"The moons didn't rise last night."
Jordan looked over at the window, where Nika stood with his hands clasped in front of him. He hadn't even realised it wasn't night anymore; the world outside was dark.
"What does that mean?" he muttered, "Something bad, I'm guessing."
"The dark season is here." Nika turned from the window and came to the bed. "How are you getting on?"
"Very badly." Jordan looked down at the tablet in his hand. It didn't look like he'd written his name. It didn't look like anything, really.
"It's not bad," Nika said.
Jordan looked at his handiwork and then back at the Unspoken, dubious. "Nictavian doesn't make any sense."
"It makes a lot of sense," Nika replied, "Once you know the patterns."
"What I don't understand," Jordan said, after another minute of staring suspiciously at his own writing, "is how we speak the same language but the writing is completely different."
"We speak Common," Nika said. It was clear the question pleased him. "Which is the most-spoken language in the Reach, hence the name. But there are fifteen languages in Nictaven, and that's not including dialects. If we didn't all share a form of written language, life would be much harder."
"So it's a code?"
"In essence. Learning this, you would be able to read a letter from someone who only spoke Tochk with no difficulty. It's taught in all schools, regardless of language or region."
"So that's why it's so hard." Jordan scowled. "I understand it more but at the same time understand it even less now you've said that."
Nika chuckled. "It was invented by the first of the Harkenn line when the family took power so he could communicate with all his subjects. It was a move for consolidation of power, but it stuck and expanded instead of fading away."
"He was one clever bugger, then."
"Oh, yes. The Harkenn line has always been exceptionally intelligent; it's how they've stayed on the throne this long. I've heard rumours that the current reigning Harkenn can speak all fifteen languages."
"Bollocks."
"Not necessarily." Nika tried to sound disapproving and failed. "But I never asked. Perhaps Yddris knows."
"I'd prefer to pretend people that clever don't exist."
"Why?"
"Because it makes me feel spectacularly dumb, is why." He darted a furtive glance Nika's way. "No offence."
Nika laughed. "Why would that cause me offence?"
"Yddris said you're really clever, and you do medicine, which is double points. Don't mean to imply I'm pretending you're stupid for my benefit."
"Oh dear, Jordan, I'm not that clever," Nika said, wiping his eyes. Jordan watched him with a faint smile. "Kiel bless you."
The mention of Yddris had cast a shadow over his mood, though, and he soon found his smile fading. He hadn't seen his tutor since the previous night, after Arlen broke in. He wouldn't have thought anything of it if it hadn't been for that, but this time it worried him.
"Does Yddris seem off to you?" he asked Nika tentatively. "You know him better than I do."
"Off in what sense?" A thread of worry became audible in Nika's voice.
Jordan picked out his words. "Withdrawn. Vague."
Nika laced his fingers together and settled more comfortably on the bed. Instead of answering, he said, "Jordan, what happened to you that night?"
"I'm not entirely sure myself," Jordan replied, around the panic in his throat. He should have seen this coming. "I woke up in the warehouse. I was tied to a chair. I didn't see who else was there. They just made threats and then let me go."
There – it was vague enough that Nika wouldn't guess, but not a total lie. He wasn't sure if the Unspoken could tell.
"Yddris lost his first apprentice."
Jordan blinked. That had not been a direction he had expected Nika to take.
"Lost? You mean..."
"He died." Nika bowed his head. "It was a Death attack, a freak accident. It was in the middle of the light season and the demon shouldn't have been anywhere near the city, so some speculated that someone baited it, that it was foul play. Whether he was the target, no one can say. Yddris arrived too late to save him. It wouldn't surprise me if he thought he'd lost you, too."
Jordan thought of Hap and Koen and how close they were; what either of them would do if they lost the other. It was hard to imagine. The two were inseparable; Koen could easily have passed as Hap's own son.
"Oh." He cursed himself for not thinking of anything better to say, but how was someone supposed to respond to that? He hadn't thought he and Yddris were that close.
"He had just received his acceptance for taking the black cloak," Nika continued, though Jordan wasn't sure he wanted him to. "They'd known each other for years and Yddris almost didn't take me on because of it. I don't think he ever did get over it."
"That's terrible," Jordan croaked. He had known he was Yddris's third apprentice, but had never asked about the first. Now he was glad he hadn't. "That's so terrible."
