My siphon steals life, the fire and the meat.
Return there can be none—
You are the rain of the Sluagh that feeds the Unseelie.”
When the riddle releases him, he curls up with his hands clutching his bleeding head as if to ward off another beating. The blue jewels flicker at his throat but he’s past reacting even to their delivered shock. His eyes are open, but he might as well be a corpse. His muscles fire without guidance, twitching. He drifts in and out of awareness while the creatures stand stiffly around him, and hears the Queen and Ađalbrandr heatedly arguing. Most of it is just incomprehensible drone. Only occasionally does he grasp what’s being said, and even then only makes sense of half of it, reminded too well of his childhood self and the arguments that went on right in front of him—parents, brother and sister—because his presence didn’t matter.
Censoriously, Ađalbrandr says, “You’d take another? Is that wise?”
The Queen’s response is as cold as a frozen pond. “Your lineage may run as deep as my . . . even ties to the Seelie court itself . . . almost as deep as my disdain of ungovernable lineal claims, any . . . could promote ourselves through a connection to the throne. Even our changelings . . . the astralis coursing through you . . . all that matters.”
“We do not know—”
“There are Yvagvoja among the court who could argue primacy over you. Two surviving heirs to your none . . .”
Ađalbrandr thrusts an accusing finger at him. “This meat’s astralis . . . incompatible.”
“. . . be altered.”
“Majesty—”
“It is not your place!”
The chirring stops.
Above him, Ađalbrandr finally bows. Steps back. Even dazed, Thomas recognizes the rage churning in those alien eyes.
The remaining Yvag knights have stood motionless throughout, eyes downcast. He knows from experience, one does not meet a monarch’s gaze.
Nicnevin addresses two of those knights then as if Ađalbrandr isn’t even there. “Bathe him before you deliver . . . to my summer house,” she says. “He stinks like all of his kind.”
She sweeps from view.
Ađalbrandr glares down on him and raises one foot. Thomas expects his head to be crushed, but the knight steps over him as if he’s a log and is gone. Roughly, he is grabbed and hauled upright. His head thunders, his vision shrinks to a tiny lens, sparkling. He passes out.
XXII. Queen’s Pawn
The ice-cold water of a perfectly circular pond snaps him back to alertness. He splutters and thrashes while two disinterested Yvags unseal their strange armor. The pond is in a different plaza, among the spires and strange stepped buildings. The Queen and her entourage have gone. The light is still the molten gloaming cast by the dull red sun overhead, but the spires and towers seem to throw off a glow of their own, much like the well did, like St. Elmo’s fire.
Dazed still, and captivated by all that’s strange, he sees but fails to register how the knights’ armor transforms—how its chitinous barbs and spikes retreat, and it simply falls away like linen or silk. He becomes transfixed at the sight of the two of them, wading in naked after him for the first time beholding more than mottled hands and faces, and thick metallic strands of white hair.
Their torsos are of tightly stacked, coiled rings of muscle, which ripple in sequence as they move. A vertical row of circular slits corresponding to the holes in their armor run down those coils beneath their arms and enlarge and shrink rhythmically. He understands that he’s seeing them breathe. While their spiky limbs and backs are all of the same greenish-gray color, their bellies are a dull yellowish pink. Their arms are segmented, almost like interlinked bulbs, capable of bending in ways that arms shouldn’t. Legs, too—their oddly jointed hips remind him of grasshoppers’ limbs. Recollects how he watched alongside Waldroup as one of them climbed the steps of the Old Melrose crypt, its movements ungainly, peculiar. Now he understands why. And while he’s observing them, those long fingers grow longer still and circle round his arms and throat, forcing him down under the water.
He comes up spluttering. One of the Yvags reaches for a coarse square of soap. The rings of torso muscle flow and let the body extend to reach it. Again he’s reminded of the red tunnel itself, as if they have all traveled inside a giant version of themselves. They utterly repulse him. Their sex, if that’s what it is, appears to be a bright yellow, hooked appendage emerging from flaps of skin.
Despite his revulsion and his attempts to pull away, the two Yvags yank him closer and begin scrubbing him with the soap. His skin reddens as if he’s being flayed. His back already raw from being dragged across a plaza. He yowls and tugs furiously to be let go. They ignore him as if bored by everything he does, and work the soap back and forth in his long hair until a froth is running over his face. They might as well be scrubbing a horse, and in fact on the far side of the perfect pond another Yvag is washing one of those sinister beasts of shiny bone, but not with anything like the kind of force being used on him. Without saddle and caparison, that creature, too, is fully revealed, a body of peculiar horizontal ribbing, its pearlescent anatomy polished and nacreous as a nautilus. How is it black in his world and such a silvery color here? There is no skin over its rigid anatomy, either. It looks less like a horse than ever, and more like an assembled, artificial thing. Its empty eyes stare at him as if it hears his thoughts and is not impressed.
