Iseult

I wake up and immediately try to ball my fists, wincing at the pain. The grating is in my wrists and fingers again, cracking softly, like a delicate threat of broken glass. I relax, and elect instead to stare down into the still, stained dirt that used to be a meadow of the Bloom glass. A loose handful of light sand skitters across the blighted ground, blown in the morning breeze. I can smell a river, somewhere.

My hands are still shaking. And now, I notice, I’d spent the night with part of my leg out of my blanket, to combat the oppressive night-time heat of the Bloom. Now my leg is riddled, knee to ankle, with furious red insect bites.

If I die of malaria or creep-fever due to Tumble’s idiot contact demanding some idiot honey then I will ensure my spectre will haunt Colt & Tumble until the end of days. All of this, just to indulge a man’s manic desire to kill a flying mountain.

Sean jerks, startled, when I place my hand gently on his arm. He’s wrapped himself in his travelling tartan, and unlike me is entirely bite-free. His wild eyes catch mine, then soften.

“Pathfinder Dahi? Íde?” Good questions. I’ve informed Sean several times that our Pathfinder’s name is actually Tdhahi, though in Sean fashion he has decided to confidently and repeatedly mispronounce it.

My neck is twinging. I try popping it, and find that pulling or cracking my spine does nothing to alleviate the tightness. I sigh. “I think I’m getting past the age where I should be doing this.”

Sean gives me a lopsided glance. “Don’t regret aging, Iseult. Too many are denied the privilege.”

I raise an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Good morning to you too. Have you evolved from beating people up for a living to quoting philosophy at them?”

He grins. “Theology. I want to say that’s Saint… Bombast. But I can’t remember. Good quote, though.”

I look down. Íde is huddled, covered in Tdhahi’s cloak. She’s sleeping with her face resting on her hands, legs dangling over the empty space beneath the shelf they’ve carved into the bark. As for Tdhahi, only his tiny feet are visible- he has decided to burrow headlong into the bark of the massive flesh-tree. Sean and I abstained from that particular task, out of concern for what we would find inside the trunk. Flesh gets infested, and I’d rather not learn what a meat-tree parasite looks like. Sean rubs his face with his hand, running the edge of his palm over the stubble he’s sprouted on this trek to the Bloom. It’s good to see him like this, without the precisely-trimmed facial hair of the city. Reminds me of when we met.

“They’re okay.”

He yawns, then starts methodically cracking his knuckles.

“What was that thing, by the way?”

A soft, honest question. He hadn’t asked last night. I sigh.

“A d’hain. A-” I translate to Irdcheol. “Traveller. We don’t know what they really are. I’ve personally never seen one, because they don’t seem to travel far away from the Shorn Peak. Maybe this one was included in whatever process caused the sporing Ābreen was talking about. They live on the surface of the dirt, most of the time. Away from people. And they can eat anything, given enough time. A bit like slugs. You can always follow them by the trail they leave.”

He cracks his neck with a slow grinding of his palm against his chin, popping a few stubborn vertebrae. His eyes gleam bronze in the morning sun. “What did it want with us? Just to eat?”

“Probably.” In truth, I’m not sure at all. “They hate loud noises. We aren’t sure if they’re intelligent. Sometimes they’ll pass around plants. Sometimes they’ll devour whatever they can get their bodies under. Looks like Íde’s pack is totally gone. They never give up the chance to eat animals though. Lucky for us the Bloom is a forest. We might not have heard it coming over sand or dirt.”

I look down, into the wrecked field below. Everywhere the d’hain had manifested, it had devoured the underbrush. We are at the centre of a sloppy circle of decimated earth.

“Seemed pretty bloody horrible.”

“Yes. Well, maybe. I don’t think anyone’s ever been able to talk to a d’hain. They’re like storms. You can look into them and see hatred, and power, and death, but at the end of the day they’re just inertia. Maybe we are as strange to them as they are to us.”

He squints into the rising sun, now a good two or three fingers above the horizon. We’re encamped a scarce ten yards up the trunk of the tree, and the canopy of the Bloom stretches out in an immense misty wall all around our little clearing. I follow his gaze, and see a flock of many-winged birds flit silently in the distance.

“Sure. Still seems pretty bloody horrible.”

He’s not wrong, and follows up with some praise, gesticulating down at our companions. “Good thing we brought a second sigilist. But Iseult… that wasn’t a good thing. I’m here to help, sure, but I didn’t think that we’d be running into anything like that. Why are we really here?”

I was waiting for this. A question asked politely and literally. Telling him the truth, though, is not going to happen. “I want to know what happened to Colt & Tumble, in the Salting Bleaks. I want to know why they owe a debt to a man like Ābreen.”

A long time ago, Sean himself told me that the best lies are always built with truthful bones. Something must have happened with Evin Tumble, here in the Wraithwild. Maybe it explains his sudden fascination with the new moon. Maybe Wynne Colt is in on it too. It’s a good cover.

