40
For Noon, her first sight of Ebora was an alarming doubling of images. Their bats flying almost wing to wing, she and Tor approached it as the sun was going down, the great clouds stacked on the horizon stained red and yellow like another world hanging in the sky. She saw the sprawling intricacy of the city, black and grey in the fading light, overgrown and broken down, and exploding from the very centre of it, the vast dead tree that was the Eboran god – all grey bark and twisted branches. The snow had not settled here. And yet at the same time, hanging over this first vision, she saw a city that sparkled with a thousand lights, that leaked spindles of smoke from a thousand inhabited homes, and in the centre of it crouched the silver glory that was Ygseril, its leaves shifting and stirring like a living thing. Because back then, it was.
She was aware that this second image was not her own, that for some reason the presence that was in her head had gifted it to her. It was so disorientating that she had to look away. Instead, she glanced over to Tor on the back of Gull, but his face was hidden within the scarf he’d wrapped around his head to keep off the chill, and what she could see of his expression was unreadable.
Following Gull’s lead, they swept in lower, and the outskirts of the mythical city came up to meet them. Now they were closer, Noon could see the crumbling buildings, the flat red tiles of the roofs, the dark holes that had been windows, and the places where nature had started to claim the place as her own. She glimpsed a trio of sleek grey shapes flitting from one set of ruins to another, and she thought of the wolves that had surrounded them in the snow. Further ahead, just beneath the sprawling branches of the dead god-tree, she could see some lights – the flickering of campfires, and the steadier points of oil lamps.
Noon felt her heart begin to beat faster in her chest. The ancient city of Ebora, for centuries largely forbidden to humans, was now passing beneath her feet. Here were the homes of the rich and important; pale marble glinted in the peach fire of the sunset, and she saw pieces of richly carved architecture, cracked or covered in ivy. Once, armies had marched from this place and swept down across the plains, massacring her people as they went, drinking their blood and worse, according to the stories. Here she was, flying in to this place, a murderer herself, free for the first time in ten years and in the company of an Eboran to whom she had freely given her blood. An Eboran with whom she had shared more than her blood.
‘Who am I?’ she said aloud, but her words were scattered to the wind, and the voice inside her head was silent.
Gull was swooping in to land now, so she leaned close over Fulcor’s head, murmuring into her cavernous ear, and they followed on down, wings beating a hectic wind along a deserted street. Tor dismounted, and she did the same, briefly hopping on legs that had grown used to not walking.
‘We’ll walk the rest of the way,’ Tor said. He was already unstrapping his bags, taking extra care with those containing the Jure’lia orbs. ‘I want to get a good idea of what we’re walking into. I saw lights ahead. More lights than I was expecting.’
‘What do you think it is?’
He unwound the scarf, and underneath it his face was tense. ‘When I left fifty years or so ago, my sister was one of the few people still alive in this place.’ He shrugged. ‘She could be long dead. Perhaps they all are, and humans have crept in, looking to loot the place, or live in it.’ He caught her eye, and his expression softened slightly. ‘In truth, Noon, I don’t know what we’re about to face.’
‘Are you all right?’
He smiled, the scarred side of his face creasing. Just lately he had seemed less conscious of it. ‘I didn’t think I would ever come back,’ he said. ‘Part of me is horrified that I have. It’s a little unnerving.’ He touched her face briefly, almost awkwardly. ‘You must bear with me.’
Noon bent and picked up one of the bags containing the orbs, feeling the slosh of liquid as she shouldered it onto her back. They had tested it on one of their frequent stops, leaving an odd patch of bright foliage in the snowy mountain pass.
‘There’s only one way to find out, bloodsucker.’ She gestured to the road ahead of them. The stones were cracked and riddled with weeds. ‘Shall we?’
‘Yes, let’s.’ Tor took a deep breath. ‘Although, if my sister is still alive, you might want to refrain from that particular, uh, term of endearment.’
Little had changed, aside from the gentle slump into decay that had been ongoing for as long as he could remember. The buildings were shabbier, the trees and plants had encroached further. There was one quite sizeable tree growing in the centre of the main street, the street that led directly to the Palace of Roots. It had not been there when he left. At some point a storm had blown off all the tiles from the roof of what had once been a very fine house indeed, and now, as if that act had opened a lid, it was full to bursting with creepers and shrubs – they trickled out the windows like bloody tears.
‘I can smell wolves,’ said Noon next to him, making him jump.
‘Can you? You can do that?’
‘I can now,’ she said, which was, in Tor’s opinion, not really an answer at all.
