38
Tor stamped his feet on the ground, trying to force some warmth back into them while Noon began making their fire. It was certainly faster to travel by bat, he had to admit that, but it was neither comfortable nor warm. After several hours in the air his face felt like a rigid mask, the numbness all the worse on the damaged side, and his burned arm ached abominably from clutching at the reins. He shot a faintly resentful look at the great black bat they had retrieved from the Winnowry agent; it was snuffling and stretching its wings awkwardly, making ready to hunt for the night. Fulcor, the bat who had followed Noon from the Winnowry, and had been summoned once more by her whistle, had already gone.
There was a soft whomph of emerald flame that swiftly turned orange, and their fire was burning merrily. Noon no longer seemed to experience any discomfort over using her ability, and her face as she fed the fire sticks was calm and unconcerned. Tor found it vaguely alarming.
‘Where are we now?’ she asked.
Tor made a point of looking around, his hands on his hips. ‘Judging by the constellations just starting to glint into life, the scent of the wind and the texture of the earth . . . I would say we’re precisely in the middle of nowhere.’
She gave him a cool look. ‘I am so glad you are in charge of navigation, oh great traveller.’
Tor went and crouched by the fire. In truth, he did vaguely recognise this place. The foothills of the Tarah-Hut Mountains had been the first place he had properly explored when finally he had left Ebora. Back then its twisting scrublands had seemed wild and gritty, just the place to start an adventure. Now it looked like a place where you couldn’t expect to find a decent drink.
‘If we were travelling by foot, we’d be about ten days away yet. With those creatures,’ he nodded to the black bat, who chose that moment to launch itself up into the darkening sky, ‘I’m really not sure.’
Noon shrugged, and began unpacking food from their bags. They had taken as much as they could carry from Esiah Godwort’s mansion, along with blankets, water, wine and as many spare clothes as they could stuff into bags. Stopping each night was an exercise in unloading the bats so that they could go and hunt – fresh meat was very welcome – but in the last two weeks they had got it down to a fine art. The orbs were wrapped in thick furs, and kept as close as they dared to the fire. Tor unstrapped his sword from his back and set the kettle against the fire before retrieving the tin of tea leaves from his own pack.
After a moment he realised that Noon was staring at his sword. Her eyes had taken on an odd, almost silvery shine; he had seen it a few times since the incident in the compound. It seemed to go alongside her odd, quietly calm mood.
‘Why is your sword called the Ninth Rain?’
Tor grimaced faintly. ‘I’m sure I’ve already told you. Or Vintage must have told you.’ He sighed, shaking tea leaves into a small clay pot. The scent made him think of Mushenska, which, in turn, made him think of Sareena. How long had it been since she had been in his thoughts at all? Feeling an unwanted stab of guilt, he wedged the pot in the dirt to wait for the hot water. ‘When the Jure’lia invaded, Ygseril would grow silver fruits in his branches, which would fall, hatching into the Eboran war-beasts. For each invasion, a silver rain.’
Noon tipped her head to one side, as though listening to a distant voice. The movement exposed the smooth skin of her neck, which looked creamy against the scarlet of her coat. Unbidden, the memory of the taste of her blood seemed to flood his mouth.
‘I know that. I mean, why is it called the Ninth Rain? Wasn’t the last one – the one where your god died – the Eighth Rain?’
‘Oh,’ said Tor. ‘That.’ The water in the kettle was boiling, so with his good hand he reached down and poured it into the clay pot, watching the leaves swirl darkly. ‘That’s a longer story. Quite a personal one, actually. And I hardly know you.’
She looked at him frankly again, smiling slightly now. For the briefest moment his chest felt tight, and he wondered if he were ill: a cold caught on the back of the blasted bat, or the crimson flux coming for him finally. This woman burned your face, he reminded himself.
‘Fine. What else do I have to do on this lovely evening, but reveal painful family secrets?’ He gestured around at the low hills, growing darker all the time.
‘Stop complaining. Pour me some tea.’
