Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  When he shut out the world again, he sat down feeling older than his years. So Minchard Prox had survived. And his testimony showed the lie in many things the Hollow Beasts village had claimed.

  Whatever dark fate had claimed Skein on the night of the storm, the Hollow Beasts had lied about it. Skein had feared for his life, and had said so in a letter to Sightlord Fain. Perhaps there really had been a conspiracy to kill all the Lost and raise the Lace once more to their long-lost position of power. Perhaps Skein had suspected something and come to the coast to investigate. That would make sense. He must have jotted his fears and discoveries down in his journal . . . forcing the Lace to tear out the incriminating pages after they had killed him.

  And who had been the Lace’s ringleader in all this? The governor could not imagine a community without a single leader, and who better to run the great Lace conspiracy than their one Lady Lost?

  Most of the dead Lost were not the governor’s problem, but two of them had died within his personal jurisdiction. He had to be seen to do something, and his people had told him what they wanted. Law and order must be protected, he told himself, glancing about his tidy, candlelit parlour for reassurance, sometimes at the expense of law and order. He had sent a message to Port Suddenwind asking for instructions, of course – and perhaps decades hence one of his successors would actually receive the reply to his letter. And when it did arrive it would probably quote some ancient Cavalcaste law, maybe decreeing that the guilty parties should have their yak herds confiscated, or that the whole town should wear beaver fur hats out of respect for the newly dead.

  So he reached for a pen to write out a licence for the Ashwalker known as Brendril, granting him the right to pursue the Lady Lost known as Arilou and any companions assisting her on a charge of Conspiracy to Murder Milady Page and the Lost Inspector Raglan Skein.

  Brendril was not sleeping when the message came. There was a bright moon, so he was half reclined in the hammock behind his shack, grinding a murderous smuggler’s knuckle bones into a fine creamy powder with a pestle and mortar.

  Laid out carefully on the ground near the hammock was a folded pile of the smuggler’s clothes. Brendril had spent the day washing the bloodstains out of them and darning the knife slashes, for he was nothing if not conscientious. In a leather bag on top lay the dead man’s earring, his water-skin and the shining blob of one metal tooth that had melted in the pyre. All of these he intended to take to the governor the next day. Brendril’s payment was the ash, and he was determined that he would take nothing more of value, or even allow it to be lost by his negligence.

  It was a hazy, smoky, sultry night and his mind was at peace, the rhythmic grinding of the pestle sounding like a cricket in his ear, a little smoke still seeping from the pyre. He no longer smelt the acrid stench from the yellow, foamy broth in the dyeing vats and the crumbs of indigo mulch drying on the palm-frond mats, or the sickening stink of molten fat. He no longer felt the bite of the ticks beneath the clothes he never removed. His eyes were almost closed, little crescent moons in a face of midnight blue.

  They widened in an instant as a loud clatter wakened the jungle beyond the clearing. In several directions he heard scuffled retreats through the undergrowth. Most were almost certainly wild turkeys frightened from their grit-picking. The loudest, however, was probably a human animal whose courage had lasted long enough for them to ring the wooden summons bell, but no longer.

  Sliding barefoot from his hammock, the Ashwalker slipped into the jungle. He noticed no chafe of his clothing, for in his mind he wore only spirits sewn one to another piecemeal – each garment’s dye containing the cremation ash of a dead criminal. He seemed to feel the way the bandanna around his head blessed his sight, the dribbles of indigo that streaked his forehead and eyelids teaching his eyes to see in the dark. He did not even notice the briars, since a set of patterns in the clouds had once told him that his kerchief would numb the pain of all thorns and stings.

  The wooden bell hung from a tree, nothing but half a barrel with a shinbone for a clapper. Beside it the other half of the barrel waited for messages, pleas, gifts. Today a small scroll in a leather case awaited him. He read it carefully, gripping the very corners so as not to stain them with the indigo that painted every inch of his skin.

