The tower of the tyrant, p.37
The Tower of the Tyrant, page 37
She felt that little needle of pain in her own heart. Substitute ‘artist’ with ‘researcher’ and ‘audience’ with ‘approval by the research board to utilise vast quantities of thaumacite’, and she could be describing herself. ‘Not every person can be held in equal esteem, after all,’ she went on. ‘People only like to look at diamonds because not every stone in the world is a diamond. Popularity will always be a rarefied thing. The difference is that, in the City, none of these folk need do anything but pursue that dream, nor worry about anything but making their work the best it can be. There is no scarcity of food, or shelter, or good clothes and small luxuries to distract and complicate that pursuit.’
‘It sounds wonderful,’ Siwan said, but by the girl’s posture and expression Fola could see that she did not really believe. It was so difficult to explain these things to those who had never seen them. When you have only ever known a world of constant struggle and competition, not for regard and achievement but for base survival, it was difficult to envision anything else. And there was always that implicit question: ‘If the City is so great as all that, why did you leave?’
Fola sighed again and held out the bar of soap. ‘Scrub my back, would you, and then take your turn before the water gets too cold.’
Siwan hopped down from the bed—eliciting a startled squawk from Frog. For a few moments she silently worked the soap into a lather, which she rubbed into Fola’s back. Tension unwound between Fola’s shoulder blades. Even after four years wandering the world, she still got saddle-sore.
‘What’s your interest in me, then?’ Siwan asked. ‘I mean … you’ve gone well out of your way to help me. What do you stand to gain?’
Reflexively, Fola wanted to challenge the idea that people only did things because they stood to gain something—but that would be disingenuous, in this case. Then again, people tended to react badly when directly told, ‘I would like to study you, academically.’
‘What do you know of the First Folk?’ she answered with a question of her own.
Siwan dipped the soap in the water. ‘Not much. Mostly myths and rumours.’
‘Us, too,’ Fola said. ‘We have some fragments of writing. Some ability to translate from their language. Not enough, even with magical enchantments that usually make it easy to parse and learn a new tongue. Volumes and volumes of books, though, all written in a language we can’t understand.’ She remembered her first tour through those labyrinthine halls beneath the Library Tower. Pick a book at random and you were likely to find an inscrutable mess of squiggly symbols and bizarre illustrations. One in a thousand was written in a script anyone left alive could read with anything approaching fluency. A treasure trove of information, locked behind languages lost with the vanishing of those who used them.
‘Sorry to say I don’t read First Folk,’ Siwan said. ‘And if you suspect the raven bastard does, I’m equally sorry to say languages aren’t its foremost skill.’
‘No.’ Fola chuckled. ‘That would be raising the dead, it seems.’
Siwan paused, the bar of soap pressed firmly against the back of Fola’s neck. Not quite in a headspace fit for bleak humour, yet. Possibly never would be.
‘For the last twenty years I have been working on a project,’ Fola went on. ‘An idea for how we might unlock all that knowledge in all those books. After all, who better to teach us their language than the First Folk themselves?’
‘You’re looking for First Folk?’ Siwan said. ‘Aren’t they all gone?’
‘Yes, as far as anyone can be certain of anything. But “gone” doesn’t mean inaccessible, exactly. The dead are gone, too, but they leave traces. Strong memories with a life of their own—ghosts and wraiths. With the right knowledge and the right artifact we can call those memories up, speak with them, learn from them.’ And, she did not say, though she remembered the bone pits and flesh machines of Ulun, borrow their power for our own dark purposes. ‘My notion is to conjure up the ghosts of the First Folk. The City is full of things they left behind with apparent purpose and intent. Things that mattered to them. It should be possible, then, to use the City as a catalyst, connect to a strong memory, and make contact with one of its builders, if only long enough for a few lessons in First Folk language.’
‘You mean to speak with them the way you spoke with Jareth,’ Siwan said. ‘But he was dead. The First Folk didn’t die, did they? Weren’t they immortal, like the fae?’
