‘Does it help?’ She stared at his ruined face, trying to see some change. Perhaps it would heal him from the inside – either way, these few small drops of blood would not be enough. Taking hold of the sharp knife again she pressed the blade to the fleshy area just below her wrist, taking care to make a shallow cut. The blood this time flowed faster and trickled down her hand to the tips of her fingers. Grimacing slightly as spots of bright crimson appeared on the bedclothes, she leaned over and pressed the wound to Tor’s mouth.
The response this time was immediate. His head shot up, his eyes still closed, and his mouth clamped down on the source of blood – she felt the hard pressure of his teeth on her skin, and for a moment she felt the room spin around her. Ten years of barely any physical contact, and now this. It was strange. His uninjured hand snaked up from his side and took hold of her arm gently. There hardly seemed to be any strength in him, but as she watched, the ruined side of his face began to subtly change. The charred and blackened skin began to flake away as new skin grew beneath, while the raw muscle and flesh began to knit itself anew. It was only in a few places, and it made little overall difference to the terrible damage she had inflicted, but it was something. Softly, he moaned under her, shifting in the bed.
‘Tor? Are you awake? Speak to me, bloodsucker, come on.’
His eyes still shut, he slumped back to the pillow, a smear of crimson on his lips and chin. He did not speak.
‘Tor?’
Working awkwardly with her injured hand, Noon tore off some strips of linen and bound the two cuts as best she could. In a little while, she would go back to the kitchens and wash her arm, but for now she felt oddly weak. With her good hand she pushed Tor’s hair back from his forehead – what was left of it – and tried to slow her thundering heart. A little blood had given him strength, had started to heal his face and neck. She suspected it would take a lot more than that to save him, but whose price was that to pay if it wasn’t hers?
Cradling her bleeding arm to her chest, she lay down next to him on the narrow bed, taking a brief and selfish comfort in the warmth of his body. She had a moment to consider that resting in such a way would have been unthinkable a short time ago, and then she was asleep.
30
The hot water stung on Noon’s cuts, but it was a good pain. Alongside the heat of the water it was soothing, pushing away all her other thoughts and concerns.
She had dragged out a large tin bath and heated the water up in the kitchen. Sure that the house was empty save for her and a comatose Eboran, she had stripped off in front of the great oven, dropping her dirty smoke-stinking clothes onto the flagstone floor. Now the steam from the bath soaked her hair, and taking a nub of waxy soap she’d found by the sink, she methodically began to wash, taking comfort in the routine of it. Back at the Winnowry they had been allowed a cold bucket of water once every two days and a rough piece of cloth to rub themselves down. You learned quickly how to make the most of that, so this tin bath of hot water and the time to use it seemed an almost impossible luxury.
‘I’m not at the Winnowry any more,’ she told the swirling suds. ‘And I won’t go back. Not alive, anyway.’
Vintage was the reason she’d got so far from the Winnowry in the first place, and now Vintage – kind, eccentric Vintage – was almost certainly dead in the compound somewhere. She thought again of the shape she’d glimpsed against the fires, a blackened twisted thing, and bit at her thumb. Perhaps Godwort would find her body. Perhaps not. Perhaps even now Godwort was sitting in the strange chamber at the heart of the Behemoth, kneeling in front of his son’s corpse, his mind finally broken.
Noon hunched over in the bath. Her hands under the water, she sought inside herself for the teeming parasite spirit energy. It was still there, like a banked fire, waiting to be poked into life. Cautiously, so cautiously, she summoned the winnowfire to her right hand, and saw a small green glow flicker into uncertain life under the water. The fire from this energy was strong.
‘I could boil myself alive,’ she said. Her voice was flat, her only audience the abandoned cutlery and the dusty shelves with their bags of oats and jars of spices. ‘It wouldn’t be quick, but who deserves a quick death less than me?’
Opening her hand, the swirling green flame grew a little brighter, and she felt a blush of extra heat against her legs. It would not take much to let the energy out – it would be easier than keeping it in, in fact.
Fool.
One word, spoken aloud in her head. Noon jerked with shock, the winnowfire winking out of existence.
‘What are you?’
There was no answer, but she could sense that presence inside her again. Something alien, and old, so old. She could feel its disdain for her, its contempt for such a small and weak creature.
‘Fuck you,’ she said aloud, feeling vaguely stupid. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know what I’ve been through.’
There was muttering now, in a language she didn’t understand. Noon squeezed her eyes shut. It had to be the parasite spirit, there was little else it could be, but Vintage hadn’t said anything about their being able to talk. Noon had thought of them as mindless animals of a sort, made of energy and light.
Standing up, Noon squeezed the last of the water out of her hair and stepped out of the bath, grabbing a linen sheet to dry herself with, but, as she did so, the ghostly presence elbowed its way to the front of her mind. The gloomy kitchens vanished, and she saw a battlefield. It was raining, the churned earth a slick of mud, and there were men and women all around her, dead or dying. A woman just in front of her was lying on her back, the elaborate armour she wore split open at the midriff. There were scurrying beetle-like creatures all around her, and the woman was trying to push them away, her movements becoming weaker. Noon felt a stab of alarm; the things she had seen in her nightmare, the insects that had been inside Fell-Marian, they were here too. Then the woman – she was Eboran, Noon realised belatedly, her beautiful eyes the colour of blood – looked up at her. She smiled crookedly, and shook her head. The black beetles surged then, slipping into the woman’s open mouth, crawling eagerly inside her ears. Her body twitched with the violence of them.
Life is suffering. It was the voice again. Life is war, and sacrifice. Life is victory.
The muddy battlefield vanished, and Noon found herself lying naked on the cold flagstones, shivering all over. She felt chilled to the bone, but the presence had retreated. Grabbing the linen and wrapping it around herself, she staggered out of the kitchens.
‘Yeah, well, fuck you,’ she said to no one in particular.