  He had been waiting for this. A licence to hunt down those responsible for the deaths of Inspector Skein and Milady Page. The killers were thought to have fled into the cave network. At the bottom of the paper he read the name of his quarry, and experienced a shimmer of what in another person might have been called excitement.

  A Lost. Who could guess what powers a Lost would give him if persuaded into indigo?

  Brendril slipped back to his hut and dressed quickly for the hunt. According to the papers he had been sent, the Hollow Beasts on the beach had tried to lose their pursuers in the network of caves that riddled the hillside. This Lace Lost would try to do the same. But there were several entrances to the cave labyrinth, and the largest was close by.

  Soon Brendril was picking his surefooted way through the nocturnal thicket, in the direction of the Sweetweather shaft.

  As Hathin and Arilou neared the Sweetweather shaft the ground started to dip and the trees grew in height as if determined to disguise the treacherous drop. The main shaft was a great, steep, funnel-shaped descent some thirty feet deep. However, Hathin avoided this and hunted out a much smaller cave entrance behind a splay of giant ferns, known only to the Lace, and pulled Arilou into the earthy-smelling darkness after her. A barely controlled slither down a steep tunnel, a squeeze through a narrow crevice, and they were in the cavern of the teeth.

  In the first instant Hathin saw that none of the village was there waiting for them. In the second instant she saw why, and her blood ran cold.

  Everywhere about her, the great hanging teeth of the cavern had been smashed from their roots and shattered, and the pieces piled up with diabolical care to form a heap in the black pool which led to the Path of the Gongs. The entrance to the underwater tunnel was completely blocked.

  ‘No!’

  Stealth forgotten, Hathin staggered to the pool and waded in, losing her footing and scraping herself on the shards of rock. Her shaking, icy fingers grappled one jagged stone piece after another and flung them out of the pool. Even though she knew that the villagers would always send someone to check that the Path was safe, she could not help imagining her family and the other villagers trapped in the musical darkness of the underwater passage . . .

  ‘Arilou! Please! You’ve got to help me, you’ve got to . . . please, just this once!’ Many of the rocks were too big for Hathin to lift alone, even with the strength of desperation. There had clearly been several people busy there, making sure that this end of the Path was blocked before the attack on the beach. ‘Arilou! I can’t do this by myself!’ She ducked her head beneath the water, and tried to shift a great, molar-shaped rock away from the hidden opening. As she tucked her arms around it, she felt something brush against her wrist.

  She released the rock and grabbed towards the trailing touch. With a shock she found that she was gripping an icy hand. For a moment she thought it had deliberately slid into her grasp, but the hand was too cold and the wrist had no pulse. Hathin jerked convulsively away from the contact, and her fingers caught in the bracelet which was floating in a soft ring around the other’s wrist. Hathin’s eyes and nose and mouth filled with water and she burst to the surface, choking and streaming and staring at the shark’s tooth bracelet that her sudden motion had torn from the cold wrist.

  There had been no time for the villagers to send a scout ahead up the Path of the Gongs. The attacking towners had known about the cave of the Scorpion’s Tail, and with the sound of pursuit behind them, the Lace had had no choice but to slip into icy darkness and trust to the mercy of the mountain. And so the foremost had drowned, grappling desperately with the rocky barrier, the others behind her unwittingly blocking her retreat, knowing only that she did n
ot advance, and unable to retreat themselves as the air died in their lungs . . .

  The bracelet belonged to Whish. The best diver was always sent first along the Path, and Whish was the second best. Eiven had not even reached the caves.

  Hathin staggered out of the water, feeling new cuts and scrapes chilling on contact with the air. Arilou leaned back against the wall with the serenity of a blind seer, her head a little tipped back so that stray droplets from the roof could fall into her slack, beautiful mouth. And this, more than anything, was beyond bearing.

  ‘I should have let the Death Rattle take you!’ The caves’ many voices joined Hathin in a chorus. ‘I should have let Whish push you into the sea! Then none of this would have happened! All of this, all of this, happened because of you!’

