Brandione began to climb.
A path had been laid out into the side of the mountain, cutting its way sharply upwards through jagged rocks. He was glad of his old boots, his military garb, as he made his way up the path, into the heights of the mountain. He stopped, once, and looked out at the world below. Blasted grasslands stretched away from the great rock, merging into the black sand somewhere far away. He thought he saw something else, out there: one of the great statues of the Strategist that now stood in the Circus. He thought she was raising her arms, but he could not be certain. There was a kind of fissure in the air behind her, like someone had torn out part of the black sky; a haze of blue light crackled in the beyond.
In the sky above, the red sun had gone. In its place was a moon, a vast, perfect sphere, casting a blue light down upon the desert.
Brandione turned back to the path and carried on up the mountain. The path began to twist and turn in tighter and tighter corners. Eventually he came to a wooden sign propped up on the rock before him, on which a question had been scrawled in black ink.
Who are you?
The one-time General stopped for a moment before the sign. Was he meant to answer this question? If so, how?
On he went, around another corner.
Who are you?
He stopped again. This appeared to be the same sign. He walked up to it, studied it, felt its edges; it was identical to the one before. He did not allow himself to feel any surprise. This is the Underland.
Brandione turned another corner, and there was the sign again, with those same three words leaping from its surface. Now, however, things had changed. He was no longer alone.
A young girl was sitting beside the sign, nestled among the boulders and smiling up at Brandione. Unlike the Gamesman or the Dust Queen, this girl had no hint of humanity. She put Brandione in mind of a figure from a painting, sliced out of the canvas and brought to life: a beautiful drawing of a blonde-haired child in a white dress, but nothing more than that.
‘Who are you?’ she asked him. The voice did not belong to a girl of her age, or to any girl: it was more of a rasp than a voice, the pages of a book blowing open in the wind.
‘Charls Brandione,’ he said. ‘I seem to always be introducing myself.’
The girl climbed to her feet. ‘That is not you.’ The voice rattled around his ears.
She reached out a finger and tapped Charls on the nose. ‘Soldier, and scholar. Last Doubter.’
Brandione felt a sudden burst of anger. ‘How do I play the game?’
The girl looked to the sky, whispering something incomprehensible, before she snapped her head back to Brandione. ‘There will be no game,’ she said. ‘Not like the old ones. The game has changed.’
Anger burned in Brandione. The one-time General was a furious insect: a wasp, trapped in a jar.
‘How?’
The girl became a man, then an older woman, then a thousand other people, changing madly in the course of a minute, before returning to the person he had first encountered.
She walked up to him and whispered in his ear.
‘You are not here to have fun, this time. You are here to help.’
She nodded behind Brandione. He turned, to see a doorway in the mountainside.
‘Death is coming.’
Drayn opened her eyes. Jandell and Jaco were at her side. She knew, somehow, in her bones, that these were the real Jandell and Jaco. There was something in the way they held themselves, something in the way she felt when she looked at them, that told her they were flesh and blood. But it was instantly clear that everything else in this place was a memory. Does that make it any less real?
A man sat at a desk before them. He was fairly young, perhaps in his late thirties, with neat black hair and smooth pale skin. He had an air of precision, of order. But there was something harried in his expression, something wan and fearful. The table was covered in papers, which the man sifted through with his fingers.
This was a younger version of Jaco. Drayn glanced from the old man at her side to his counterpart in the memory. There was a strange look in the old man’s eye: a kind of affectionate disdain.
There came a great lurch, and Drayn almost tumbled to the floor. This was a ship like Jandell’s, the one that had carried her into the East. But it was very different. On Jandell’s vessel she had sensed his power, carrying them across the waves. There was none of that here. There was only the peril of the real.
At the doorway stood another man, who must have been the speaker. He was a short, stocky type, who seemed to have sprung from the ship itself, a thing of seasalt and cold winds, his unblinking eyes making Drayn think of some animal of the depths. His head had been shaved with such severity that only the barest hint of stubble could be discerned on the gleaming pate.
‘Who, Teel?’ asked the memory Jaco.
The man called Teel entered the captain’s cabin. He glanced at the floor and lifted a torn black cloak.
‘Harra,’ Teel said. He tossed the cloak to Jaco. ‘She’s above deck, my lord. It is cold.’
The younger Jaco stood and tossed the cloak aside. ‘Let’s go.’
They found themselves on the deck at night, staring at a dead woman.
Her corpse was positioned against a mast. A handful of other crewmembers were spread around the deck. Some watched Jaco, as he knelt down by the body of the woman called Harra. Others stared out to sea, to impenetrable blackness.
Drayn looked to the real Jaco. If he was surprised to find himself in a memory, he did not look it. Instead, he stared ahead with a dark gravity. Jandell seemed lost in thought as he watched the unfolding scene.
‘How did you bring us here?’ he asked Drayn, emerging from his reverie. ‘Do you remember how you did it?’
‘No.’
‘And can you … what do you feel?’
‘Nothing,’ Drayn said. But perhaps that was not true. Perhaps she was once more deploying her tricks, as if to ward off the Voice, that thing that had watched her in the Choosing. It’s gone, now. Isn’t it?
She could feel something: the edge of the memory. There was something there: a whisper of power …
‘What killed her?’ asked the Jaco of the memory.
Teel crouched down beside the captain. ‘It’s the same thing that gets them all,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is. The Blight. She was fine this morning, or as fine as you can be, out here. And then …’ He shrugged.
The young Jaco nodded. ‘The Blight,’ he said. ‘What is it?’ He lifted Harra’s arm, turning it over to study the underside. ‘When I was a boy, I used to hear of terrible scourges. They came from the swamps in the South, folks used to say, from the festering waters. People would come out in blotches, and that would be the end of them. You never got rid of it, when it arrived in a town. You had to keep the people inside, until they were all … gone.’
‘Then perhaps you shouldn’t be touching her, my lord.’
‘That’s just it, Teel – there are no marks on her.’
Jaco brushed a strand of thin black hair away from Harra’s forehead.
‘If it is the same thing, we’re all