Noon swung her legs off the bed. ‘What are you talking about, war? And where are you expecting me to go? The door is locked.’
But the voice was gone. Noon stood up, feeling warily for the stirring of energy within her. It was still there, banked down to embers now but ready to be called on. She walked over to the door and rattled the handle, just in case, but it was still firmly locked. Leaning against it, she grew still. What was that noise? She held her breath, and it came again: distant screaming. Her skin grew cold all over.
‘What’s happening?’
The voice rushed back into her head, and for the first time it did not sound calm or in control – it was panicked, wild and desperate.
Go! it cried. You have to go now, or you will miss it. You will miss me!
‘You have to tell me what you’re talking about. Talk some sense!’
The Hall of Roots. Please. You must go there, for me.
It was the note of pleading in the normally arrogant voice that got Noon moving. She grabbed her jacket and pulled on her boots, her heart thudding painfully in her chest. The screaming was louder now, and she thought she could hear the thunder of people running. She went back to the door and crashed her fists against it.
‘What’s happening? Let me out!’
There was no reply. Noon turned back to the room. There was a feeling now, a rushing tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the screams outside or even the voice inside her. There was somewhere else she needed to be. This room was all wrong.
‘I’m stuck in here,’ she said aloud. ‘I can’t get out.’
The bitter amusement of the voice spread through her, making the ends of her fingers tingle.
You believe that this place can hold you?
It was a good point. Noon raised her arms in a slow graceful movement, summoning a churning ball of winnowfire between her hands. She swept it back and forth, feeding it the energy it needed to grow slowly, calling on the discipline of the presence inside her to do so. Eventually, the globe of fire hummed between her arms, a pot waiting to boil over. She ran towards the window and threw it. The fireball crashed into the window and it exploded in a shower of wood and glass. Noon covered her head with her arms, an expression on her face caught somewhere between fright and joy as the debris pattered down all around her. There were cuts on her forearms, stings like kisses over her flesh, but she barely noticed them. Now there was a hole in the wall rather than a window, and through it she could see bright daylight and the embers of her own fire. A way out. It seemed she was pretty good at finding those, after all.
As an afterthought, she picked up Tor’s sword before she left.
The distance between Ygseril and the doors had never seemed so far.
Behind Tor, the Jure’lia queen still hung suspended over the tree-god’s roots, held in place by the stringy black material that seemed to be both a part of her and something she could control. Hestillion had dropped to her knees where she stood, but the burrowers were ignoring her, splitting around her still form like the sea around a rock. He had lost track of Aldasair, somewhere in the midst of the panic, and now Tor was climbing over a mass of overturned chairs, pausing to stamp on the burrowers underfoot or brush them from his clothing. Everywhere he looked, humans were falling to the scurrying creatures, and the great hall rang with the sound of their screams as they were eaten alive. A figure lurched in front of him – a man with a trim black beard, now his face was lined with scratches from the busy feet of burrowers, and his eyes were holes lined with the same black substance oozing out from the roots. He grinned at Tor, and reached for him as though they were old friends.
Tor pushed him away, and then, thinking better of it, punched him solidly in the jaw. The man went down like a sack of potatoes but as Tor stepped over him, he saw that he was still grinning. Tor remembered something from Vintage’s many notes: it was difficult to knock a drone unconscious, because they had no brain left to damage.
‘I need to get my damn sword.’
Ahead of him he saw a pair of drones – they were easier to identify than he’d ever have imagined because they all moved in the same slick and boneless way – standing over a human, an older woman with a red scarf over her hair. The drones were holding her down while the burrowers flowed all over her, seeking their way in, and the poor woman was screaming and kicking. Tor vaulted over the fallen chairs, in the grip of a horror so great that it seemed to fill his throat with a painful heat, but as he reached them he saw two burrowers busily forcing their way down the woman’s throat, and her screams were abruptly muffled. He turned away. There was nothing he could do.
There was another woman on the floor ahead, struggling to get to her feet, and he recognised Mother Fast, the representative of the plains people who had so unsettled Noon. For now, the burrowers had missed her, and he scooped her up by her elbow. She met his eyes with her one working eye.
‘I believe it is time for us to leave, Mother Fast.’
‘And go where, boy? The worm people are back, and there are a handful of Eborans left to face them. We may as well lie down here, and have an end to it.’
‘You’re a barrel of laughs, aren’t you?’ Tor steered her round a pile of chairs, while all around them the screaming went on. ‘I have no intention of dying today, so if you’ll just—’
Ahead of them, the doors to the Hall of Roots blew off their hinges in a crash of green fire. Noon stepped into view, her black hair a corkscrewed mess and a teeming glove of green fire around her right arm. Next to him, Tor felt Mother Fast recoil.
‘That’s it, she’s come to kill us all now.’ Her voice was breathy, on the verge of hysteria. ‘I should have known, should have known that’s how it would end.’
‘Oh, do get a grip.’ Tor stamped heavily on a pair of burrowers skirting around Mother Fast’s feet. At the sight of Noon he had felt his heart lighten, and now he waved at her. ‘Noon!’ And she had his sword.
They met each other by a pile of broken chairs. Most of the audience had fled, with the remainder either drones or in the process of being made into them.
‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ he said quickly, although he suspected that wasn’t entirely true. Hadn’t it always been a mystery, what had happened to the Jure’lia at the end of the Eighth Rain? Hadn’t the question now been answered? ‘We have to get out of here.’
Noon pushed his sword into his hand. There was no confusion on her face now, no uncertainty. She didn’t even appear to be upset by the presence of Mother Fast; she gave the old woman one appraising glance and looked away.