"I shouldn't be telling you this." Nika shook himself out and stood up. "Do you want to carry on?"
"Not really," Jordan said, fidgeting. "Where's Yddris now? I need to talk to him." Nika's hesitation was cautious, so he scrambled to add, "I won't mention this. Promise."
Nika relaxed. "Do you feel able to walk?"
They found Yddris in the courtyard of the inner keep, a small paved square of land surrounded on all sides by the towering castle walls. A lamp post in the centre of the yard picked out the edges of dark-leaved shrubs and trees, and along each side of the manicured pathways were rows of tea lights in metal dishes. Their flames flickered madly in the movement of their passage, all except for the candles picking out a hollow in the castle wall nearby, which housed a stone bench. Those candles burned green, and in the centre of the semi-circle, sitting cross-legged on the ground and ignoring the bench's existence, was Yddris.
"If you get too tired, come straight back inside," Nika murmured as they approached.
"I will." Jordan had no plans to go back inside, no matter how tired he was. He was sick of that bed. The air was fresh and cool against his skin, and the night sky was deep burnt umber streaked with orange from the reflections of thousands of fires. The effect was so mesmerising that Jordan almost forgot to miss the stars back home.
"Sit here," Yddris said, though he hadn't shown any outward acknowledgement that he knew Jordan was there. Jordan remembered the existence of astral signatures after a moment, but not before he'd had a small heart attack out of surprise. His tutor indicated the cobblestones opposite him, and Jordan gingerly lowered himself down. His back instantly set up a cacophony of protests.
"Do you feel her?" his tutor asked, as Jordan's magic was released to him. The castle walls and the courtyard pavements glowed with runes. Veins of green snaked their way up the trunk of a nearby tree, glittering.
"Feel who?" Jordan asked, and then blinked, the moment shattered. "Who's her?"
"Nictaven, dungbrain," Yddris said, "You see anyone else here? I assure you I'm not sitting on a maid."
"Didn't think you were sitting on her," Jordan muttered. "Stuffed under the bench, maybe. Or buried in the flowerbed."
"Check if you like," Yddris growled. "Insolent little shit."
"I'm joking," Jordan said. "Jeez."
He focused, guessing from his tutor's pointed silence that it was expected of him. He saw evidence of magic all around him, in the runes and living things of the courtyard garden, but only if he really concentrated did he hear that steady thrum of the current beneath them. He'd never heard it so quiet.
"It feels far away," he said. He refused to refer to magic like a person. Despite all he had been through and seen since his arrival in Nictaven, acknowledging any notion that magic was sentient was a toe over the line.
"It's the dark season, starting tonight." Yddris turned his face skyward, looking up at the moonless expanse. "Better get ready, boy. I have a feeling it'll be a bad one this year."
It was then that Jordan noticed Yddris's hands, which he'd never seen before without gloves on. His skin was laced with the dark tracings of magic, and Jordan couldn't believe he had never noticed that he had two fingers missing.
"Stuff the empty ones with a rag," Yddris said without looking at him. "You're not the only one who's never noticed."
"But..." Jordan began, and then sat back, startled. The little finger on Yddris's left hand and the middle finger on his right were both missing at the knuckle. His left hand's amputation was clean and smooth, but the right looked like it had fought to stay on. Knots and pits of scar tissue cut through the markings on the Unspoken's skin on the back of his hand, shining dimly in the candlelight.
"A tip for you, boy," Yddris murmured, seeming amused by his bafflement, "If you're not sure a fleshmonger is dead, don't swear at it."
Jordan caught a breath. "Would it be bad if I laughed?"
Yddris chuckled. "It wasn't my finest hour."
"Nika has scars like that up his arms," Jordan said, glancing at the missing little finger but deciding not to ask about it. Something about its cleanness unnerved him, and Yddris wasn't offering the information. "Are they from demons too?"
"Most of them," Yddris said, nodding. "It's a dangerous job. You're probably not doing it right if haven't collected a few scars by the time you take the black."
"That's encouraging," Jordan said, his skin prickling as if it could already feel demon claws raking through it.
"The others are from the time before he met me," Yddris said. "I rescued him from an auction when I realised he had potential."
"An...auction?"
"A slave auction. Proprietor tried to get me to buy him so I hit him over the head with his own gavel." Yddris cleared his throat. "Another tip for you – don't do that."
