Chapter V

City of Levanah, Month of Dragonflies

Once she reached the relative sanctuary of the shore, Alivet hid down among the thimble pines, perched upon the high bole of a root above the water. She stared unseeingly out across the marsh, thinking of Inki. Her twin’s face, with that puckered hole, still haunted her. She should be working in the alchematorium, earning the money to free her sister, not squatting here in a marsh. Frustration pounded behind her eyes like a headache. She glanced up at the sun, filtering down through the needles of the pines. It was almost time to make her way back to the pilgrimage boat.

There were several passengers waiting on the wharf. One was a marsh wife with an empty basket balanced upon her hip, her mouth moving with the rhythmic cud of uth gum. Alivet wondered what the woman was seeing in the steady march of hypnagogic images. There were also two old men, clearly brothers, clad in the dull green robes of the deep fens. No one paid any attention to Alivet. She took a seat on the bench beneath the shadow of the boat house and watched the anubes make their final preparations. Cargo was loaded and oars checked. An anube in the prow gestured for the passengers to step forwards. Alivet took the anube’s hand as it helped her into the boat; the flesh was cool and moist, like the skin of a frog. She seated herself near the stern, out of the way of the rowers, and drew her hood over her face in case anyone might be watching from the wharf. She breathed deeply, trying to calm herself.

The anube at the prow gave a booming cry like a bell, startling Alivet. She considered asking the marsh wife for a piece of the gum to steady her nerves, but thought it best not to draw attention to herself. The boat rocked as the hawser was untied. A shaft of sunlight, reaching down through the clouds, sent quick sparkles across the water. Alivet looked back as the boat was rowed swiftly out into the channel. The buildings of Little Swamp Street were silent in the morning light. No one was watching. Alivet gripped the sides of the boat more tightly and looked out across the fen. The pilgrimage boat darted through the reeds, disturbing a nesting attern that bolted up in a flurry of dark wings. Unlucky, Alivet thought, and dipped her hand in the water in the old gesture against ill fortune.

It was growing warmer: the air between the high rushes was stifling and stagnant. The distant outline of the city fell away. Ahead, lay the stilt villages. In a couple of hours, Alivet would be able to recognise the channels: the humps and islets where the First Farms were located. At least if it all went sour she could hide out in the fens for a time; there was plenty to eat, as long as one avoided ochiles and whisps. And liches and water-children; all the monsters of the marshes. No wonder the anubes spent so much of their time trying to placate the local deities through their sacrificial practises. Alivet’s spirits took a turn for the worse.

Sweat was starting to trickle down the back of her neck. Reaching up, Alivet loosened the collar of her dress and her fingers encountered a thin, slippery chain, reminding her to check that her pendant, her aunt’s gift, was safe. Alivet tugged the pendant from its place in the neck of her dress and glanced down at it. The pendant was an ancient thing, or so she had been told.

“It goes to the eldest girl,” her aunt had said. “And you are the eldest by thirteen minutes. My grandmother once told me that it must have come from the Origin with the ancestors, that it hung around the throat of your great-great-great grandmother even as she stepped from the bowels of the Night Lords’ boat.”

Looking now at the pendant, Alivet wondered again whether the old story was true. She preferred to believe that it was—and indeed, belief was not hard. The pendant was a curious thing: a cross of metal perhaps an inch long, studded with garnets and pearls. Upon it was bound the little figure of a man, each hand fixed to the arms of the cross. His head was bowed, drooping to one side like a flower that the sun has ceased to touch. It seemed likely that the piece had come from the deep fens, where the small pearls were spat from the murie shells and littered the shore like beads. But the more fanciful story had greater appeal for Alivet.

“Who is this man?” she had asked her aunt, when she had first been shown the pendant.

“I have no idea,” Elitta had replied. “I do not know who he might be, nor why he should be so sadly bound. There are no stories about him. Perhaps he had some meaning back in the Origin.” She smiled at Alivet. “Keep it safe. My grandmother said that it was a protection against evil.”

Well, if ever she needed protection against that, it was surely now. But Alivet wondered, as she always did, whether the pendant had not been the reason why the Unpriests had taken Inki and not herself. It was a foolish, superstitious thought, but she had never been able to shake it off.

The rest of the journey passed in a reverie of worry and plans. The phial that had contained the sozoma was still safely in her pocket; it might be a good idea to get that analysed if she could find an alchemist. One of the backstreet people would probably do it without asking awkward questions. The possibility that the red-eyed Poison Master was involved with Madimi Garland’s death had not been far from her mind ever since the events of the previous night. She was wary of being drawn into some kind of trap, but why would anyone bother? She was nobody special. Perhaps the empty phial might supply a clue.

The boat was drawing to a halt. Alivet looked up. A collection of ceremonial poles towered above her: black and shiny, with clusters of russet marsh moss entwined about the wheels at the summits. The anube rowers and the steersman, some nine people in all, stood up smoothly. The steersman again gave his booming cry and it rang out across the marsh, seeming to splinter the afternoon light. There was a ripple in the black water ahead. Again the cry, and movement beneath the water: things sinuous and long, sidling up to the base of the poles.

Alivet felt the air grow thick and shivery, and she looked at the marsh wife with unease. Sometimes people felt the need to cast themselves into the water around the poles and when they did, they sank without a sound and did not rise. But the marsh wife sat placidly chewing. The anube at the prow dropped a tangled mass into the water. There was a brief thrashing.

