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TABETH MADE HER WAY down the rickety ladders that connected each level of the towerhouse until she reached the wide, slightly cock-eyed base. The towerhouse wasn’t hers, as such. She’d not had it built, and it hadn’t been built for her. Before she came back to Pelimburg, the towerhouse had been the home of a poisonink baron called Rayek Ironseed. Poisonink wasn’t strictly illegal, but nor was it strictly legal. The drug occupied a nebulous grey zone in Sharif law. Under the city rules anyone could grow poisonink. It was a sprawling low shrub with thin leaves like limp fingers, with a peculiarly sharp smell. It didn’t grow particularly well in Pelimburg’s heavy clay, but it thrived in wetland areas where its root system could sprawl through a watery mess of silt and loam. It was almost as ubiquitous in some areas of the Swartmarch as dogleaf was in Pelimburg. So, by law, anyone could grow it, anyone could prune it.
And there the law grew somewhat murky.
It became an illegal substance only when dried and processed. Most people smoked it; the leaves finely ground and poured into their pipe bowls or rolled tightly into thin paper. ’Ink was a hazy kind of drug. It left most users sleepy, comfortable. It could wipe out the reality of an empty stomach and flaccid purse and replace it with a warm, woolly slowness. It brightened colour and smell, and if you smoked enough of it, would give intense dreams that some claimed were close to prophetic visions.
It was this last that Tabeth thought had first made it unpopular with the Lammers. The only visions they allowed were those that came from their own drug, from Saints who took pipettes of scriv and fell into the myriad paths of the future. Hobs weren’t allowed magic, and smoking ’ink was a touch too close for comfort. That, and it made workers slow.
Tabeth stalked across the deck, the wood bouncing underfoot, with the tower creaking eerie as a ghost ship in the mist above her. The crowd of Hobs-at-watch around her home nodded as she passed them. It was probably the dulled movements of a workers that made ’ink illegal, she thought. More than their hatred of any magic that was not their own, Lammers hated to feel like they didn’t own a body completely. If you were a Hob you might not be a slave, but you didn’t go out of your way to remind the Lammers of that in case they decided slavery was a brilliant idea.
The towerhouse then, had been a refuge to an assortment of ’ink-addled Hobs and one mean fucker who had made his money off supply and demand. Rayek had called himself a businessman. He’d also been a cruel and greedy bastard who hadn’t given two fucks if one of his little runners got caught ’ink-handed and sent to the Sharif house, and lost a hand, or both. He had a steady supply of poor and desperate to fall back on, after all. The Swartmarch wasn’t exactly known for its wealth, high standards and general longevity of its inhabitants.
So Tabeth had killed him.
Not in any obvious and messy way. That wouldn’t have worked in her favour, especially once word started to filter out that she was sparked, but he’d had appetites and appetites, and Tabeth could fuck a man she had no interest in for the greater good. Rayek had liked having women around, and she’d become one of his. Slid herself seamlessly into the strange pattern of towerhouse life and moved dreamwise through her plans, letting them unfold slowly. She’d even, at times, liked Rayek’s company. He hadn’t been scared of her. He’d liked the idea that he got to fuck a sparked Hob—something so deviant even their own people would revile them in the name of safety. Swartmarch hadn’t gone to those extremes, partly because life was hard enough without turning on one in their midst, and partly because no one liked the idea of what Rayek might do if someone called an Onnery down on his favourite whore and left her a drooling, mindless cretin.
It had, once Rayek had become used to her, been fairly simple to do. Tabeth had planted the fear of his own death in him. It wasn’t mind-control, or anything like that. It had been ’ink that had done all the hard work; Tabeth had merely augmented the effect, concentrating the poison in the leaves to extreme dosages. Her magic wasn’t showy. She couldn’t set people on fire with a thought or call down mountains, or bring the wild animals of Oreyn to heel. It didn’t allow for much more than working with plants. It was a fuzzy, unpredictable magic, liable to be as nightmarish as it could be useful. She could urge a seed to grow and bloom out of season, or loosen a deep root, or bend a tree like a willow branch. It did allow for some more subtle acts, though.
In this case, she’d let Rayek’s appetites work hand in hand with her own. They’d sat and shared a post-coital pipe, and Tabeth, knowing what would happen, had crawled away from the nightmares with her head still mostly her own. The drug had worked itself deep into her system, and even these days she sometimes found herself waking from nightmarish visions, or being caught out by flurries and movements that weren’t there, talking to people who no longer existed.
