‘And the dark conspiracy surrounding Arilou clearly counted on all of this. They must have thought that we would have no choice but to turn to the Lace, to their Lady Lost and their farsight fish. Rather a nice chance to trade in their shell necklaces for governors’ chains, don’t you think? This is more than the actions of one village, Mr Prox. This conspiracy must have had agents in every village, every town, ready to strike down every single Lost, all at the same time. This “night of the long knives” must have taken a great deal of plotting and, whatever the conspiracy plans to do next, Arilou must be central to it. We are looking at a secret organization of Lace who have never forgotten the power their people once wielded, and who thought they saw a way to rise again. And in Arilou they have a leader, a sacred totem.’
‘She wasn’t more than a child herself,’ Prox murmured almost to himself. ‘Thirteen, fourteen.’
‘I’m sure you know what you’re talking about,’ Camber responded quietly, ‘but I’ve always found it hard to judge the age of Lace. They’re generally so small and slight for their years.’
‘Is there no doubt that she was involved? Could she be a pawn in all this?’
‘Well, I daresay you can judge that better than I.’ Again a sustained respectful pause which made Prox feel stupid. ‘I had heard that the Hollow Beasts had no chief or priest, but if you witnessed someone other than the Lady Lost running the village, then that would of course be useful for us to know.’
Camber regarded what was left of Prox’s face for a few moments and then stood. ‘Mr Prox, I am trespassing upon your rest. Let us leave this until tomorrow.’
‘Wait . . .’ Prox struggled out of his chair. ‘You still haven’t told me – what does everybody want me to do?’
‘They want you to take charge, Mr Prox. Somebody must, to stop anarchy breaking out, to make sure that everyone is working together against the Lace threat. Somebody needs to find Arilou, before she can rally her troops and do any more damage. You’re everyone’s hero at the moment, people will listen to you – and my superiors are impressed by your organizational record.’
‘But how? I’d need to check with Port Suddenwind, and . . .’ Prox trailed off. It was unnecessary to say more. If he wrote to them asking for authority to deal with the Lace threat, he would probably wait six months and then get a letter giving him permission to add lacework to his saddlebags.
‘There’s a way. Two hundred years ago, when our ancestors needed to find a way of purging the Lace for the good of Gullstruck, they discovered that the existing Cavalcaste murder laws prevented the purge only if the Lace were legally considered to be people. And so they drew up a new law stating that if the Lace became too numerous or troublesome then legally they ceased to be people, and were considered to be . . . well . . . timber wolves. And naturally, if there’s a plague of two-legged timber wolves you can declare a Time of Nuisance, and elect a Nuisance Control Officer with immediate and automatic island-wide authority to . . . control it. An officer who can act freely, without needing permission for everything from Port Suddenwind.’
‘So you think if I became Nuisance Control Officer . . .’
‘Oh, I don’t think. I’m merely a channel, a utensil. But right now I’m a utensil dedicated to making sure that nobody bullies you into a decision until you’re rested, Mr Prox.’
Prox stared at the mirror again. What kind of face would stare back at him when the blisters were no more?
You were not meant to survive . . . With a pang Prox remembered Camber’s words. Again he recalled his vomiting in the boat, and wondered if the water in the shell had been poisoned. Had the village been planning his destruction even then? He tried to recall why he had felt a rush of affection and trust for the girl who had run to him with the water. But his mind was still dazzled by the white-hot madness of the three days on the boat, and he could not remember her features.
‘I don’t need to rest before making a decision,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll lead the hunt for the Lady Arilou.’
Camber inclined his head in a small, slow bow. ‘Then you will have the papers on your desk tomorrow morning, Mr Prox, ready to be signed. And I’ll make arrangements for the town courthouse to be turned over to you so you can use it as a base of operations.’
‘We’ll need to send armed men to Sweetweather,’ Prox muttered to himself. ‘No more massacres. No more mob violence.’
