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SYPHER
ESTRID LENG
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Estrid Leng dreamt vaguely of home. Of warmth and of life, and a modicum of comfort, and the soft sound of the public fountain, down in the square beneath her window. When the waking world came spiraling back, it was instead buried in a knot of stone. The huge, winding stems of a dead and petrified briar patch stretched out for miles in every direction, a convolution of scrambling corpse-thorns dancing and twisting round their own past selves in helicite fistulas and porcupine slabs. A city of brambles turned to limestone by the uncaring hand of time.
Estrid was not home in Windlewist. She was three days deep in the grasp of the Cradle and she felt in to her bones. She stretched and twisted in her repose, and felt her scales scrape against the earth. No such comfort as a bedroll had been allowed. Her party traveled light to make room for the bounty they would bring back with them. Her legs were sore from the long hike and her back was stiff and aching from rubbing up against the nubs of chiselled thornspikes she’d sanded down last night to make a space for a bunk. Her long tail was numb where she’d laid on it funny and only a dappling of sunlight came through the granite canopy—chilling her blood to a sluggish pace in the cool morning breeze.
She drew deep a breath to replace the one she had slowly exhaled over the course of her sleep and got her feet under her. Their chosen camp wasn’t much, but it was about as good as you got for comfort and space in the Cradle and it’s where they’d found the motherlode--a tall and living ebon tree. It was their ticket out of here, and that made it paradise as far as Estrid was concerned. The tree stood in the center of the little clearing, a fat trunk of black wood shooting straight through the grasping stone canopy overhead. Its color was on account of the vast store of Fumagin roiling inside the bark. A fog of rot, eating it from the inside. The stuff was rare, and powerful, and the only place you could be sure to find it was deep in the Cradle. The Mirrorlords had decided they needed some, so here they were—Estrid, Lord Raziel’s aide; Abbot Pol, Sypherian, like her, and an excommunicate from the church of Obelus who’d sought sanctuary in Windlewist; A Shend called Melek who Estrid knew as a guard in the Lords’ Court; and wee Argot, one of the rare Kitvos fox-folk who still answered to the call of the Mirror-Lords. There had been two more when they set out from the City of Doors, but they were gone, now.
In the shadow of the tree sat a pile of sputtering embers—the precious last of their firewood—and her kinsman, the ex-priest, was stirring the ashes, morose. Argot was still sleeping nearby, curled atop his pack and snoring merrily. The furry little bastard was the only one who ever seemed to find any comfort in this callous labyrinth. Made sense. The Kitvos had come from here, back when the world was whole, and the Cradle was still a living briar patch. Melek was tending to the tanks, of course. He was filing his tusks to a razor keen and gnawing a hunk of stale bread and he looked tired. Estrid knew he didn’t sleep, but even Shend had to relax sometime. He’d kept a vigilant watch for the last two days—ever since they’d woken up and found Kratz and Odie disappeared in the night. He hadn’t said anything but
Estrid knew. He thought they’d been taken. That was just the way his brain worked. The Shend always expected a fight.
Estrid packed up her kit and walked over to him, picking off a dead scale and tossing it into the campfire cinders. Melek raised his chin to her and offered the crust of bread. She shook her head, looking up at him.
“You need it more than me.”
She’d eaten well before they’d gone into the Cradle. She’d live for a while yet, even if her gurgling stomach didn’t think so. The Sypher were a frail folk on the whole, but between the breathing and the eating (and the Misting, of course), they were good in survival situations. Estid had taken pride in her own self-sufficiency since the expedition had set out, and left the food to her two non-Sypherian companions. Pol did not share this polite consideration for Melek and Argot’s quicker metabolism and snatched at the bread greedily.
“Thanks,” he said through a mouthful.
Estrid ignored the piggish ex-priest and bent to watch the heavy smog of black-fog Fumagin trickle like dark water down from the wound they’d carved in the tree and into the pressurized reservoir of the tank. It was heavier than air and thicker than smoke, and it corroded everything it touched, eventually.
“This the last one?” she asked.
“One more,” Melek answered. “Wake the fox. We leave as soon as it’s full.”
Estrid was glad he was here so she didn’t have to be the taskmaster. She was technically in charge of the mission, after all, and this sort of work called for discipline. She was bad at discipline. That sort of thing was best left in Melek’s hands and she was happy to leave it there, so long as the job got done.
Estrid scratched Argot behind his twitching ear and he cracked an eye.
“Mornin’, Ess,” he said sleepily, and Estrid wondered idly if the Kitvos had evolved cuteness as a defense for their utter incorrigibility.
