‘Lady Sorrow . . .’ Here Lace and not Doorsy was the language of solemnity and ritual. ‘I bring a gift from your royal husband.’ Hathin spoke as loudly as she dared, but the soft air caught her voice like a moth between gloved hands and crushed the life out of it.
A sound – a sweet, sibilant rattling – somewhere above. Perhaps a threat. Perhaps an invitation.
Gripping the flower in one hand and Arilou’s hand in the other, Hathin advanced, hearing the white rocks crackle under her feet. She halted at a cleft stone, in which she placed the flower, its flaming tongue the only warm colour in the scene, for even Hathin and Arilou were now covered in white dust.
How would the white mountain react? Everyone knew that she was beloved of both the King of Fans and Spearhead, but nobody knew which of them she preferred. Would she take the bringing of a gift from her husband as a favour or a slight? For the King’s flower was a sign of her power over him, but also of her allegiance to him . . .
‘Lady Sorrow . . .’ Hathin spoke on impulse, but this time kept her voice at a whisper out of respect. ‘You deserve more gifts as bright as this. Lord Spearhead would burn a hole in the very sky if he knew that you were wearing such a token from your husband. He has been robbed of the sight of you, good lady – the only comfort he can be offered is the chance to send you a present fairer than this. Let me go to him, my lady – what message shall I take him from you?’
A faint hissing again, and a thin veil of white gravel and dust bounced and smoked down the slope to Hathin’s feet. Hathin stooped to fill her shaking hands with it and tied it carefully in a knotted cloth, for she was loath to spill a gift from Lady Sorrow to Lord Spearhead, particularly with Lady Sorrow watching.
It had looked like a trap. However desperate their situation, Brendril could not at first believe that the Lady Lost had really chosen to flee into the domain of Sorrow. The picture had to be a false trail to lure him to his destruction, and a clumsy one at that. But it was too clumsy, he realized. He was meant to see it, of course, but the longer he looked at it, the more certain he became that it could only be meant as a challenge. The Lady Lost had invited him to follow her if he dared.
Well, he would accept the challenge and follow his commission, even into the court of Sorrow.
And so he walked the plains of quiet, where great wraiths of mist hurried silently by without seeing him, until he came to the twin lakes, and between them a flower with a flame-coloured tongue. What kind of ward had the Lady Lost set up against him?
It is not in the nature of an Ashwalker to walk away from power. He knew that the volcano could not see him so, taking care to make no sound, he padded his way to the flower and gently stooped to pluck it from its cleft. Only as he did so did he notice that his hands were not their usual blue, but a deathly white. Too late he realized that he was covered in the white dust. The volcano could not see him, but she could see the ash. Right now a ghostly man-shape outlined in the fine ash would be clearly visible to her . . .
He started backwards, and his hasty heels kicked rocks to the left and right, filling the dead air with the gunshot crack of their collisions.
Above him there was a hiss, a rattle, a rumble, a growing roar. No time to dart from the path of Sorrow’s anger. The Ashwalker vanished beneath a torrent of rocks that ricocheted and crashed down the slope for a little age and then gradually stilled once more. For a long time dust sighed itself back to earth. The midnight blue figure was no more to be seen, and all was quiet again in the court of Sorrow.
For hours Hathin struggled down the slopes of Sorrow. The cloud hid everything, and Hathin had to listen all the while for the telltale hiss of rockslides. When the strain of supporting Arilou became too much for Hathin’s arms, and when her leg muscles were aching with each treacherous downwards step, Hathin let the pair of them tumble to the turf. There had been no trace of the Ashwalker for several miles.
After she had recovered a little, Hathin found shelter for them in a cave which was the cold remains of a great lava bubble, half collapsed. She was heaping leaves and dead furze around them to warm them when Arilou gave a physical jolt as if somebody had punched her. Her eyes seemed to fix on a location over Hathin’s shoulder. So wild was her look of horror that Hathin involuntarily glanced behind her. There was nothing, nothing but spiralling mist.
