WHEN THE DAY of ruination came, Cherenthisse had been on her way to address the graduating class at the Thousand Eyes hatchery.
She had been aboard her war-dart, resting in her true aspect, her proper serpentine body. Her vassal pilot hadn’t needed much direction, leaving her free to try and remember her speech and think about how much she was looking forward to getting this over with.
Like the other Thousand Eyes, she had spent her infancy and early training at the hatchery. Her memories of it were distant, and not warm. More than half of her hatchmates had died before graduation. There was honour in being hatched for the Thousand, but few of them remembered the place or its discipline with pleasure. Cherenthisse was one hundred and twenty years old, and she had not returned to the hatchery since her own graduation, and she hadn’t seen a Thousand Eye hatchling in years. She was always startled by how tiny they were, how bright and glossy, and tinier still when they began to shed their skins and learn to take on a prey aspect.
The first Cherenthisse heard of the cataclysm was the pilot’s scream. Then she saw it, a wave of darkness which rippled out through the Gate, burning and draining everything it touched.
She assumed it was the rebels. The civil war was in full flood, and there were rumours that the revolutionary faction had got hold of a void-weapon, that they might attack the Gates.
The hatchlings! she had thought, before anything else.
The pilot was dead. Cherenthisse assumed her prey aspect, took the controls, and accelerated toward the hatchery, the war-dart flying before the devastation like a bird before the storm.
She meant to supervise the evacuation, to play her part in safeguarding the future of the Thousand Eyes. She had not known the nature of the catastrophe.
The goddess had punished them all.
I could have died not knowing that, she thought, and although it was beneath her to feel hatred for prey, she could not help hating the prey creatures who had woken her.
There were none of her own kind left. Not a single Echentyri infant in existence. Not a single Echentyri but her, and she was trapped in the weak fronded shape of her prey aspect.
And still the speech she had meant to give kept going through her head. She had written it herself, though oratory was not her strong suit and she hardly remembered who had spoken at her own graduation. In this time of upheaval, it had begun, it is you who must carry forward the hope of the Empire.
She laughed. It made a dry sound in her throat, and hurt her chest. Three thousand years, and all that was left of Echentyr was her alone.
The prey who had woken her had brought her to a place called Cricket Station, to quarters so small and cramped she would have been ashamed to provide them to the prey-servants on her own estate in Echentyr.
Once she was alone, she had tried to return to her true aspect, thinking it might bring some comfort to feel her own strength, something wholesome and familiar amidst this degradation. She couldn’t do it. The unfurling which had once come so naturally refused to take hold, as though something in her had dried up and withered away as the years slipped by. Her useless body shuddered, twitching within its dead wrappers as though trying to shed its skin. This struck Cherenthisse as such a cruel parody that she threw herself against the wall of the cabin, slamming bodily into the timber in rage. It hurt, and the maddening newness of the pain made her angry enough to do it again.
One of the prey creatures came in. Shuthmili, that was her name. Cherenthisse had known the names of all her own servants. She had taken pride in it. The estate would be ruined now. The park where Cherenthisse had hunted. The temple to the God-Empress where she had made her vows of dedication. The banqueting hall where she and her squadmates had celebrated their victories. There was no safe or comforting place for her thoughts to rest. Everything was gone.
Cherenthisse bared her blunt and useless teeth, trying to make Shuthmili leave. Shuthmili put her head on one side.
“I’ve brought you something to eat,” she said.
There was a deep pit of sickness and anguish in Cherenthisse’s belly. She never wanted to eat again.
“There is nothing left for me,” said Cherenthisse. “No purpose in nourishing this useless body.”
“Well,” said Shuthmili. “You killed Professor Tvelujan—may she rest at the Hearth of the Mara. So I’m sorry if I don’t feel particularly sympathetic. She was a strange person, but she did not deserve that.”
“She ought not to have intruded.”
Shuthmili’s face crinkled in disgust.
“You are aggrieved by it. It was an insult to you,” said Cherenthisse, guessing a little. She took Shuthmili for the leader of the group, insofar as prey had leaders. “She was a servant of yours? If so, I apologise for any disrespect.”
“No,” said Shuthmili.
Cherenthisse felt a flare of anger. This creature clearly did not realise what an immense concession it was for Cherenthisse to apologise to her.
“You cannot think it brings me pleasure to be here. To be trapped in this form,” she said coldly.
Shuthmili did not seem moved by this.
“Eat. You’ll feel better.”
“My people are gone,” said Cherenthisse. “My order are all dead. My duty is obsolete. Better to submit to the just punishment of my goddess and die.”