‘You have to let it steep longer than that, you barbarian.’ Even so, he retrieved the small tin cups from his pack, and passed one to Noon. ‘My people live for a very long time. If all goes well and we are not hacked to pieces in battle or eaten up by the crimson flux, we can live for hundreds of years. My father was still young during the Eighth Rain, and my mother had not long had me and my sister. At first, it seemed to be a smaller, almost half-hearted invasion by the Jure’lia. They landed near what is now Reidn, and started to consume that part of Sarn as swiftly as possible. Their Behemoths birthed their giant, hungry maggots, and the other scuttling creatures that are part of their charming company, and soon great stretches of that place were lost under a slick of their varnish.’
He paused to pour them both a cup of tea. The warmth was very welcome, particularly to his stiff, burned hand.
‘My father and his older sister travelled there as part of the main force, wearing their shiny armour and happily carrying their lethal weapons. Back then, it was a matter of pride to repel a Jure’lia invasion, a rite of passage almost. My father had been anxious that the worm people might never return, and he would never get to face them on the battlefield. His younger sister was furious, as she didn’t even get to leave Ebora.’ Tor smiled slightly. ‘What idiots they were. What idiots we are, especially if your dream turns out to be true.’
‘Your father fought with the war-beasts?’
‘Not directly alongside them,’ he said. ‘Only the most skilled warriors fought alongside the sacred beasts. There were those who had a special relationship with them, men and women who were heroes to the rest of us. My father and my aunt were not so important. Not then, anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
Tor grimaced, and took a sip of his tea to wash away the sudden bitter taste in his mouth. ‘When the crimson flux came, it wiped out much of a generation. The old generals, the war leaders, the politicians and the royalty – all those who had been in power for centuries, in other words – all died of the curse. Those Eborans left behind suddenly found themselves with the reins of the kingdom – even if it was a doomed one. My family were largely untouched by the flux to begin with, and they rose in importance.’ He snorted. ‘Although all that really meant by that point was that you got the pick of the empty chambers in the palace.’
‘And the sword?’
‘Mm? Oh, yes.’ Tor patted it absently where it lay on the ground next to him. ‘My aunt was the real warrior of the two of them. She had dedicated a full century of her life to the martial arts, while my father had only been training for a decade.’
‘Only a decade, huh?’
‘He was absolutely determined to go, despite his lack of experience, and in truth, my mother and my grandparents made no real attempt to stop him – as I said, fighting the Jure’lia was considered an honour, a rite of passage for any young Eboran. My aunt promised that she would keep a close eye on him, and off they went to Reidn.’
There was a flurry of leather wings nearby, and the flames of their fire danced wildly for a few seconds as Fulcor landed. The great bat scuffled over to them and dropped a dead hare at Noon’s feet, before taking to the air again. Tor craned his neck to watch her go, but she was lost in the darkness almost immediately.
‘Where do they go?’ he asked.
‘How should I know? Somewhere comfortable to sleep, I expect.’ Noon had reached into her pack and retrieved her knife, now skinning the animal with swift, practised swipes of the blade. Feeling his eyes on her, she shrugged. ‘It’s odd how this stuff comes back. I didn’t skin a single animal in the Winnowry, but put a knife in my hand and it seems as natural as breathing.’
‘That’s not exactly reassuring.’
She huffed laughter. ‘The sword.’
‘Right. When they got there, Reidn was a mess. The Jure’lia had more or less decimated it. What wasn’t covered in varnish was scuttling with the burrowers – the beetle things you saw in your dreams – and the people . . .’ He stared at the fire. ‘My father was an unpleasant bully, much of the time, but whenever he talked about the Eighth Rain, he would go very quiet, and he would rub at his lips constantly.’ Tor demonstrated, frowning as he did so. ‘Almost all the humans they found weren’t human any more. You know what the Jure’lia do to captives?’
Noon shifted on the ground. ‘If it’s like what I saw in the dream . . .’
Tor smiled grimly, feeling the scar tissue on his face stretch as he did so. ‘The burrowers get inside a victim and . . . hollow them out. What is left occupying that body is something else, some greater extension of the Jure’lia themselves.’ He shook his head slightly. ‘Vintage probably knows more about it than I do. But what my father said, what he told us, was that it must be incredibly painful to be eaten from the inside out like that, because the screaming deafened them, for days on end. None of them could sleep because of it.’
Noon had finished with the hare, and was busily skewering it to go over the fire. For the time being he watched her work, admiring how sure her hands were, even though they were covered in blood. Especially because they were covered in blood. He felt that tightness in his chest again, and breathed past it.
