The Prince of Lies (Night's Masque, #3)(3)

She was tall as skraylings went, though she still barely reached Mal’s chin, and broader than most. Her face was an even bluish-grey, lacking the mottled pattern that male skraylings enhanced with tattooed lines, and she wore a robe of deep lapis blue over tunic and trousers of the same colour. Mal recalled Ambassador Kiiren’s explanation of his own garb: that male outspeakers dressed as women to form a bridge between the two sexes, who normally lived apart. He wondered what had brought Adjaan here to live among her menfolk. Nothing good, he suspected.

“Gentlemen. Welcome to my humble lirraan.” Adjaan bowed, a little awkwardly. Her English however was flawless, with even less of an accent than Kiiren’s.

“Senlirren-tuur.” Sandy returned the courtesy in the skrayling fashion, palms forward and head turned to one side to expose his throat.

Mal did likewise, and Adjaan replied in Vinlandic. He racked his brains, willing the words to mean something, but unlike his brother he had limited access to Erishen’s powers and even less to his memories.

“Forgive me,” Adjaan said in English. “It was impolite of me to use the language of my kinfolk, when we are the strangers here. Please, sit.” She went over to the brazier in the rear doorway and picked up a wooden-handled jug that steamed in the cool evening air. “What brings you back to London so soon?”

“Soon?” Mal sat down cross-legged on the near side of the table. “We have been in Derbyshire all winter.”

Adjaan cleared a space on the corner of the table and set down the jug. “How old are you?”

“We will be thirty years old in November,” Mal said.

“Not these bodies. How long have you walked in the worlds? Five hundred years? Six?”

“About that,” Sandy said. “I was born in the Ninth Cycle–”

“Then a few turns of the moon is but a moment, yes?”

She took out three cups of translucent porcelain and filled them. Aniig, Mal realised, the herbal brew favoured by the skraylings, though he had never drunk it hot before. At least not in this body, as Adjaan would no doubt be quick to point out.

“To answer your question, honoured one,” Sandy said, taking a cup, “we are here with good news of our findings in the north.”

“Or lack of findings,” Mal put in.

“You found no hrrith?”

“None. If our brother Charles ever hunted the devourers, as he claimed, they are long gone.”

“They were there once,” Sandy added. “I saw his scars. But my brother is right, they are long gone.”

“Well, that is good news.” Adjaan cupped her aniig in her hands but did not drink. “I would not like to think of those creatures roaming any land, especially not the home of our good friends the English.”

“We are still good friends?” Mal asked.

“Of course.” She gestured to her cabin. “I would not have come all this way if we did not wish to continue in friendship with you.”

She smiled, showing even white teeth, but something about her expression did not convince Mal.

“And is that all your news?” she went on. “It seems a long way to come, to say you have found nothing.”

“Well, since we no longer have aught to do in the north,” Mal said, “we thought we might be of help here.”

“Indeed.” Adjaan continued to smile, but her tone was icy.

Mal put down his cup. “The guisers are our enemies as well as yours, honoured one. And I have vowed to drive them from England.”

“You? A kiaqnehet?”

The word meant broken soul, abomination. Mal ignored the insult. Their mission was more important than petty squabblings over skrayling dogma.

“My brother has been teaching me. How do you think we determined there were no devourers – no hrrith – in our lands?”

“Show me.”

“Now?”

“Why not now? It will be quiet; even your enemies are unlikely to be around at this time of day.”

She motioned to Sandy, who stood up and began closing the doors of the hut. Mal laid his hands in his lap and closed his eyes, forcing himself to breathe more slowly. No, not forcing. That would not work. He breathed again, focusing on the play of light and colour behind his eyelids, letting his imagination draw pictures. The colours rippled and flowed past him, so that he felt as if he were running down a narrow alley with high walls on either side… A moment later he stepped out onto the familiar open plain of the dreamlands, twilit and silent.

“A little clumsy,” said a voice at his side, “but better than I expected.”

He turned to see Adjaan, and Sandy beyond her. She was as tall as them both now, or perhaps they were as short as her; it was hard to judge size in this featureless place.

The dreamlands were not entirely empty, of course, not even at this hour. A scatter of golden lights on a nearby slope marked the city full of humans, and closer at hand the paler glow of skrayling dreamwalkers, some resting, some circling the compound.

“We patrol day and night,” Adjaan said. “Not a soul enters or leaves this compound without me knowing.”

“How far do they range?” Sandy asked.

“Not far. Our purpose is to guard our own people, not yours.”

Mal crouched and ran a hand through the cold, colourless grass. The earth – if such you could call it – felt different here: more alive, or perhaps less substantial.