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.