‘So, they fought. It was a bloody and nasty fight, my father said, trying to cut a swathe through the occupied town. Mostly they were cutting down the bodies of the drones – that’s what they called the humans who had been burrowed into – and it was dispiriting work. Above and in front of them, the war-beasts and their consorts tore into the maggots and the mothers.’
‘Mothers?’
‘The ones with spindly legs. They birth the burrowers out of their pulsating sacs.’ Seeing the expression on her face, he grinned. ‘Shall I go on? Would you like another bedtime story?’
‘Get on with it.’
‘Night came, and my father and aunt holed up in a deserted cottage. They had been separated from the rest of their unit by that point, and they were both exhausted. My aunt, who had taken a shallow wound to her thigh, slept and my father took the first watch. It was quiet, he said. Eventually, the strain of listening to every single noise gave him a headache. He went to the kitchen of the cottage to see if he could find something to drink –’
‘Like father, like son.’
‘– when he heard a scratching at the back door, like a dog was out there, pawing for scraps, but then he heard a whimpering too, like a child crying. Needing to know what it was, he swept the door open and a small figure fell across the flagstones. It was a little human girl, covered in dirt, as though she’d been hiding for days.’ Tor paused. ‘You know, it’s this part of the story I always find strange because, apparently, my father bent down automatically to pick her up, and the roots alone know how many times I fell over in front of my father as a child and not once did he—’
‘Tor.’
‘Mmm. Her head snapped up, and her eyes were gone. Just holes coated with the shiny black residue they fill their drones with. My father cried out and stumbled back, trying to get away. He was unarmed. Fortunately for him, my aunt appeared at that moment and ran the child through with her sword, but not before the girl had started to vomit up her burrowers. My father retrieved the sword and tried to get them off my aunt, or at least he said he did, but she was quickly overwhelmed. He left, before they could get him too, although he heard her screaming, all the way down the street.’
Silence grew between them for a time. The hare suspended over the fire popped as the fats started to cook.
‘And the sword?’
‘Oh. Yes.’ Tormalin cleared his throat. ‘My father had his sister’s sword re-forged in winnowfire and renamed. When the Ninth Rain came, he used to claim, he would avenge her death. Unfortunately for him, the crimson flux carried him off before he ever got the chance, and the sword passed to me.’ He touched the fingers of his good hand to the long thin scabbard. ‘So he named the sword after the future war he hoped was coming, all so that he could assuage his own guilt about getting his sister killed. He was never a terribly complex man, my father.’ Tor looked at the flames. These were things he had not thought about in a long time, and certainly he had not discussed them with anyone. To Vintage he had only ever given small hints; partly because he enjoyed frustrating her nosiness, but also because, he realised, he was ashamed. ‘Once, when he was in his cups, my father told me that he did see his sister again, after the town had been reclaimed from the Jure’lia. He was leaving, preparing for a miserable march to the next battlefield, when he passed a giant pit that had been dug on the outskirts of the town. The last of the drones were being forced into it, where they were to be burned until they were nothing but ash.’ He cleared his throat. ‘What they carried inside them was considered a sort of pestilence, you see. My father saw his sister standing on the lip of the pit, her hair hanging down around her like a shroud and her eyes a pair of ragged holes. He said she looked at him, and then one of the soldiers pushed her down into the pit with the others.’ Tor looked up at Noon, who was sitting with her teacup clutched in both hands, watching him closely. ‘And then he left.’
‘That’s fucking awful.’
‘It is, rather, isn’t it? Doesn’t show my family in the best light, certainly.’
‘What was her name? Your aunt?’
For a terrible moment, Tor couldn’t remember. He had no clear memories of her, had only seen her portrait in his family’s apartments. She had been a striking woman: tall, with wide-set eyes and ebony hair, and in the painting she had looked faintly angry, as if she already knew that her younger brother would cost her her life. And then it came to him, like a gift.
‘Carpacia,’ he said, wondering how many decades it had been since anyone had said her name. ‘Carpacia the Strong.’
Noon nodded. ‘Thank you for telling me the story. Eborans certainly have an – interesting history.’