‘Of course. It will take time, through. Obviously there’s no path through the volcanoes’ domain, so from here the shortest practical route is due south, then west through Rogue’s Pass, and north up the coast to Sweetweather. Four days’ journey at least.’
Prox glanced towards the window and flinched as a lance of sunlight struck his eye. Something was troubling him, something to do with what he had just been told, something to do with the papers promised on the morrow. But he could not work out what it was. ‘Where . . . ? Where did you say we were again?’
‘New Warkbridge, or so the maps have it,’ came the answer, ‘but nobody calls it that. You’ll have heard of the town as Mistleman’s Blunder.’
Hathin was woken by sunlight in her eyes and sat up to peer out of the lava bubble.
The clouds that had cloaked everything had receded before the growing heat of the day. It was as if Sorrow herself and her weird white world had drawn back from them with a hiss of white skirts. The sky was a deepening blue, and the crumbly, creamy earth around them was dotted with small blue and pink flowers and little mounds left by burrowing birds. Somehow, miraculously, they had survived to see the sun again. To judge by its height it must be nearing noon. Dizzily she realized that it could only be a matter of twelve hours or so since she had fled the mob with Arilou.
Hathin emerged blinking into sunlight and found that she was standing on a promontory. Before her lay a vast, flattened vista. There below was the Wailing Way, the long trench that Spearhead had carved in his furious departure, the thread of the river meandering along its base. In the far distance the land rolled and rucked, and Spearhead himself could be seen amid his humpbacked army of hills, his head lost in the grey haze of his own anguish and rage.
But near the base of Spearhead she could also make out a haze of white smoke rising from a hundred chimneys and the brilliant green of fields that had been flooded for rice.
As far as Hathin knew, only one town had ever been built in the track gouged by Spearhead’s flight, the track he might retrace if he ever decided to renew his quarrel. Everyone knew it as Mistleman’s Blunder, after the name of the founder who had ignored the entreaties and advice of the Lace. Mistleman’s own daughter had been one of the first that the local Lace had quietly kidnapped and sacrificed in their attempts to appease the volcanoes and save the town, and so the thick jungle north of the trench had been nicknamed Mistleman’s Chandlery, a grimly humorous reference to the many trees and vines from which the district’s Lace had been hanged, like tallow candles left to drip. The Lace had never been trusted again . . . but nobody had ever built another town in the Wailing Way.
Mistleman’s Blunder, however, remained. It did so with grim defiance, testimony to the triumph over the Lace. And it was after all a fine location, conveniently close to the river, surrounded by flat grazing land and within easy reach of many of the obsidian and jade mining outposts in the ridge of mountains.
Hathin sank into a crouch, and for ten minutes she let herself watch the great eagles while they wheeled above and watched her right back. There were things that had to be done, and so there were things that could not be thought about yet. It was as simple as that.
The Ashwalker had come after them. Not just the maddened crowd and the crowd-witch Jimboly, but the Ashwalker. Which meant that he must have a licence. For days, Sweetweather had been waiting to see whether the governor would hire the Ashwalker to chase down the murderer of Milady Page . . . and now he had. Hathin swallowed and stared the fact down. The Ashwalker was hunting her and her sister as murderers. Which meant that even t
he governor must have believed those strange accusations that Jimboly had used to spark the crowd into frenzy, those poisoned hints that Arilou was the centre of a Lace plot to kill all the other Lost.
It was too late to think of appealing to the law and protesting their innocence. Sentence had already been passed. For now, with the help of the King and Sorrow, they had outrun it. However, in a few days others would arrive from Sweet-weather, taking the safe but slower paths that detoured down to the southern passes. They would come and ask after two Lace girls, one of them outwardly wander-witted . . .
Mistleman’s Blunder. Of all the places they could have fled to, perhaps the city least likely to look kindly upon a pair of vagrant Lace . . .
. . . and suddenly Hathin was recalling a conversation many years before between Eiven and Whish on the day that Whish’s eldest son had left on his revenge quest. Whish’s voice had been sharp as a gull’s.