"Not making any promises on that one," Jordan said. "So is slavery legal here?"
"You can't take a Nictavian slave under any circumstances," Yddris said. "That's illegal. Foreigners like Angels have no legal protections unless they're in employment, so it's lucky you and your sister landed where you did." He sighed and dug his pipe out of the inside of his cloak. "You'd landed in Klinort, your sister would already be up the duff and a seventh wife to some rural shithead, and you'd be picking lint out of a Varthian chieftain's toenails with your teeth."
"Nika's not Nictavian?"
"Oh, he almost certainly is, but he doesn't look like your typical Nictavian and people don't like that. He never knew his parents, so even he doesn't know his heritage. No proof that he is or isn't, see."
Jordan sat back. He wasn't sure how he felt about having all this information about the people he lived with. It was easy to think of them as always having been demon catchers, exactly as they were. It was almost unnerving to think that once, neither Nika nor Yddris had had magic, and they'd walked the streets with their faces visible just like he had.
"How long have you known each other?" he asked, instead of pressing the point. He'd got more out of this than he'd bargained for.
"Oh, Kiel's teeth," Yddris groaned, leaning back against the bench and blowing a column of smoke out of his nose. "Twelve years, at least. Probably closer to thirteen. He took a lot longer to manifest than you did."
It was as if their conversation in Jordan's room had never happened. The vagueness in Yddris's manner was gone, and he had made no effort to mention any of it; Jordan couldn't tell if Yddris had told him all these things to stop him from bringing it up again. He was reluctant to broach the topic had intended to if his tutor had set it aside, especially since he hadn't been sure about it in the first place. Asking a near-stranger, with far-superior fighting skills and whose face Jordan had never seen, if he knew a ruthless crime lord personally wasn't something he was rushing to do. He had tried to reason out that Laurel had known who Usk was by sight, and that Yddris might just know Marick from hearsay, but he couldn't quite convince himself of it.
His magic sparked, responding to a change in the air around him. He looked up at one of the castle towers and saw a dark winged shape peel away from the wall and disappear below the battlements. He turned to Yddris, heart in his throat, and found his tutor looking in the same direction.
"Marrowhawk," Yddris said, as if pointing out a sparrow, though the creature had easily been the size of a large human. "Inhabit the scrublands and the Aven's floodplains for most of the year. Nasty buggers."
"Do I want to know where it got its name?"
"It eats bones," Yddris said. "Leaves its prey a big wobbly sack of meat and makes off with the skeleton. Some of them have learned how to take them out almost whole, leaving the right sinews and tendons in place."
"That is way more information than I wanted," Jordan said, feeling sick. He steadied himself on the courtyard cobbles and felt reverberations deep in the current of magic, like aftershocks. "Did it hit a rune?"
"It hit the rune net, yes," Yddris said, voice tinged with pride. "Good lad. Harkenn'll be glad he commissioned Koen to touch up the net on the barracks." He got to his feet, and Jordan followed suit, slower as his back and head protested. "Marrowhawks always arrive first. Their night vision is terrible so cities are easier hunting. Though the first night isn't usually this busy."
Yddris began to walk out of the courtyard, back the way Nika had gone. He didn't rein in Jordan's magic again, which Jordan would never admit to being grateful for – he resented the Gift more than anything, but letting it free of its constraints felt like taking a deep first breath after a long time underwater. Every time it happened the relief was more acute, his senses that bit sharper. He was more aware of the world around him than he ever had been at home; the people around him, passing them in corridors and moving elsewhere in the castle, were like pinpricks of flame in his subconscious, sparks of life. Yddris was like a bonfire, and he could feel Nika too, a stronger flame not too far away from them.
There were no runes on the inside of the castle, and the magic felt muffled by thick stone. Jordan flinched as they stepped inside. He remembered a conversation he had had with Killian, back when all this had just started, about why Unspoken slept on the ground if they could. Jordan never had understood it, but if this was how all Unspoken without constraints on their magic felt while inside buildings – stifled, claustrophobic and cut off – he understood it now.
He must have made some kind of involuntary noise, because Yddris turned around.
"I can rein it back in if you want," he said. "The castle is particularly bad for it."
Jordan shook his head. "Gotta get used to it, haven't I?"
