘Mystery my arse.’
‘Again, something I have seen from a distance and greatly wish to see up close—’
She hit him a little harder this time. ‘Even if that shit hole were worth showing you, I can’t just mess about with dreams like you can.’
‘Of course you can. We’re in your head, aren’t we? You are dreaming and aware of it, yet you haven’t woken up. That suggests to me that you have enough mastery of your own dreamspace to manipulate it.’ He caught the look she was giving him and smirked. ‘Just try it. Imagine being back at the Winnowry. Pick a memory of it, and concentrate on it.’
Noon sat back on her haunches, considering. She had lots of memories of the Winnowry – ten years of nothing else, in fact – but they were all more or less the same. Damp walls, narrow windows, grey food. There was one occasion when she had seen it differently, of course. She held her hands up in front of her, remembering that they had bound her hands and then wrapped them in thick black cloth, and during the journey they had covered her head with a heavy hood. When they had removed it and pulled her down from the back of the bat she had been surprised to land on wet sand. Confused, terrified and wracked with guilt, she had had no real idea where she was, and when she had looked up –
The cave and the grotty marshland were gone, and instead they were standing together on a beach. A bleak and featureless coast stretched away to either side of them, and, looming ahead, was the Winnowry.
‘By the roots,’ murmured Tor. ‘The architect must have been having a really bad day.’
The black towers stretched towards an indifferent sky like broken knives. High above, tiny slivers of light burned from narrow windows, while just ahead a great iron door marked the entrance. On either side of it were a pair of torches, unlit now, above two pieces of bleached driftwood. Tomas’s inscrutable face had been carved into both with little love for the subject, it seemed to Noon; the staring face looked blind. She remembered being dragged towards that door, boots pushing up furrows of sand. She remembered how she had screamed.
‘I was eleven years old when they brought me here,’ she said. ‘They just snatched me up, bound me, and flew me to this miserable place. I wasn’t allowed to bring anything with me. Not that I had anything left to bring.’
Tor didn’t say anything, and she felt embarrassed that she had talked about it at all. She looked at him and noticed that his outfit had changed again – now he wore a dark maroon coat the same colour as his eyes, with a dove-grey silk shirt underneath. There was an elaborate earring hanging from his left ear, some confection of cloudy glass and spiralled silver.
‘Why do you keep changing your clothes?’
He smiled at her. ‘Why not? I wear them so well.’ He made a sweeping gesture as if presenting himself for inspection, and his earring spun, catching the muted light. Noon abruptly remembered that he barely had anything left that could be called an ear on that side of his face. She looked away.
‘I never wanted to see this place again.’
‘What’s it like inside?’
As easy as that, they were there, standing too close together in the cramped cell Noon had lived in for ten years. The cold iron grid of the floor was the same, the narrow bunk untouched. It was smaller and darker than she remembered, but then it was a place from a nightmare – perhaps her own emotions were distorting it. Tor walked up to the bars and looked out across the echoing chasm to the far side of the prison, where rows of identical cells waited. They were alone.
‘I’ve never seen it empty,’ she said. ‘It’s strange.’
‘What a desolate hole,’ remarked Tor. ‘At least my prison was beautiful, if sad. No one should be kept in a place like this.’
‘What do you mean, your prison?’ asked Noon. She joined him at the bars. ‘What did you get locked up for?’
‘Oh. Forget I said it, I was being poetic.’ Tor pushed the door and it swung open easily. Beyond Noon’s cell the Winnowry was drowned in shadows, a place made of darkness and sorrow. Seeing it without the living, breathing women who had populated it was deeply frightening, she realised. Looking at the darkness and feeling the emptiness of the space between them, she didn’t assume they had all escaped, like she had. She assumed they were all dead.
She turned to look back at her bunk, only to see the thin covers there boiling with movement.
‘No!’
Hundreds of shining black beetle-like creatures erupted from the bedding, streaming towards her on needle-sharp legs. From somewhere outside and above them came a shattering roar, and the Winnowry trembled around them. She looked at Tor, who was staring at the beetles in bemusement.
‘What is happening?’
‘It’s them! They’re back, we’ll all—’
There was another crash and Noon stumbled, trying to keep upright while the beetles surged around her feet. The Winnowry was now full of the sound of screaming women, and Noon knew that they were down in the shadows somewhere, crushing each other and suffocating in their panic to flee the building. The urge to summon the winnowfire was enormous, but if she did that, if she did that—
Tor was suddenly next to her, taking her hand firmly – she was surprised that it was warm, when everything else here was cold – and they were back on the beach.
