‘I must have a closer look, my good man. How deep is the water atop it? Can I stand on it?’
The captain looked bemused now. ‘I reckon you could, m’lady, but you’ll get your clothes all wet.’
She swatted at his arm. ‘Wet clothes? Wet clothes? Do I look like I care about wet clothes?’ Seeing his face, she relented slightly. ‘My dear Captain Arus, I would be most grateful if you could take me down there. I would, of course, reimburse you for your trouble.’
Soon enough Vintage was bobbing on the river in the ship’s small rowboat, the captain himself keeping it steady while she leaned over the side, peering down past the water at the grim scene beneath. It looked like two men and a woman, and they were tumbled every which way, as though a great tide of varnish had surged over them and caught them while they were fleeing. And it was as she thought – another figure caught down there in the green depths, something so rarely seen that it made her heart thump painfully in her chest.
‘What is it, Lady de Grazon?’ asked Captain Arus. ‘You must have seen the varnish before? Those worm bastards have left their muck all over Sarn.’
‘You probably won’t have noticed it,’ said Vintage softly. She had a sketchbook in her hands, her pencil moving feverishly across the page. ‘It’s down past the human bodies. We call them mothers, although it has always struck me as a wildly inappropriate phrase.’
It looked rather like a squashed spider seen from above, if spiders were the size of goats. From the drawings she had seen of them, she knew that there was an orb at the centre of those oddly muscled legs, a pale thing that pulsed and secreted the creatures they called burrowers. Not for the first time she felt a stab of frustration that the varnish was impenetrable, whilst simultaneously fighting a wave of horror that such a creature was so close. If they could extract it somehow, would it still be alive? They knew so little about the Jure’lia. Despite the heat of the day she felt a rash of goosebumps move across her arms. The captain was next to her now, peering down into the water too.
‘I can see something dark.’ He grimaced. ‘I always thought that was a weird plant, or something.’
‘This is incredible, captain.’ She paused, and squeezed his arm. ‘You could make a fortune bringing scholars such as myself up here to gawk at it. I cannot believe my luck, that I am the first to see it.’ Her eye caught the pale shape of one of the human victims of the varnish, and her brief good mood seemed to evaporate. To be trapped like that, without even the simple dignity of being able to rot away to nothing. She swallowed hard. Nanthema. ‘But I must keep moving, my dear Arus. I will be back one day to study this properly, I promise you.’
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.’