Alivet drew quickly back from the side of the boat and took her seat on the opposite edge, away from the poles. She looked up across the marsh, in the direction from which they had come. The sky was beginning to darken along the eastern horizon: a thunder­head building up like an anvil over the fens. Alivet could see the swarms of insects beginning to rise from the rushes, conjured by the promise of rain. Then a glint of unnatural light caught her eye. Another boat was approaching. It moved swiftly through the channels and she heard the sound of a glide-motor. It was not a pilgrimage boat. A figure stood erect in the prow; the profile was human. Perhaps it was nothing more than a farmer, returning from the markets of the city …

Alivet strained to see. The sky grew darker. A curtain of rain swept across the marsh, seeming to drive the boat before it. The figure in the prow turned. She saw a black circle in the pallid face; the gleam of a lens. The anube’s cry echoed out once more across the fens: a long, melancholy wail. Alivet drew her hood close about her face and nudged the arm of the nearest rower. The anube did not respond. It was staring into the untidy nest at the crest of the poles, where something was starting to stir.

“Excuse me,” Alivet said, in an urgent whisper. “But I think an Unpriest’s boat is coming.”

The anube was silent. Alivet had never heard of any penalty for interrupting a devotion, but perhaps she was about to set a precedent. The boat would be upon them in minutes. She could take a chance and sit it out; she knew that fugitives sometimes fled into the marshes and perhaps the Unpriests’ presence had nothing to do with her. Or she could cut and run—but Alivet glanced at the writhing water on either side of the boat and dismissed that possibility almost as soon as it occurred to her. Then she realised that the anube at the prow had spotted the approaching boat. It gave a low hiss, perhaps of disapproval.

“Make your offerings!” it instructed the passengers. Fumbling for the pouch in her pocket, Alivet took out some of the lamp seeds and, with one eye on the approaching boat, held them out. The anube took them without comment and scattered them around the base of the poles. The glowing seeds seemed to burrow into the mud, as though twisting downwards by their own volition.

The first heavy drops of rain began to fall. Alivet glanced anxiously at the boat, which had now cut its glide engines and was sailing smoothly up the channel. It was now some fifty yards from the pilgrimage boat. The Unpriest at its prow was wrapped in a waterproof greatcoat; its tails streamed out behind him like half-unfurled wings. The lens in his eye had spiralled inwards, so that the socket seemed puckered and bruised. Behind him, a woman crouched in the stern of the boat, leather-gloved fingers skittering over the engine casing. Unhurriedly the anube took offerings from the two old men, who clucked and muttered at the sight of the Unpriests, and from the marsh wife, still chewing her narcotic gum with bovine contentment. Alivet turned her hooded face away from the Unpriest and tried to look small and unobtrusive.

A sudden flurry of rain drummed on the floor of the pilgrimage boat. The last echo of the anube’s cry fluted across the marsh and the steersman turned the prow of the boat away from the poles. Alivet held her breath, her heart hammering. They were moving out into another channel beyond the poles, out of the path of the glide boat. The head of the Unpriest snapped sharply up; the lens flickered.

“Remain where you are! We wish to question your passengers.” It was a reedy, sibilant voice, suggesting that the Unpriest’s vocal cords had undergone modification. The anubes behaved as if they had not heard. The steersman adjusted the tiller and signalled to the rowers. They pulled on the oars. The pilgrimage boat shot forwards.

“Stop!” The glide boat nudged the edge of the poles. Alivet saw the water beneath grow suddenly still. Cold rain scattered across her hood. She looked up and saw a livid edge of cloud, glaring with the light of the hidden sun and a crack of sky. Then the clouds drew together. A shadow swept across the marsh. The Unpriest in the prow raised a long barrelled thing to his shoulder; Alivet recognised a web-gun. If they were after her, at least she was wanted alive—but if you spent too long under a web it would eat into the skin, cause lesions that could prove fatal if touched by the infected waters of the fens.

The Unpriest fired. The glistening strands of the web fell out like white flame across the water. The anube steersman whistled an order and the boat spun around. The web fell short, hissing into the marsh. The Unpriest raised the gun again, adjusted the range, and methodically fired. The edge of the web fell across the marsh wife, who uttered a shrill, startled cry as though she had only just realised that they were under attack. Glutinous, burning strands attached themselves to Alivet’s hand, welding it to the side of the boat. The marsh wife fell against her, entangling her further in the web. Lightning cracked through the clouds and hissed into the marsh.

Alivet, knocked to the floor of the boat by the marsh wife’s struggles, saw in the sudden light that the nest at the top of the poles was moving. An elongated, dark red body twisted out and up, and fell on top of the Unpriests. Alivet glimpsed a bristling underside and a series of mouths like the lenses of a camera. The female Unpriest gave a sudden shrill scream, but the weight of the fallen thing was enough to roll her boat over. The Unpriests were sucked down into the marsh. A few ripples corrugated the surface, then all was calm and silent.

The steersman heeled the pilgrimage boat around and drew it further up the channel. The marsh wife was still uttering small, yipping cries as she struggled. Alivet felt as though nails had been driven through her hand. She gritted her teeth against the pain and snapped, “Stay still! You’re just making it worse.”

“Only itumin will dissolve that,” one of the old men said, with something approaching satisfaction. “Never any good for anything else, but wonderful stuff for the fire nets. Wonder what the dredgers wanted? Nothing here for them, you’d have thought.”

Alivet twisted round to look at him. “You wouldn’t happen to have any itumin, by any chance?”

“Oh not here, Sister. You need to keep it in a jar. Got a jar on my boat—it’s at the next wharf.” He made a sucking sound, as if remembering something. “Expensive stuff, too,” he told Alivet, and fixed her with a rheumy eye.

“I can pay,” Alivet said, with very bad grace.

“That you’ll have to.”

Eventually, she reached an accommodation with the marsh wife. At least they were not welded to one another; Alivet was learning to be thankful for small mercies. Half sitting, half crouching, they remained in the bottom of the pilgrimage boat as it sped up the channel. The poles receded into the distance, as the storm flattened the reeds and rushes and drenched the passengers of the boat into a dreary silence.