Wolf Star Rise: The Claidi Journals Book 2, Tanith Lee [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

any comment on him at all. There was only one. ‘He’s intelligent.’ That was it. I suppose she did mean Venn?

Had she ever loved him or been interested in him?

She hadn’t wanted him.

This is all rather—I don’t like putting this down. In a way, he’s let me pay him out for reading my own book, letting me see this.

From what I could make out, no one was at the Rise but for her, and her servants, though Families of the Towers had been living there in earlier times. There was one mention of local people – ‘Otherlanders’ – arriving on a sort of visit. She made no comment.

On one page there was a beautiful, involved description of a new plant she’d somehow grown, a mix of a lilac and a pear, that produced fragrant purple fruit. She cared about that. Then again, three pages later, she just says, ‘Mauve thing died.’ So. (Where are her other notes on her endless experiments – the vrabburrs and dolls, the moving rooms—?)

But there was one long passage which may have been why he gave me the book to read. It isn’t about him, or about her. It’s about what she was sent here to do, twenty years or so ago.

I read it, and thought she’d made it up, or was talking in some clever way that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.

But then it seemed she did mean it, so she was mad.

Then again – there are things here – if I hadn’t seen them, I’d have thought they were all lies.

He was leaning on the railing a long way off across the roof, looking out towards a deepening red sunset.

‘Venn … can I ask you? This stuff about creating the jungle – these things about plants and animals being bred here, and then taken away to the Towers and Houses and so on – as if this was a sort of farm, or workshop, for the benefit of the places back over the sea – it isn’t true, is it?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

The short sunset was already ending, and I’d missed most of it. I’d really wanted to see it from up here, too – after all, the library might not still be up here tomorrow, or we might not. (We won’t be.)

‘But – she seems to say they sent her here to make the jungle – where there was mostly a desert waste—’

‘Yes. That’s why they sent her. Apart from punishing her, of course, for irritating them all.’

‘How could she do that? Make a jungle?’

‘How could she do any of it? Think of the animals. Think of Jotto.’

‘But the jungle-forest is immense – and natural.’

‘She was very clever and she worked very hard. And she had lots of machines she herself invented, to help her. Planting and sowing, working out systems to water everything or bring rain – she did most of it in the first two years. Then, because of how she’d arranged it all, the jungle grew and spread itself. I can remember bare places, long areas of sand, even when I was seven or eight, that grew over, filled up. I used to like all that, before I got used to it.’

The red was maroon now, and going out. Soaked up by the vast sponge of the jungle. In the afterglow, a white ghost came wheeling through the sky below, on two wide sails.

Venn held out his arm, and the owl veered slowly in and alighted on him, folding its vast ghostly wings. ‘Hallo, owl,’ he said to it, and it turned its head, that way they do, almost all around, like a stopper in a bottle, to look at him.

‘Even the owl,’ said Venn.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You think he’s quite real, don’t you?’

‘The owl is a doll?’

‘Yes, Claidi. Once a month, Jotto or Grem or I undo a little panel – look, under the feathers, there – and oil him. He’s two years younger than me. She made him for me and gave him to me that day, when she said, ‘You’re two, now.’ The day she changed.’

‘But – he eats things!’

‘But he’s not supposed to.’

The owl settled. It closed its eyes and all the light went from the sky.

‘I missed the sunset, reading her journal,’ I lamely said.

‘Never mind. You’ll see the Star come up in a minute. I wanted you to see that, Claidi, from here. Let’s go over to the east side of the roof.’

Down and down, the miles and miles and miles of now-dimming forest. The huge, sky-touching trees and knitting of creepers that cover and devour everything – roads, statues – vegetable lushness and life.

Ustareth made all that. Can it be possible?

Venn must hate his father, too, this unknown prince with the ugly name – Narsident, from the Vulture Tower.

‘She doesn’t,’ I said, ‘say much about her experiments. And – did she have a special room in the Rise where she worked?’

‘No,’ he said. I was going to say, Then where? but he said, ‘Come here, Claidi. The Wolf Star’s coming up. I want you to see.’

‘I don’t like your Star.’

‘You said. It isn’t mine.’

We stood there.

There was a gleam, in the distance, and down. I thought it was a lake or something I’d never been high enough to see before, catching the rays of the Star – which I couldn’t yet see either.

But the glow got unbearably fiercer and whiter, until it was almost blinding.

‘You’re not missing that, are you, Claidi-Claidis?’

‘What is it?’

‘What do you think, madam?’

‘Something’s on fire – white fire.’

‘Almost.’

And then the scorching blaze began, inch by inch – in fact mile by mile – to rise. Up out of the forests. Up into the eastern air. Up and up. It was clear of the land and into the sky, now.

‘The Star—’ I said.

He said nothing.

‘But Venn – it didn’t come over the horizon how a star would—’

‘No.’

‘It came up from the jungle!’

‘Ustareth made that too,’ he said. Already the blue-white glare had drained his face of any colour. ‘It’s