‘Well, don’t go spreading it around.’ He gestured at the empty landscape. ‘I am choosing to trust you with this scurrilous information, since we’re friends now.’
Noon raised an eyebrow. ‘We are?’
Suddenly there was a tension in the air that hadn’t been there before. Tor found that he couldn’t read the expression on Noon’s face. He remembered being on his knees inside the Behemoth, overcome with despair, and how she had held him to her, waiting for his pain to pass. He remembered the taste of her blood.
‘After all we have been through together, witch, I should think so.’ His tone felt too light, but he was powerless to change it.
Noon raised her cup, as if to toast him. ‘I think you might be right, bloodsucker. So, friend, shall we eat this hare while it’s still pink and juicy?’
The next few days were hard. A storm came down off the mountains, filling the skies with a thick powdery snow that turned the world into a blanket of white. Noon, awkwardly waving her arms and shouting at them, drove the bats off to find shelter until it had passed, and she and Tor had made their way as best they could on foot, dragging their bags along with them on a makeshift sledge. It was very slow work, and now that they were truly at the foot of the mountains shelter was scarce; it was all flinty rock and dead trees, the mountains rising to either side. They made camp in the shadow of a giant boulder, at least partly out of the winds, and Noon re-lit the fire every time it went out – it was, she joked to Tor, the one thing she was good at.
Despite the fire, the wolves came to them that night. They were dark, shifting shadows at a distance, eyes glinting yellow-green – not worm-touched, but very hungry. Noon could sense them circling, drawing slowly nearer, and neither of them got any sleep that night. The next day brought another blizzard and their progress was slower than ever, and as the sun set – a milky disc that looked painted on the grey patches between clouds – the wolves came for them again.
‘Watch out!’ She saw the first one slipping towards them out of the snow, as swift and as lethal as a thrown dagger, and Tor dropped the ropes of the sledge and turned, the Ninth Rain singing as he drew it from its scabbard. She saw him dance forward and there was a spray of crimson on the white, the brightest thing she had seen in days, but there were more coming, perhaps five or six narrow shapes closing in. Turning round she saw another three advancing directly behind her.
‘Get these ones,’ she shouted to Tor over the wind, gesturing behind her. Flakes of snow landed cold and biting on her tongue. ‘I’ll take those!’
He did not question her, only moved to take her place, and Noon reached for the presence inside her without hesitation. It had been quiet recently, assuaged, she suspected, by their fight with Agent Lin, but as she reached out it filled her again as it had before.
You fight with animals now?
The voice was cold, unimpressed.
‘These animals want to eat us.’
It didn’t matter. She felt strong, and the winnowfire was building within her. She pulled off her gloves and dropped them on the ground.
A wall of fire might startle them enough to leave, said the voice. It sounded reluctant, and Noon knew why; startling something was not the same as fighting something. No, I can see how hungry they are in the lines of their faces. Horizontal discs of your witch-fire. Swiftly now.
Summoning the green flames, Noon held her arms out in front of her. The wolves were edging closer, and time was short. From behind her, she could hear Tor’s grunts of effort as he held off the animals on his side. Holding her hands close but not touching, Noon swept downwards and to her right, feeling a surge of satisfaction as the ball of fire flattened and became a vertical disc, humming with its own energy. She let it build, even as the wolves crept nearer. They had been put off by the scent of wolf blood, but they were thin, and desperate.
What are you doing? Horizontal discs are what you need, several of them, and swiftly, to cover the widest area, snapped the voice in her head. You are wasting time and energy.
‘It’s snowing,’ said Noon. Next to her, multiple discs had formed in the space between her hands, hovering and boiling with light. ‘Winnowfire is weaker when it’s wet. This shape will catch less of the snow.’
And then she swept her arms forward again, releasing the fiery discs. They shot outwards in a spray of green light, and four of the wolves were immediately aflame, their screams of pain sounding too human. Noon staggered, suddenly frightened again, guilty, but she felt the presence inside her step forward somehow, and her arms were moving again, dealing out sheaths of fire that skidded off into the shadows. The rest of the wolves fled, while the bodies of the others burned intermittently, the fire already being extinguished by the ever-present snow.
Noon sagged, exhausted, before turning to see where Tor was. The tall Eboran was leaning on the pile of bags. Three dead wolves lay in front of him, one of them perilously close. Seeing her look, he shouted across the wind.