Arilou’s mouth dropped open, and a horrible, low, harsh sound came out, as though someone had squeezed her like a bellows and forced the noise out of her. A pause, then her jaw fell again and she started to scream – long, ragged, ugly, moaning screams, all the while staring rigidly at the mists.
Again Hathin found herself imagining an Arilou wandering invisible in search of her carelessly discarded body. She imagined this spectral Arilou moving among the houses of Sweetweather, then floating back to her village to find the huts gone, and only blackened marks where they had stood on the beach. And then following sandy tracks into the caves, perhaps even into the Path of the Gongs . . .
Arilou’s screams were white-hot lava. She started to move her arms wildly and stiffly from the elbow, beating at her own face.
‘Here! It’s me!’ Hathin grabbed Arilou’s hands and pressed them against her own face, hair, shoulders, so that Arilou might know and recognize them, even if she could not hear her voice. ‘I’m here! I’m with you. I’ve got you, I’ve still got you.’
She put her arms tightly around Arilou and rocked her until the screams became croaks, then gentle sobbed breaths. Hathin kept her arms around Arilou even when the two lay down to sleep.
It was only as exhaustion clouded her mind and she was slipping into sleep that Hathin wondered why the Ashwalker had not come running at the sound of Arilou’s screams. But no padding steps came, and it seemed the mists had swallowed him whole.
13
A Slippery Slope
‘Mr Prox?’
He felt an attentive hand on his shoulder, and with a sickening effort opened his eyes. Outside the window of the sedan chair, waving palms polished the sky to a burnished blue, and a white-faced house burned his mind.
‘We’re here, Mr Prox.’
His head seemed to be made of brass, and it took all his effort to raise it.
‘Here.’ A silver stopper was tweaked from a leather-bound bottle and the bottle was lifted briefly to Prox’s lips, allowing him a short swallow. He tried to take hold of the bottle, but it withdrew. ‘Forgive me – your stomach is still too weak to stand more than a sip at a time.’
The sedan door opened, and Prox almost fell out into a glaring hell of pitiless colours and sounds. How long had he been travelling? Days? He thought it was midday, but could not be sure. As the sedan carriers unburdened the elephant birds, setting down loaded packs, leather water bottles and cages thrumming with pigeons, Prox stared at them without knowing what he saw.
His left elbow was gently but firmly commandeered, and he gratefully leaned into the support.
‘I’m afraid they’ll want to greet you, but we can make it all quick and painless, I think,’ came the murmur in his ear as he was helped up the path towards the gleaming house.
‘Greet?’ Prox’s voice came out sounding rusty. ‘What? Who?’
But before there could be any answer, the whats and the whos came out of the house to meet him, all solicitous respect and ceremonial chains winking in the sun.
‘The governor here in New Warkbridge,’ murmured the helpful voice in his ear. ‘Deaf as a post. You only need to bow and smile at him.’
The governor was replaced by a young man with a painfully firm handshake and a sharp voice.
‘That’s the governor’s aide.’ Prox almost felt the murmur was taking place inside his own head. ‘He’d like nothing better than to get your support. Don’t let him push you into signing anything until you’ve rested.’
Other voices came at him from all directions and beat his mind like a gong.
‘After your ordeal naturally you’ll want to see some justice . . .’
‘. . . taken steps of our own which I think you’ll find . . .’
‘. . . a symbol . . .’
‘. . . for too long the Lace . . .’
‘. . . the Lace . . .’
‘. . . as soon as you’re well enough, of course,’ the governor’s aide was saying to him, ‘but I think everybody in the town would like to hear your story. Already feelings are running high about the loss of the Lost, and I think our townspeople have a right . . .’
Talking ceaselessly, the aide showed Prox to his room at the far end of the hall. It was with relief that Prox saw the door close between them.
Prox staggered forward, giving the merest, bleariest look around the chamber that had been prepared for him. Orchids. A yellow nugget of honeycomb in a china bowl. A tall flute of water. A four-poster. A four-poster? Was this room really meant for him? A writing desk. Ah, perhaps it was.
He tottered over and slumped in the chair before the desk. Whenever he was not touching his face, he was bothered by the feeling that it had been coated in wet clay. Examining himself in the scratched little mirror on the desk, it was easy to see why.
