The Grand Gate of Gelmorre stood tall as a cathedral and atop it stood hundreds of bodies sheathed in iron and in their hands rested hard-bore longarm terramachs that turned metal hot and angry and ready to charge for blood and behind them reared the impossible height of the Tower of Gelm the seat of Her Worshipped the lighthouse of all Gelmorre the tip of the spearpoint thrust into the heavens and some scant distance below its very peak Jessle sat in a library scholars would die to see at an ancient desk at a new map and swore and rubbed at her hands and her ears, the former cold from the drafts and the latter numb from the just-noon ringing. The Morebel was a beauty and a wonder all across the capital, save when you were within three floors of it. Weeks (that felt like years) spent up in this hand-built mountain and she had no idea how Her Worshipped had endured it all those centuries.
Well, maybe Her Worshipped was used to it. Maybe Her Worshipped had official hours of state and a consistent sleep cycle. Maybe Her Worshipped wasn’t spending every waking hour constantly wracking her brains for every last crumb of memory that she’d spent half her life pushing into as deep and dark a fold of her brain she could fit it into.
Maybe Her Worshipped wasn’t old and frightened. Jessle had gotten used to the first – shortness of breath, aching joints, failing eyes… not gracefully, but she’d gotten used to it.
She still wasn’t used to the latter. And she doubted she’d change that by now.
Her door opened. No creak, nothing moving but the air. All was oiled and cared for in these halls, kept smooth and secure. “Courier Jessle,” said a diplomatically-tuned and perfectly neutral voice.
“Not my title,” said Jessle. She also still wasn’t used to that. But a Courier must bring the will of Her Worshipped and fulfill it, and you need a strong stride and a stout heart for that. Jessle’s right hip complained at a brisk stroll, and her heart… well, it had beaten out her aunt’s, but her auntie’s had taken a whole lot of liquor to check out early. She could see grandmother’s deathbed now and again in the early morning after her bladder nagged her awake: pale, sweating, gasping. Eyes still wide awake. Sometimes she found herself checking the sheets, certain she’d see the old grandfather-sewn quilting – even here in the Tower of Gelm, where the mattresses were heaped high with elbow-deep gyrwolf pelts.
“Courier Jessle,” repeated the man, inflection absent. He was a Courier himself, not that she knew his name. Even if she wasn’t twice his age, theirs wasn’t (hadn’t been) a profession that demanded collaboration. Your words were Her Worshipped and she did not repeat herself. “You are summoned to the Court.”
His enunciation was impeccable; she actually heard the proper noun slide into place, capitalization-first. She was so impressed she didn’t second-guess, didn’t boggle, didn’t ask why, just got up from her desk – got up from the third edition of hesitant supposition on Wyrms; the first edition of stridently-voiced facts on Wyrms; the atlas of what little still remained known of the fringes of Afar; the fresh-drawn map; the page of her report she’d been writing and rewriting – and left it behind.
She glanced back once, at the door. The library’s window was not large – too cold at this height – but its view drew the eye. The descending ramparts of the Tower that was all of Gelmorre’s strength, and then the city, and then the gate. And beyond it, and beyond it, and all around it, a surrounding sea of mist that swallowed the land and turned mountains to islands.
The Silence of the Stone had come at last.
***
Jessle had walked the world for Her Worshipped. She’d weathered trackless seas and barren dunes; trafficked with anyone for anything; sat down at grand banquets and half-broken wooden benches with grand allies and worst enemies; cleared the way with her father’s common sense and her grandmother’s old siege-gauntlet and the song her auntie had sung for her; gambled and held fast; won and lost.
Now she gasped for air at every step on the damned staircase, and when she forced herself past the threshold, tremble-limbed as a colt, the breathlessness was already inside her and she had nowhere left to turn as she bore witness to the thousand-year High Court of Her Worshipped of Gelmorre.
