The bat gave no indication as to whether she thought this was a wise idea or not. Ahead of them, the landscape of twisted greenery gave away to a stretch of land so strange to Noon’s eyes that she sat up in Fulcor’s saddle, trying to see it more clearly. It looked to her almost like the surface of a pond crowded with lily pads, only the circular growths were huge, the size of the roofs they had passed over in Mushenska, and tall, on the same level as the tree canopy. Each circular mound was brown, or beige, or a pale cream with dark grey spots, and as they passed overhead and Noon caught a whiff of a deep, earthy and somehow lively scent, she realised that they were the caps of enormous fungi. It made no sense to her at all, but they were somehow less alarming than the clinging trees, so she leaned forward to speak into Fulcor’s great crinkled ear again and the bat took them spiralling down through a chink in the caps. Beneath the surface of this strange, fleshy forest were more of the enormous toadstools, their caps smaller and in some cases more colourful; Noon saw pale pink, deep ochre and some examples of a dusty blue. White and grey stalks feathered with fringes of creamy white flesh twisted up all around, and the shadowed spaces were shot through here and there with shards of weak sunlight, dancing with motes of dust. It was all eerily quiet.
Fulcor landed on a craggy hill of black dirt, lifting her feet off it one at a time and making discontented squeaks. Noon unstrapped herself and her new hessian bag and just about had time to step down onto the damp ground before Fulcor flapped her leathery wings and was away again. Noon watched as the bat flew agitatedly from one stalk to another, looking for all the world like a moth battering a lamp, and then she found a space amongst the caps and was gone.
‘Oh.’
Noon stood staring up at the place where the bat had vanished, trying not to feel the weight of shadows all around her. After a moment, she hesitantly blew on the silver whistle, feeling vaguely foolish, but the bat did not return.
‘Fuck.’
Slowly, Noon realised that the place was neither as quiet nor as still as she’d initially thought. The shadows contained tiny points of movement, creatures native to this dank underworld skittering away from her intrusion, while a dry ticking, like bone dice being lightly thrown together, seemed to come from all around. Trying not to imagine what might live in this strange offshoot of the Wild, Noon swiftly gathered an armful of bracken and sticks, sucked the remaining life energy out of them, and built a small haphazard fire on top of a dirt mound. The sticks were still too damp, but she blasted them with winnowfire until she had a small, smoky blaze, and she crouched next to it, shivering.
‘Here I am,’ she said. The dry ticking noise had grown quieter, and she guessed that whatever had been making it had moved away. ‘Here I am, then.’
It was strangely mild down under the fungi, and the air was thick, but the damp of the soil had quickly soaked through her Winnowry-issue slippers and a deeper kind of cold was seeping into her bones. Presently, she began to shake all over.
‘I don’t know where I am,’ she said to the lively shadows. ‘But I am free. I don’t have much food, and I have no idea where I am, but I have escaped the Winnowry.’ She picked up the hessian sack and clutched it to her chest, recalling the bustle and the noise of Mushenska. ‘Free to starve to death under a fucking mushroom.’
7
Hestillion paused with her hand on the door, staring down the corridor at nothing. Nothing.
The slick wood was cold under her fingertips, but then, her fingertips these days were little beads of ice, a shivery reminder that everything was wrong. The end of the corridor was in shadow, with strained grey light falling across the threadbare carpet. It was an overcast day, and the windows were dirty. There was no one left to clean them – not unless Hestillion went and fetched a bucket from the cavernous servants’ quarters, and she couldn’t face that yet. Not yet.
There was nothing to look at down the corridor but, even so, Hestillion stared at it, letting herself fade into a kind of weary trance. Perhaps, if she stood here long enough, thinking very carefully about nothing, she could step outside of time. And then she would walk down this corridor and hear voices behind every door. The light would be the good, strong light of summer, and nobody would be dead at all. She would laugh with her brother, and this whole nightmare would seem so silly. Perhaps it was all a nightmare she had woven and made everyone dream for a time, and Tormalin would smile indulgently at her and suggest they toast her, a true master of dream-walking.
From inside the room came a high-pitched, wailing wheeze, snapping Hestillion out of her comfortable trance. Her fingers tightened around the clean linens she held in one hand as she listened for what came next. A wheeze, growing tighter and tighter as the lungs struggled to gather air, a few heartbeats of nothing – was it over? Was this the end? – and then the explosive rattle, a coarse tearing that made her wince. It was impossible to hear it without imagining soft tissues tearing deep inside, and the splatter of blood on sheets. Another whistling wheeze, another pause, and the thick avalanche that followed.
‘Hold on,’ she murmured, leaning on the door to open it. She wasn’t sure if she was talking to herself or Moureni.
The room inside was dark save for the hazy rectangle of grey light that was the window. She could make out the great four-poster bed and a stormy sea of white sheets; the shape in the middle was a range of narrow mountains, twisted and treacherous. The air smelled of blood and dust, but then Hestillion was almost certain that Ebora had smelled of nothing else for the last hundred years.
‘Good morning, Lord Moureni,’ she said, gliding into the room and setting the linens on the corner of the bed, as if she were a maid and this were her job. ‘How are we feeling today?’
Moureni answered with another rattling cough, one so severe that he went rigid under the sheets, his body caught in the violence of the spasm. Hestillion went to the window and pulled the sashes back as far as they would go. It barely made a difference.
‘Girl,’ croaked the figure in the bed. ‘How do you think I am?’
‘Do not call me that. I am no child, and I have a name.’
Moureni went back to coughing. As she turned back to the bed, Hestillion saw a dark patch spreading on the sheet near the head of the bed. It was not the clear fluid that Eborans bled from a superficial wound, but the deep oily black blood they shed when death was near. By now, Lord Moureni would be leaking this black blood from cracks in his skin all over his body. It was near impossible to get out of white sheets.
‘Good thing I brought fresh linen for you, isn’t it?’
There was a candelabra on the small chest of drawers by the bed stuffed with fat white candles, half burned down to nothing, so she lit them quickly with the matches in her pocket. The warm yellow light that spread across the pillow was the brightest thing Hestillion had seen in months. Unfortunately, it also revealed the ravaged face of Lord Moureni, and that was less heartening.
He had once been a handsome man. The evidence of that was on the walls of this, his much-reduced suite in Ygseril’s palace; enormous oil paintings of a striking man with broad shoulders, tightly curled dark hair and shining bronze skin, his clothes always a military uniform of some sort, and the setting often the top of some windswept hill, looking off across some newly conquered territory. The skies in these paintings were almost always stormy, as though Ebora’s sprawling empire were itself an oncoming conflagration – or perhaps the artist had just liked painting clouds.