CSORWE LOOKED UP from the raspberry canes and saw a sphere of blood. It was about the size of a grapefruit, it hovered in the air at head height, and it was speaking in a voice she knew.
“Your help if you hear this,” it said.
“Tal?” she said, when she recovered the power of speech.
The orb had the heavy sheen of oil, and it trembled faintly as it spoke, and the voice was unmistakably that of Talasseres Charossa, which Csorwe had not heard in fifteen years.
She sat back on her heels, looking up at the orb. Maybe she was seeing things. Maybe she was dreaming. Maybe this was some kind of strange joke or gift from Zinandour, a simulacrum of mortal company. Any of these possibilities seemed more likely than that Tal was still alive, somewhere.
“Just a kid,” said the orb.
“What are you talking about?” she said.
“Really need your help if you hear this.”
The orb muttered on, and she listened in bewildered silence, gradually piecing its message together. Tal sounded older, his voice roughened by the years. He was in pain, and being a stubborn jerk about hiding it, as always.
If this was a joke, it was a cruel one. Hearing him talk made her chest ache. Zinandour had told her what Tlaanthothe had become, but it hadn’t come home to her until now how much had been lost while she was gone. All the while she’d been sleeping in her own head, oblivious, as Tal had lived through every day of every year of the God-Empress’ reign.
And was she really doing any better now? Hiding out in the Pearl of Oblivion while the world crumbled? If Tal needed her help badly enough to admit it, she really must be his last hope.
“Your help,” said the orb. “I’m dead by the time you get here.”
“Better not be,” said Csorwe. She put down her trowel. Tal had saved her life. She owed him. But more to the point, she could not bear to let him die. Maybe the world burnt, but she could save one small thing.
“No hard feelings,” said the orb, and evaporated.
“Oh, fuck you,” said Csorwe with fondness, and rose, dusting topsoil off her knees. “I’m on my way.”
Csorwe found Zinandour in one of her shipwreck attics, between a bucket of iron pokers and a barrel of rusted keys. The goddess was hunched up on a crate like a jackdaw, running her claws through a basket of sea glass.
When Csorwe told her about what she had heard, her armour bristled around her and her face went as cold and still as Csorwe had ever seen it.
“These mortals are not my concern.”
“Well, maybe they’re mine,” said Csorwe. She seated herself on a crate opposite the goddess. Faint specks of phosphorescence glimmered in the scales of Zinandour’s armour.
“I do not see that that is so,” said Zinandour, tapping her claws on the armour plate that covered her knee, an irritable little clicking noise. “You owe this child nothing.”
“If you don’t want to get involved—”
“No,” said Zinandour. There was a pause, measured out by the tap-tap-tap of claw on chitin. “I do not wish you to get involved. You have proven we hold some power over one another. Obey me in this and stay with me.”
“Why? It’s not as if you like my company,” said Csorwe.
“If you proceed with this plan, you will be harmed. Sethennai will capture you, and you will die with your friends. I know you. You yearn to sacrifice yourself to no good end.”
Csorwe shrugged. “I’m good at it.”
“I forbid it,” said Zinandour. “You are safe here. We are safe here,” she added, clearly feeling it was a great concession. “You will not be hurt. But you will not leave.”
She closed her eyes and turned away, her profile like a paper cutout of Shuthmili’s, framed in dark scales.
Csorwe felt herself sinking back down in that old pond of misery, but perhaps she’d hit the bottom, because she hit a hard surface, as cold and unyielding as iron.
Oh, right. That was anger.
“You think you can stop me?” she said.
“If I must,” said Zinandour. “Or we could make a bargain. I enjoy bargaining.”
“I bet you do,” said Csorwe sourly.
“You seem to think there is some overlap. Some remnant of the vessel. Something … lurking. If we remain safe here, then perhaps it would be easier to—”
As Csorwe grasped the implications of this, she laughed bitterly, a fountain of black bile like burning tar.