They walked on, the sound of their boots too flat on the stones while shadows seemed to rush to meet them. Deep inside, Tor could feel a sense of dread gathering, as though they walked quietly towards their deaths. Because, of course, that was what Ebora had always meant to him – a quiet death in a dusty room somewhere, waiting endlessly for it to all be over. Why was he back here? What was he thinking? The plan had always been to run away, to run as far as possible and to have as much fun as possible before his body turned on him. His heart thudded sickly in his chest. What waited for him here? The giant corpse of a god that had abandoned them, or the skeletal remains of his sister, dead these fifty years and hidden in a room somewhere?
‘Do you hear that?’
Tor grimaced. ‘What?’
‘Listen.’
He could hear only the wind, the quiet whisper of dead leaves being blown across their path. He glanced at Noon, but her face was intent, a crease between her brows that bisected the tattooed bat wing perfectly. For a moment, he remembered how much he enjoyed the stubborn set of her mouth, and how her narrow eyes creased with pleasure when he—
A pair of voices, chatting amiably enough – there and then gone. Noon met his eyes.
‘You heard it.’
For one dizzying second he was seized with terror – the ghosts of his ancestors were here all along, waiting for the wanderer to return, Tormalin the Oathless, Tormalin the Walker on the Wall. And then the wind changed again and he heard the soft babble of many people, gathered together somewhere ahead. A hidden crowd. They were nearing the outskirts of the palace and the public gardens that led to the inner gate.
‘They’re not Eboran, by the voices,’ he said. This possibility too was frightening; not ghosts, but usurpers. Humans rattling around in the Palace of Roots, stealing all those things that had been hidden away or covered up, perhaps throwing out the long-dried corpses of his people into the gardens, to turn into mulch there.
‘Tor?’ Noon touched his arm, and he nodded once.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go quickly now. I need to know.’
Shortly they came to the small ring of buildings outside the palace, which in better times had been home to the men and women who kept the place running smoothly – servants, administrators, artisans. Tor led the way up the central street, skirting around a particularly dense thicket of thorn bushes, and suddenly it was in front of them – the great sweep of the welcome gardens, the gates shining in the distance, the low magnificence of the palace beyond that – and there were people camped on the grass. Tor stopped, and next to him he heard Noon catch her breath.
There were caravans and tents, great silk ones and smaller, cone-shaped ones, horses grazing on the now short-cropped grass, and several large campfires. Men and women were gathered around these, talking animatedly and cooking, while a handful of children ran around, shouting so that their words were caught in short bursts of white vapour. It was a cold night, and growing colder. The gates, he could finally see, stood partly open, and there was a steady stream of people wandering up and down the great path, even moving through the sacred gardens beyond. As he stared at them all, a few curious faces turned to look. He sensed more than saw Noon pulling her cap down over her forehead.
‘There are lots of different people here, Noon,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘I see plains people, but there are also people from Reidn here, and Kesenstan and Jarlsbad, if I’m right. I recognise the languages, their caravans, their flags.’ He blinked. ‘What are they all doing here?’
‘Plains people,’ Noon croaked. Her eyes were riveted to a cluster of wide conical tents at the edges of the grass. ‘I see them.’
Their arrival was causing some excitement now. Men and women leaned their heads close, staring, eyebrows raised as they speculated together. He stood up straight, and without waiting to see if Noon would follow, he began to stride towards the centre of the group. This was his home, after all.
He wasn’t sure what he intended to do – stride up to the palace and then start shouting at everyone to get off his lawn? But instead, as he moved through a crowd that were all staring at him, Noon following on in his wake, he spotted a figure that caused an odd constriction around his heart. A slender young man with soft auburn curls, talking animatedly to a tall human man with a pair of axes at his waist. The last time Tor had seen the Eboran, he had been wandering away from him down a corridor, not listening as Tor tried to explain that he was going away, that they would not see each other again. He had had dust in his hair, he remembered, and his tattered shirt had been untucked. Aldasair had aged in the last fifty years, but only slightly.
‘Aldasair?’ Almost immediately he wanted to take the greeting back, half convinced that it wouldn’t be his cousin after all, just some stranger with his face, and then he would find Aldasair’s body somewhere in the labyrinthine palace, long dead of the crimson flux. But the young man was turning – Tor had a moment to admire the fine jacket he was wearing, not Eboran style at all – and he watched as the shock flitted across his face. Aldasair’s eyes grew so wide that Tor thought they might fall out of his head.
‘Tor? Tormalin?’
Around them, men and women were standing back, and Aldasair stumbled through them. When Tor had left, he had been certain that his young cousin’s mind had been lost forever, but there was a brightness, an alertness in his face that hadn’t been there before. The constriction in his chest grew tighter and he swallowed past it, feeling his mouth stretch in a grin he couldn’t deny.
‘It’s me, Aldasair. I came back after all.’
Aldasair grabbed him and embraced him, and then held him back to stare at him closely. There was a glassy look to his eyes now, and Tor suspected that his mind had not healed entirely, after all.