“Get up,” she told him softly. “Melek says we’ve got to hit the road in a couple hours.”
Argot swore on the Four, rubbing at his red eyes. It was the same way every morning. Most Kitvos keep a pretty slack schedule, and there’s no way he’d even be here if they didn’t need him. Argot was their guide, as much as such a thing could exist for the mindless maze of the Cradle. Kitvos had a knack for navigating these sorts of places, though, and Argot had spent some time exploring the font of his forebears. He was the first to admit he couldn’t map this place. No one could. It was all about instincts. Without him, they’d never have found their way to the Fumagin well, and without him they’d never find their way back.
By the time Argot was up and fed, they were breaking camp and capping the last of the Fumagin tanks. Five. That was quite a burden. The stormcloud fog was almost as heavy as water. The two missing party members had been meant to help, but they were well past that duty now, one way or another. Melek was going to have to carry three. That meant he had no free hands to wield the hulking arquebus he’d been lugging through the stone jungle. Estrid watched his gaze drift slowly from the willowy Kitvos to the craven ex-priest to her. He shoved the hefty bolt-thrower into her arms. Between the weapon and the tank strapped to her back, she was barely upright under the weight.
“It’s loaded with Anima,” he told her. “Enough to burn a Raishe down, it comes to it, so be careful.”
“Air and Earth!” she swore. She could feel the fiery element warming the gunmetal from the inside. “Where’d you even get this thing?”
“Off a Djet.”
“What’d you give him for it?”
“Nothing. He was dead.”
Melek kicked the ashes of the fire pit and the smouldering embers died. They took one last look at the great black pillar of a tree where it stood, dripping puffs of Fumagin from the wide hole they’d cut into it, and left.
* * *
Three hard-hiked hours later, they stopped. Melek sat his two extra tanks down and leant heavily against one of them. Argot was perched on a thick twist of vine, sniffing the air and craning his neck to catch a look at the sun between the hundred-odd stone fingers woven above them when he caught a sudden scent on the thin wind and cursed, spitting into the dust.
“What?” Estrid asked.
“We’re being followed.”
“How long?” Melek asked between pants of shaky breath.
“My guess?” Argot sniffed the wind again. “Before the Widderlings disappeared.”
“Knew it,” Melek grunted.
“You should’ve said something, you idiot!” Pol hissed. “We’ve been--I’ve been--”
Argot held up a short, sharp finger and the slack faced ex-priest lapsed into silence.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Not until this morning. Wasn’t sure until five minutes ago. Now I’m double-sure and telling you. So get off my back.”
Pol flared into a tumble-word garble of disbelief. Estrid suspected it was ‘double-sure’ that had got to him. Inquisitors were funny about that sort of thing.
“Why aren’t we all dead?” Melek asked.
Argot shook his head. The Abbot was caught up in his own stuttering nonsense. Only Estrid considered the problem with a cold mind. An alchemist’s mind. The gun was hot and awkward in her grip. She’d never been more aware of it. Then, it dawned on her.
“The fire,” she said. Everyone looked at her. “Widderlings hate fire. Odie and Kratz never slept with us. Always at the edge of camp. It’s the only thing I can think of.”
Melek nodded. “The fire.”
“But,” Pol stammered. “But.”
“But we’re out of wood,” Argot finished for him.
“We don’t sleep, then.” Melek turned to Argot. “How fast can we get out of here?”
Argot clucked his tongue. “At your pace?” He nodded to the two extra tanks Melek was hauling. “Two days. At best.”
“Then we aren’t looking for a way out. We need a place to make a stand.”
“What are you talking about?” Pol rasped, already stripping his tank off. “We’ve got to ditch these damned things and get the hell out of here!”
Melek put a wide hand to Pol’s shoulder, and the Abbot froze half-stripped of his burden.
“The City of Doors got no use for an ex-priest can't even keep his word. We said we’d get the Fumagin. You said you’d help. That’s that. If you like your chances alone, go for it. You can try and make it as an outlaw or crawl back to your masters in Obelus. See what I care. But if you want to stick with us, you’re gonna do your job.”
“But—”
Melek discarded the slouch that he used to put people at ease. He had an easy foot on Pol and was twice as wide at the shoulders.
“No buts. Fall in or beat it.”
“There’s a clearing nearby with a wall we can put our backs to,” Argot offered, “and some cover to get behind.”
“How far?” Estrid asked.
“Two hours. We passed it on the way in.”
Melek took up his tanks and made sure Estrid had the arquebus at the ready, then he nodded to Argot and started the march. After a long and quiet moment of solitude in the serpentine malpais, Pol fell in behind. Everyone knew he would.