‘Frankly, we don’t know,’ Fola answered. ‘So the myths and legends say. What we do know is that the ordinary means of conjuring a ghost don’t seem to work on them. I have theories as to why, and a plan to test them, but … Well, suffice to say not everything in the City is limitlessly available, and my experiments would be costly. The people who decide how to deploy certain resources don’t quite share my enthusiasm for my theories.’
‘I don’t see how any of this relates to me.’ Siwan swallowed and shook her head. A tear choked her voice. ‘I wish it did. Stones, I wish I knew why any of this was happening. Losing control to the raven fiend is bad enough.’
Fola gave her a moment to collect herself before she spoke again. ‘I don’t know precisely how the raven fiend and the wraiths are related, but know this—it has nothing to do with you.’ True in one sense—the girl Siwan was not the one conjuring the wraiths—but half a falsehood in another.
Shared suffering could resonate. Two incidents, two seeds of pain, distant in time. Siwan on the sacrificial altar and the wraiths sacrificed for some other, as yet unknown end. The young roots entwining with the ancient. Long-slumbering wrath stirred to wakefulness as the same crime—in spirit, if not in fact—hammered at the world anew. And the raven fiend, a being with powers expansive and ill defined, reaching out to wield that hammer.
Fola twisted slowly, so as not to slosh the water out of the tub, until she could meet Siwan’s eye. Sitting as she was, cross-legged on the bed with a bird in her lap, all her vulnerability was on full display. Fola wished she could comfort her as the troupe had done on the night the wraiths attacked the festival. But they were still little more than strangers, and Fola had little experience mapping such fraught emotional territory.
‘None of this is your fault,’ she said—her best attempt. ‘There are powers in this world beyond any understanding or control. You’ve stumbled into one of them.’
‘So what?’ Siwan rubbed a tear from her cheek. ‘You think the raven fiend can teach you something about the First Folk? Or the ghosts that walk out of the sky when I lose my bloody temper?’
Fola smiled. Maybe ready for bleak humour, after all. Still, best not to push things. This was sensitive ground, and Fola had to put her thoughts into words that would not alienate the girl. Not her strongest of skills. If she had been better at phrasing things as her audience wanted them phrased, she might have talked her way past the research board without all this hassle.
‘Conjuring a ghost requires some knowledge of what you intend to conjure,’ Fola said. ‘And there is a difference between calling up the ghost of an ordinary mortal, like Damon, or Spil, or Harwick—of natural, evolved morphology—and someone like Colm, whose lineage descends from First Folk experiments and the like. I theorise that the reason we can’t conjure the First Folk is because they are, in some way we don’t understand, fundamentally different sorts of beings from anything we’ve been able to study. Different from fae, from fiends, from any kind of mortal.’
‘And I am different from every other mortal,’ Siwan said. A harsh cast had returned to her face, like the shadow of a cloud drifting over the sun.
‘In a way that is fascinating and wonderful, yes,’ Fola said.
Siwan paused. ‘“Fascinating” I’ve heard before, but “wonderful”?’ She shook her head. ‘I’m not one of the First Folk. And whatever I am, it happened by accident. What could you possibly learn from that?’
Fola took a deep, slow breath, and glanced at Frog, who had hunkered down on the bed to sleep.
‘Just because something happened by accident doesn’t mean it isn’t good, or important, or a potential source of knowledge,’ she said. ‘Think about this, Siwan … There are four types of souls in the world, that we know of—fiend, fae, mortal—with several sub-varieties—and undead. At a glance through my loupe, I see patterns indicative of all four within you. Which means, even if you have nothing to do with the First Folk, you represent a complete picture of everything they aren’t. Sometimes the only way to understand something you can’t actually study is to study everything it isn’t. Does that make sense?’
Siwan shook her head firmly. Curiosity could only carry one so far against winds of fear and uncertainty. The girl was exhausted. Any more conversation would achieve little.
‘Right.’ Fola scrubbed a hand through the tight curls of her hair, flicking out droplets to patter against the floor. ‘Anyway, this water’s getting tepid. Your turn.’