He squints at me for a heartbeat longer than I’m comfortable with, then nods. “I know. I wasn’t sure what to tell the Pathfinder, when he asked. But to be honest, I don’t know much more than what I said. I asked around, quietly, back in Ildathach. Tried to dig up anything that I could. But it’s much trickier than you’d expect. Nobody really knows anything about what Colt & Tumble did, save their own assumptions and conjectures.”

The conversation lulls, and fills with the background buzz of a forest morning. In the distance, some wet hooting animal barks out a sad little song. He starts again. “I wasn’t able to seriously verify anything. We’re not the only ones who’re asking about Colt & Tumble. Vardon & Company were sniffing around, three weeks earlier. I also heard,” he lowers his voice, absurdly. We’re about two stories up, in a breathing tree, in the middle of an unexplored part of the Wraithwild. “The Chaplain’s Office was interested. One of my contacts knows someone who talked with a Dour House agent about the very same topic. A lot of players are asking, is my point. All anyone really knows is, about eighteen months ago Colt & Tumble moved a tonne of expensive equipment and a very small team of professionals into a part of the Salting Bleaks. They hired local help in Brixa Thalaam, then sailed to the Bleaks. Evin Tumble was there. They returned to Ildathach after a week or two, but have been very tight-lipped about it ever since.”

I don’t comment on how deep the paranoia in Ildathach must run for a man to be concerned with being overheard while we’re hiding in a tree, deep in a wandering Wraithwild forest. I take a moment to make sure my rucksack and pouches are buckled correctly, so that I won’t rattle or sway too much when we start walking. Sean looks down, then back to me. “What do you think about Íde?”

I tell him the truth, after some hesitation. “I didn’t want to bring her. I’m glad we did. That knotwork she did wasn’t easy.”

We secure a rope to our little cliff, then rappel down the fleshy scales of the tree. I stop just before touching the new dirt under the tree, and poke it tentatively with my foot in case it does something unexpected.

An hour later, after breakfast, we orient the compasses and leave our meadow, stepping gingerly across the sinking earth left in the passing of the d’hain. I’m familiar with the way the Peak bends compasses and maps, but the directions seem to have held overnight. The soil rots and crumbles underneath us, turning not into mud but a kind of loose orange silt. It is a relief to return to the glinting crunch of the glass blades. When we pause at the edge of the meadow, poised to return to the darkness of the Bloom, I feel a palpable sense of anxiety at the thought of plunging back into the foggy shadows.

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Time to get it over with. I march past Sean and Tdhahi, joining Íde at the shadowy threshold.

She’s not in good shape. She’s exhausted, and bleeding. Both her hands and both her feet are bandaged, then bandaged again, and she shuffles through the brush with a sad, loping shuffle. We do our best to skirt major obstacles- great iron cairns, pools of rank mercury, particularly grotesque looking vine thickets. The more banal impediments are actually more of a challenge than the exotic ones, and we spend long hours navigating treacherous scree slopes and dense knots of underbrush. At one point, Tdhahi stops us all dead in our tracks, pointing with a machete at the tangle of rocks ahead.

“Problem?” I ask. He shakes his head, then shrugs and responds in smooth Thalaami. “Vipers, I think. Better to take the long way around than risk anything.”

There’s nothing in the jumbled scree that indicates any sort of viper nest. “How sure are you?”

He looks at me pointedly. “In truth? Perhaps there are no vipers, and this is pointless. Or this is the work of a devilish predator, which has invaded my thoughts and tweaked my suspicions. It would not be unthinkable.” This monologue in his native language is starkly contrasted with his choppy, faltering Irdcheol. He’s a different person when he speaks Thalaami. “So yes. In short, not sure at all. Nevertheless, I’d rather not get within fifteen yards of a potential nest.”

“Fifteen yards? How big do you think they are?”

“That’s the distance I’ve seen a viper spit.”

I fall in behind him and swat at a slavering, palm-sized mosquito. She dies easily, though this does little to stem the interests of her compatriots, who harry us for miles. Tdhahi winces, then shucks off his minimal pack and takes a swig of water from one of four goat-skin bags. He gestures respectfully towards me. “You’ve done this before.”

I nod. He’s just being polite- even if he can’t read my tattoos, he’s from the Wraithwild, so he knows what they imply. When I was younger, the part of the Wraithwild my family roamed through lacked this deep, cloying mist. Nevertheless, even if the foliage is unfamiliar, there are similarities between this Bloom and certain other places I’ve walked before. Though far from the badlands that my tribe trod in my youth, I can feel the spiralling energy of this place, and find it intimate.