‘Bastard nearly got me. It seems I am not as fast as I once was.’ He was breathing heavily, and when she joined him at the sledge, she could see that his skin looked grey.
‘Come on,’ she said, retrieving her gloves. ‘Let’s get out of this fucking snow if we can.’
For once, they were lucky. Not far from where they were an old avalanche had created a deep cave, so deep that the floor was dry and the winds couldn’t reach them. So tired now that spots of darkness were dancing at the edge of her vision, Noon helped Tor drag the sledge far enough inside so that the weather couldn’t reach it, and then set about building a fire with the debris that had gathered in the corners. She built it as big as she could, glad to see that the smoke was filtering up and away from them through some unseen passage in the ceiling. Soon enough they both sat before it, for a time too tired to say anything.
‘You were talking to yourself,’ Tor said eventually. He had thrown back his hood and in the firelight his face looked gaunt. There were dark circles around his eyes, but the look he gave her was keen. ‘When you were fighting the wolves.’
‘Was I?’ Noon busied herself with retrieving things from her pack, although she couldn’t now think what it was she was looking for.
‘Yes, you were. Like you were carrying on a conversation with someone who wasn’t there.’
Noon shrugged. ‘I spent ten years in a tiny cell by myself. It’s not that weird for me to talk to myself sometimes, is it?’
‘I’ve never known you to do it before.’
Giving up on her pack, Noon peeled off her scarlet coat and laid it by the fire. It was wet and cold.
‘It must be the strain of putting up with you.’
Tor snorted at that, and then grimaced with pain.
‘What’s up with you?’
He shook his head at her. ‘The burns. They’re thawing out, as it were. Everything hurts.’
The wind howled outside, and Noon found herself listening for the voices of the wolves. She doubted they would come back tonight – surely they had established themselves as the greater predator. Blinking, she realised that thought had not come from her.
‘Do you want to . . .?’ Her voice trailed off awkwardly, and when Tor looked up at her he, too, looked faintly embarrassed. She held up her arm, the sleeve now rolled up to her elbow.
‘Oh. That.’
‘We’ve a long way to go yet, and the weather is shit. I don’t want to be dragging that bloody sledge by myself.’
‘This should not be the case,’ said Tor. He turned his face away from her so that she could not see the scarred side, but not before she caught the look of hunger in his eyes. ‘To need blood just to walk through snow – it shames me. This’ – he gestured at his injuries – ‘has taken more from me than I thought.’
Guilt again, a sore contraction in her chest, but she pushed it away. ‘So you’d run the risk of getting stuck here for the sake of your pride?’
She expected him to get angry at that, but instead he nodded. ‘You are quite correct. You have a pragmatic streak, just like Vintage did. Does.’ He met her gaze now, and she thought she could almost sense the things he was hiding: fear, and a very stark need for what she was offering. ‘Once we get to Ebora, all this will be solved. It is merely temporary.’
‘That’s the spirit.’ She pulled a knife from her bag. ‘Shall we?’
Rising, he came and sat next to her, facing away from the fire. She held up the knife, but he touched her hand.
‘May I?’ Seeing her look, he smiled slightly. ‘I know where to cut so that it will bleed well, and cause you the least discomfort.’
For a long moment Noon didn’t move. She thought of all the stories she had grown up with, of the inhuman enemy over the mountains, the monsters that came to steal their children and drink their blood.
‘Do it,’ she said, passing him the knife. He pressed the blade to her skin, and the sting was less than it usually was. He pressed his mouth to the cut before she even saw the blood, and she gasped a little – his lips were warm on her chilled skin. His other arm, the one not holding her hand, circled her waist, drawing her slightly closer whilst barely touching her. And this was what she hadn’t told him, of course: that it was possible to become addicted to this closeness, the warmth of another body. She no longer felt cold at all. If anything, she felt feverish.
His tongue slid over the cut, and when he raised his head there was no blood on his lips at all.
‘You’ve done this before,’ she said, slightly shakily. He nodded, his eyes half closed. Already he looked brighter, his skin almost as luminous as it had once been. Without speaking, he held out her bare arm and touched his lips to the flesh of her forearm, tracing a path to her wrist. There he raked his teeth over the pale blue veins just under the skin, and Noon shivered, more violently than before.
