‘Your tree-god died, aye, and took your precious sap away with it. Maybe you all should have died then, rather than getting a taste for our blood. Maybe that was what should have happened.’
The man settled himself, his dark eyes watching Tor closely, as though he expected an explanation of some sort. An explanation for generations of genocide.
‘What are you doing up here? This is an outpost. Not a refuge for tramps.’
The man shrugged. From under a pile of rags he produced a grease-smeared silver bottle. He uncapped it and took a swig. Tor caught a whiff of strong alcohol.
‘I’m going to see my daughter,’ he said. ‘Been away for years. Earning coin, and then losing it. Time to go home, see what’s what. See who’s still alive. My people had a settlement in the forest west of here. I’ll be lucky if you Eborans have left anyone alive there, I suppose.’
‘Your people live in a forest?’ Tor raised his eyebrows. ‘A quiet one, I hope?’
The man’s dirty face creased into half a smile. ‘Not as quiet as we’d like, but where is, now? This world is poisoned. Oh, we have thick strong walls, don’t you worry about that. Or at least, we did.’
‘Why leave your family for so long?’ Tor was thinking of Hestillion. The faint scuff of yellow slippers, the scent of her weaving through his dreams. Dream-walking had always been her particular talent.
‘Ah, I was a different man then,’ he replied, as though that explained everything. ‘Are you going to take my blood?’
Tor scowled. ‘As I’m sure you know, human blood wasn’t the boon it was thought to be. There is no true replacement for Ygseril’s sap, after all. Those who overindulged . . . suffered for it. There are arrangements now. Agreements with humans, for whom we care.’ He sat up a little straighter. If he’d chosen to walk to another watchtower, he could be drinking his wine now. ‘They are compensated, and we continue to use the blood in . . . small doses.’ He didn’t add that it hardly mattered – the crimson flux seemed largely unconcerned with exactly how much blood you had consumed, after all. ‘It’s not very helpful when you try and make everything sound sordid.’
The man bellowed with laughter, rocking back and forth and clutching at his knees. Tor said nothing, letting the man wear himself out. He went back to preparing tea. When the man’s laughs had died down to faint snifflings, Tor pulled out two clay cups from his bag and held them up.
‘Will you drink tea with Eboran scum?’
For a moment the man said nothing at all, although his face grew very still. The small amount of water in the shallow tin bowl was hot, so Tor poured it into the pot, dousing the shrivelled leaves. A warm, spicy scent rose from the pot, almost immediately lost in the sour-sweat smell of the room.
‘I saw your sword,’ said the man. ‘It’s a fine one. You don’t see swords like that any more. Where’d you get it?’
Tor frowned. Was he suggesting he’d stolen it? ‘It was my father’s sword. Winnow-forged steel, if you must know. It’s called the Ninth Rain.’
The man snorted at that. ‘We haven’t had the Ninth Rain yet. The last one was the eighth. I would have thought you’d remember that. Why call it the Ninth Rain?’
‘It is a long and complicated story, one I do not wish to share with a random human who has already insulted me more than once.’
‘I should kill you,’ said the man quietly. ‘One less Eboran. That would make the world safer for my daughter, wouldn’t it?’
‘You are quite welcome to try,’ said Tor. ‘Although I think having her father with her when she was growing through her tender years would have been a better effort at making the world safer for your daughter.’
The man grew quiet, then. When Tor offered him the tea he took it, nodding once in what might have been thanks, or perhaps acceptance. They drank in silence, and Tor watched the wisps of black smoke curling up near the ceiling, escaping through some crack up there. Eventually, the man lay down on his side of the fire with his back to Tor, and he supposed that was as much trust as he would get from a human. He pulled out his own bed roll, and made himself as comfortable as he could on the stony floor. There was a long way to travel yet, and likely worse places to sleep in the future.
Tor awoke to a stuffy darkness, a thin line of grey light leaking in at the edge of the window letting him know it was dawn. The man was still asleep next to the embers of their fire. Tor gathered his things, moving as silently as he could, and finally paused to stand over the man. The lines of his face looked impossibly deep, as if he’d lived a thousand lifetimes, instead of the laughably short amount of time allocated to humans. He wondered if the man would reach his daughter, or if he had a daughter at all. Would she even want to know him? Some severed ties could not be mended. Not thinking too closely about what he was doing, he took a parcel of tea from his own pack and left it by the man’s outflung arm, where he couldn’t miss it when he woke. No doubt it would do him better than the evil substance in his silver bottle.
Outside, the world was silvered with faint light from the east, and his breath formed a cloud as he made his way down the steps – the steps on the far side of the Wall, this time. He tried to feel excited about this – he was walking beyond the border of Ebora, forever – but his back was stiff from a night sleeping on stone and all he could think was that he would be glad to be out of sight of the Wall. His dreams had been haunted by half-seen carved faces, made of delicate red stone, but he knew that inside they were hollow and rotten. It had not made for a restful sleep.
The far side of the Wall was blanketed with thick green forest, coming up to the very stones like a high tide. Quickly, Tor lost himself inside that forest, and once the Wall was out of sight he felt some of the tension leave his body. Walking steadily uphill, he knew that, eventually, he would meet the foothills of the Tarah-hut Mountains, and from there, he would find the western pass.
At around midday, the trees grew thinner and the ground rockier. Tor turned back, and was caught like a moon-mad hare by the sight of Ebora spread out below him. The crumbling buildings of the outer city were dust-grey and broken, the roads little more than a child’s drawings in the dirt. Trees and scrubby bushes had colonised the walkways, dark patches of virulence, while over the distant palace the still form of Ygseril was a silver ghost, bare branches scratching at the sky.
‘Why did you leave us?’ Tor licked his lips, his mouth suddenly dry. ‘Do you even see what you’ve done? Do you?’
Every bit as dead as the corpse moon hanging in the sky above him, the tree-god kept his silence. Tormalin the Oathless put his back to the great tree and walked away, sincerely hoping he would never look upon Ebora again.
2
Five years ago