  There was a sharp, palm-sized shard of pure white stone in Hathin’s hand, and something savage seemed to have control of all her muscles. Arilou stirred her head a little, as if she had felt rather than seen a shadow fall upon her, and then her throat moved clumsily, and she continued her parched and pathetic attempts to catch in her mouth the meagre drips from the roof.

  Hathin hurled away the shard of rock, and saw it shock apart against the opposite wall. Once the stone was out of her hand the rage abandoned her and left her shaking. Unsteadily she knelt, cupped water from the pool and brought it over to Arilou. She could not help it.

  Arilou had barely taken a gulp when Hathin jerked into alertness, her ears catching a distant sound from back down the tunnel. A spit and spack, the crack and tumble of tiny rocks. Somebody was descending the spiral path down the main Sweetweather shaft.

  Could it be another fugitive from the Hollow Beasts? No. Any Lace would have used the small, secret tunnel. Whoever was coming, it was not a friend.

  Hathin hurriedly heaved her sister to her feet. If any of the village had survived, they would have taken the route further into the mountain. So Hathin turned toward the darkness of the deeper caverns with the weight of her sister on her shoulder. Hope refused to die, and beat in Hathin’s chest like a fist.

  11

  Dread of Dyeing

  Brendril had hoped to start the hunt alone. When he was halfway down the Sweetweather shaft, however, he looked up and noticed a number of the townsmen staring down at him from the brink. They had taken one look at his raven-wing blue figure and known him for what he was. They had smelt a kill in the offing, and because the angry blood was still banging in their veins they had decided they wanted a part in it. And so they had followed him, their faces filled with uncertain hostility as though he had already told them to go away. He thought of flies on a fallen fruit and said nothing. Brush them away, and they would come back, perhaps even sting.

  The trick to descending the great shaft was to find the edge before it found you, and then descend it in a very gradual spiral, like flotsam drawn down the funnel of a whirlpool in slow motion. Otherwise, you were likely to find yourself treading air and darkness for a second and an eternity. While Brendril was gently manoeuvring his way from invisible ledge to imperceptible handhold, it became clear that a couple of his new followers were a little unclear on this trick. However, there seemed no point in letting the resultant screams distract him, so he continued without looking up or down.

  At the bottom, while the towners were fashioning makeshift stretchers for their injured and filling the caves with noise and the smell of their rushlights, Brendril examined the caverns, looking for traces of his quarries and some clue to which of the many passages they had chosen for their retreat. Beside a black pool littered with rock shards he found what he was looking for – and yet, it was not what he had been expecting.

  On the pale rock floor were prints from two very different sets of feet. One solitary print was pinkish with dust and showed the outline of a narrow foot with long toes and a tendency to roll. A second set of feet had left wet prints leading from the pool into one of the nearby tunnels. These feet were smaller, shorter and more squarely placed.

  What surprised Brendril was the size of the prints. He had not thought to ask the age of the Lady Lost and her retainer. For the first time he realized that he was on the trail of children. It did not so much stir an emotion in him as make him aware of the place where it should have been, like a tongue-tip finding out a narrow hole and remembering the missing tooth.

  Wet footprints dry quickly. The young fugitives could not be far ahead of him. Brendril set off in pursuit.

  At this moment, the owner of the wet prints was stumbling through the darkening tunnels, lips moving as if in prayer. But Hathin was not praying.

  She had never walked these caverns, but nonetheless she knew them. Some of the stories taught to Lace children were nothing but old legends, but others had meanings encoded in them. The version of the Legend of the Rivals that was taught in the village of the Hollow Beasts was also a means of remembering a list of directions. As she took each shivering step, Hathin was allowing Mother Govrie’s soft, storytelling voice to speak in her mind.

  For centuries the King of Fans thought of nothing but dancing with the great plumed fans of cloud he used to shield his head. One day when he paused weary, the fans drooped in his hands and for the first time he glimpsed Sorrow. A silver river of tears formed in his eyes as he beheld her beauty. He took her to wife, and was so in love that it was some time before he noticed how strangely and coldly his wife received his tender caresses . . .