He could scarcely recognize himself. Great reddened blisters disfigured every inch of his face. Some of them were starting to harden like parchment. Others had burst, weeping a mess like egg yolk down his cheeks. The damage was worse across his forehead, cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, where it seemed he had no real skin left.
Prox stared, remembering the care he had always taken to be presentable. Once he had nicked his chin shaving and had driven himself mad all day imagining that everybody was staring. Everybody staring. His throat was too dry even for tears to swell in it so he reached for the slender bottle of water.
The first day adrift on the boat, there had been little to tell him how the sun was ravaging him. His skin had felt a little strange and tense, that was all. He had been far too busy battling vainly against the current and the storm with his splintered paddle to worry about it.
It was only that night he had been woken by a feeling that someone had placed a clammy mask against his skin. He had raised a hand to touch it, and had felt a searing pain as something tore under his tentative touch. Wetting his fingers with water from the shell and dabbing the place had not helped, and when in the madness of desperation he had cupped some sea water and flung it at his cheek, the agony had increased tenfold.
At that point he’d still been trying to ration the water in the shell the little Lace girl had given him. Soon after, though, he’d succumbed to thirst and taken a long drink. Ten minutes later he had been gripped by racking pains, vomiting, dizziness. The second day he’d meant to shield his face from the sun. However he had kept raising his head to look for imagined boats or villages along the coast, and somehow over and over he had woken to find himself staring upwards.
The second night and third day had been phantasm-ridden. His paddle had fallen from his grasp, he remembered that, and he’d stood to look for it, and then there had been a rushing roar in his ears, stars before his eyes that came and went and came and went and came and came and filled everything until the world went black. And then all the rest had been fireworks in red and gold, horizons twisting like ribbons, voices without owners . . .
He took a gulp, managed to halt himself before he drained the water bottle, then hesitated, the glass rim still touching his lips. Very slowly he set it down and turned around in his chair.
‘Who . . . ?’ Prox managed through his sandpaper throat. ‘Who . . . the hell . . . are you?’
The man who had supported Prox into the room, and then seated himself discreetly next to the wall, looked up from his study of the atlas by the bed. His eyes were a patient, pale hazel, with something crisply Cavalcaste about them, like an evening sky with snow behind it. Although he was over average height, he seemed to take up less space than he should, perhaps for the sake of tidiness. His garments were smart but unremarkable, a waistcoat and breeches of good grey wool, a modest knot of cravat.
Only his gently receding hair with its dusting of grey betrayed the fact that he was probably over forty, perhaps even over fifty. At present his narrow face wore an expression that was startled but gratified, as if it made a refreshing and amusing change to be noticed at all. There were bells attached to the back of his boots, marking him out as an official of some sort. When he moved his feet, however, they did not ring out.
‘My name is Camber.’ The same gentle, cat-footed tone that had murmured in Prox’s ear – the same attentive voice that had been Prox’s companion, he realized, for the last few days of travel. ‘We have introduced ourselves before, but you were . . . not well then, so I hardly expected you to remember. In fact, since you are likely to be peppered with many much more important introductions from now until autumn, you should feel free to forget my name as many times as you need to. My name does not come with a chain of office, Mr Prox. I am nothing. Nothing but a window – my job is to help you get a view on the situation so that you can make the decisions that face you.’
‘What . . . decisions?’
‘Well, this is unlikely to strike you as much of a silver lining . . . but your ordeal has made you something of a celebrity. You’re the “survivor”, you see. Politics is all about timing, and you’re a highly symbolic figure at a time when emotions are running very high. You have been told about the current crisis, do you remember?’
‘Skein . . .’ Prox tried to recall what he had been told during the days of fever.
‘Not just Skein,’ Camber said gently. ‘All of them. All the Lost are dead. At first we weren’t sure, but word has been arriving from the outlying areas in dribs and drabs, and it’s always the same story. The adults died on the same evening, within hours of each other. And then that very night every child known or strongly suspected to be a Lost passed away in exactly the same fashion. Oh, all but one, that is to say.’ Camber met Prox’s questioning gaze, and gave a short sigh. ‘Yes. Yes, you met her. Lady Lost Arilou of the Hollow Beasts cove. Of all the Lost in Gullstruck, only she survived. Strange, that.’