Jessle’s cataracts had grown worse, or she would have feared she’d turn blind. As it was she saw only the glow and the glory, the weight of stone and the impression of glass, the shape of a waterfall. How the Morebel’s daily call hadn’t shattered it whole was something she couldn’t understand.
But Jessle wasn’t thinking of what she could understand, because at the peak of the hall was perched a chair and on that chair in the heart of the light sat a figure and that figure was Her Worshipped, so instead of thinking she bowed low and full and the fire that ran up and down her spine turned sweeter than the honeyed shooms she’d received as a retirement gift. It pooled in her skull the same way; turned her into something yearning to be more than her flesh, strained skywards like a brokewing bird.
“You will rise,” said the Courier from precisely beside her.
They rose. Jessle didn’t look up. Even beyond what protocol she could barely remember from training more than half a century gone, her head was swimming.
“Report, Courier Jessle,” he said. “On the adversary.”
Her breath was returned to her. The haze was lifting. She hadn’t spent a minute awake since she arrived inside the Tower without being completely aware that she was the single person most responsible for the situation she had been called to consult upon.
That didn’t matter. A Courier carried and fulfilled the will of Her Worshipped. And she was one for now, regardless of what she thought.
So Courier Jessle opened her mouth, and she said “I have nothing useful or new to tell you.”
She waited. The leftover ringing in her ears from the Morebel slowly crept back into her awareness. No response was forthcoming, so she provided her own. “I met and imprisoned one Wyrm almost half a century ago. Twenty years later when it demanded my presence, you sent me. And that is all I have. I know this. You know this. There is at least one actual work on the creatures now – proper college-writ, not Pearlbodie’s collection of drunkard stories and campfire tall tales – and no shortage of voyageurs or even troopers that have been called back from Afar who can match or best my experience. Fresher in their memories, too.”
The silence was expected this time, so she used it. Took a measured breath, firmed her stance. Hands behind back at rest, like it was easy and didn’t almost dislocate her elbows, projecting confidence and calmness without artifice. That used to be a habit of hers. She’d had so many useful habits, taken such care in cultivating them. When had they all fallen away? “Your Worshipped,” she said. “I can tell you nothing you do not already know. In this, as with all else relating to this creature, I believe I have failed you. I failed in bringing it to the Stone. I failed in not cautioning the warden there against its influence. I failed to defect or influence its intentions in negotiation. I know this. You know this. What I do not know is why you have brought me here, when there is nothing I can tell you?”
“The Silence has come for Galmorre,” said Her Worshipped. “But not for me.”
Her voice was steady and sure and if it was thin it was the blade of a knife. Everything else ceased to exist. Even the ringing seemed to dim.
“It comes for her.” A slight motion and the light flared from the high seat, Jessle’s shadow pinned and left to cower underneath her as she stood in the beacon of Her attention. “Does she know why?”
“A meal, perhaps,” said the Courier, as if Jessle weren’t paralyzed at his side and unable to speak of her own accord. “One long-delayed. Not one of flesh, but of steeped terror? She defeated it, then it let her walk away. They are creatures of cruelty; to call in a debt so long-buried it might be assumed forgotten-”
“Cruel but with a predator’s instincts. They do not pause when they see a turned back.” Another flicker of movement and the light left Jessle, cascaded across the ceiling like ripples in a pond, like comets in the sky. “No. It wants her alive. And so we have our strategy. Courier Hilmont, take her to the glass-sky.”
She wasn’t sure which shocked her more: the orders, or that Courier Hilmont did not bow, merely nodded and took her arm and opened his mouth and said: “Courier Nesk will take the throne two days from now in my place.”
The voice was old, and soft, and worn. It sounded like a well-used slipper.
The figure in the high seat shot to her feat. Light spattered around the High Court, a kaleidoscope of sunbeams scattering to the dark corners like scurrying insects.
“You will summon her there afterwards,” said the voice, with the patience that came from exhaustion. Hilmont’s hand was shaking on Jessle’s arm, hard enough she could almost see the bruises in her mind. “Courier Hilmont will bring her. Take her to the glass-sky, and each of you will hold the deadswitch that will cast it into the aether. Bargain with the beast. Remain firm. I will return by sea when you have succeeded. The Silence may come for Galmorre, but not for me.”
