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‘I will destroy you.’
There have been others, over the millennia, who were just as focused as you – many of them. No, it is not your focus that makes you curious. Nor is it your coldness.
‘Go on then. Let me have it.’
You have another quality. It is unusual in one like you, so most people do not see it. You are nurturing. There have been people throughout your life who you turned into your children. Aran Fal was one.
Brightling leaned against the wall, as the image of a blond-haired boy rose before her mind’s eye.
You changed him. I saw it happening. You took him, and when you were done, he was something else. Changed so subtly, yet with terrible finality. Aran Fal into Aranfal. A boy become a torturer. The torturer. A dark creature, yet he still has a little sparkle. I can see it in him.
‘So he is alive, then, wherever he is,’ Brightling said.
Perhaps, perhaps. Everyone is alive to me, Brightling, because all memories are here. All of them, from the beginning of everything. I have seen them all. I have touched them all.
‘You must have seen a lot, then.’
Ruin laughed.
A nurturer to Aranfal, but also to others. To one above all. A girl, whose family was destroyed. I set that all in motion.
Brightling winced.
The Paprissis were destroyed. The girl was abandoned, and ended up where she belonged: with you, the cold nurturer.
Brightling steeled herself. It is testing me. It is only a voice: it has no power. ‘She was going to join you, no matter what happened,’ she whispered. ‘I feel no shame in that. That thing was always going to take her over.’
Always? Always is a powerful word.
A door opened to Brightling’s right. There was no escaping it, this time, no walking away. Something in the room beyond called to her, pulled her towards it. She resisted, perhaps longer than Ruin expected; she thought she heard him muttering darkly. She was not one to give in to temptation. Not her.
But there was no refusing the draw of the room. It was the light that did it. As she stared at her feet, it gathered across the stones: the purple of the Strategists, spilling into the darkness, driving it away.
She began to tremble, and she cursed herself for it.She could resist no longer. She turned her head towards the light and saw her: the girl who changed everything. Her foster daughter. Mother. The Strategist.
Katrina stood alone in a small, confined space, more like a cell than a room. No. This is not Katrina. This was the creature, at its zenith: taller than the girl Brightling had known, stretched into unusual proportions. Her white rags had turned purple, as had her eyes. The same colour of light hung around her in a strange haze. She was standing completely still.
‘It is not really her,’ Brightling said. She felt a wave of relief. She did not want to face that thing, the parasite that had seized control of an abandoned, orphaned girl. But she perhaps feared meeting the real Katrina even more. She had failed that child. If she had been wiser, or more observant, she would have seen what was inside her. She could have gone to the Operator, and he would have done something. She was sure of it. But she had failed. The greatest Watcher of them all, a Tactician of the Overland, and I let my girl be devoured from the inside out.
Isn’t she wonderful?
Brightling silently agreed. There was something incandescent about this girl. Something luminous.
You did this, Brightling.
Anger flared within the Watcher. ‘I failed her,’ she said. ‘But your people put the demon inside her. Not me.’
But what are we, Brightling? What are my people? We came from you. All of you. The memories of humanity. They gave birth to us. They feed us. We are your creations. You are the parents, and we are nothing but children.
‘Children don’t live forever. They don’t have powers that could break the world. They aren’t called fucking Ruin, either.’
There was a laugh in the darkness. I am a child, Brightling.
There was a movement behind the image of Katrina. An old woman appeared, her face just visible under a dark hood. She threaded her arm through the Strategist’s, and smiled at Brightling. Something crawled from her mouth, and flew away.
We are powerful beings, it is true. But all power has constraints. We are born of humanity; we cannot live to our true potential until we are at one with humanity. When we join a host, we become something more. An immortal, still, but one with greater scope. A truer being.
‘And the mortal dies.’
The man that you see, when you look at Jandell – that is not Jandell. He is the host for Jandell. He was meant for Jandell.
The old woman turned and embraced the girl, before vanishing. Katrina breathed in deeply.
The host and the Operator must be just right, before the combination reaches its full potential. You made Katrina the perfect host for Mother. You gave her a certain strength: the mentality of a Watcher. Yet you weakened her as well. You filled her with self-doubt. Mother waited, and watched, and smiled, while you worked your dark influence.
Katrina disappeared, replaced with a flickering procession of images: Brightling and Katrina, Katrina and Brightling, over and over, as the girl grew up under the wing of the Watchers.