Prox thought of the serene-faced, grey-eyed young seer-ess. It pained him to imagine her a part of the conspiracy that had set him adrift. But her survival was too suspicious to ignore.
‘So what are you saying?’ he asked bluntly. ‘That the Hollow Beasts somehow murdered all the other Lost on the island so Lady Arilou would reign supreme?’
‘I am saying nothing,’ Camber answered quietly, ‘but one must look at the facts. Fact one: thanks to Inspector Skein’s letter we know that he was investigating some great conspiracy on the Coast of the Lace, and feared for his life. And his was the only Lost body never found. Fact two: the Hollow Beasts lied about his disappearance. Inspector Skein did not join you in the boat, nor did your mooring rope pull loose in the storm – it was cut. You were not meant to survive, Mr Prox, but you did, and thanks to you we have caught the Hollow Beasts out in two deliberate lies. Fact three: the only Lost left alive in the whole of Gullstruck is Lady Arilou of the Hollow Beasts.
‘I think we can be fairly sure that Skein found out a little too much in the cove of the Hollow Beasts, and the villagers had to kill him a few hours sooner than they expected. Which meant of course that they had to get you out of the way as well. Whoever else was a part of this great conspiracy, it seems obvious that the Hollow Beasts were at the heart of it.’
There was a long pause while Prox digested Camber’s words.
‘You need testimonials from me,’ Prox said at last, staring at his singed knuckles, ‘for their arrests. Is that it?’
Camber looked down and frowned slightly, as if something pained and embarrassed him.
‘If you are speaking of arrest for the villagers of the Hollow Beasts . . . no, we do not. We’ve just received some news about that. The fact is . . . by the time law and order had mobilized, the ordinary people of the area had taken justice into their own hands. There is no village of the Hollow Beasts now. It’s upsetting, I suppo
se, but it happened too quickly to be prevented . . .’ Camber spread his hands. They were long and elegant, well suited to the gesture. ‘The Hollow Beasts simply had no idea what they were unleashing on themselves.’
‘They’re all . . .’ Prox’s head was suddenly crowded with images – small fists waving shell necklaces at him, elderly creviced smiles . . . ‘Ancestors beyond, are you saying the village is destroyed?! There . . . There were children there – you’re not saying the children . . .’
Camber left a respectful silence before answering.
‘You’re a humane man,’ he said at last. ‘Of course this upsets you. It upsets me. Yes, innocence has suffered in the quest for the guilty, but that does not alter the fact that the guilty are still at large.’
‘But . . . if everyone there is dead . . .’
‘Not quite everybody. Nearly all of the inhabitants have been . . . accounted for. But their Lady Lost seems to be a very cool and practical young woman. It appears that as soon as trouble loomed she grabbed a companion and abandoned the village. There’s a warrant out for them, of course – the governor saw fit to hire an Ashwalker.’ Camber frowned for a moment and let the tip of his tongue show between his lips, as if testing the flavour of an opinion he might express and deciding against it. ‘But the fact is she’s disappeared. Which means of course that our problems are far from over.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Lost are gone, Mr Prox, and until it happened nobody really realized what a cataclysm like that would do to Gullstruck. We’re an island of provinces, separated by volcanoes, vicious ridges, swamps and jungles. Without the Lost, our communications systems simply collapse. We can’t report anything, we can’t find out anything, we can’t check anything. A hurricane could hit the north tomorrow, and we’d only know about it when it roared down the Wailing Way a few days later. Soon bandits, smugglers, pirates and cutthroats are going to realize that nobody’s mind is patrolling the hills to watch for them. Our fishermen and divers count on the Lost to spot shoals or delve through prime coral. Our merchants depend on being able to bargain with each other through the tidings huts – if they can’t, we’ll see some of our far-flung towns starving this winter.
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