‘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.’