‘What happened to you?’
‘That’s a very long story, cousin, and I do want to tell you all about it, but first of all would you—’
‘Your face, Tor, what happened to your face?’
For a second it was difficult to breathe, as though his lungs had turned to ice. He had forgotten. His cousin was reaching out well-meaning fingers, about to touch his scars. Tor stepped back lightly.
‘That – is not something to be explained out here. Could we—?’
‘And who is this?’ Aldasair had stepped around him, peering at Noon, who was looking at him with a faintly amused expression.
‘Ah. May I present Noon of the plains people, a companion of mine who has—’
‘You travel with a human?’
Tor cleared his throat. ‘Noon, this is my cousin Aldasair.’
‘I figured that much out.’
The campsite was entirely silent now, watching their little scene. With faint desperation, Tor took Aldasair’s arm. Only the tall man with the axes seemed to sense their need for privacy; he was carefully looking the other way, as though he’d spotted something incredibly interesting on the far side of the gardens.
‘Please, Al. My sister. Is Hestillion still alive?’ He wanted to follow up the question with, and what are all these bloody humans doing here? but it was so very quiet now. Only the crackling of the campfires accompanied their voices.
Aldasair jumped as though he’d been pinched.
‘Your sister! Quickly, come with me.’
A thousand memories with every step. The palace gates were rusted in places but they did not screech as they once did when Aldasair led them through – someone had oiled them recently. The wide path that led to the palace had once shone with the brilliance of its polished white stones. Now many of them were shattered or lost, but someone had attempted to wash the rest – Tor could see dark streaks on some where a wet rag had been dragged across an accumulation of filth. Tiny details, but signs that Ebora was not quite as dead as when he had left it.
‘This place,’ said Noon, her voice low, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Aldasair led them up the wide marble steps, through the gigantic lacquered doors – the elaborate golden trees had mostly broken or been chipped away, and these had not been repaired – and through into the palace itself. He took them down corridors, and here and there Tor heard human voices behind doors. It was difficult to concentrate.
‘Where is she?’ he asked finally, not able to keep it in any longer. ‘Where is Hest?’
‘Where else would she be?’ said Aldasair. ‘In the Hall of Roots.’
Faster than Tor had expected, they were standing outside another set of doors he remembered very well. The golden dragons and phoenixes looked dusty and tired. Aldasair paused then, looking at Noon.
‘She may have to wait outside.’
‘What? Why?’
His cousin looked uncomfortable, although Tor sensed it wasn’t down to any embarrassment. There was something here that Aldasair didn’t understand, or was afraid of. Looking at his face, it was easy to remember the vacant man Tor had left behind.
‘Hestillion has yet to allow any of the diplomats into the Hall of Roots.’ Aldasair blinked rapidly. ‘Which I don’t understand, because I thought that’s why they were here. To see it. Him. To help bring him back.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Noon brightly. ‘I’m not a diplomat. And given I’ve just flown over a mountain on a bat to get here, there’s no way you’re keeping me out of that room.’
‘A bat, did you say?’ Aldasair’s eyebrows had disappeared up into his mop of hair.
‘Enough.’ Tor reached past them both and pushed the doors open. Inside, the Hall of Roots was a shadowy, cavernous space. Outside, the last of the sun’s light had burned away to orange and purple, and all of the objects Tor remembered from this room, the paintings wrapped in parchment, the sculptures hidden in greying linens, had all been moved to the outer edges. Directly ahead of them, solid and dark and enormous, was the trunk of Ygseril. There was a collection of oil lamps, placed haphazardly on the roots, making it look as though a crowd of errant fireflies had decided to rest there, and amongst it all a slender figure sat, knees drawn up to her chest, her head to one side. Her yellow hair was loose, partially hiding her face.
A memory rose up in his mind, sharp and sick, and he was helpless against it; he remembered coming into this room, wondering where his sister had gone, only to find her perched on the roots, the body of a human child slumped before her. The human blood that had doomed them all already soaking into the dead roots of their god.
‘Hest? Hest, it’s me.’ He shouted across the hall, too aware of how his words were eaten up by the space between them. Despite that, the head of the figure snapped up, as if roused violently from a deep sleep. As they watched, she stood up and walked across the roots, slowly at first and then with greater urgency until she nearly fell as she came to the edge. Instinctively, Tor began to trot towards her, until he found that he was running. And then she was running too. Tor had thought that nothing could have hurt him more than the cold fury she had shown him on the day he’d left, but as he looked at the desperate, unbelieving expression on her face, he felt that pain shrivel into nothing like parchment on a fire.
‘Tormalin?’ Her voice was hoarse, as though she hadn’t spoken for years. ‘Tormalin? Tormalin?’