“There may be another,” said Shuthmili, hesitant. “Csorwe once met a great serpent who said she had come from Echentyr.”
The moment of hope hurt like someone pulling a knife out of her flesh. “And where is she now? She lives?”
“We don’t know,” said Shuthmili. “She disappeared. Csorwe tried to find her a few times, but we never got anywhere.”
Shuthmili went on for a while about the worlds they had searched, but Cherenthisse was overwhelmed by memory. The Thousand Eyes assembled for parade in a courtyard of the God-Empress’ palace. The scent of lily and tuberose, the sound of cool water, the opaline brilliance of Echentyr’s sun gleaming on marble. The others around her, the rest of the Thousand, the knowledge that she was part of something far greater. She would have died for any one of the Thousand Eyes, and how she wished she had been given that opportunity.
“I’ll leave this here. It’s just porridge,” said Shuthmili. She put a bowl down on the floor beside Cherenthisse’s bunk and left. Cooked food, such as a servant would eat.
The smell of the cooked grains filled her with a mixture of disdain and wretched hunger. Cherenthisse had always tried to avoid eating in her prey aspect. Its senses were still so alien, and it always wanted to understand things by touching them.
There was a metal implement for eating with, but Cherenthisse ignored it. She took the bowl in both hands and lowered her face to it for a mouthful of porridge. It tasted so good that she lost herself for a moment in slurping up as much of it as she could.
She did feel better. She had been hungry; that had been a part of the lurching emptiness. That made her angry all over again. Her world was dead, and with it everyone she had ever known. All her Thousand Eyes were dead. The Maze was overrun with prey, and she had no idea what she was supposed to do now, and yet somehow her prey aspect was so hungry for servants’ gruel that it was enough to blunt the edge of her suffering.
There is a reason for this, she told herself. The will of Iriskavaal is just. My goddess would not have spared me for nothing. There is no cruelty and no degradation I cannot tolerate if my suffering serves her ends.
Cricket Station was a little teardrop of timber suspended in the deep Maze, a stopping place for merchant ships and travellers, wanderers and pirates, and people like Csorwe, Shuthmili, and Tal, who were none of the above but had no other home to go to. For the past year they had run their business out of a rented apartment on the station’s upper tier, and while the apartment itself was small, poky, and airless, the place had its compensations.
The station was far from any world with viable agriculture, so permanent inhabitants could claim gardens on the upmost tier. There weren’t many crop plants which flourished in the dry air and unearthly light of the Maze. Everyone’s gardens were full of small grey potatoes, huge pallid squash, and an unfamiliar vegetable with a pink snappable stalk, which Csorwe called rhubarb. At least fresh vegetables made a change from the algae and mealworms which were the station’s staple foods.
The gardens were designed for utility rather than beauty, but Shuthmili liked them all the same, especially compared to the cramped interior of the station. Here were dark earth and crisp leaves below, and the ever-shifting Maze above, pieces of sky shimmering from blue to green to purple between the great stone arches. If you sailed through one such arch, and then on, deep into the curlicues of the Maze, you might come eventually to a Gate that would spit you out somewhere else. Travel far enough, and you could reach any corner of the known worlds. One day she and Csorwe would see them all. They’d save enough money to buy their own ship, not the rickety thing they’d been hiring for expeditions, and they’d go. They would walk in the light of foreign suns, and maybe one day they would find a world where they wanted to settle down.
Until then, the gardens of Cricket Station weren’t bad at all. Now that Cherenthisse seemed resigned to behaving herself, they took her along with them. Back in the apartment, her formless grief filled the three small rooms like a miasma. Shuthmili was trying not to think too hard about what they were going to do with Cherenthisse, long term. They did owe her a responsibility. Csorwe was the one who felt that kind of thing most deeply. Shuthmili wasn’t sure how far their obligation extended: Was it enough to let Cherenthisse stay with them for a week or two? Did they need to teach her how to feed herself and how to get a job?
After Shuthmili’s flight from the Inquisitorate, Csorwe had patiently taught her about money and laundry and groceries and all the other exciting things which had formed no part of her education in Qarsazh. Cherenthisse was even worse off than she had been, because her knowledge of geography was three thousand years out of date.
One thing they had discovered was that Cherenthisse liked to have a task and would set to anything you asked her with bitter determination. That was soldiers for you, Shuthmili supposed. Just now she was pulling weeds with Csorwe.
“Couldn’t you blast all these dandelions and speed this up a bit?” said Csorwe, wrenching out a handful by the roots and tossing them into the bucket of weeds. Shuthmili was wearing her gauntlets already, pouring warmth and encouragement into the roots of their crop plants.