‘Now, it really is quite rude of you to have a nightmare while I am accompanying you,’ said Tor, in an entirely normal tone. ‘It spoils the mood utterly.’
‘Shut up, you idiot. Look!’
Above the Winnowry the sky was crowded with Behemoths, corpse coloured and teeming with tiny vessels pushing their way through the ships’ shining skin. Things like giant spiders, their legs spread like grasping hands, were floating down towards them.
‘Get control of it,’ said Tor, sharply. ‘This is your head, remember?’
‘I can’t! This thing, it – it comes from outside of me.’ As soon as she said it, Noon knew it was true. ‘This isn’t my nightmare at all!’
The gates of the Winnowry were open, and thousands of the beetles were skittering towards them. In that way that only happens in dreams, she knew that there was someone behind them now, a figure with a low, feminine voice who would speak directly into her ear. She knew what it would say.
Tor spun round, looking towards the strip of iron-grey sea, and she knew that he had felt it too. ‘There’s no one there. No one there at all,’ he said, his voice low. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’
He took hold of her hand again, and this time Noon felt herself physically wrenched from the terrible scene around her. Caught between the feeling of falling down and being thrown up into the air, she stumbled to her knees, only to find herself on all fours on a thick, luxurious carpet.
‘This is about as far from that miserable place as I could get,’ said Tor in way of an explanation. ‘Welcome to the Eskt family suite.’
Noon stood up. They were in a room more opulent than any she’d ever seen; fancier than Vintage’s carriage on the winnowline, larger than any of the rooms she’d seen in Esiah Godwort’s rambling mansion. There were tall, lacquered screens everywhere, long, low seats spilling over with plush cushions, and elegant pieces of sculpture in each corner, stylised images of people with long faces. The walls were covered in patterned silk; blue herons against pale gold. She couldn’t take it all in. Tor had sat down on one of the low seats. He was breathing hard and looking at the floor.
‘What did you mean,’ he asked, ‘when you said that dream wasn’t yours?’
‘I meant what I said.’ Noon pushed her hair back from her forehead. Her heart was still beating too fast. She half expected thousands of skittering beetles to come surging out from behind the screens, or for the ceiling to shake apart to reveal the fat belly of a Behemoth. ‘I don’t know where it came from. All my bad dreams, they’ve always involved what happened to me when I was a kid. I’ve never even thought about the Behemoths, they’ve all been gone for so long. They’re just a story Mother Fast told us when she wanted to scare us.’
Tor made a pained face at that. ‘What you dreamed was so similar to what Ainsel dreamed, I can’t ignore it. What if—’ he grunted and pressed his fingers to his forehead – ‘it’s still trying to push its way in. Maintaining this dreamscape is hard.’ He looked up at her sharply. ‘Stop it. Stop thinking about it.’
‘Oh, that’s great advice, thanks. I’ll just stop thinking about it. Piece of piss.’
Tor stood up and stalked over to a low cabinet where a bottle of wine rested. Noon was sure it hadn’t been there a moment ago. He picked up the bottle and poured himself a glass, draining it off in one go.
‘Dream wine.’ He put the glass down. ‘Dream wine should be excellent, don’t you think? But it’s not. It’s a ghost of the thing.’ He took a breath. ‘Don’t you see, witch? What if these dreams mean something? What if they’re a premonition?’
Noon looked at him. He was at ease here. There was an archway in the wall behind him, leading to another, equally beautiful room, and beyond that she could see glass doors leading out into a garden. She thought for a moment she could see figures out there, children running through the grass . . .
‘You are pushing at the edges, Noon,’ he said. ‘Please desist.’
‘When I escaped the Winnowry, it was because I fully believed the Jure’lia were coming,’ she said. She paused, pressing her thumb to her lips before continuing. ‘I didn’t doubt it at all. And then I left, and all these other things happened. I’ve barely had time to think.’ She took a breath. ‘But if I think about it again, if I allow myself – yes, I think they’re coming. I think the dreams are true.’
Tor picked up the bottle, and put it back down again. He laughed, a short, bitter sound. ‘If that’s true, witch, then we are all—’
There was a hand on her shoulder, shaking her. Noon turned to see who it was, and sat up in the narrow bed, nearly falling out of it.
‘My darling,’ said Vintage, ‘look at the state of you both.’