“That’s it? That’s what you’re offering me? You think if I stay and keep my mouth shut, you might let me talk to her from time to time? Wow! Fuck you!”
“Csorwe—”
“I miss her so much I think I kind of want to die about it. But I’m not going to sit up here brooding about it with you and let everyone else go to hell. And I’m disappointed that she did.”
“You do not know how she suffered.”
Csorwe ignored her. Shuthmili’s note was still in the pocket of her coat. She pulled it out, crumpling it in her hand.
“Where’s my sword?” she said.
“Your sword was lost at the temple of Saar-in-Tachthyr, fifteen years ago.”
“Great,” said Csorwe, through gritted teeth.
She went over to the bucket of pokers and rattled through them, looking for whichever felt best in her hand.
“What are you doing?” said Zinandour.
“I told you,” said Csorwe. “I’m leaving.”
Zinandour’s face became stonier than ever.
“You’ll have to bar the fucking door.”
“Will you waste what was bought so dearly?” said Zinandour.
“Sure you want to try that line with me?” said Csorwe. “You saved me, so you own me? No.”
For a moment Zinandour looked very tired, very thin, older and paler and sadder than Csorwe had ever seen Shuthmili look, and yet somehow more like her.
Shuthmili was gone. Tlaanthothe was gone. In this new world Grey Hook belonged to the snakes, and the House of Silence was burnt. Csorwe herself was a faithless runaway, as she had been for decades. She might be able to save Tal and the kid, but her world was already dust and ashes.
Her whole world, except whatever flicker still burnt in the back of Zinandour’s mind, gone out of her reach.
Maybe I should just stay with her, thought Csorwe. Shuthmili had done the same thing, hadn’t she? She had chosen that path and followed the God-Empress’ hollow shell wherever it took her, whatever it made of her, whatever the consequences. No. Csorwe had tried blind loyalty before, and she hadn’t liked how it had turned out.
“I cannot stand by and watch you die,” said Zinandour. “I cannot. Csorwe—”
“My life is mine to waste.” With an effort, she softened her voice. This was her last chance, maybe. The last opportunity to get through. “You said that yourself, once.”
Zinandour flinched back as if Csorwe had burnt her.
“I am not her,” said Zinandour. “Not anymore.”
“So you’ve told me,” said Csorwe. “Well, when this is all over, and I’m gone … if you ever remember being her, remember that I loved you.”
Csorwe tossed the crumpled note at Zinandour’s feet, stuck the poker through her belt, and left.
There was a half-functioning shuttle in one of Zinandour’s hoards, and it carried her as far as Grey Hook before giving out.
Grey Hook was almost as Csorwe remembered it, but not quite. There was a nervous tension in the air. At the port, dozens of Tlaanthothei refugees waited in small flocks, surrounded by bags and cases and whatever else they’d been able to carry. In the streets, half the shops were boarded up.
She went to the market to look for a new cutter, doing her best not to feel anything about the way the city had changed. She had spent the best years of her childhood in Grey Hook and hadn’t been back since. All those memories were dangerously close at hand. There was the empty office of the Blue Boars Mercenary Company. There was the abandoned wagon of the lentil curry man, missing its wheels. There was the street where she had lived with Sethennai—no, she wasn’t even going to look that way. Guard up. Eyes on the road ahead.
At the corner of the market was the watchtower Sethennai had shown her on her first day in the city, now half fallen and scrawled over with graffiti: SNAKES OUT. FUCK THE 1000. IRSKAVAL SUCK MY DICK.
She grinned at that. Even if she herself would never be the same again, some things never really changed.
Her smile faded as she passed another crowd of refugees and heard what they were discussing. Zinandour had told her about Sethennai’s dead city, the way it enveloped other towns and choked the life from them, but it was one thing to hear rumours and another to listen to someone who had seen it engulf their farmstead.