“If you want the soil and all its produce cursed for a couple of decades,” said Shuthmili dryly, pausing the fertiliser spell to admire how Csorwe looked in a sleeveless jacket.
“See why they were so scared of you back in Qarsazh, if you’re always cursing vegetables,” said Csorwe.
“Mm. Squash that bleed. Potatoes with teeth. Botany is really hard.”
Csorwe murmured something—from experience, Shuthmili thought it was probably “your botany is really hard”—and sauntered off to the compost heap, taking the bucket with her. Shuthmili busied herself with weeding. Some kind of wild geranium had sprung up at the edge of the bed. It seemed a shame to throw it in the bucket with the other weeds—maybe she could put it in a pot in the apartment? They could do with something to cheer the place up.
She laid her gauntleted hands flat on the soil, feeling for the seed tubers sleeping in the earth. She tried to relax into it. You were meant to let the power seep gently from your fingertips and settle into the ground like rainwater. It was frustrating when every fibre of her being wanted to burn hot, to pour everything she had into the soil and raise a canopy of rhubarb leaves that would soar over Cricket Station like a sail.
Her eyes settled on the geraniums again, and the nodding pink flowers disquieted her. Pink flowers … Something in the back of her mind associated pink flowers with the metallic taste of blood. Cherry blossoms and the taste of iron in her mouth.
SHUTHMILI. I WOULD SPEAK WITH YOU.
Leave me alone, my lady.
REMEMBER ME. REMEMBER ME.
I would prefer not to, thought Shuthmili, trying to wrench her focus back to the garden.
Shuthmili had not yet told Csorwe about the voice. That faint murmur in the back of her head whenever she used magic. It was not at all a threatening voice—it was quiet, and it came from somewhere very far away, but her teachers at the School of Aptitude had warned her well enough about what it meant to hear the voice of the goddess. Zinandour was not called the Corruptor for nothing.
Not to mention that the first time she had heard it was when she had killed her aunt. She had come close to losing herself in that bloody scramble to escape from the clutches of the Inquisitorate. She did not regret killing Aunt Zhiyouri, but she did not want to return to that state, every nerve in her body singing with the lust for atrocity.
She needed to talk to Csorwe about it. She would do, soon, unless she could find a way to fix it—and she did have one idea about that. The gauntlets kept her safe from some of the everyday risks of magic. Without them, every time she called upon Zinandour’s power, it would damage her body in minute but unfixable ways, a constant slow erosion, until the mage-blight eventually took her. The gauntlets shielded her from the blight; perhaps there was some way she could alter them so that they also blocked out the voice of the goddess?
She’d need to figure out how they actually worked first. There was some fiendishly complicated magic embedded in their fabric, etched into the lining at a microscopic level. Deep Echentyri craft, difficult to understand at the best of times. She couldn’t even tell what kind of creature the leather had come from. If only she could find some Echentyri spellbook or at least a proper dictionary of arcana … She had looked, covertly, in every ruin they had surveyed, but the snake empire’s magicians had kept their secrets well.
“What is wrong?” said Cherenthisse abruptly. Shuthmili realised she had been staring into space.
“Nothing,” said Shuthmili, hoping the presence of the goddess did not show in her face.
“I see,” said Cherenthisse, and there was a long, uncomfortable pause, until at last the serpent said, “There is something you wish from me. I can see it in you.”
What a question. Shuthmili had not been lying, back in the hatchery. Cherenthisse’s survival itself was a miracle and a wonder, and you could not treat such things lightly. And of course, there was the mystery of the gauntlets, as Shuthmili had been so recently reminded.
“Well … I’m a scholar,” said Shuthmili. “And you’re a primary source.”
“I am a soldier,” said Cherenthisse. “You will have to speak more plainly.”
“I suppose I want to know about Echentyr,” said Shuthmili.
“My homeland is now the subject of ancient histories. I understand this. I am becoming accustomed to novel griefs.”
“Yes. I thought it would be insensitive to bother you, while you’re recovering,” said Shuthmili.
“I do not think there will be recovery from this,” said Cherenthisse. “What is it? There is something in particular.”
Shuthmili wondered how on earth the serpent knew this. Cherenthisse’s eyes were fixed steadily on her, the red point glittering in each pupil.
It was at least worth a try. She pulled off the gauntlets and held them out. Unremarkable dark leather, shiny in places with wear. There were faded sigils stamped into the leather, only visible when they caught the light.