Rayek, on the other hand, had stabbed out his own eyes with a wooden fork and then had shrieked and gibbered his way to the windows and flung himself off the top of the towerhouse. They’d had to scrape his brains and organs from the deck wood, and scrubbed the bloodstains off with sandstones, bleached it with seawater.
Tabeth had moved in not long after, quietly taking up the reins, moving the last of the ’ink as inconspicuously as possibly. It had taken almost half a year before people had stopped calling her Rayek’s whore, and calling her The Green Lady instead. If there was one thing she knew and understood, it was plants. Herbs. She gave freely of her knowledge, and soon the towerhouse became a place where Hob kits without packs came to spend time, learning from her. It felt almost good. She liked knowing that what she did made a difference. At first she’d thought she’d have little to offer, but organising the various skills of the women and runners who’d lived here had turned the towerhouse into a place of craft and safety. Skills were taught and shared freely, and while she might never have coin, no one who lived in the levels and layers ever went hungry or lost a limb. And for a while that had actually been good enough.
Tabeth paused at the edge of the little towerhouse jetty. Runner boats often stopped off here to trade goods and food, and it wouldn’t take long for her to get a ride. One of the runner boat girls was already there, unloading stock of fish, and limes, her boat bobbing against its ties.
“Limes, eh?” she said to the boat girl. “Where’d you get them from?” Limes grew much further upriver, closer to MallenIve, where the great citrus farms spread in rows of bright green in the little rolling valleys of the fertile sections of rich black soil.
“None of your business.” The girl grinned as she passed the last string bag to a towerhouse resident. She was trading them for woven reed baskets, coloured with plant dyes, their patterns intricate. The baskets had turned out to be surprisingly popular. Good for storage, and decorative too.
“It is my business if you bring the Sharif down here.”
“For a handful of soft limes?” The girl sneered. “They’d have to be right bored to bother. But I bartered for ’em fair and square, anywise, so don’t worry yourself none.” She set the baskets neatly on the bottom of her long narrow boat, then looked up, squinting at the rucksack thrown over Tabeth’s shoulder, the sleeping roll tied up tight beneath it. “You’ll be wanting a lift, then?”
Tabeth nodded. She did this often enough, hired a boat to take her as far away from Swartmarch and people and trouble as she could. The spark was getting out of hand. She didn’t use it freely or often for fear of what it might bring, and it grew, itched along her scalp, filled her hair with ripples of static. It was time to let it loose.
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THERE WAS A HOUSE HERE, far from prying eyes and safely out of any kind of danger. By the time they drew near, Tabeth’s scalp was a surface of pain, making her head throb, her eyes felt like burning stones cupped in the hollows of her skull.
The shack had been left to rot into the marshes, the wood gone black and green with mildew, the roof sagging. The thatch was spotted with mould and mosses, and great chunks had been torn out by wind a birds and time. Under the eaves, mud-nests hung like strange, cancerous growths, the ground beneath spattered and dribbled with bird shit.
Tabeth watched the girl row away with her runner boat, soon lost among the high labyrinth of water reeds and waterways. Alone, suddenly, it felt to Tabeth that the air was buzzing and vibrating, pressing in on her with an almost animate vengeance. She shook her head and walked inside, into the damp dark misery of a house left to decay.
She’d brought provisions for the next few days. It would only take today to deal with the spark, but she wanted a little time to herself once it was done. Release could leave her feeling jellied and weak, a fat-headed baby. That kind of vulnerability might be fine if she’d had a lover or a family member she could trust to take care of her, but she was far from the last few straggled ends of her family line, and as much as the Swartmarch kits and packs liked her now, she still didn’t feel entirely safe.
She wouldn’t, not until the Grinningtommy saw that it was time to stop letting Lammer law dictate their fear. To stop letting their own fear stop them from saving themselves. Spark was not what it used to be. After the Well was opened and everything had been corrupted, spark had been something to be scared of, a raging monster, magic with no control, no direction, a raging storm unleashed on all without thought or discrimination.
And bloody Emme wouldn’t help. Or rather, she just put Tabeth off, saying that when the time was right, the river-beneath would bring together the next generation of sparked Hobs, and that they would be safe from deformity and Onnerys and Lammers and iron laws. That when the river-beneath was ready it would pull its power from the Onnerys and they would fall. Emme believed in patience. And Tabeth believed that patience was a coward’s choice.
“Nillyshit,” hissed Tabeth as she stripped out of her clothes and folded them neatly, putting them out of the way on a shelf she’d wiped down with a handful of broad reed leaves. The river-beneath was temperamental, natural. The Grinningtommy’s mistake was granting it some kind of self, as though it knew what it was doing. It was just power, flowing. It had no mind, no thought pattern.