* * *
Five minutes from the clearing, Estrid heard a strangled yelp and turned. Pol was gone. There was only a smear of bright, fresh blood dappling the fossil leaves to mark where he’d been. The arquebus hummed in her grip, but there was nothing left to shoot.
A sound like thunder or rolling boulders rose up to her right and she whipped the muzzle around to cover the stretch of shadowy thicket. Something ancient caught in her throat as she stared into the darkness and saw a gold-flecked and loveless eye rise to meet her gaze. Blood on the black. A rumble.
Melek grabbed her by the shirt collar and threw her forward, screaming, “Run!”
She ran. Argot had dumped his pack and was scrambling on all fours. She followed over tripvines and natural stairs and around fallen, calcified tree trunks and under garrotes of criss-crossing creeper-stalks, bursting out into the clearing with Argot ahead and Melek thundering behind her and behind him there was a sound like an avalanche screaming through the thick, dead undergrowth. There was the wall—a massive fossil-fern frond towering over them like a frozen wave.. It curled in on itself where it met the ground and game up again in a waist-high ridge like a shooting gallery. The perfect place to hide, if only they’d got here a little sooner.
Estrid heard Melek fall. A lumberjack crunch.
Turning, she brought his gun up to bear on a mass of onyx flesh. A beast, as dark as the space between the stars. It was bigger than all of them, dwarfing even the prone Shend it now loomed over, but she could see the distant brotherhood to small and wiry Argot. The ears, the muzzle were vulpine. The eyes held that same volatile brilliance.
It bulked with predatory muscle, ten feet long at least with a face full of cruel, barbed fangs. Born to snap bone. To strip flesh. Her finger froze, shaking on the trigger as the hulking thing let loose the coil of its musculature and pounced. A shadow fell over Melek, and she fired.
A sun was born in the midnight beast’s yawning jaws.
It screamed like shearing metal and was thrown back through the treeline, snapping the rocky formations like chalk. Melek was up and running at her and carried her with him over his shoulder ‘til the frond-wall was at her back, and she was sinking, sobbing to the ground. Only then did she notice she was still pulling the trigger, that she’d been pulling all the while and that the gun was empty. Melek took it from her.
“It’s okay,” he told her, tossing the useless weapon aside.
“It’s not.”
“No,” he admitted, and drew a jagged crystal knife from his belt. Geas-made. A blade with a history.
He went out into the clearing, body compact with the same ready energy as she’d seen before the beast pounced. Argot was cowering near Estrid, eyes peeked over the ridge. His breath came in ragged ebbs and flows.
“What is it?” she asked him.
He was shaking his head, but not at her question.
“The ones that got out,” he whispered, “we were the smart ones. The small ones. We had to get out.”
“Because of the big ones.”
Argot only swallowed in answer.
Melek never saw it coming. He heard it, and he turned to meet it, and he drove his knife deep into the neck where it would stop the brain of a lesser beast, but this was not a lesser beast. Afat paw swept the big Shend over and pressed his chest down until the earth compressed beneath him, until the bone sof his best crackled and his pleading eyes ran red with burst vessels, until there was a last sickening crunch and Estrid sunk behind the cover of the curling frond, hand clamped over mouth and eyes. Argot’s last words trickled back to her like the whisper of water over river-stones.
“I’m sorry, Ess,” was all he said, and then left her—up and over the wall.
She was alone. She would die alone. There was a slush of abattoir wetness behind her, a snap, and she knew that Melek was no longer Melek even in form. That she would not recognize her friend. Then came the step. Like a distant cannonade.
Another.
Another.
She could hear its cave-wind breath seeping out across the glade. Out. Then in. It smelled her. She was certain. It smelled her and it was coming to eat her.
But then the breathing stopped, aborted on the intake. Silence hung louder than any scream.
There was again the sound of thunder, and this time it was so clear that her hollow stomach told her for certain that the sound was laughter. Laughter, hissing like sea and sand and then it stopped and there was nothing left to hear but the drip, drip, drip of Melek leaking out.
There was no telling how long it took for Estrid to peek out over the ridge. Long enough to prefer death to the waiting. The midnight beast was gone. It had gone a long time ago, and some part of her had gone with it. She came out from her hole and over to the puddle where Melek had been. She found that she couldn’t feel anything. Her fear had broken that. She wondered if she would ever feel again, and hoped that the answer was no.
