‘How much do you know about the Jure’lia, my dear? About the worm people?’
‘What everyone knows.’ She frowned, thinking about her dream. The sense that it was real in a way other dreams were not hadn’t left her. ‘They’re invaders that have tried to take Sarn. Each time, they’ve been stopped.’
‘By my people,’ put in Tormalin. ‘Forced back by brave Eboran warriors and their war-beasts.’
‘Well, what you’re looking at here, my dear, is one part of how the Jure’lia have tried to make Sarn their own. We call it varnish, although that hardly does it justice.’ She tapped her boot against it. Here, the roar of the city was a distant murmur. ‘The Jure’lia, they bring their giant beasts, and they secrete this,’ she gestured around at the memorial as a whole. ‘They covered over great swathes of land with it, suffocating anything that might have been underneath, anything slow enough to be caught. Here, follow me.’
She led them out towards the centre of the square, still talking. ‘There was indeed a market here once, before Mushenska was Mushenska. In the time before the Sixth Rain, the Iron Market was the place you came to for your weapons and your armour.’ Absently, Vintage patted the crossbow at her side. ‘It was still quite a provincial place then, you must understand, a gathering of skilled blacksmiths and leather workers in the centre of a village. The village was called Fourtrees, for not especially imaginative reasons. And then the Jure’lia came. They landed a Behemoth to the east of what are now the outskirts of Mushenska, and they released one of their great maggots. The enormous worm creature and its helpers quickly consumed everything there was to Fourtrees, and then spread this glassy muck over what was left. Here. Look.’
Vintage pointed down at her feet. The translucent glassy substance was like looking down into a murky lake. The ground that had once been there had fallen away, leaving a hole, and in its greenish depths, objects were suspended, caught forever in the ‘varnish’. Noon narrowed her eyes, trying to make out what they were.
‘Really, Vintage?’ Tor sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘This is what you delay my bath for?’
‘There are swords down there,’ said Noon. ‘Just hanging there, in this stuff. They look as though they were made yesterday. And . . .’ She stopped. What initially she had taken to be a bundle of clothes had, on closer inspection, revealed a round, pale shape at its centre. A woman’s face, turned up to the light, her eyes open very wide, her mouth pressed shut as though she had tried to hold her breath. Her skin was clear and unblemished, and her hair, the colour of seaweed under the green, flared out around her like a woman caught mid-swim. Her hands, white exclamations in the dark, were reaching up to the surface. ‘There are people in there.’ Noon felt bile pushing at the back of her throat.
‘Oh yes,’ said Vintage. ‘Men and women and children who were not caught by the initial hunger of the worms were often caught by the varnish. Or fed to it by drones.’
‘Drones?’
‘Those that were taken by Jure’lia. You know what I speak of, my dear?’
Noon nodded slowly. In her dream, hundreds of black beetles had swarmed over Fell-Marian, rushing to fill her mouth and nose and eat her from the inside out.
There was a noise behind them, and a group of around ten children trooped diligently into the memorial. They wore expressions of barely checked fidgety boredom, and with them was a tall man with a fringe of white beard and dark eyebrows. He glanced over at the three of them as though surprised to see anyone else there, and then appeared to pick up a lecture he’d been giving outside.
‘And here we have the Iron Market Memorial. The Iron Market was lost during the Sixth Rain, children, although much of this area was saved by the sudden intervention of the Eboran Empire.’
‘Bloodsuckers,’ one child whispered to another in an overly dramatic fashion. Next to her, Noon sensed Tormalin stiffen. ‘They was monsters too, is what Mam said.’
‘I’ll show them how monstrous we are right now, if they would like,’ muttered Tormalin.
‘Tormalin, please try not to throw a tantrum over the comments of a child, there’s a dear.’
‘What are these weird things, sir?’ asked another of the children. She was standing next to one of the strange spikey shapes formed by the varnish, leaning away from it slightly as if it smelled bad.
‘No one knows. The Jure’lia were mindless monsters, who thought only of consumption and destruction. It is likely they mean nothing at all.’
Vintage narrowed her eyes at that.
‘Luckily, the Jure’lia threat was ended . . . can anyone tell me?’
‘At the Eighth Rain,’ chorused a handful of the children.
‘That’s right. The Jure’lia queen was finally defeated at the great central city of Ebora itself, and all their creatures and all their ships died as one. The Eighth Rain was the last, the final invasion by Sarn’s ancient enemy.’ The tall man pointed up into the brilliant sky, where the corpse moon was a smear of greenish light. ‘Their greatest ship tried to escape, but died before it could leave our atmosphere.’
One of the children began to jump up and down on the varnish, clearly meaning to attempt to break it, and a handful of his friends got the same idea. Noon watched their teacher take a deep breath – he, too, looked bored by the memorial – before ushering them back out through the simple archway.
‘Look at that, would you?’ muttered Vintage. ‘One of the greatest and most terrible artefacts in Sarn history, and they were barely here a handful of moments.’ She rounded on Noon, wagging a finger as though she were a reluctant student. ‘And thinking of the Jure’lia as mindless monsters? Nonsense. Clearly, they were here for something, we just don’t know what it was. Why won’t people just think?’
‘Was it the last invasion?’ asked Noon, curious despite herself. She was thinking of the soft female voice in her dream, that presence unseen behind her. ‘Was the Jure’lia queen really beaten in Ebora?’
To her surprise, Vintage turned to Tormalin. After a moment, he shrugged.