‘ You persuaded him to go? What, it is not enough for me to lose a daughter, I must lose my son on a revenge quest as well? And where is he more likely to be strung from a tree than in Mistle-man’s Blunder?’
And then Eiven.
‘He will find friends and help at the Reckoning. You know that.’
Yes – Whish’s eldest son had left for Mistleman’s Blunder in order to find help from the secretive Reckoning, so that he could avenge the death of his younger sister. He had never returned. It was likely that he had died in the attempt, or been imprisoned for his pains. However, hope started to beat its angry little drum in Hathin’s chest again. Perhaps he was still alive. Perhaps he could be found in Mistleman’s Blunder.
Hathin rose unsteadily and hobbled off to search for one of the bird burrows. The one she found was occupied by its rounded, fuzz-feathered resident and, hungry as she was, she could not bring herself to strike it with a rock as it emerged. Instead she waited for the bird to depart, then dug up the mound with her fingers. She wrapped the eggs in leaves and lowered them into a pool of hot mud until they were cooked. They were still a bit gluey and weepy when she broke the shells, but they took the edge off her hunger. Arilou seemed drugged, perhaps drained by her long journey and her out-burst of the previous night. She did not protest when Hathin poured half-cooked egg into her mouth.
Then Hathin found a stream where the water was not boiling or discoloured, and brought the sleepy, stumbling Arilou to its banks.
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to walk again, Arilou,’ Hathin said as she washed Arilou’s bruised and bloodied feet. She had no reason to believe that Arilou could hear her soothing tone, but it was a matter of habit and Hathin clung to it. ‘But it’s all downhill from here. We’re heading there . . . Mistleman’s Blunder. I’ve got to find Therott, if he’s still alive. I need to go to the Reckoning.’
14
Bloodied Butterfly
After two hours of leading Arilou through the dry tangle of mountain undergrowth, Hathin fell in with some small, companionable streams, all bound for the river at the base of the Wailing Way.
As the ground levelled, the rough ground gave way to paddyfields, carved into squares by ridge paths. King of Fans and Sorrow gradually fell back behind the sisters, and over the next couple of hours the looming shape of Spearhead became more distinct. When they were close enough to the city to make out the white and black specks of grazing sheep and goats on the outskirts Hathin halted and set about making Arilou a nest amid the ferns.
‘I’m going to have to leave you here for a while, Arilou,’ Hathin said as she found some heavy rocks and placed them on Arilou’s hem to stop her standing and straying. ‘I’m nothing to look at, but people will notice you.’ Then she beat the worst of the white dust out of her clothes, kicked the sad tatters of her shoes aside, and set off towards Mistleman’s Blunder, barefoot and alone.
As she grew closer the town resolved into a sprawling mass of hundreds of palm-thatch roofs, clustered as if some enormous and untidy bird had abandoned its nest half made. In the heart a clutch of crimson clay-tile roofs and walls formed neat rounds about a central tower. Hathin saw these grander houses and knew only that they were Doorsy, no place for her. What she did not know was that they were mostly no place for anyone living.
Like many of the older colonial towns on Gullstruck, Mistleman’s Blunder was dying from the inside out. Many centuries before, the Cavalcaste homeland plains had been full of warring, horse-mounted clans fighting each other for land that they could dedicate to their own dead. The Ashlands were commonly placed at the centre of their cities so that they could be protected by the outer ring of the living. The problem was, of course, that once the Ashlands at the centre of town were ‘full’ of the dead, there was nowhere for the dead to go but into the houses of the living. Families found themselves cohabiting with the urns of their ancestors, yielding them first one room and then another, until the living were squashed into a tiny corner of their own home. Finally they would give up and build themselves a new and smaller house even further out on the edge of the city, surrendering their old house to the dead. And so it would go on. There were many great cities, both on Gullstruck and in the original Cavalcaste homeland, that were thriving at their edges but dead at their hearts. Mistleman’s Blunder was just such a city. And so it had grown and grown, swallowing precious farmland, pushing the inhabitants’ paddyfields out and out until they were brought up short by the volcanoes and there was nowhere left to till.