Hilmont wrenched his hands lose from Jessle’s arm and forced them into his mouth, clutched at his tongue. “But not for me,” it slurred, teeth moving without heed of his fingers. “By sea. For me. By sea.” Blood spurted and fell on bright stones. “It came for me by sea by sea for me.”
His fingers left his mouth and sank into Jessle’s coat, feeble-gripped. Red ran riot over her collar. “It comes for her,” it said in the worn old voice.
Then it screamed without dignity or restraint.
It was strange, Jessle thought, that such a loud noise should sound so quiet. And then: I cannot hear the ringing of the Morebel. And then: it should have rung one o’clock by now. And then: oh.
Courier Hilmont’s pupils were shrunken pinpricks, his body a rictus, all his energy and oxygen sunk into a now-muted wail so endless that he fell at Jessle’s desperate shove, the worst application of force she’d ever attempted in her entire life. She turned to run down the stars and stumbled in the dark. The light was gone. The sky was clouded. Jessle felt cold pain in her hand, her cheek, her neck. A rain of invisible razors was pelting down from above; Courier Nesk was taking cover behind her loaned throne.
Jessle tore loose the culprit from the web between hand and thumb, swore (inaudibly) as it cut her fingers. She glanced aloft.
Broken glass.
And sinking down amongst it descended the Warden of the Stone.
***
When they had met, its skull had been larger than a warhorse.
When they had met again, its face was as large as a house.
Now…
…now Jessle’s eyes were poor. Now she stood in the ruins of a room she’d never imagined the like of. But she’d kept a keen eye for distance once, and she felt comfort in being sure that it had grown.
The Tower of Gelm swayed under her, clenched by a creature that was nothing more than a moving grasp.
Yes, its body had grown greatly. But the Wyrm itself had grown beyond all recognition.
How had she not seen the mist, even through her cataracts? How had she not heard the muting of the bells? How had she not smelt the moss that grew amidst its scales?
Well, it was there now, all of it. Beaked chin cradled in the crushed ruin of the High Court’s seat, it beheld her with its endless unblinking gaze. Each swollen pupil could’ve drown her whole long-dead family, arms, armour and all.
“Courier Jessle,” said Courier Hilmont’s voice.
She didn’t look at him. He was on the floor and bleeding beyond her ability or inclination to fix and it wasn’t him speaking.
“You will rise,” it said. “You are summoned.”
“Fuck you,” she told it.
“It comes for her,” it said in Courier Nesk’s thin voice. “Does she know why?” The slow, frail words again. “Bargain with the beast.”
Jessle’s neck felt wet through the thick cloth of her collar. She didn’t trust either of her hands. Her grandmother’s siege-gauntlet was six miles away in a chest under her bed at home. She had forgotten half the song her aunt had given her.
She spat on the floor, made a very old gesture with both hands, and looked into the Wyrm’s eyes. For the fourth time.
They looked back and more.
***
Someone moved and it wasn’t her. Just a little. It sat, careful of her legs – wobbling, useless things – and looked up at her looking down at her looking up at her looking down at her looking and
seeing.
The mist around her was clear as noon sun – clearer; where it fell, she could feel. A billion billion fingers made of droplets. The flexion of her spine shook stone; set the Morebel trembling mutely in its lair. Around her neck rode a searing collar: sixty iron bars that had once penned her in her cell, now perpetual vaccinations against the alien metal that had once daunted her.
Around her body moved her Silence.
Her core was sixty leagues across; her broader borders stretched from sea to sea. She felt the fearful scurries of what remained at the fringes of vanished Matagan. She knew every panicked scurry within the city below. She saw their little minds crackle and pop with the malleable spark of little life, easy to grip and turn and spin and dance and bend around the anvil of her thoughts.
