The White Towers (18 page)

Yoon jerked, but the quests had already administered a local anaesthetic via the teeth in their heads, and then triggered a series of nerves in the brain which allowed Yoon to sink into a relaxed state of unconsciousness. They moved deeper, easing through tissue and causing the minimal amount of damage.

Then, they stopped.

Feelers sprung from each head, narrow strands almost invisible to the human eye, which spread out through brain tissue, searching.

Back under his blanket, Sameska gave a narrow smile. A nod of the head.

And slowly, the quests began a retreat towards their master.

“Now, I understand,” he whispered.

 

She stood in a forest. Mist curled across a blanket of dead pine needles. Her heart beat a tattoo of panic in her chest. She was unarmed. Naked, without her weapons. She glanced up, sweat on her brow and caressing her top lip, salt in her mouth, fear in her breast and with quivering fingers.
Where was she? Why was she alone?
Confusion smashed her like a helve blow from behind.

She blinked.

There were five shapes up ahead. Tall, just shimmering black shapes in the woodland gloom, their limbs slightly distorted, their heads kinked to one side as if listening for something.

“We have followed you for an eternity,” said one of the figures, the voice beautiful, musical, and a part of the forest.

“You are in our dreams,” said another.

“Until we kill you,” said a third.

“But… you are in my dreams,” she whispered, words barely more than an exhalation of fear.

“Not so.”

One figure stepped forward. It was a woman. Tall, lithe, powerful. She looked vaguely human, but her eyes were like black glass, the expression on her face one of hate and arrogance. “Fucking human,” said the woman, striding towards her. Her movements seemed to drift, like smoke, as if her eyes weren’t working properly.

“What do you want?” she said, but the smoke shifted, reappeared closer, shifted again. The figure rang out a peal of brittle laughter, cold and cruel.

“I am Sileath,” said the figure. The words came from all directions and none. “And I am here to kill you.”

She blinked. And Sileath was there. Close as a lover.

“Welcome to Hell,” said Sileath, and slammed the curved blade into Kiki’s chest and she was falling, and she was drowning: drowning and choking in an ocean of her own blood.

The storm rolled in from the oceans to the north and east. It ploughed over the mountains from all points of the compass. It cast giant shadows over the Crystal Sea, the Elf Rat Lands and the Plague Lands to the southwest. Winter’s onslaught had arrived, pushing forward, violating the skies, with towering storm fronts driving across Vagandrak in its entirety and depositing snow, and sleet, and bringing the bitterest cold winds the country had experienced in a century.

A raven, flapping high, flew west over the barren Rokroth Marshes. A light peppering of snow covered the reed beds, the narrow channels of water, and even more narrow pathways, which criss-crossed this treacherous part of the country. Deep in the icy waters, vicious tenta eels and sharp-toothed moranga pike lurked, waiting for an unwary step and plunge; and indeed, waiting for one another.

The raven coughed a cry, dipping its left wing and banking, dropping to lower, slightly warmer currents. To the north squatted the ancient and abandoned Skell Fortress, high black towers like spears, the battlements and their crennellations like so many broken teeth. Deserted, haunted; it was a place not often frequented. It was said men went mad beneath the shadows of its ancient walls.

The raven pumped wings, flowing onwards across Vagandrak. Far to the south a large unit of infantry was camped, fires burning, pennants loyal to King Yoon’s Vagan Division flapping wildly in a rush of tempestuous wind blasted from east and south. The raven continued, heading straight for Vagan. The city, with its huge fortified walls loomed on the horizon like a squat beast, a creature of stone and iron. The huge Eastern Gates were shut, black oak and thick iron bars centuries old and scarred from some long forgotten civil war. Usually the gates were open during daylight hours, allowing travellers, merchants, adventurers and soldiers access; it was an anomaly to see them closed, but the raven did not concern itself with such matters.