I did this.
The host was ready when the world changed. She was ready when the Machinery broke, and I sent such powers to her.
The mask throbbed against her. ‘Say what you want: I am coming for you, with my mask.’
See what I have wrought, from my prison. See what I did to your world. See what powers I gave the One. You think I am weak?
‘I think my mask is stronger.’
Ruin laughed, and the door to the cell slammed shut.
CHAPTER 2 (#uef57288c-4ff0-50f4-8e12-2300f85234f7)
‘The Machinery destroyed my family,’ said Jaco Paprissi. ‘The Machinery destroyed us all.’
The old man stared hard at Jandell. When he had first appeared before Drayn and the Operator, rising out of the grass like an animal, his features had been obscured by thick, green paint, the same colour as his robes. Now the paint was gone, but the wildness remained. His skin was raw, his grey hair matted with dirt. His face was deeply lined, but there was a certain spark in his dark eyes. A drive. It reminded Drayn of her mother.
He had taken them into this settlement, him and his men, through clusters of low, stone buildings, until they had come to this cold, dark hall, a damp space of wood and animals and smouldering flame. The other people had peeled off as they went, until they were alone, just Drayn and Jandell and this strange old man.
The wind howled outside the building. The wind always seemed to howl in this place.
Jandell took his son away. That’s what he’d said, when they first met this man. Drayn had met a boy, deep in the Old Place, one who had stood at her side on her journey through her worst memories. That was him. Drayn knew it. She saw some of Alexander in Jaco. She wondered if she should tell him. I met your boy, my lord. I met him in the land of memory.
‘No,’ Jandell said.
Drayn was unsure, at first, if he was speaking to Jaco or to her. He was sitting to her side at the rough-edged table, hunched over, his strange cloak gathered around him, the faces staring wanly at the world outside their prison. ‘I destroyed your family. I cannot hide from that.’
Jaco ran a hand through his nest of hair. ‘Yes. But you’re as much a victim as the rest of us. You may have built it and operated it, but the Machinery was its own thing. It spoke to Alexander. It told him such … things. And it made you take him away.’
A new brightness seemed to enter Jaco’s eyes. He was directly opposite Jandell, and he leaned in towards him. ‘Is he alive down there?’ But the light flickered out as quickly as it had come. ‘No. He can’t be. It’s not a place for little boys.’
A little boy. I met him. I knew him well …
Jandell shook his head. ‘There is a boy in the Underland, but he is just a shadow. He is a dream. When I took him away …’ He bowed his head.
‘He’s just a memory, now,’ Jaco whispered.
Jandell frowned. ‘Just a memory? How do you know that?’
Jaco waved a hand. ‘I’ve learned a lot, out here.’ He took his gaze from Jandell, and looked again at the table. ‘Did you hurt him, Operator?’ he asked in a quiet voice.
An image came before Drayn: Alexander, chained to a chair, exhausted. Jandell was inches from his face, his mouth twisted into a sneer. He held something in his hand – a whip, perhaps.
‘The boy was gone at the beginning. But the memories … I fought that creature of memory, for his knowledge,’ Jandell whispered. ‘Yet even when he told me the One had returned, I would not believe him.’
‘But he didn’t tell you everything, did he, Operator? He didn’t tell you who the One was. He wouldn’t have wanted you to hurt her. His sister.’
A new image appeared in Drayn’s mind: a girl with black hair, a girl in white rags, slowly turning to purple …
Jandell rubbed his temples with thin fingers.
‘Alexander did well to keep it from me,’ he whispered.
‘No,’ Jaco said. ‘Not Alexander. The thing that lives down there: a memory of a boy.’
‘Perhaps that is Alexander. Why shouldn’t memories be real?’
It was the first time Drayn had spoken. The others turned to her, and Jandell smiled.
‘I was a dark thing, in recent years,’ Jandell said. ‘I was mad, and paranoid, and weak. Do you know what saved me, Paprissi?’
Jaco shook his head.
Jandell pointed at Drayn. ‘This girl,’ he whispered. ‘This Fallen Girl, and her powerful memories. More than that, though: her memories are powerful indeed, but so is she.’
Drayn turned her head away. Part of her wondered if she should thank the Operator. But why? How can I thank him for his praise, when I did nothing to earn it?
‘Operator,’ Jaco said.