The rain started slowly, with pits and pats against the earth, the trees, her scales, then grew into a hundred-thousand drum corps beating out a death march on stone leaves, stone vines, stone blades of stone grass. Estrid watched with stone eyes and stone heart as it washed away what little was left of Melek, mixing with the mud and the bonemeal.
The storm was loud, but the scream was louder. Estrid knew at once that it was Argot. That the midnight beast had left her behind only to find him—a delicacy almost forgotten in the dim recesses of its genetic memory.
Now it was coming.
She left everything behind. None of it would do her any good, anyway.
* * *
The rain mocked Estrid. The Cradle teased her. The midnight beast, the ashmud of the soaked firepit, the empty promise of home—all sneering with the inscrutable humor of fate. More than any of that, though, the tall, black trunk of the Fumagin tree spat contempt with a slack mouth that she herself had carved in its bark. They had opened it up and bled it dry and it had gagged out a hell-cat to kill them one by one. Now here it was before her, stock-still with a glee it held close to its chest. Without Argot, she hadn’t stood a chance and running blind came right back to the place where her bad luck began. She found that all she could do was stare into the leaking Fumagin gap as the hot rain soaked over her scales.
There was a light snap behind her. That was all.
“Can you understand me?” she asked. “Can you speak?”
Its only answer, the gravelslide laughter. “Hhh-hh-hhhh.” She turned to find the midnight beast pacing round the camp. It grinned lop-sided and slack, jaw broken by Estrid’s shot. It would starve of that wound in such an unforgiving place, but not before it killed her.
“Is there nothing that you want? Nothing I can give you?”
Estrid thought she saw the smile grow. Just by a hair. Then, it leapt.
Estrid’s options narrowed to one. She emptied her mind and Misted herself. It began, as always, in her fingers and her toes. A tingling numbness, like when she’d woken up this morning. Nothingness ran up her limbs like flashpaper and for just the barest moment, she was nothing. A ghost.
That was all it took.
The midnight beast tumbled through her and twisted midair in its confusion. It did not know this trick. Estrid came back into being a half-pound lighter and head spinning in starvation. She felt her ribs pushing up against her skin and her stomach screamed. Nothing came without a cost. She had learned that long before her days in the Mirror-Lords’ alchemical laboratory.
There was no time to starve, though. Her vision blurred, but she took an uneasy step toward the black tree. Only one way out. A deep breath, then another much faster than needed to stretch her lungs full of fresh air. She didn’t know how long before she’d get more. You couldn’t breathe Fumagin.
She heard the beast snarl and scramble to its feet but it was too late now. She dove and felt the inside of the bark against her scales as she slid down the great fat artery of the dead and hollow tree they had mined. A killing arm chased her through the hole , but it was behind her now,
everything was
behind her—
scraping,
yowling,
caught in
the snare,
and even
the shadows
were
melting.
Paint on a burning canvas.
* * *
The bottom of the tree was deep and dark. A secret place at the heart of the cradle, where a thousand midnight veins converged―but in that darkness there was a light, and Estrid found it cradled in the thickest wisps of choking Fumagin. A pinprick star caught in a crystal. She reached out and it spoke to her in the language of her blood and of her teeth; of her scales and of her bones. She knew then the cheapness of words, and it told her what it was. First thing.
Primaridix.
Here, the secret of her peoples’ heart, wrapped in a Fumagin cloak. How long had it hid here, waiting? How many more? Was this the only one? It could tell her if she asked it. What did she desire more than anything else? Knowledge? Power? Safety?
There were many answers that came to mind. Home, first of all. The calls of distant birds and children soft at play. The warmth of well-known sheets and the trickle-tap of the fountain outside. Then came thoughts of Viridium. Healing the Triskelion. Rewinding time. Could it do such a thing? If anything could, it was surely the Ur-Element. But these were wishes of the mind—yes, even those dreams of home, for if she was honest no place would ever feel safe to her again. Her heart held only one desire, and hearts were what the Primaridix talked to.
She closed her eyes and felt the loss. The impish laughter of Kratz and Odie, Argot’s scream, the firmness of Melek’s grip as he dragged her to safety, and even the last dripping evidence of the coward Pol. All comrades. All gone.
Estrid cracked her lips, licked her teeth as she felt the promise of the Ur-Element’s power held in the words she had not yet spoken.
“Burn it,” she told the darkness, and the darkness heard her. “Burn that thing alive.”
Estrid felt the star melt into her hand. A promise made. Far above, echoes twisted by the long hollow of the ebon tree’s heartwood, the screams of the midnight beast sounded loud and long, and it knew at the end the same fear that had gripped the souls of its many, many victims.
A promise kept.