She stumbled into his arms, muttering his name over and over again, her red eyes wide.
‘It’s me, Hest,’ he said into her hair. ‘I came home.’
She drew back from him, and seeing his face, all the strength seemed to rush out of her. He staggered as she fell to the floor, a sick tide of dread rising up in him as he saw the dirty cuffs of her robe, the way the hair on the back of her head was matted, as if she had been bedridden for months. There were dark circles under her eyes. She was alive, but where was his strong, unflappable sister?
‘Your face,’ she gasped. ‘What happened to your face?’ She took his hand, the one rippled with scars, and squeezed it as if checking it was real. ‘Tormalin, what have you done?’
‘There was an accident.’ He forced a smile. Her fingers dug into his arm, her nails ragged and soft. ‘But I am fine. I came back. Aren’t you glad to see me?’
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Noon and Aldasair standing off to one side, having caught up with them. Noon had taken off her cap and was looking at Ygseril with an expression Tor couldn’t fathom, but then his sister was grabbing at his arms, shaking him.
‘You come back now, of course you do,’ she said, moving her face into something that was more a grimace than a smile. ‘If there is to be glory, you could not miss it. It is so like you to know, Tormalin. That you should come back precisely now, at this time.’
‘Hest,’ Tor took a slow breath, ‘there is a lot we need to talk about, a lot to catch up on.’ Carefully, he helped her to her feet. ‘Hest, why are there humans in the city? What are they doing here?’
‘They had dreams,’ said Aldasair, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Dreams that made them remember what Ebora was, and why they needed it.’
Hestillion looked up, seeming to see the other people in the hall for the first time. Tor saw her dismiss their cousin instantly, before her gaze snapped to Noon.
‘Who is that?’
‘Please, let me introduce you properly.’ Tor cleared his throat. ‘This is Fell-Noon of the, uh, plains. She has travelled here with me, Hest, because we found something important, which I need to tell you about.’
Noon was still staring at the tree-god, acknowledging none of them. Tor had the sudden dizzying sense that he was the only sane one in the room.
‘A fell-witch?’ Hestillion shook her head as if to clear it. ‘No. No, not at all. This has never been a place for humans – I can’t tell what effect that might have. What if he’s insulted? What if the proximity of their blood taints him, as it does us?’ She paused this strange diatribe as some sudden realisation washed over her, and Tor found that he knew what she was going to say before she said it. Hestillion the dream-walker, always too perceptive for anyone’s comfort. ‘Did she burn you? With winnowfire? She did this to you?’ They were demands more than questions.
‘It’s a long story, Hest, please.’ Tor took a slow breath. ‘Let’s go to one of the smaller rooms, sit down together and open a bottle of wine. We can talk about all of it, I promise. I would like to share a drink with my much-missed sister. You still have wine here, don’t you?’
She was already shaking her head. ‘No, I cannot leave here, and now that you are here, Tormalin, you will have to stay too. That one,’ Hestillion pointed at Noon, as though gesturing to an offensive artwork she wished removed from her sight, ‘must leave. Now. I will not have a human in the Hall of Roots.’
Finally, Noon seemed to hear what they were saying, and she turned, an imperious expression on her face that Tor had never seen before.
‘You order me out? How dare you, small creature. I have more right than anyone to be here, in this place. Certainly more right than a child such as you.’
For a moment Tor was too stunned to move or speak. Dimly he was aware of Aldasair watching all this with a bemused expression.
‘How dare I?’ There was such a note of danger in Hestillion’s voice that Tor felt a genuine surge of panic – again he remembered the small boy she had murdered, his throat cut open in honour of their god. Noon, meanwhile, stepped forward, her cap falling to the floor as her hands leapt with green fire, filling the Hall with eerie light.
‘Noon, no!’ He grabbed at her shoulder, turning her towards him, and whatever it was that had been in her face winked out like a candle. After a moment, the winnowfire vanished.
‘Tor?’
‘This is too much,’ he said. ‘This place, it’s overwhelming. Aldasair, a quiet room where we can talk, please? A place where the stakes are not quite so apparent.’
Aldasair nodded. ‘I know such a room. Hestillion, will you join us?’
Tor was surprised by the simple note of kindness in his cousin’s voice, and even more surprised that Hest seemed to respond to it. Glaring once more at Noon, she pushed her hair back from her face and nodded.
‘The Bellflower Room has recently been aired,’ said Aldasair. ‘And I’ve had wine put in there for future guests. Follow me.’
Tor knew where it was, but he was glad to follow his cousin from the Hall of Roots, and relieved to put the dead form of Ygseril behind him. For all the emotions that had rushed back to him at their arrival in Ebora, he felt only dread when he looked at the god-tree.