She had covered her face with a scarf, since the sight of the God-Empress strolling down the boulevard might cause a bit of a stir, and the anonymity was a relief. She wandered closer to the group, listening discreetly.
To her surprise, she heard someone speaking Oshaarun. The accent was like a snowball to the face. The remotest north of northern Oshaar, the voice of Csorwe’s childhood. It was saying:
“Like I said, one bag each, or there won’t be room for everyone.”
Among the other refugees was a group of Oshaaru women in ragged grey uniforms. The speaker was clearly their leader: startlingly young, not much over twenty.
“Another straggler?” said the leader when she caught sight of Csorwe. She had the determined heartiness of someone who has been keeping other people’s spirits up for hours, if not days. It made her seem older than she was. “I don’t recognise you. There’s not much more space on the ship, but—”
“You’re from the north,” said Csorwe. “I’m from there.”
The girl looked at Csorwe in mixed suspicion and bewilderment, then seemed to decide Csorwe’s accent was legitimate.
“Yes, all of us—we’re all House of Silence people, from the Iron Hill. Who are you?”
Csorwe realised she had been staring, over her scarf. “Prioress Cweren,” she said, somewhat at random. “Is she alive? I met her once.”
“She didn’t make it out,” said the girl. Her expression closed briefly, as though shutting away this grief somewhere Csorwe couldn’t get at it. “I’m her successor, Prioress Tsurai. Are you one of the faithful?”
Csorwe ran a hand back through her hair. “Not really. Born into it, but—”
Tsurai nodded. “I understand. Things change. We’re all lost things now.”
“Where are you going?” said Csorwe.
“Back to Oshaar,” said Tsurai, “if we can.”
“The House of Silence is burnt,” said Csorwe.
Tsurai smiled, not offended. “The House is not a building. Maybe you should come back with us.”
Csorwe thought about it.
Oh, yes. She could do it, if she wanted to. None of them would know who she was. Back to the House and its cold comradeship, back to the woods and mountains, back to the numbing familiarity of ritual, back to the fading of all things and the oblivion of the lotus. She could put herself away in that box, and there would be no more loneliness and no more uncertainty. Always to know what you were meant to do, always to have a place. As if she had never met any of them, as if her life really had ended when she was fourteen. The smell of woodsmoke on the wintry air, the rise and fall of the black pines on the horizon, rippling like a woman’s hair. Better, maybe, to go home, and forget.
For a moment the vision sustained her, like a sip of hot wine, and then she had to admit to herself that it was empty. The place that had been her home no longer existed. The Unspoken One no longer resided in the mountain, not as it once had. And she could not pretend her life had truly ended when she was fourteen. Shuthmili was gone beyond her reach, but would she really turn tail while Tal was still blundering forward somewhere? She knew better than to think he would really give up on anything unless someone dragged him from it shrieking. And he’d asked for her help.
“I’ll catch up to you,” she told Tsurai, and let them go.
It had been a long time since Csorwe had made a long journey through the Maze, and the formlessness gave her a headache. Only one establishment in Grey Hook had been prepared to accept the ancient and tarnished coins she had stolen from the Pearl of Oblivion, and the cutter she had hired jolted like a wagon over rubble.
To reach the nearest gate to the Lignite Citadel, she approached along the base of a narrow gorge. The cutter’s lanterns illuminated nothing but a puddle of jagged stone ahead. The great silence outside pressed upon the little silence inside.
Csorwe had never thought before about what it might be like to live at the bottom of the ocean, and she didn’t think she would enjoy it very much.
When at last she saw the Gate blinking above her, a circle of green fire gleaming like a penny in a fountain, she was relieved. Whatever she found on the other side, it couldn’t be as bad as the journey they’d just endured.
Then a shadow passed across the face of the Gate, black against green like a fly crawling inside a paper lantern. Hovering above the Gate was a Thousand Eye warship.