  So far, the story had guided her between two rocky outcrops shaped like fans, through a narrow wedge-shaped tunnel where water ran over the walls like tears, then through a hole as round as a wedding ring.

  Where now? What came next?

  There was a whisper from the walls around her, as if the shadow was trying to answer. The tunnel was widening to either side, and the darkness before and above her was alive with winged movement. Hathin realized she stood at the edge of a vast cavern, in which the shadow spun, slung and snatched fragments of itself. It was flickering and whirling with bats.

  . . . One day as he approached her chamber the King of Fans heard voices and knew that his wife was with his own brother, Spearhead. His heart, which had overflowed with love, became filled with dark rage, and winged imps of jealousy . . .

  The cavern was the largest she had ever seen, an enormous ghost ballroom with stalactite chandeliers. Bats blackened the high ceiling, flitting crazily or clustering suspended, each a neat little dangling triangular package, heads a-twitch. Hundreds, thousands of bats. Their dung was piled waist-high on the floor like dull oatmeal, so that you could barely see where the funnel-shaped floor descended to a great pool in the centre, fed by drips from the ravaged ceiling.

  It was important not to enter this cave, Hathin suddenly remembered, not to walk into the King’s anger. She faltered, again trying to remember the next part of the story, all too aware of the growing sounds of pursuit from the tunnels behind them. Arilou slithered and lurched, nearly losing her footing, and Hathin flinched as the rattle of her shell bracelets was taken up by the echo.

  She snatched off her own bracelets and those of Arilou, and stared down at them with a sudden pang. They were treasures, painstakingly built up a shell at a time over years . . . but survival depended on silence.

  Hathin covered her face and darted into the cavern. She dropped the fistful of bracelets on to the nearest vast, soft mound of bat dung, kicked droppings over to hide it and withdrew before the fumes of the mounds could start to poison her lungs. She did not need legends to warn her of the dangers of grottoes such as these.

  Brendril continued through narrow veins linking little antechambers, all the while painfully aware of the glow of the towners’ torches close behind him. After some time he started to notice the bats, first in ones and twos. And then there were more, a dozen, then dozens, then tens of dozens.

  He reached the edge of the great bat domain, and his attention was caught by one of the heaps of dung. There was a slight dint and disturbance, as if it had been stirred by a rece
nt step.

  Brendril was about to cross the threshold when by pure chance he saw a pattern of bulges on the opposite wall, and recognized among them a macaw-like beak and beneath it the shape of a cruel human mouth. The old paint was long-faded, but this cave was an ancient Lace temple, guarded by a demon shaped like the Gripping Bird. Brendril felt suddenly breathless.

  Another step forward, and he would have placed himself in a sacred domain. His control over the captive spirits in his clothing would no doubt have been broken instantly. Ashwalkers were not priests, and they avoided temples.

  He turned and edged back along the tunnel, into confrontation with his now perplexed and angry followers. For once he did allow himself to speak with them, since they clearly needed some reason for the whole queue of them to retreat and let him past. His explanation was passed along the line.

  ‘He says he can’t cross the cavern,’ he could faintly hear one of the furthermost explaining in weary disgust, ‘or his trousers will stop working.’

  They pulled back to let him through, and murmured as he scouted around, staring intensely at the walls. However, when they found him determined to travel up a rocky mousehole tunnel too small for anything but wriggling on one’s belly, murmurs became challenges. The general feeling among those whose trousers had nothing to fear from macaw demons was that they would rather cross the bat ballroom that the fugitives apparently had passed through than wedge themselves like corks in a pipe that they almost certainly hadn’t.

  And so as Brendril wriggled slowly up the ‘mousehole’, taking care not to rip his tunic and feeling little breezes lick at his face from a hidden opening somewhere ahead, he heard the rest of the search party slithering and splashing through the ballroom, calling to each other as they looked for the next cavern, their voices getting fainter as they ventured into further reaches of the bat palace.