“It’s like thinking the rain falls or the wind blows with a fucking reason.” The empty shack swallowed her words, made them feel small and empty. It was time someone stopped sitting around waiting for a bloody river of magic to bring them to a new world, and make that new world themselves.
Barefoot and naked, Tabeth walked away from the ramshackle house, her feet sliding down into thick mud as she drew closer to the water’s edge. She was upriver, a good hour’s walk or more from any coastline, but the tidal surge brought salt water high up the inlets and estuaries that webbed Pelimburg’s outskirts. A brace of geese flushed out of hiding clattered out of a clump of grasses, their wings slapping the water as they took flight. Tabeth shaded her eyes with one hand and watched them. Cool air blew against her skin, prickling the fine hairs. The sky was dull and grey, though parts were lit with faint blue, little holes in the wind-scudded clouds. The previous night’s storm had rattled itself out finally, though it had left the ground puddled and soggy. Tabeth didn’t mind. She enjoyed the squish of living earth under her feet and between her toes. There was something grounding about it, something that called to the magic inside her. She stood still for a moment, letting the flow of power under feet tug and caress. Then she stepped out into the bracing water.
Tabeth forced herself to plunge chest and shoulders into the icy blackness. The reeds danced, bowing as the tidal sweep slowly pushed inland. The small wave was broken up by now, but Tabeth could feel the currents nudge at her, surprisingly strong, even this far from the ocean. She could smell the faint iodine trace of salt, of seaweed, kelp rotting underfoot, a fish brushing against her thigh. She stood and waded deeper, until she could no longer see the little house.
It was like being lost, or being the last living person after the end of everything. The stillness was broken only by the lap of water, the thin whistles of fisherbirds, the gliding clouds of midges, and the distant squabbling of a hidden flock of flamingos. She scanned the surface for the telltale gliding shadow of a river-drake, but the huge reptiles preferred wider areas of open water, not these little networks of channels. It was safe. She raised her hands and began to pull the little cheap wooden hairpins free and dropping them into the water, to float or sink. These were black and sticky, tarred as though the spark had changed them from the inside out. In her rucksack was a little woven basket of new-made ones. Iyva, who had once been one of Rayek’s and now helped with the towerhouse, made them from salvaged wood she’d find on the outskirts of building sites. She’d carved these little forked spikes for Tabeth as often as Tabeth needed them.
The itching on her scalp grew to a searing pain, as though the hair knew it was about to be freed. When every pin was freed, Tabeth uncurled each braid and began to undo it, separating the tightly bound hair with slow fingers. Around her, the water trembled and underfoot, roots pushed through mud, moving fast as snakes below heel and arch.
Each braid was freed and loosened, and the hair curled across her shoulders, writhing like a headful of eels, the spark pulsing as it was released from its confines. The water was seething now, little eddying clumps of water hyacinth doubling and tripling, bloated leaves fattening and unfurling. The reeds around her thrust higher, grew so fast Tabeth could hear the leaves rustle, could hear the greenness shooting through the chambers and veins. Algae clung to her submerged skin in a hairy coat of silken green fur.
At last Tabeth plunged underwater, and let her spark drown in the saline estuary waters. She stayed in the green murk as long as she could, feeling the tendrils of her hair caress her back, her face, her shoulders. She let the spark ripple out of her to spread and dissipate in the water. Salt was the best way to subdue magic—salt and iron. Everyone knew that.
But where iron burned and destroyed, salt merely washed clean. Running salt water over her head every few days was normally enough to keep the spark damped down, but after a while, the magic was too great, the threat that something unexpected would happen too much. The other option was to keep her head shaved. It kept the magic to a minimum, but also tended to do odd things to the brain and body. Magic turned in on itself could lead to illness, both mental and physical. This was the safest.
Tabeth floated on her back, and let the scattered sunlight shine weakly on her breasts and stomach, on her tilted face. Around her the growing was dying down, things returning to normal. She drifted, thinking.
Perhaps it was time to move on again. The towerhouse was almost self-sufficient by now, the commune strong. They didn’t need her. And somewhere out there was sure to be other sparked Hobs.
She closed her eyes, and felt the cool embrace of the water, the rock and cradle. Perhaps there was something to what the Grinningtommy said, about letting the river-beneath do what it had to.
It was all shit and nonsense to Tabeth, but there was also no harm in asking the river. She sent her thoughts down, deep into the mud and dead things, into the packed sand and down into the rippling line of magic that lay beneath. She could feel it better now, with her hair loose, the spark still streaming out of her. They were connected.
“Send me something,” she said. “If you fucking dare.”