Csorwe took the cutter hastily down again, back into the safe darkness of the trench, and cut the lights, praying they hadn’t seen her.
No such luck. There was the deafening crash of a missile hitting the rock face, so close that the cutter rolled to one side, all its timbers creaking.
Csorwe cursed, and ducked deeper into darkness. Would they come after her? Surely she was too small a fish for that?
Another impact. They weren’t going to let her go. And this thing didn’t go fast enough to outrun a mail transport, let alone a military frigate. If she went deeper into the trench, she might be able to outmanoeuvre a larger ship in the dark, but in a cutter as clunky as this, the chances were that she would smash herself to pieces on a stalagmite. What a stupid way to die, after all this.
In the darkness of the cabin, Csorwe heard a hiss. Fear traced its cold fingernails down the back of her neck, and then she recognised the sound.
“Zinandour,” she said.
“I can help,” said the goddess, her voice low and grating.
“Not the time for this,” said Csorwe. It was taking quite a lot of nerve just to keep her hands steady on the wheel.
She heard the goddess move, the rustling of a huge bulk, like scales or feathers, much larger than Shuthmili’s small body. The rustling grew louder as Zinandour slithered forward into the cockpit. Csorwe hung on to the controls, staring fixedly up at the green coin of the Gate, and felt Zinandour grip the back of her seat. Her breath was as cold as the wind outside.
“I can help,” said Zinandour again.
Csorwe pulled the lever that opened the cockpit evacuation hatch. A freezing wind roared into the cockpit, scattering debris. Csorwe had never been more glad to be securely strapped into the pilot’s seat. There was a release of pressure that made her ears pop, as Zinandour pushed up and away from her and escaped through the open hatch. Rattled and blind, she fumbled for the hatch and latched it closed again.
The noise stopped. There was a perfect, silent darkness. Then a winged shape passed into the penumbra of the Gate. It was smaller than the warship, but just as sleek and murderous.
It might have been the ringing in Csorwe’s ears, or the distant song of the Gate, but she thought she heard an alarm bell pealing. Zinandour closed with the warship, melting into its silhouette, and for a few seconds it tumbled in space, turning and twitching like something caught in a web. Csorwe was equally transfixed. The warship struggled for a few seconds longer, then exploded. The fragments hung in a cloud before the Gate—there was a kind of beauty to it, like a dandelion clock—and then the wind picked up and blew them away.
Csorwe sat very still, unblinking. A moment later she felt the vibration as something landed on the cutter’s upper hull, and then the hiss of the upper hatch opening.
“There will be no further trouble,” said Zinandour, behind her. There was nothing left of the warship but a faint trace of frozen dust in the air, sparkling in the Gate-fire like specks in a sunbeam.
Zinandour had loved to fly since she had first taken a living vessel, long millennia past. How she missed being a true dragon: the immense architecture of that body, its hollow bones, the metallic sheen of her scales, the taste of fire in her mouth, the wings whose very shadow was the fear of kings. But all the dragons were extinct, and now the next best thing was to wreak destruction upon a helpless warship. The rending of timbers, the shrieking of the doomed sailors, the sound of all life’s sinews tearing: this was music and sweetness to the Devouring Fire.
Down in the pilot’s seat, Csorwe clutched the wheel very tightly. She was controlling herself, but Zinandour smelled her blood and sweat and knew her fear.
This too should have been a pleasure, to a goddess who had cut a path of blood and fire across countless centuries. In long-ago Qarsazh all had trembled in her presence, all mortal courage failed before her, and this had pleased her—and yet. There was a bitterness, to know that this insect feared her.
“Zinandour,” said Csorwe. Her voice was very calm.
I COULD MAKE HER TRULY FEAR ME, Zinandour thought, rather halfheartedly.
(absolutely not you hateful old crocodile,) said Shuthmili.
Zinandour ignored her. Guilt, shame, self-doubt—these were emotions which ought to be foreign to her.