"Yes." Yddris sounded approving. "We won't be inside for long. I want to show you something."
He led Jordan in the opposite direction to his room, down a long straight corridor and then another, until at last they reached one Jordan recognised. His bowels clenched at the sight of the dark mouth of the dungeon stairs, the memory of being frogmarched into the dusty gloom with no idea what had happened or where they were still painfully fresh. There were people down in the cells; he could feel their flames. One of them felt strange, but Yddris didn't give him time to linger. The Unspoken had taken a left and was holding open a hidden door in the wall.
The narrow corridor beyond was rune-warded on both sides, lighting a space that for anyone else would have been pitch dark. Jordan breathed as the claustrophobia eased, and slipped off one glove to touch a finger to one of the runes. A light shock passed from the wall to his skin, that sense of rightness and the deep thrum rising for just a second before he let his hand fall away.
"Don't fiddle too much," Yddris said. Jordan pulled his glove back on in a hurry. "Your magic might warp the net by accident and you'd be paying Koen for the repair."
"So do you do rune work?" Jordan asked, glancing guiltily at the rune once more and burying his hands in his pockets.
"Got no knack for it," Yddris said, "Using runes for casting against a demon and correctly netting a building are two very different skills. I've never known anyone better at it than Hap, and Koen's taken after him. Nika can do a decent job, but he'll only do it in a pinch. His talent is in medicine, always has been." He grunted. "Don't know where he got that from, but it wasn't me."
They had reached a ladder in the wall. It was little more than an ascending set of metal rungs bolted to the stone, but Yddris started climbing without hesitation. Jordan followed, ignoring the memories of the warehouse swarming to the surface and the deep ache that instantly reignited between his shoulders. They emerged on the ramparts, a thick curtain wall with lit fire holders ranged at equal distances along the crenulations. The city was spread out below them, the dark ribbon of the Aven visible from the gap in the lights. The whole city was ablaze with thousands of fires, big and small, in every direction. Beyond the glittering metropolis loomed the hulks of the mountains, no longer shining green. Jordan jumped as another winged shadow flickered over the lights and vanished, and somewhere nearby he heard something wailing.
"Do you see it?" Yddris asked. Thinking his tutor meant the Marrowhawk that just flown past, Jordan nodded until he realised Yddris was pointing in the other direction. "Come on, you can see it better from just down here."
They edged along the wall until Jordan saw it; it hadn't been visible when the mountains had also been illuminated by magic, but through a gap between two of the peaks, something winked bright emerald. He squinted, but couldn't make out a shape. It appeared to be a wall, constructed entirely out of magic, like the weapons he had seen the Unspoken use against demons.
"That," Yddris said, "is the Whispering Wall. Just a small part of it, mind, and it's further away than it looks. It follows the borders of the settled world."
"What is it?"
"There's lots of speculation," Yddris said. "In Kelian lore it's a gate to the afterlife, and the Nicts take a harder line and say it's the gate to the Pit. The Orthanians think it's a border and that there is more land we could inhabit on the other side. Got war on the brain, the Orthanians. Varthians believe it's a spirit realm, the Heretical Orders, who knows. Keep to 'emselves, mostly, them."
"Why's it called the Whispering Wall?"
"Because it whispers," Yddris said, faintly mocking. "And it is..."
"A wall?" Jordan suggested, rolling his eyes. "You know what, fuck you."
Yddris laughed. "Hence all the afterlife theories. But no one's ever been past it and lived to tell the tale. One of the Harkenns, Kiel knows I can't remember which, sent out a scout party to try and cross it. Every one of them was incinerated instantly."
"What do the Unspoken believe?"
Yddris was silent a moment. "That it's not a gate anywhere. The Wall is a surface manifestation of Nictaven itself, a sign that everything is still stable. It lives in all of us, and we live because of it. Without it, none of this could exist."
They both looked up as the Marrowhawk returned for another round. Up close, it was a grotesque caricature of a bird, with leathery wings and a thick, sharp beak. Large eyes sat on either side of its head, the irises ice-white. Its talons were spattered with something dark and gelatinous and Jordan felt his gorge rise. They watched it rebound off the rune net with a blaze of light and an enraged shriek before it plummeted back down, reappearing a second later as a dark arrow over the city.
Yddris sighed. "Gods help us if that wall ever fails."