“My grandfather,” he continues, after wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “He was Bani Yathrib.” My ears perk up. “Dead, now, of cancer. Ate him up from a young age. My other grandparents said it was because he spent too much time in the deep parts of the Wraithwild. So…” he shrugs, and I can’t tell if he’s looking for me to say something. I choose not to, so he is forced to continue. “I’m a descendent of the Thamaut tribe.”

My ears perk up. He notices, and hastily adds: “Do you know these people?”

So he definitely doesn’t know about me. I relax, and smile. “Yes. They’re a fine folk, I’m told. But I’ve never met someone from your tribe.” I gently lie.

He grins, pleased. “I’ve always wanted to learn more about the tribes. I don’t have a lot of links to the Bani Yathrib, don’t really remember my grandfather at all. And the Bani Yathrib, come to the city less and less these days, like you’re less interested in other Wraithwilders.”

It’s possible. I left the Wraithwild two decades ago, and much could have changed in that time. I give Tdhahi enough information to make him happy. He’s technically Bani Yathrib, but some concepts sound strange to say in Thalaami, and he never learned to speak Mutafasih. He’s significantly more talkative in his native language than in Irdcheol, which I can appreciate. I explain some of the oldest ink that’s engraved on my hands, the powers that the knotwork invokes, the history that has been embedded into my flesh.

I lie about the tattoos on my neck and face, of course. Luckily he can’t read Mutafasih.

By midday we are deep in the fetid depths of the Bloom, eating handfuls of the Pathfinder’s mujadara, flanked on all side by trees entirely encased in great, faintly transparent pyramids. Sean runs his hand over the perfect surface of one of the shapes, peering at the tree imprisoned within. Tdhahi winces and mutters a prayer of protection to Saint Teneral as Sean inspects his fingertips, grinning when he confirms they haven’t been burned or frozen or dissolved away.

The path saps us of energy, and we hike, determined but slow, under the canopy. Without the easy reckoning of the sun, or any sort of permanent landmark, it’s impossible to truly measure our pace. Given the elevation changes and the time we’ve spent marching, we could’ve gone anywhere between five and ten miles by the time I find myself next to Íde, shuffling beside her as she takes careful, awkward steps. She looks over at me and smiles, despite the discomfort. When she talks, it’s the first time we’ve spoken all day, and she doesn’t sound as exhausted as I expected.

“Clever, what you did back there with the d’hain. Collapsing the death charm with a bullet to make the noise without finishing the sigil. Where did you learn to do that?”

I can’t help but be surprised: she used the Mutafasih word. I counter her question with my own. “Where did you learn about that?”

She winces as a small stone comes loose under her boots. We pause and watch it tumble down the shallow slope, settling finally in a tiny, trickling stream behind us.

“One of last year’s lectures, actually. Considerations on Western Mythos. I didn’t even realise what it was until we were high up, and it took me until this morning to remember the name. Knew that they didn’t like sound. Didn’t know that they still existed. I dragged my younger brother Fionn to that lecture- he fell asleep about a minute into it. But it was interesting. But he covered a lot of topics I didn’t know about.”

“There’s a lot in the Wraithwild that the rest of the continent doesn’t know about.”

Íde lets her hands swing by her side. Those bandages will need to be changed soon.

“You don’t really talk about the Wraithwild.” She says, quietly. Before I can respond, she rolls through her next sentence. “And that’s fine. Or whatever. How you ended up in Ildathach. We don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to. I get it.”

I look at her, lopsided. She turns, and raises her chin at Sean.

“I’m still a bit in the dark about Sean though.”

“In what way?”

“He’s got that way of speaking to people,” I don’t change my expression, and she rolls gently into her next thought. “He phrases everything in a way that lets him win conversations. Why? We’re his friends, and I know he fights, but when I see him talk to people I know he’s trying to get what he wants by being nice or being direct or being intimidating. I don’t know if I’m talking to the real him, when he talks to me.” She’s surprisingly insightful, for a young academic. I mull this over as she keeps going. “Plus, you know, with him and you…”

This warrants a response. “With him and me?”

“Well,” here she pauses, then blushes. “Are you two, uh.” I wait for her to finish. She’s turning as red as the d’hain’s flesh. “You know. Together?”

Both Sean and Tdhahi turn around when I burst out laughing. I actually have to rest my hand on Íde’s shoulder for support, and only stop when I start wheezing.

“That’s,” I stop again to laugh, and to wipe away the tears at the corner of my eyes. “No. Íde. No. That’s not a thing. You have entirely the wrong idea about Sean. And about me.”

She looks annoyed. “Why? Is there something wrong with him?”

The mirth ebbs, slowly, and so does my grin. We continue walking, and I think about it for a moment. “We only travelled together for a few months, truth be told. Before this, I mean. In the Aergan. And I haven’t seen him in years. But sometimes you spend time with someone, and you don’t forget them. Especially after what we went through. But Íde… Sean’s not like that. He’s good at talking. And fighting. Not so good, always, at listening. He never really came to terms with what happened with his family. Every once in a while you see that crater in him.”