Its wing beats thudded on, fighting a headwind now, and as it approached the city walls it noted, without consideration, a change in the landscape below. The ground before the city fortifications was always kept clear, of scrub and trees, of market traders and debris. But a hundred feet out some trees did flourish, and now was the time of year for winter blossoms and the glow of evergreen. However, something was subtly changing in the trees. In the pines, in the red cedar and blue spruce, in the silver fir and various vast holly bushes that ranged away from Vagandrak’s outer walls; the colours of needles and leaves seemed to have subtly shifted. They had darkened, into deep rich greens, perhaps shot through with another colour, something like blood. And, again, a subtle transformation, the trees were leaning, or bending near their summits. As if sending out tendrils seeking sunlight and changing the direction of growth.

The raven gave a caw, ragged and bleak, foregrounding the utter, total silence that drifted up from the city of Vagan like inverted snowflakes. The glossy black bird spread its wings and soared over the fortified walls. There were no guards there. No pikemen, no archers, no infantry standing watch. The braziers were cold and silent and full of black, damp ashes. A chilled ice-wind snapped along the deserted battlements, like an angry little dog.

And over, swooping down into the city. Streets were silent. Cobbles gleamed with ice. Market stalls stood empty with tarpaulins cracking and snapping in the wind. Windows were dark and without light. Not a single chimney pumped out smoke. The War Capital of Vagandrak was a ghost town; an abandoned realm; a city of the dead.

The raven flapped towards the Palace of the Autumn Stars, Yoon’s own private and personal estate at the heart of Vagandrak. Over yet more perimeter walls, across marble walkways and past sculpted gardens, and on to a vast architectural indulgence of fanned, curved, pure white marble steps which were dominated by huge bronze doors.

The raven cawed again, and dropped, black eyes fixing on a figure seated on the steps. The creature, for he was not a man, looked up sharply at the approach and lifted his arm, twisted and deformed, to create a perch.

The King of the Elf Rats, Daranganoth, smiled a smile of thorns and, leaning towards the black eyes of the raven, which appeared glassy and dead, whispered, “Tell me what you’ve learned about the traitor.”

 

They called him
Pockets
, on account of his superbly light touch and the ability to lift purse, watch or coin from minister, clerk or whore without capture. He was twelve years old, with dark eyes and a cynical expression far beyond his years and earned, in the majority, from being abandoned by a honey-leaf addicted mother at the age of six and having to learn to feed himself, fight his corner against the larger, more vicious street urchins, and basically
survive
in a nasty, cruel world of poverty which showed no mercy to a kid down on his luck. And Pockets had been down on his luck right from the start.

The main reason for Pockets’ survival was his intelligence. He was bright beyond the ken of your average orphan or youthful street vagabond. He’d started with simple theft, usually from the markets where the mass of people made it easy to slip in and out, and, indeed,
beneath
the market stalls where there was always a plethora of fallen fruit and veg, the odd crust of a pie or half-eaten sausage roll. By the age of eight he had a room with another two orphans up by the tanneries where the slums provided plenty of condemned housing – apparently unsafe to occupy, but with a bit of love and care to the broken roof tiles, provided a reasonably comfortable, dry, rent-free accommodation which kept the snow and biting wind from skinny, underfed bones.

By the age of nine Pockets was running his own gang, their crimes escalating until they were staging robberies on carriages during the dead of night, and breaking into jewellers and watchmakers. He had contacts throughout the city of Zanne, and further afield, where he could fence marked stolen merchandise away from the eyes of the makers. He even had a couple of contacts in Rokroth, although had never visited himself. He preferred to stay in the city he loved and loathed, having an expert knowledge of every street and alley, walkway, slum, bridge and palace. From the Corpse Fields to the gloomy, frightening streets of the Haven where even the City Watch hardly dared tread, Pockets was a smiling, happy character with lots of friends and even more enemies, but who knew his place in the great scheme of things and was willing to get on with life after the shit card he’d been dealt by an uncaring God. A boy makes his own luck, Pockets thought nearly every morning when he first opened his eyes after yet another dreamless sleep – Pockets did not dream – and it was a philosophy that had seen him survive this far; survive
and
prosper.

However. Something had changed.