She stood, shivering against the autumn chill—there was no hearth in the room, only a metal coil that carried heat up from the fireplace in the commons. The serving folk had left a few sheets of towelling. Fola scrubbed the water from her skin, then wrapped a towel around herself and helped Siwan into the tub. It no longer wafted steam, but was warm enough to be comfortable. Fola felt a little guilty that she had taken the first bath, and briefly considered reheating it with a quick spell. Playing with temperature was dangerous, though, particularly in a timber-framed structure. Her attempt to convey some heat from the radiator to the water would as likely flash it to steam, or burn the inn to the ground—and half the city with it.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Siwan said when she had situated herself comfortably in the tub. ‘All this talk about the First Folk, and how I fit into it, I mean. But that doesn’t mean I’m saying no. I need time to think about it, and if I decide to go with you, I’ll need time to explain it all to Llewyn.’
Fola felt a swell of gratitude towards the girl, so sudden and profound that she found it difficult to form words. No one—not even Arno, the nearest thing she had to an ally on the research board—had been so ready to actually consider her ideas instead of dismissing them as little more than wild fantasies and dreams.
‘I …’ Fola started working her way towards ‘thank you’, which felt wholly insufficient to convey the swirl of emotion that had suddenly attacked her, when she was interrupted by a heavy knock at the door.
She cinched the towel tighter. ‘Must be a tailor right around the corner,’ she muttered, and opened the door a crack. Rather than Harwick or Spil with a bundle of new clothes, she found Colm, his own towel wrapped around his waist, droplets of bathwater still clinging to the curled hairs of his chest and tracing the lines of his fresh scars.
She yelped, startling Frog awake.
‘Sorry,’ Colm said. ‘Not my intention to startle you. Just thought …’ He rubbed at the bandaged stump of his left upper arm. Almost bashfully, if it were possible to imagine him feeling such a way. ‘Well, the other lads are out, and should be out a while longer. Not sure when we’ll get another opportunity as good as this. Anyway …’ A boyish, half-ashamed, half-excited smile crossed his face. ‘I’m still up if you are, is what I’m saying.’
‘You’re still injured,’ Fola protested, her eyes lingering on that stump. He’d kept it out of the bathwater, which was good. His other injuries had already closed on their own. Warborn blood … a marvel. Her brief examination of his wounds became an examination of his body, of the slopes of muscle and fat, the angles of his abdominal ligaments like the wings of an inviting arrow. It was becoming increasingly difficult to think of good reasons not to accept his invitation. ‘And we’ve just bathed, Colm.’
At that, he shrugged, his upper shoulders like mountains shuddering and sending ripples through the foothills. It was too much. Fola shot Siwan a quick glance. The girl had hunkered down in the water up to her chin. She grinned back at Fola and waggled her eyebrows. Frog, having adjusted his perch and settled back into his sleepy huddle, glared at her, still upset at her for yelping.
‘Bleed it,’ she muttered, and grabbed one of his good arms. They scampered across the hall like two teenagers on their first, secret tryst—Fola’s had been in the Prism Garden, a labyrinth of odd geometric sculptures of twisted glass. She and Sima, the boy who’d been awkwardly courting her for months—he’d carried books for her and brought her flowers from all over the City despite her total disinterest in them—had found a secluded alcove deep in the labyrinth. Not the best choice. Being surrounded by their contorted reflections while they fumbled around had added a layer of absurdity to what was already a novel experience.
These environs were far more plain. The bed was too small, and care for Colm’s wounds demanded a slower, gentler pace. Still, those dainty hands on the ends of his lower arms proved as skilled and knowing as she’d imagined them. And there was something to be said for having such a powerful body beneath hers, gazing up in pleasure and wonder, his eyes tracing her curves and the silver lines of the enchantments tattooed onto her skin. Until the height, when the broad, leathery hand of his upper arm pressed flat against her back, holding her on to him as need overcame the aesthetics of the act in a pulsing, desperate rhythm that built and built until, in a shuddering exhalation, it was over.