As Hathin reached the ramshackle outskirts she faltered, uncertain. Her only hope of finding Therrot was to make her way to the Reckoning, the legendary revenger meeting house.
The ancient Lace tradition of the revenge quest had been illegal since the Lace purges. However, over time ominous rumours had spread that there were still Lace pursuing such quests, and that the revengers were working together, becoming a formidable and frightening force. The idea of a secret, murderous conspiracy of Lace revengers terrified the non-Lace. And the name of this conspiracy, this nightmare, was the Reckoning.
The governors had taken this new threat very seriously. Ashwalkers at least worked with laws and licences, but Lace revengers operated outside the law and answered to nobody. How could you reason with people like that? What could you do but stamp them out?
For over a century the governors had waged war against the Reckoning. Rewards had been offered for anyone found wearing the revenger’s mark, the butterfly wing that was tattooed on the forearm when a revenge oath was sworn. The Lost Council assisted the forces of law and order, scanning the wild places for the Reckoning’s hideouts until at last they reported that the secret cult of revengers was no more.
Only the Lace knew that the Reckoning was far from dead. The cult still thrived in the shadows.
The location of the Reckoning’s headquarters was never spoken aloud, and Hathin knew only that it was near Mistle-man’s Blunder. She had to hope that the local Lace would point her in the right direction. And surely there would be Lace working and trading in this town. She need only look in the barren, unwanted places and there she would find their stalls . . .
But where were they? Here were the trains of shambling pack-birds bearing loads of obsidian down from the mountainside mines and the shallow streams that had raged into the Wailing Way from the heights of the King and Sorrow. There should have been a dozen Lace girls selling wares to the workers or stirring through the torrent-borne shingle for tiny pieces of obsidian that had been missed.
The main street was flanked by narrow wooden houses whose planks bore the tide-marks of floods, and whose palm roofs were grey and ragged. The labourers who worked up to their waists in the paddyfields had apparently brought a good deal of the mud home with them, walked it all over the streets and through everybody’s expression. But first and foremost, Mistleman’s Blunder was an obsidian town. There was something sharp and brittle in the stances and faces of the pale-faced miners queuing before the merchants to have their packs of obsidian weighed. Hathin trembled under cold, hard, curious gazes. There w
ere no smiles here, so there could be no Lace.
Hathin quietly loosed her cloth belt and tied it about her head to hide her shaven forehead. Suddenly she was grateful for the white dust which she had feared would draw attention to her. Now she realized that it was the only thing that might conceal the unmistakable Lace embroidery of her skirt. She let one of her hands hover in front of her telltale Lace smile, as if waiting to smother a sneeze.
From time to time despite herself she felt her heart leap with hope. A young woman scrubbing a table outside a toolmender’s reminded her for a moment of Mother Govrie in gesture and feature. But the woman looked up and met her eye without a smile or any of the silent signs of camaraderie with which even unacquainted Lace greeted one another. A young man polishing amber pieces with a steel brush had a jagged coral cut along his forearm like many of the young divers in her village, but when Hathin got closer she saw that his lower lip was painted with berry juice, showing him to be from the tribe of the Bitter Fruit.
One shack that stood alone smelt strongly of hot, sick fruit, and outside it men of all ages sat and sipped tiny wooden cups of steaming liquid. A white-haired old man grimaced as he tasted his, and for a second Hathin was sure that she saw a wink of jewelled colour in his teeth. She settled down behind a well-pump to watch him.
A previous life leaves marks on the manners, just as floods leave tidemarks on riverbanks. As he drank from his shallow cup, the old man unthinkingly held up a hand on the windy side, shielding his drink from sand that was not there. And then as she watched he wiped the tip of his little finger around the rim of the cup with care. It was one of the many small unexplained rituals that Father Rackan had always performed in mute serenity. All is well, Father Rackan is taking care of things, everything he does means something.
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