Just as they reached the other side of the wreckage a creature like a translucent snake boiled up out of the ground, fizzing and sparking with orange and green lights. Noon cried out and tried to push Vintage out of the way, but the tapering tail of the parasite spirit whipped around and caught the older woman across the hand. There was a terrible sharp tearing sound, and Vintage hollered with pain.
‘What’s happened?’ Tor called, close behind them now.
‘Get inside, get inside.’ Noon pushed Vintage in front of her, almost throwing the woman into the shelter of the wreckage, before dragging her up a series of steps. More than anything she wanted to be away from the dirt – the spirit had just appeared from it, rising up like a flood water, and now nothing felt safe. ‘Up, up!’
They scrambled up the steps, Tor’s footfalls close behind them, until they found themselves on a platform looking back across at the other chunk of wreckage. This was the place where the two sections had once been joined, but now the walls ended in torn pieces. Below them, they could see around ten parasite spirits, writhing and wailing, obviously still searching for them.
‘Fucking fire and blood, we’re fucked.’ Noon took a wild breath, willing her heart to stop hammering in her chest. ‘Vintage, are you hurt?’
Vintage was leaning against the wall, her hand cradled to her chest. There was blood on her shirt. ‘I’d say so, my darling, yes.’
‘We should head deeper in,’ said Tor. He had appeared behind them, his face in the shadows as serious as Noon had ever seen it. ‘There could be a way out on the other side. Or we can cut our way out.’
He held up the sword, which was already caked in the oddly jelly-like blood of the parasite spirits – Noon had a moment to wonder when he had done that – when the narrow space behind him shimmered with ominous lights. He spun round, sword moving with precision despite the dark shadows under his eyes, and the parasite spirit that had followed them in screamed discordantly. Noon and Vintage took a few hurried steps back, taking them perilously close to the edge of the platform.
This time Noon saw Tormalin’s sword at work: the thin blade cut through the writhing spirit like it was butter, and the screaming grew so loud she felt a pulse of pain deep in her head. Part of the creature fell away, followed by a shimmering cloud of what almost looked like smoke, but the long fronds that formed part of its head shot forward, barrelling past Tor towards where she crouched with Vintage. The pair of them scrambled backwards, only to find that the giant parasite spirit, the one that had hovered over them as they left the wreckage, was now waiting for them, its huge bulk blocking any view of the outside world. For a few alarming seconds, Noon was faced with the shifting, amorphous texture of its body; she could see tiny lights falling inside it, as though it were made of the night sky. She turned back, and saw Tor battling with the other creature; despite how badly he had wounded it, the spirit’s fronds were filling the small space where they had taken shelter, writhing and whipping back and forth like a nest of angry snakes. They were trapped.
‘Burn them!’ Tor shot her a desperate look from beyond the fronds. One of them was sliding, tentacle-like, round his forearm, scorching the leather there.
‘I can’t!’ Noon felt a surge of frustration. She’d already spent the energy she’d stripped from him in her useless fireball, and now Tor was out of reach, trapped behind a wall of shifting fronds. Vintage’s energy would not be enough to harm the spirits.
Next to her, Vintage fired off one crossbow bolt after another, hitting a frond with every shot. Although each one she hit turned black and inert, the grasping appendages kept coming. Behind them, the giant spirit was pressing itself against the hole, and its body was slowly filling the space, like bread rising in the oven. The only light left was the light dancing inside the creatures just about to kill them. Noon thought of how they killed; of seeing Tor overwhelmed, of seeing Vintage turned inside out.
Reaching out behind her, she brushed her fingers over the smooth, yielding body of the giant parasite spirit, and she took. Ignoring how her hand turned cold and numb, she ripped the life energy from the creature with all her strength, and although she realised almost instantly what a terrible mistake she’d made, it was already too late. The energy slammed into her; at first at her summons, and then against her will. Bright light filled her, along with the sharp scent of sap and the sense of being high up, very high up, and surrounded by rustling and the feeling of breaking free, a terrible severing, oh lost, we are lost.
Noon stumbled away, breaking contact. Her body sang with a thousand voices, centuries of lost memories. It was too much. Dimly, through the cacophony that now inhabited her, she saw Vintage staring at her with horror, while Tor struggled, on his knees as the parasite spirit tried to tear him in half. Unable to do anything else, Noon raised her hand, feeling the winnowfire boiling into life inside her, and let it go.
The world was lost in green fire.
29
Tor remembered very little of what followed. For a brief time, everything was made of colour and pain. A boiling light had filled his vision, and then a skein of red covered all things. There had been a sense of falling, or flying, and a distant sound that, eventually, he realised was his own voice, broken and screaming. Then a blessed kind of darkness.
Beyond that were brief fragments of memory. He had an image of looking down at his own boots as the world spun around him. Noon’s voice, shouting Vintage’s name. The strange foliage looming all around them – it looked familiar, as if he’d seen it recently, but when he stopped to try and remember, someone tugged him fiercely in another direction. A time of lights and silence and fear. The gate to the compound – this he did remember, and he felt pleased with himself – and a man with a dark beard standing there, his eyes wide.
A knife near his throat. He had stiffened, pulling back, but it was cutting away his clothes, and all at once there was so much pain that he was gone again. Darkness.
Noon remembered it all.
A thousand voices shouting at once, or the same voice, shouting a thousand times. The living energy of the parasite spirit overwhelmed her immediately, and the resulting explosion was a boiling green and white. She had been thrown backwards by it, through the space where the spirit had been until she’d absorbed it, and out into the air, where she crashed onto the black dirt. Debris from the Behemoth fell all around her, smoking and still aflame in places, while the roar of the greater fire in front of her reached up to the sky.
I’ve done it again.
The thought hit her harder than the explosion. She gasped, barely able to get air into her lungs, and it had nothing to do with the oily smoke roiling around her. I’ve done it again.
She scrambled to her feet and cupped her hands to her mouth, preparing to scream for Vintage, when she realised that one of the pieces of debris that had fallen around her was Tormalin.
‘No. Tor! Tor!’
He had fallen face down, his leathers and silks scorched and spattered with mud. Reaching him she turned him over. Dimly she realised she’d lost her hat.