When she didn’t say anything, Father Wasten held up a small fabric bag in his gloved hand, and placed it in her palm. Her small portion of the akaris, to give her a dreamless sleep. Not taken from what she had just made – it would be too hot, and would need raking and sifting – but an older supply. She pinched it between her fingers, feeling the grainy powder through her gloves. Under Wasten’s careful watch, she pulled the drawstring open with a gloved finger and tipped the contents into her mouth. There was the familiar suffocating tickle as the drug coated her mouth, and then, on contact with her saliva, it turned slippery, oily almost. It tasted of nothing, and she swallowed it with a grimace before handing the bag back to Wasten. Many of the women chose not to consume akaris. She supposed that for them, their dreams were an escape from the Winnowry, bringing them sweet memories of their old lives. Not so for Noon.
‘You know, Fell-Noon, why you are here, don’t you?’
Noon looked up at him. His eyes were brown and watery, and could not disguise his disgust for her.
‘Because I am too dangerous to be outside.’
He nodded. ‘Evil works through you, girl. All of your kind are tainted, but here you have a purpose at least. You should be grateful. How many more could you have killed, if you were still free?’
Noon looked at him flatly until he turned back to the door, and they began the slow process of returning her to her cell.
4
In order to properly understand the Jure’lia and their queen, we have to know something of their opposite number. In recent times, the Eborans have been almost as hated and reviled as the invaders; their only saving grace perhaps the fact that they have, for thousands and thousands of years, held back attack after attack from the worm people.
What should we know of Ebora? For generations they were sustained in their glory by their god Ygseril, known more prosaically to outsiders as ‘the tree-god’. The sap of their great tree, ingested orally, made them almost immortal – young forever, inhumanly strong, impervious to most wounds and diseases, and perhaps, to human eyes, beautiful.
And then at the end of the Eighth Rain, the last great war with the invaders, Ygseril suddenly died. There was no more sap. The Eborans began to grow old, they began to grow weak. They became ill, just as humans do, and succumbed to injuries and infections. Eborans do not have children at the drop of a hat like humans do, and without the sap, newly born children grew rarer and rarer. It was a disaster. Their great cities beyond the Wall began to fall into disrepair, and the Eboran people into despair.
In time it was discovered that human blood could be used as a substitute (please see journal 73 on Lady Carmillion for the possibly apocryphal details of that incident). Blood was not nearly as powerful as the god-sap had been, of course, but it did slow their aging, and it gave them back their strength, their vitality, acting almost as a stimulant in small doses. Over a period of time, in sufficient quantities, it could even heal grievous injuries, to some extent.
Unsurprisingly, relations between Ebora and their human neighbours deteriorated rapidly.
So began the years of the Carrion Wars. Ebora sporadically invaded the surrounding territories – the nomadic plains peoples taking the brunt of the attacks – stealing away human captives to be donors and, eventually, simply killing and ‘harvesting’ their human victims there on the battlefield. Out of desperation? Fear? Perhaps. Without their war-beasts born from Ygseril the Eborans were not as fearsome as they had been, but they were still stronger than the average human warrior, and could heal faster. It was carnage, and who knows where it would have ended? Except that human blood turned out not to be their saviour, but their curse.
The first recorded case of the crimson flux befell Lady Quinosta. Known for her prodigious consumption of human blood – bottle after bottle decanted at every meal, she would also bathe in the stuff – she awoke one day to find herself in terrible pain, her body stiff and unresponsive. Her white skin grew hard and cracked, revealing livid red flesh beneath. She developed a terrible cough, and her silk handkerchiefs were soon soaked with the strange fluid that passes for Eboran blood. She took to her bed, and spent six months dying in agony. Human blood did nothing to arrest the progress of the illness – it made it worse. And she was just the first.
Ebora was decimated. Those few who have so far survived the disease now keep to the land beyond the Tarah-hut Mountains, and many, it is said, still drink human blood in small, regular doses. Enough to keep old age and weakness at bay, but not enough to summon the crimson flux. They hope.
Extract from the journals of Lady Vincenza ‘Vintage’ de Grazon
There was half an inch of wine left in the bottom of the bottle. Untangling his arm from the sheets, Tormalin reached across and snatched it up. There were no glasses within reach of the bed, but he was no savage, so he poured it into one of Sareena’s empty incense bowls instead. He took a sip and then spotted the tray of cheese and fruits she had left on the small table on the other side, so he rolled in that direction, narrowly avoiding tossing the wine over the sheets and falling out of the bed.
‘What are you doing?’
Sareena had returned, a bottle of sweetly perfumed oil in her arms. She wore the purple silks he’d bought for her on a previous visit, and they shifted and swirled around her body as he’d known they would. He grinned at her.
‘I am hungry, my sweet.’
She raised an eyebrow at him and came to sit on the bed, in the warm space left by the curve of his body. Tor drank the last of the wine and set the bowl on the table, before chasing a ball of cheese around the plate with his fingers. It kept getting away from him.
‘I’m not surprised you are hungry,’ said Sareena. She laid the bottle, still stoppered, on the bed, and smoothed some strands of hair away from his face. ‘But does it always have to be cheese?’ She wrinkled her nose, which Tor found delightful. ‘And always the most pungent ones.’
Tor kicked his legs out and lay with one arm under his head, contemplating the cheese. ‘There are few things as fine, Sareena, as a good piece of cheese and a decent glass of wine.’
‘Except you are not even drinking it out of a glass.’ She drew herself up, preparing to tease him. ‘I am sure that the House of the Long Night does not whiff of strange cheeses, or keep ridiculous drinking vessels.’
Tor sat up and put the cheese to one side. He could feel the wine warming his blood and everything in the room was pleasantly hazy, but he attempted to focus. ‘You are quite right, of course.’ He took hold of both her hands, running the pads of his thumbs over the sensitive skin of her wrists. The Early Path: Spring’s First Touch. ‘It is a place of great seriousness, and we have a contract, you and I. Forgive me, Sareena, for neglecting you.’
Her cheeks turned a little pink, and she even turned her smile away from him. He loved the fact that she was still bashful, could still blush at his words, even after all these months.
‘If you knew how jealous my sisters are,’ she said, ‘you would know no forgiveness is needed.’ Her smile was now wicked. ‘Our arrangement is very satisfactory to me, Tormalin the Oathless.’
He kept his eyes on hers, and gently ran his fingers along the underside of her forearms. He felt rather than saw her shiver. The Early Path: The Rising Leaf.
‘Do you want the oil?’ she asked. Her eyes – a deep dark brown, just like her hair – were very wide, and as he smiled she bit the edge of her lip.