“They are garments,” said Cherenthisse, doubtfully, after peering at them for some time. “Hand garments. This is why you keep me alive?”
“They’re Echentyri,” said Shuthmili. “An artefact. I’m trying to understand—”
Cherenthisse’s face twisted up in confusion and disgust. “Why should my people produce such an object?”
“I believe they were made by or for a … I suppose you’d call him a vassal mage,” said Shuthmili. “You’ve never seen anything similar?”
“No,” said Cherenthisse. “I am no practitioner.”
“Even so,” said Shuthmili. “Anything you could tell me about their construction, or the magic used? I am reaching in the dark, here, so anything—”
“The priests of Iriskavaal are hatched at their own sanctuary in the deepwood of Tachthyr. They are our mages. But you tell me they are all dead, and all their sanctuaries turned to dust.” Cherenthisse hunched her shoulders, sorrow battling frustration. “I cannot tell you anything you wish to know.”
“But you aren’t exactly mundane,” said Shuthmili, not prepared to give up hope. Anything was worth knowing, and might bring her closer to understanding. “Your transformation—I’m right about that, aren’t I? You can take a serpent form?”
Cherenthisse hissed, drawing back. “I am a serpent,” she said. “Every part of me that exists is a serpent. This body is a mockery.”
Shuthmili watched her expectantly.
“There are things that everyone should know, and things which none but the Thousand are to learn, and you are so ignorant—” said Cherenthisse. “The goddess granted the Thousand Eyes our double aspect. We may walk among prey for a time, to better serve her ends, but this is not all that I am.”
“I see,” said Shuthmili. “And you can’t change back?”
Cherenthisse’s face hardened, as though she regretted having admitted it. “I do not doubt that the Lady Iriskavaal has spared my life for a reason,” she said. “But it is hard, what she asks of me. To serve is an honour, but how it hurts.”
Shuthmili was struck again by the inadequacy of any comfort she could offer.
“I could have a look at you,” she said. “I might be a prey creature—which is a fascinatingly horrible choice of words, by the way, I must ask you about it at some point—but I am also quite a powerful magician, and I’ve worked as a medic before. If you’d let me examine you…?”
Cherenthisse hissed. “You would use me to pry into that blasphemous artefact,” she said. “No. I do not trust you.”
Shuthmili blushed. She hadn’t entirely meant it that way, but Cherenthisse wasn’t entirely wrong either.
Before she could think what to say, boots crunched on the gravel path behind her. She turned, expecting it to be Csorwe.
It was not.
Tal was back, looking—as usual—like a grasshopper that would spring a foot in the air at the least provocation. And next to him was an Oshaaru woman, wrapped up in a thick scarf and hood so that it took Shuthmili a moment to recognise her.
“Tal?” said Shuthmili, and then, “Oranna?”
“Oh, great,” said Csorwe, returning with the bucket. “Nobody told me the circus was coming to town.”
“So what do you want?” said Csorwe.
“You people always want so many explanations,” said Oranna. “Surely you recall that the Unspoken teaches us to embrace obscurity and surrender to unknowing. All voices sound in silence, and silence relieves them at last, hmm?”
Oranna settled in the booth, in the attitude of a large grey cat stretching itself in the sun. It really was embarrassing how good she always looked, even with her dark hair streaked silver. Shuthmili had mentioned it to Csorwe once, and they had stared at one another for five full seconds in horrified agreement.
“But since you’re good enough to ask,” Oranna went on, “I would like a pot of tea, thank you, and some biscuits if this place has such a thing on offer.”
The station canteen was still full of late breakfasters, for there were people on Cricket Station who were prepared to linger over a bowl of porridge or sour rhubarb soup. The five of them had crammed into a booth meant for four. In the far corner, Cherenthisse hunched up on her seat, her long arms wrapped around her knees and her cheek resting on the pitted surface of the canteen table.
“You must be Cherenthisse,” said Oranna. “Talasseres has told me about you. The last of your kind. How interesting.”
Cherenthisse did not respond. Csorwe set a pot of tea on the table and settled opposite Oranna in a manner that emphasised the breadth of her shoulders. You might describe Csorwe as wiry but only in the sense that a steel cable is technically a wire, Shuthmili thought, and could not help smiling secretly to herself.
“Well, isn’t this friendly,” said Oranna, sipping her tea with apparent enjoyment, though, in Shuthmili’s experience, the tea on Cricket Station was an oversteeped broth the colour of tar, and the coffee was worse. “It’s sweet that you all come as a matched set these days. Csorwe, must you really loom like that?” she added. “I don’t see why you must be so distrustful. Last time we met, I helped you.”