She was waiting and she was watching and she’d never been so terrified in her life, her heart racing up to more than a beat per minute.
What would she do?
What would she do?
She’d been hungry and curious and made a meal the likes she’d never seen, clever flittering sparks that shone brightly in the mires of the coast, that couldn’t hide and didn’t realize they should. She’d seen how easy they were to turn inside out and backwards, to walk and talk and die. And then she’d come, the fourth one, and she had been just like the others.
Oh she had been just like the others until she wasn’t.
She’d been beaten and broken and scarred with iron, caught and cast down, turned from captor to captive. She’d been thrown in a pit, and from that pit had spun salvation. A thousand little sparks all within reach. She’d braved the bars and reached through the agony, glutted and grown and called out and MADE her return, and she’d shown her all that she was and all that she’d done, and then.
Nothing.
She’d waited.
Nothing.
She’d dreaded.
Nothing.
She’d squirmed.
Nothing at all.
So she’d grown again, and again. And reached. And reached. Everywhere she could, everywhere she wasn’t, until there was only one place left.
The Stone had cracked around her, its cragstone gates ground to gravel by the force of her passage. She had hatched for the second time, and knew again the fear of the vulnerable and small.
She had brought herself out of her home. She had travelled the long open ways through the roaring and murmuring lands. She had placed herself into her beak.
What would she do?
What would she do?
What would she do, eye to eye, looking down at her looking up at her looking down at her looking up at her looking down at her looking looking down at her looking up at her looking down at her looking looking down at her looking up at her looking down at her looking looking down at her looking up at her looking down at her looking at her with
understanding.
***
Jessle coughed and had to start it over three times from the start before it happened. Something thick was trying to clot in her throat.
“Poor beast,” she rasped, or tried to. Gurgled, more. “Did I give you more than a bruise all those years back, with that tap on the head?” She laughed and oh, she shouldn’t do that, it almost killed her good mood right there. Things were loose where they shouldn’t be. But how couldn’t she laugh? “The two of us aren’t like each other. My kind work together.”
A Courier was not a profession that demanded collaboration.
“We learned and grew by teaching one another. Not by forcing others.”
The will of Her Worshipped is to be heard, and it is to be fulfilled.
“And we trade rings for engagement. Not…torments.”
She hadn’t.
“Is that you answering me?”
“I have nothing useful or new to tell you,” sighed the last air from the lungs of Courier Hilmont.
Jessle stood up. It took her a minute. The Wyrm watched and waited. She almost laughed again, which would’ve been disastrous.
Then she walked. Up the steps, over the rubble, to the ruins of the throne that had once seated Her Worshipped, to the beak that had killed Her Worshipped.
She stopped to breathe and think. One was hard, the other was easy.
“One thing,” she said.
It waited.
“It’s important. Auntie gave it to me. Do you remember?” She really did laugh this time – as much as she could, the wet retch caught it to the quick. “We were both busy. Don’t remember it all now. But. Listen?”
Jessle stared up at it. It stared down at her. Less than five minutes (six? She’d used to know so easily) and she’d already forgotten half the senses it had, half the ways it had to know her. Bleeding, staggering, all she could do was ask.
“Listen?”
The stare caught at the edges.
With the song in the back of her head, she looked up at her looking down looking up at her looking down at her and
raised the glass shard in her palm to the soaked cloth of her collar and cut once. Hard.
***
The Silence broke.
***
Years later in the deepest of the hushed lands, where the mist still ran through the air thicker than blood through veins, there rested a sundered and derelict gate and behind it was spread a field of toppled stone and at the trailing end of the devastation sat a deep pit smashed by a ringing hollow fist of metal and some scant distance within its depths amidst the adamant splinters of a skull that could shatter a fortress and the mouldering rust of sixty iron bars lay six irregular spheroids the size of a crouched human that shook and quivered from no force outside themselves.
They waited there, in the dark and calm. They weren’t afraid. They weren’t alone.
In their heads, amidst the silence, a song was singing.