‘What was that?’
‘The Early Path: Dawn’s Awakening. One of the first levels attained at the House of the Long Night.’
‘Will you do it again?’
His face split into a grin, and Noon saw several things happen one after another, like a stack of falling cards: genuine pleasure at her response, a flicker of that same hunger, and then, as his skin tightened on the burned side of his face, his smile faltered. She saw clearly, in the way he looked down and away, how he imagined she saw him – something ruined and broken.
‘No,’ she said, and she touched his face. ‘No. I want you to.’
In the firelight his eyes were a deep maroon, warm and uncertain. Without looking away from her, he pressed his mouth to her wrist again, kissing her skin and then biting, very softly. She had never seen him look so vulnerable, and it was that, more than anything, that made her shift forward and, as he raised his head, kiss him. He tasted of snow and apples and her blood, and then he moaned against her mouth, pulling her against him, his hands sliding up the back of her shirt.
Noon had not kissed anyone before. She quickly concluded that it was something she intended to do much more of.
‘Wait.’ Tor pulled away from her. He seemed to be searching her face for something. ‘I am not what I once was.’
Noon blinked, for a moment completely uncertain of everything. Had there been an injury she had missed?
As if guessing her thoughts, Tor shook his head. ‘I mean, I am – you can see what I am.’
‘I do, I see what you are.’ She took a slow breath. ‘I see who you are, I think.’
This time he kissed her with an urgency that took her breath away, and banished all thoughts of their bleak situation; of the location of their friend; of the potential invasion; the alien voice in her head. She was lost in a silky warmth she had never guessed at.
They fell together onto the floor, Noon’s hands seeming to search of their own accord for buttons, belts, fastenings. Tor tugged at her shirt and she yanked it off, revealing the tight undervest she wore against the cold. He murmured something in a language she didn’t recognise and kissed her softly just under the ear, weaving a trail of kisses down her neck to the rise of her breasts. With a hand pressed on either side of her chest, he trailed his thumbs down to her midriff.
‘What are you doing?’
‘The Early Path: Morning’s Music.’ He paused. ‘Can I take your trousers off?’
She kicked them off along with her boots and his hands smoothed the skin along her thighs and the backs of her calves, curling around the soft roundness of her heel. It tickled slightly, and she laughed.
‘The Morning Sun: A Bright Bird’s Song,’ he said, smiling.
‘Take more of your clothes off.’
He hesitated only for a moment. Soon they lay together on the blanket, with only Noon’s thin underclothes between them. She could feel every place that he had touched her with a special clarity, while at the centre of her was a deep rhythmic crashing, like the sea pounding the beach. Her hands were hungry devils, fascinated by the smooth, hard planes of his body, his luminous near-golden skin, like some exotic wood. Next to it, the tawny colour of her limbs was like silk.
‘If the wolves come back now, we really are fucked.’
He gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘I refuse to rush.’ Sliding his hand down the back of her underclothes, he pulled her close again. ‘The Morning Sun: The Rushing of the Day.’ His voice, she noticed, was less than steady, and under her hands his heart was beating rapidly.
She moaned and pressed her body to his; the crashing inside her was growing faster.
‘The Afternoon’s Awakening: The Turning Shadow –’
Her hands slipped around him, no longer thinking of anything coherent. He cried out a little, jerking against her, and with her free hand she pushed her underclothes to one side.
‘Enough of your shadows and suns.’ In another time and place she might have been amused by the sound of her voice – it was barely hers, so low and rough was it. Tor murmured something unintelligible to her neck, and then they were fully together.
A revelation. The crashing that had been inside her was now in both of them, tumbling them along in a riptide. Tor’s hair hung over her face, she could taste his breath. He locked eyes with her and she remembered the touch of his tongue against her broken skin and that was when it took her. In the midst of the violence of it, she felt him shuddering over her and understood that he too had reached this final place.
For a time, the cave was full of the sound of their breathing, harsh at first and then gradually evening out. She became aware again of the howling blizzard outside, and it sounded different somehow. Everything did.
‘Well,’ said Tor, when he had his breath back. ‘No wolves, at least.’
Noon laughed, and after a moment he joined her.