Csorwe gave her a long look. “And the time before that, you kidnapped Shuthmili, murdered at least twelve acolytes, nearly got us all killed in a rockfall—”
“Poisoned me,” added Tal.
“The Unspoken contains multitudes, and so do I,” said Oranna, dipping a biscuit in her tea. “I am here to help you, and to ask your help in return. The Siren of the Speechless Sea is dead, and I believe that whoever killed her is hunting Belthandros. He has many enemies. Disgruntled mercenaries, hostile foreign agents, Tlaanthothei political rivals—take your pick. If one of them somehow has the capacity to kill a god all of a sudden … I doubt they will stop at Belthandros. Which means we’re all in trouble.”
She told them what had happened in Tlaanthothe. Shuthmili and the others listened in growing unease. She wasn’t entirely convinced of Oranna’s theory, but maybe that was just because she couldn’t imagine Belthandros Sethennai being hunted. It was uncomfortable to imagine that there might be a bigger fish out there than the man who had shaped half of Csorwe’s life.
“Doesn’t it seem most likely that he killed the Siren?” said Shuthmili. “Belthandros, I mean? And then fled the scene of the crime?”
“I considered that theory,” said Oranna. She peered down at the dregs of her teacup, where the black leaves swirled like seaweed, and ran a fingertip thoughtfully round the rim before continuing. “But he would gain nothing by killing the Siren. He and she are both remnants of the same old god. Survivors from the wreck of Iriskavaal’s being. You could almost think of them as siblings.”
Cherenthisse raised her head from the table, red sparks flashing in her eyes. “These matters are not for you to speak of,” she said. “It is a desecration to take the name of the goddess so lightly.”
Oranna ignored her and went on explaining. After the fall of Echentyr, some of the shards of Iriskavaal’s shattered body had grown into smaller divinities in their own right. The Siren was one of them, and they had encountered at least one other, back in the Precursor world where Shuthmili had first met Csorwe: a stone pillar that sang endlessly of oblivion.
“The Siren was a goddess in her own right, but a very minor one,” said Oranna. “She served Belthandros without complaint. Why would he turn on her?”
“If she turned on him, maybe—” said Csorwe.
“Well, possibly,” said Oranna. “I think it more likely that a third party is involved.”
“Another one of Iriskavaal’s remnants?” said Shuthmili. There were probably hundreds of them scattered through the Maze, shards of stone lying undiscovered in caves or at the bottom of the sea. “The only one we know that walks and talks is Belthandros, though.”
“Belthandros is a special case,” said Oranna. “He was a mortal man, once upon a time. As Pentravesse of Ormary, he willingly accepted the snake goddess into himself. But there could have been others. Belthandros kept his identity so well hidden that he himself forgot what he was, for a time. Who’s to say for sure that there were no others? You or I or even Talasseres might be secretly divine—”
Shuthmili shook her head, thinking uneasily of the voice in her head.
“Joking aside,” said Oranna, “the Siren is dead, and so is every other remnant of Iriskavaal I have managed to trace. There is trouble ahead—”
“Right,” said Csorwe. “And it sounds like you expect us to do something about it. Seems to me like Sethennai deserves what’s coming to him.”
“That may be so,” said Oranna. “But do you have any idea what a god on the rampage can do? Zinandour’s reign of terror in Qarsazh razed cities. Isn’t that right, Shuthmili?”
From far away Zinandour murmured appreciatively, and black flames flickered across Shuthmili’s vision. She shook her head hard to banish them.
“Yes,” she said, feeling dizzy. “Thousands of years ago. These things don’t—”
“These things don’t happen? If that’s the case, why does the Qarsazhi Inquisitorate keep its mages so tightly bound? Why does the House of Silence appease the Unspoken One with sacrifice? A volcano may lie dormant for millennia, you know. Our gods lie sleeping, and I think it all too likely that—”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Csorwe, much to Shuthmili’s relief, “there’s probably some kind of secret monster out there, I get it, and you want someone to deal with it.”
“Someone surely must,” said Oranna.
“I can tell you it’s not going to be us,” said Csorwe, and before Oranna could respond, there was a cough from outside the booth. A nervous young man in the uniform of station security stood there, flanked by two stolid colleagues.
“Er, ah—” he said, and cleared his throat. “Is one of you a Professor Ilver Tvelujan?”
“Tvelujan’s sick,” said Csorwe, not missing a beat. “We work with her. What’s the matter?”
“There’s a cutter registered to her name moored in the shuttle bay—it might be easier if you come and see. Something is growing in it…”