Pockets had begun, just like his mother before him, to experience the properties of the honey-leaf, that illegal, bitter and most joyous of leaves. Whether smoked, placed under the tongue and sucked, or increasingly formed into concentrated little cubes and swallowed, Pockets and some of his fellow gang members had been
experimenting.
The previous night, if indeed it
had
been the previous night, had been the heaviest session yet and it had allowed Pockets to – whilst not
dream
exactly – to at least experience some forms of colour and flashing wild imagery during that long, coma-like experience other people called sleep.

Now, as he lay on his low pallet bed with cold winter light peeping between cracks in the old wooden shutters, he tried to decide exactly
what
was different. And then it hit him worse than his pounding head, and the bitter dregs nestling in his mouth like so many unwanted tea leaves. Outside, the streets of the Haven were
silent.

Slowly, and with a groan, Pockets rolled over and fought with his blanket for a moment. He rubbed at weary, bloodshot eyes that had no place in the head of a boy of twelve, and searched the room for his companions in leaf experimentation, Jona, Ranz and Solimpsapa. Incredibly, considering the amount of leaf they’d ingested, all three beds were empty. Indeed, the blankets were pulled back as if they’d not even been slept in at all.

What happened last night? Did I come home alone?

Who was I with?

Where did I go?

The previous evening was a blur to Pockets, and he had simple, vague outlines of memories, of dancing through fresh snowfall, laughing into the scratching claws of the wind, an intention for mischief. But that was the last image in his mind. Kicking up flurries of snow.

Why was it so damn quiet outside?

There should have been shouts and bustle and laughter. Only twenty footsteps from his front door was Midwives Market, so called because, apparently in long-gone poorer times, back during the Bad Old Days, it was common for a so-called midwife to steal a newborn babe and sell it to the highest bidder, whether that be into slavery, to parents who could not sire their own, or to horrible characters who wanted them for personal pursuits. Now, the market was much more respectable – in as far as
anything
in the Haven could be considered respectable – and dealt in simple pies, vegetables, loaves of bread; and sometimes stolen merchandise and property.

There should have been noise. A
lot
of noise.

Pockets rolled from his bed and eased open the shutter a fraction. Outside, cold grey light made him squint against the honey-leaf dregs, and his dry-bark tongue roamed around his bitter mouth with a hint of regret. But then, it makes you dream again, so how can there be any regret? He peered down at the blackened, cracked cobbles. A smattering of icing snow clung to them, powdered and fresh. Pockets frowned. There were no footprints.
No
footprints?

He pulled on some tattered trousers and a thick jumper, shivering at the chill in the room. The reality was he could afford the grandest, richest livery from the finest tailors in the city of Zanne; his money hoard was now quite exceptional thanks to his
light fingered approach
. But to dress in the manner he could afford would be not only to destroy his anonymity, but ironically, to place him in the firing line of other vagabonds and pick-pockets in the city.

Still frowning, Pockets stepped down the rickety staircase and opened the door a crack. A cold breeze caressed him, along with the silence. Distantly, a dog barked. Then, fell suddenly to quiet. It did not bark again.

Pockets stepped out into the snow, and walked swiftly along Market Street, but before he reached Market Square, which was anything but a square, he ducked left down Cracked Skull Alley, narrow and winding, with the buildings to either side having shifted on weak foundations so they leaned together high above, where they’d been propped apart with hefty iron beams to halt any more progress. It made the alley dark, foreboding, and treacherous unless you knew the right people. Pockets knew
all
the right people.

He stopped, and listened to the silence again. He moved to the nearest house and, cupping his hands to the glass, tried to peer in through the grime and cracked panels. Inside, nothing looked out of the ordinary. But there were no people present.

Pockets trotted down Cracked Skull Alley, pausing at the junction between Quimspike and Groper’s Lane. It was still silent, still eerie and deserted – a spirit town. But here, now, there were marks in the newly fallen snow. Looking left and right, Pockets moved warily to the scuffled marks. Footprints approached down the centre of Quimspike, quite far apart and smudged. Somebody running? Then the marks turned suddenly into a series of sweeping crescents. Pockets searched around the centre of the marks, which seemed to suggest a struggle. There were no other prints. It was as if the person had simply… vanished. No tracks led away.