thought that gagged and tied they’d left her powerless too. She could have wept. Why? Why did they have to do this? Why was there never an easy way?
She let the blood in her mouth seep into the wad of cloth stuffed in there and dissolve it slowly away. When it was gone, she spat bloody saliva onto the ropes around her, but before she could set her mind to work on them, she heard a voice.
‘Oh ho.’
She looked up, still trussed hand and foot. There was a face staring at her from the outside. Siff, except his eyes were pure gleaming silver.
‘What did you tell them?’ She peered closer. ‘What are you?’
Siff shook his head. ‘I told them not to leave you alone, for a start. A few minutes with no one watching and you’re almost loose again already. This won’t do, but later, when we have time, you must show me how.’ He pulled himself up into the sleep-space and squatted beside her, toying with a knife. ‘What did you tell them?’
‘The truth.’
Siff laughed out loud. ‘The truth where you take the secrets of the Silver King back to your precious speaker and make everything exactly as it used to be? Back to the days when men on dragons came and took them away to be slaves?’
‘I told them it would be theirs.’
‘Ah. So you lied then.’
She twisted her head, trying to look him in the eye. He kept his distance. Afraid she’d spit at him, perhaps.
‘You’re the outsider here, alchemist. You’ll do what riders always do and it’ll be people like me and these who suffer, just like we always did.’
‘You don’t even know for sure that anything is there.’
‘No. You don’t know. I saw it. I saw a gate. Besides, look at me. How can you doubt it?’ His voice began to wander, back into a memory full of wonder and amazement. ‘I saw a way to their world. And it was so beautiful.’ He snapped back to the present.
‘Do you want to see it or not?’
‘Yes.’ She looked down. Yes. If even a sliver of what he’d told her was true then yes, yes, she wanted to see it, more than anything in the world. The treasures of the Silver King. ‘Of course I do.’
‘Well then, you listen hard, alchemist. They do what I tell them, not you. They know I’m the one who can lead them there, and I don’t need you now. So we’re going to go to the Aardish Caves, just like you wanted, only you’re going to be trussed up like this all the way so you don’t go using your blood-magic on people. I’m going to be sitting with you all the way, and if you even squirm wrong, I’ll just throw you in the river to drown, simple as that. Because I do — not — need you. I hope you understand. And now I’m going to show you something.’
He moved to sit in front of her. Very slowly he took his knife to her cheek and made a shallow cut. She felt the blood roll down her skin. Then he cut his own palm and put the knife away and stroked a drop of his blood onto his finger. Right in front of her, carefully and deliberately, he pressed her blood into his own and mixed them together.
‘That’s how you do it, isn’t it? That’s how you made your doggy do what he was told?’ His gaze never left her face.
She stared at his hand. It had to be a trick but she couldn’t see how it worked. Without even thinking, she was already reaching into the blood, feeling for him, looking for the bridge that would give him to her. As she’d done to Skjorl, just like he said.
There. There it was. There he was.
But he wasn’t alone. There was something else. Something immeasurably larger than either of them, and as she tried to touch him, it seemed to wake up and sense her. It turned as though struggling from a deep sleep to bring her into focus.
She backed away. Broke the bridge, but she wasn’t quick enough. A knife followed, stabbed into her head, a pain that exploded from her very centre outwards. She screamed.
As fast as it had come, it was gone. Siff was staring at her. His silver eyes blazed and the moonlight snakes were wriggling their way from his fingers.
‘What are you?’ she gasped. ‘Are you him? Are you the Isul Aieha?’
The silver light faded. Siff blinked as his eyes became his own again.
‘See, alchemist. I don’t know what it is I found in there, but it’s bigger than you. It wants to go back. And it doesn’t want you in here.’
‘Doesn’t it scare you?’ she asked him.
He hesitated. For a moment she saw the answer in his face. Yes. He was petrified, but the thing, whatever it was, had such a hold on him now that the old Siff was already as good as lost. He smiled at her. ‘Why should I be scared, alchemist? You’re the one who ought to be afraid.’
‘I am,’ she said.
He was by her side every moment after that. As the outsiders gathered what they would need, he sat with her to watch. He was the one who brought her food and her water. When she fell asleep, he was sitting beside her; when she woke up, he hadn’t moved. If he slept himself, she never saw it, and no one else came near her. She tried talking but he rarely answered. Mostly he seemed to be lost in thought, far far away, but he never missed a movement. All she had to do was lift her hand and he’d be looking at her. His eyes were silver all the time now.
The outsiders brought spears, nets and bows, blankets, ropes — so much that she wondered if they had anything left. Perhaps fifty of them walked with her and Siff through the trees to the river. A few were little more than children, but most were adults, half men, half women. Kataros wondered whether there was anything significant in that, or whether it was simply the hand of chance. The trouble with being an alchemist, as her grand master had once said, was that you couldn’t help wondering about things, even things that didn’t matter a jot. They worshipped Siff and they were terrified of him too. They did whatever he said, half in awe, half from fear, and she had no idea why. Was it the silver eyes? No, there was more to it than that. They knew him. There was history here, but neither Siff nor anyone else would tell her what it was.
There were boats at the river, five of them, sections from branches fallen from of one of the great trees. They’d been sliced in two, hollowed out and sharpened at either end. She might have called them canoes but they were nothing like the little dugouts she’d seen on the upper reaches of the Fury; no, these were huge, wide enough for three to sit abreast. The outsiders divided themselves evenly between the boats. Eight of them in each with paddles, working against the current of the river, while two sat, one at the front, one at the back, with spears and nets. Now and then they swapped places. Whenever they stopped to eat, they dozed, all carefully as far from Kataros as they could be. All the while Siff sat beside her.
And so it went, day after day. The forest never seemed to change. They passed rapids, where the outsiders carried their boats over their heads along the bank. Fallen trees blocked their way upriver, boulders, even sandbanks. In other places the waters were wide and deep, so broad that Kataros wondered if they’d reached a lake. She’d never heard of any lakes in the Raksheh, but that didn’t mean much. The great forest was a mystery beyond the fringes where the alchemists gathered its riches.
‘Don’t you worry about the worms?’ she asked Siff one day. No point in asking the other outsiders. They flinched every time she even looked at them. Whatever Siff had said, he was their master now and they revered him every bit as much as they feared her.
‘Them again? You and doggy, eh? No such thing.’
‘You’re wrong,’ she told him, but he only looked at her and shrugged.
When Siff wasn’t watching, she picked at her fingernails. Keeping them short, for the most part, but keeping them sharp. Claws. The first weapon she’d been born with. Her blood might not touch Siff any more but that wasn’t what she was thinking about.
After a week, when she thought he wasn’t looking, she scratched herself on the ankle as they were climbing out of the boats one evening and then stumbled and fell into the water. A tiny drop of her washed away.
Worm! Wherever you are, I call you!