Head shoved under the surface again and held down, released, he comes up choking, spitting.
The two Yvag attendants haul him out and drop him on the stones. He notices their feet for the first time. Elongated like their hands, the feet are some cross between those of humans and taloned birds of prey.
Lying there, he sees that the Yvags who went wandering into the Þagalwood have returned. Little fae hobs dart around them. They carry with them bundles of hacked-off branches and larger severed sections of those moaning tree-things. It looks as if they’ve cut one down and split it apart among them. As they pass by, he realizes that the pieces have the same iridescence as the beasts, and that they are moving, slowly curling as if alive.
His two Yvag keepers have paused to watch the procession, too, but now step once more into their black-and-silver garments. Almost molten, the material flows over them again, reconstituting their solid shape within its breastplates, thorny helms, and greaves—armor that’s not armor, is more like a shell encasing a lobster, but that, a moment ago on the ground, was something as squishy as a lobster’s flesh. The black armor has molded their forms, in some ways disguising their true grotesqueness and making them more resemble human knights. Disguising seems to be something they’re skilled at. They remade Sìleas like it was nothing before they condemned her to death.
For him, no outfit is offered. They pick him up and drag him between them. He looks for a destination in the weird landscape of star-shot spires, massive edifices, and sky-roads overhead, but they seem merely to be wandering along paths through an ever-nocturnal domain. Other Yvags observe him with mild interest as he’s hauled past. Their costumes are strange and seem to flicker with color, but how much is clothing, how much glamour? No one says anything nor seems surprised by his presence in their midst.
At a point he fails to notice, they enter a field in the middle of the stepped towers and obelisks, and wander into wine-colored grasses as high as his waist. His hauling flattens the grass. It hisses angrily at him.
Ahead looms what at first he takes for a great mount of rock—a circular outcropping but flattened, something like Eildon Hill with the top sheared off. The sides are marked with runnels and crevices, many of which reflect sparks of light, of color, as if gems are embedded in the deepest recesses.
The entrance proves to be a cut to the far left, and passing through it they arrive in a curving atrium walled with polished onyx, reddish brown and lustrous. The scrape of him being dragged along echoes off the walls, echoes ahead of them on their ever-curving journey through chambers of different colors, textures, some brilliant and as iridescent as the bones of Þagalwood; others are blue or purple despite that there’s no source for the light. Walls arise seamlessly from the floor, and the deeper the knights take him, the higher they reach, until all the ceilings are vaulted and ribbed. Because of the omnipresent dimness of the sky, it’s awhile before he realizes that the vaults are transparent between the supports. He is seeing the weird matrix of stars. He marvels at the construction of this place, so far beyond anything he and Waldroup ever worked on or could have imagined. The halls, however, are structured much like the framing in his cruck house, and he wonders if the shape of it came to him from the Queen or from his first contact with the portal, a ghost-image lodged in his head, waiting to be used.
The final chamber is round. They deposit him on a great circular tile in its center, then withdraw.
Overhead, the seventeen ribs all gather at one spot—a single clear panel that mirrors the tile he’s on; it’s like an eye, a lens that magnifies the reddish star of perpetual twilight hovering above, and its intense orange radiance paints the floor around him. He raises a hand to shield his eyes from the intensified light, recalling another time when he did that—the day he first set eyes on her against the sun. The day they killed Onchu.
“Keep that to yourself, Tom,” advises Waldroup’s ghostly voice, though he can’t see the point—she already knows his identity. Keep it to himself that he remembers?
“Why, Alpin?” he whispers. No response.
His deliverers have gone, left him alone, and he’s beginning to bake in the light. The tile, however, remains oddly cool.
He stands up. Immediately there comes a tug at his throat. When he instinctively resists, it chokes him. He lets go, lets it pull him to the left. He staggers off the tile, out from under that star’s light, leaving wet footprints across the great open space.
He thought he had entered through the only doorway in this circular chamber, but it’s as if the walls have rearranged. The door he entered is gone, and what was a smooth wall panel previously is a dark opening. Pulled along, he walks through another chamber, one containing a silver throne adorned with carved faces distorted either by anger or terror . . . it’s hard to say which. From there he’s drawn through one after another parabolic arch, a long procession of them, each with an alcove between the nacreous supports, so many arches that it seems impossible he is still inside the same structure. Here and there more branch off, more vaulted ribs, a confusion of apses and transepts. Through some he spies more Yvags, some of whom glance up, disinterested, at his passing. In one they’re attending to a seated figure in brown robes, a monk it seems. Then he notices the manacles on its wrists and ankles, huge hands and feet. When he tries to walk toward it for a closer look, the pull on him turns to burning anguish. There will be no investigating anything. He stumbles on.