She lay beside him, afterwards, slick with sweat, listening to the drumbeat of his heart fade from frantic passion to slow, soothing calm.
‘We put that off too long,’ he murmured, and she heard him as much through the rumble of his ribs as the sound of his voice. She murmured agreement, and dozed a while. There was much to do, and danger still on their heels, but it was worth basking in an island of calm while she could.
The Aleph
YC 1189
It is commonly theorised that thaumaturgy functions by making meaning, naming the nameless, and binding it to a purpose and function.
Curious, then, that the frenzy of activity before the First Folk’s fading can be, in many ways, understood as a war against meaninglessness.
Librarian Quilthis Aer, On Magic, YC 592
Thrice before, Llewyn had been to the city of Glascoed. The second and third times had been as a member of the Silver Lake Troupe, in the first years after Nyth Fran. At midsummer, folk from as far as Caer Palu came to dance beneath pines strung with tinsel, to drink summer mead from Miggenbrot and to hear the old songs and watch troupers play the old stories. Tales of Abal the Protector and the Beast-King of Galca, of course—though earlier versions, not Damon’s reinterpretation. But also of folk heroes like Jak the Leaper, who on legs jointed like a hare’s could cross the river Afoneang at a bound. Or of Teri Mountainsdaughter, who it was said emerged from her crystal palace beneath the earth once a season to visit her charms and pleasures upon a lucky fool—a woodsman in spring, a shepherd in summer, a farmhand in autumn and a miner in winter.
Some folk tales struck too close to home, for Llewyn, particularly those told around low campfires when the midsummer sun had fallen. Tales of changeling children returned from the forest, something of their souls twisted by the fae.
The death of Harlow had changed things. Ifan, racked by grief, had neglected his father’s usual donations, and the foreboding atmosphere bred by the nascent haunting had dulled the common folk’s appetite for entertainments. More, after Siwan’s grip on the raven fiend had first faltered in Caer Bren, Llewyn and Afanan had agreed to leave the Greenwood as far behind as possible, for fear of the Grey Lady picking up their trail.
And now they had returned, having proven that flight from the forest had offered no protection from the powers that dogged Siwan’s heels.
Eyes peered from windows and alleys that morning as they travelled towards the castle. They put an itch under Llewyn’s skin and a chill beyond the misty air of early autumn in his bones. Old anxieties coupled with new fears that cast his mind back to older, darker memories.
Siwan nudged him with her elbow. ‘You asked, and now you’re not even listening.’
They occupied the rear of their party’s little procession up the hill, towards the inner palisade wall and the shut, iron-bound gate to Castle Glascoed. Damon, Harwick and Spil walked just ahead of them, arguing back and forth about what their next steps ought to be. From the sound of things, Spil wanted to return to Parwys as soon as possible in the hope of tracking down Ayden, Tula and the others, including Afanan. Llewyn had resigned himself to the idea of Afanan’s death, but Spil refused to accept it. He had known her the longest of all of them. Harwick said little, while Damon seemed determined to stay with Siwan. Llewyn regretted dividing their loyalties in this way. With Afanan’s death and the troupe’s shattering, they had lost the only home they had known.
Just beyond them was the four-armed mercenary—three-and-a-half-armed, now—who served as Fola’s bodyguard and, apparently, lover. The stump of his amputated arm hung in a sling, though he seemed little troubled by the loss. As dangerous a mortal as Llewyn had ever known. Fola led the column, plodding ahead with a new staff of smoothed oak she’d bought from the innkeeper. Her strange little bird perched atop it, bobbing up and down with its rise and fall.
She looked no more than an ordinary traveller in the simple blouse, skirt and riding cloak Spil had picked out for her. Notable only for her odd company and a complexion a few shades darker than was usual in the kingdom. Folk who would stop and stare at Llewyn for the sharpness of his cheekbones would let Fola pass with only a brief acknowledgment. She seemed, to even a discerning eye, alert and clever but not unkindly. Certainly no danger. And Siwan, despite his best efforts to train her in caution, had fallen for the glamour.