‘My name is Jandell.’ He sighed. ‘A bleak name. The Bleak Jandell.’
Jaco nodded. ‘Jandell. I want you to know …’ He looked at the moss-covered ceiling, as if searching for answers. ‘I do not forgive you, for what you did.’
Jandell bowed his head. ‘You shouldn’t.’ He gestured at his cloak, at the faces inside. ‘Someone made this garment for me to remind me of all the things I did, and all the people I hurt, when I was Jandell the Bleak.’ He smiled. ‘Was. I am a fool; I will always be Jandell the Bleak.’
‘I hadn’t finished,’ Jaco whispered. ‘I do not forgive you for what you did. But I do not hate you, either. Because it was my fault.’ He stroked his beard. ‘I brought this upon my family. I could have stopped it.’ His voice grew weary. ‘Alexander told me about Katrina. He told me what she was. And I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t. I loved that girl as much as my son.’ He placed his head in his hands and began to tremble. ‘If I had told you the truth, you could have destroyed her, and Alexander would still be alive.’
Jandell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps it is all fate,’ he whispered.
There came a noise from outside: the whinnying of a horse. A man pushed open the door. He seemed to be middle-aged, though it was difficult to tell with any precision. His head was completely bald, without even eyebrows. He was tall, but strangely stooped. He had pale skin, but it was so weather-beaten as to almost be a shade of red, and he wore the same green robes as Jaco.
‘Dark is coming from the beyond,’ he said, pointing in the direction of the ocean. ‘Not now, my leader, but soon, the dark will come.’
Jaco nodded, before turning to Jandell and Drayn. ‘We have to go. This isn’t a good place at night. There are raiders, further up the coast, and animals that come from the forests.’
They made their way on horseback from the small settlement, Drayn tucked in behind Jandell, with the faces of the cloak staring up at her. She felt something when she looked at them: things from the past, tugging at her.
She turned her head, back in the direction they had come from, squinting her eyes against the wind. The settlement was very small, only a handful of squat, broken dwellings. There were people, there, leaning against the walls or wandering around, armed with spears. But the only ones on the road were Jaco, Jandell, Drayn and the bald newcomer.
‘Allos,’ he said. He rode up next to Jandell and Drayn, and pointed to his face. ‘Allos. Me.’
Drayn smiled at him and extended a hand. The man grasped it, perhaps a little too hard, and grinned back at her.
‘I’m Drayn,’ the girl said.
‘Drayn,’ said Allos. His voice was as rugged as the landscape, a thing of stone and hill. ‘Drayn, from another place.’
Allos turned back to the road, and his expression fell serious once more.
‘Where are we going?’ Drayn called up ahead, where Jaco was leading the way. The old man came to a halt and turned to the girl.
‘Up the road,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of travel. ‘That place back there is just an outpost. We don’t live there.’
‘What’s up the road?’
Jaco grinned at her. He was old, this man, but remained a powerful physical presence. She could feel the merest hint of his memories. They were full of wonderful things: things that no one else had ever seen. But they were tinged with sadness, too.
‘Home is up the road,’ he said in a cheery voice.
The road gave way to a dirt path. As the night came in, trees sprang up on either side, great sentinels that loomed over them, moaning and swaying in the air. The darkness beyond crackled with sound: the movements of animals among the branches and twigs of the forest floor.
Drayn did not know what she had expected when she first set sail with Jandell. In some ways, she was disappointed by what she had found: wind and rain and rocks and trees. But there were other things, here, that she had never experienced. The land was vast: she had seen that when they first landed. Even the smell here was different, coming at her in waves: the scent of a fire, fuelled by strange things.
‘We are almost there,’ Jaco said. It was growing difficult to see him, up ahead in the gloom. ‘I hope you’re not tired, Drayn.’
‘No,’ the girl said.
Allos spoke, then. She could not see him, but he was near her side.
‘What powers? Why, when you will not turn to them?’
For a moment Drayn was confused. ‘Powers? What powers do I have, is that what you mean?’
‘He is talking to me,’ Jandell whispered. ‘He knows what I am. Perhaps he has seen my kind before.’
‘Yes, before,’ Allos said. ‘For such a long time before, the powers were here.’
‘He’s wondering why I ride this horse,’ Jandell said. ‘He wonders why I don’t lift us all up, with the click of a finger, and take us where we need to go.’
‘They are things, indeed, that matter now,’ Allos said.