(welcome to mortality.)
YOU ARE A SHARD OF GLASS IN MY MOUTH, said Zinandour. A PIECE OF GRIT, A PATHOGEN.
A moment’s loss of control. Zinandour bit her tongue hard, the muscles of her jaw tightening without prompting, and she tasted blood.
“How long have you been following me?” said Csorwe. Her fear was gone, replaced with mild frustration. Zinandour felt an unprompted desire to kiss her between her eyebrows, and bit her own tongue again.
“Are you all right?” said Csorwe.
“I was pursuing you. I boarded when you last stopped to refuel,” said Zinandour firmly.
“I’m not coming back with you,” said Csorwe.
“I promised Shuthmili that I would not permit you to come to harm,” said Zinandour.
(oh please spare us this again.)
“I know, and I don’t—”
“No,” said Zinandour, “listen to me. You have chosen a path of destruction. Very well. I am destruction. I am ruin. I am carnage. I am the Devouring Fire, and I would like to help you.”
Csorwe sat back in her seat, letting out a breath.
“With your permission,” said Zinandour in a halting snarl.
“This is new,” said Csorwe.
“Yes,” said Zinandour. She folded her wings and sat in the copilot’s seat. “It is a new world we find ourselves in.”
“What does that mean?” said Csorwe.
“Mortal form is not what I imagined,” said Zinandour. “I face an impossible decision. I cannot inhabit this form and remain as I was. Nor can I return to the void. You cannot know what it is, to attain one’s desire after millennia of striving and despair, and to find it so … inimical.”
“Kind of think I can, actually,” said Csorwe. “Not millennia, but still.”
Zinandour snorted, preening her wings. “You are as presumptuous and disrespectful as she. A fine pair.”
“I got what I thought I wanted too,” said Csorwe. “Long time ago, when I worked for Sethennai. I couldn’t live with it, either. I would’ve been somebody else if I stayed, and somebody else if I left.”
“And what did you do?” said Zinandour, though she knew, really, from the way Shuthmili brightened.
Csorwe shrugged. “I left. With her.”
Csorwe’s eyes were just the same luminous yellow they had always been. Like lanterns at the window, when you come home late at night, whose light means that however far you have travelled, somebody sits waiting for you by the warm hearth.
“I see,” said Zinandour. That was no memory of hers. She had been cast out from the Hearth of the Mara. There was neither home nor companion for her. Such things disgusted her.
And yet. She remembered so much. Coming home to find Csorwe sprawled on the couch with a book and finding herself stopped short by her lines, all that unselfconscious confidence, how well her clothes fit her. She had leant down and kissed her bare ankle—
THAT WAS NOT MY MEMORY.
(no? but after all remember our time in the void. the loneliness. the terror of eternity. enthroned in darkness.)
I AM MYSELF. YOU ARE A PARASITE.
Zinandour shut out the thought, pushed the voice away to the furthest reaches of her mind, shut it away under stone and iron, and locked the door. No more of that.
“You chose her,” she said. Her. Shuthmili was not here. No longer real. “Would you choose the same again?”
“Yes,” said Csorwe.
“Even knowing all that would follow?” she said. “Even knowing you would lose her?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Csorwe. “I did know. Everyone dies. It would happen eventually.”
“All mortal things fall to ruin,” said Zinandour. “So speaks the Unspoken, yes? All things fade and perish. That is your doctrine. All things rot, they burn, they are devoured. That is mine. And you would still choose her, knowing you would suffer?”
“I loved her. What difference would knowing make?” said Csorwe.
Zinandour folded her clawed hands and rested her chin on them. Shuthmili’s pointless grief weighed heavy on her, seeping cold like a block of ice.
“Will you permit me to help you?” said Zinandour. “I ask nothing in return.”
Csorwe watched her, her expression unreadable. Zinandour might have preferred another year in the void to this endless instant. Then, at last, Csorwe nodded.