Íde looks at me disarmingly, and I scrabble for the words. “You might want to ask him about it directly.”

“Yeah.” She looks over at the two men, who have started clambering up a short, boulder-strewn hill. She shoves her bandaged hands into her pockets. “Maybe I will.”

*

“Irksome things.”

Sean swats at some kind of flitting black insect, eye-sized and menacing his poor sunburned ears. It flees, buzzing across the little campsite we’ve made, and he returns to poking a small pot of stew. It smells, if nothing else, adequate. The ambiguous, bubbling brown and beige stew that is a Yvreathan staple, and the first thing he’s cooked since we boarded the Gundog Walking. A little yellow half-circle emerges from the muck with iceberg patience, seems to regard me balefully, then submerges again. I think that was a potato. I hope that was a potato.

This time, we haven’t set up camp inside of a clearing. Light is hard to come by, under this immense canopy, so Sean’s decision to stop took me by surprise. He was right though- it’s now an hour after his announcement, and the sun has almost entirely set. We’ve cleared a small camping space on the damp, mossy floor of the Bloom. The trees here look like they’d support our weight. In case we get another visitor.

“Set up the tents on the slope, near the top of the hillock,” Tdhahi had said. Good advice, though the threat of rain seemed unlikely, shielded as we are under the heavy canopy of the trees above.

Our second night in the Bloom. It’s hard not to be on edge, but I wonder how much the constant sense of tension and the lack of sleep are affecting us. You can’t really tell when you yourself start losing your edge.

“Should be done in,” Sean squints, poking something dark that has risen to the surface of the sludge, “half… an… hour?”

Íde and the Pathfinder are by themselves, about twenty yards away. She’s sprawled, exhausted, on a thick mat of mildly phosphorescent lichen. He’s bent over her, wrapping her hands again and murmuring something soft to her. I see the ribbons of filthy and discoloured cloth hanging from a nearby tree. They were clean, at the start of the day. The quiet conversation seems jovial enough, and I don’t try to eavesdrop. Beside them rests a small coffee dallah atop a tiny, smouldering fire.

“So how close do you think we are to finding these bees-that-aren’t-bees?” Sean, once again, looking up after rapping the wooden spoon several times against the edge of the cauldron. It rings out pleasantly in the dusk, a counterpoint to the screeching of evening birds.

“No idea. Dhahi didn’t have any comments either. I don’t think he’s leading us to a specific location. Sounds like his plan is to just get to the middle of the Bloom and hope that we run into the bees along the way.”

He looks thoughtful, and wipes a bead of sweat off his brow with a sleeved forearm. “Seems like… not so good of a plan. To be honest. There’s no animal sign? Or knotwork to be done? What effect is this place having on us?”

I’m going to reply sarcastically, but decide instead to consider his second point for a moment. “Well, possibly. I don’t know anything to summon a hive of bees. How would you find a bee in Yvreathe?”

“They normally seem to find me. Especially if I’m eating.”

He has a point. I have no response, and Sean returns to lazily stirring the stew.

There’s a change in the air. I snap my attention to the treeline, expecting something dire. It takes me a moment to realise that Íde and Tdhahi have stopped talking. She’s frozen, her hand holding a tiny Thalaami coffee mug. The Pathfinder, holding the battered tin dallah in his hand, is also stock-still.

“Sean?”

He looks up. Tdhahi says something in a low tone. He’s not talking to Íde. He’s talking to her cup.

“Sean. That bug that was annoying you.”

There’s an iridescent black shape the size of an eyeball resting on Íde’s index finger. It bobs, twice, sinking its head into the coffee cup. Sean hasn’t noticed what’s happening to our friends, and looks at me strangely.

“You alright, Iseult? You look like you’ve seen a Saint returning.”

The bee arrows away, lost immediately in the shadows of the Bloom’s depths.

Íde is dead on her feet. She is exhausted. Her hands are bandaged, fingertip to forearm, in white cloth that is already being stained pink. She can barely stand. When she sprints into the underbrush with a gleeful whoop, I am astonished. Tdhahi, seizing his pack, turns to us and shouts an explanation before leaping after her.

They disappear almost instantly into the underbrush. I am frozen in surprise. So is Sean.

“Should we follow them?”

I look at our discarded packs, at the tents, and at the campsite we’ve already erected. We’d never find our way back, not at the pace that those two have just bolted away at.

“I suppose not. Should make sure they can find us again.”

He shrugs, accepting the circumstances. Typical Sean. “What did the Pathfinder say?” He asks me. I mull the translation, before realising that Irdcheol has a single word for it.

“Kismet.”

He stares at the space where they’ve both disappeared to for a few moments, before nodding a few times and returning to poke at his stew.