Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘Well, the stitching’s a bit rough, but I didn’t think the hat was that bad.’

  There was a small pause, which the cap saw as an opportunity to croak sonorously and nudge its way a few inches along the floor. Therrot crawled over, lifted it and stared into the pearly, fearless eyes of a bright yellow frog.

  ‘It was all I could find,’ whispered Hathin. ‘I was trying to perform a good-luck sacrifice for the quest, trying to see if I could . . . but it kept looking at me.’ The frog was still suiting its action to her words, its throat coming and going in soap-bubble swells. ‘And then I heard you waking so I threw my cap over it.’

  ‘So you have trouble with . . . oh. All right.’ Therrot closed his eyes and pressed the heels of his hands against them. ‘All right, yes. That is a problem, isn’t it? We’ll talk about that in the morning. Right now, I think you should go to sleep . . . and if you don’t mind I shall take the deadly poisonous tree frog out of the hut. Does that sound fair?’

  Many miles away, another person was having a troubled night. Not for the first time, his dreams saw him walking against the wind on a white dust plain. A great, gold-framed mirror was hanging in the air before him, angled slightly away so that he could not see his own image. Even while curiosity drew him closer, a gnawing alarm tightened in his chest. Another step closer, another . . . and Camber woke into a warm and airless darkness.

  Why can I never confront that mirror? What am I afraid of?

  Nothing.

  He was afraid that in the mirror he would see nothing but the misty wasteland behind him.

  Now Camber looked around his room, but it still felt unoccupied. It suddenly struck him, as it often did, that if he took a step it would make no sound, and if he reached for the door handle his fingers would no more rattle it than if they had been made of moonbeams.

  Perhaps I am too good at being invisible, he reflected. Perhaps I have faded to a shadow of a thought.

  Another idea occurred to him unbidden.

  The night could snuff me out, and nobody would notice.

  And it was as this notion struck him that he realized he could hear something not unlike the rush of wind that had haunted his dream. A stealthy swishing that came from somewhere out in the moonlit dark.

  He opened the front door, and the candle behind him threw out a long finger of light, his own shadow stretched thin as bamboo down the middle of it. He had taken up rooms in the house adjoining the town courthouse, which Prox had now adopted as his headquarters and home. Here in the dead heart of the city the ground was paved with a mosaic of white tiles, puckered by erupting weeds. All around stood the ornate but peeling houses from which the dead had slowly pushed their living relations, windows lightless, balconies untrodden, chimneys smokeless.

  For a moment there was no sound but the sleepy throbbing of the pigeons in the loft of the building behind him, then he heard again the furtive noise that had woken him. It seemed to come from the tower at the centre of Mistleman’s Blunder itself. Here some of Mistleman’s Blunder’s most precious and reknowned dead commanded the best view of the city, had they only eyes to delight in it.

  Camber quietly patted at his own hip and felt the outline of his discreet pistol, then walked cat-footed between the rounded houses until he reached the open arch that led into the tower. The mysterious sound had become harsher, a rain on a bonfire noise. Then all at once it stopped. He waited a moment or two in the silence, then advanced into the dead’s most prized residence.

  Camber believed ardently, utterly, in the power of the ancestors, and it was for this reason that he knew he did not properly exist. His own family had been late arrivals, sailing into Gullstruck’s waters a mere century before. Unfortunately they had timed their arrival to coincide with that of a particularly rapacious pirate, who had promptly sunk their ship. The precious ancestor urns and all records concerning the family had been destroyed. The only survivor had been Camber’s great-great-grandmother, who had crawled up the beach, given birth and died without saying who she was.

  Camber’s name meant nothing. He could not serve his ancestors, nor could they save him. He was rootless, anchorless, adrift. He was nobody. He was damned. And this gave him a strange sort of freedom.

  He halted just inside the first rounded room. Somebody had already disturbed the dust of the floor. The china paving slabs below could be seen through the prints left by a pair of long, lean bare feet. Where was their owner?

  She was above him.

  Crouched on a sill twelve feet from the ground squatted a lanky figure, a jumble of knees and elbows, but a jumble tensed to become something else. A blood-coloured bandanna bound back a torrent of black hair. There was a bat-like flicker of shadow about her head. The light from the moon was just enough for him to see the knife clutched in her hand.

  There was no time for Camber to react as the woman tensed and sprang down from her perch, swinging a dry pig’s bladder. Her feet hit the floor less than a yard from him, but even when he found two black eyes staring into his, still he did not react, did not move or flinch. There was a long, dark second of absolute silence.

  ‘I thought,’ Camber remarked at last, ‘yes, I am almost sure – that I told you to get rid of that bird.’

  ‘I couldn’t – couldn’t do that.’ Despite the hoarse playfulness of Jimboly’s tone, there was an icy trickle of fear in her voice. ‘Couldn’t wring the neck of my ’itterbittle. And if he flew off, he’d unravel me into a big loose pile of Jimboly twine.'

  ‘The bird is memorable,’ continued Camber. ‘You have been memorable. You were noticed in Sweetweather.’ Under his gaze, Jimboly wilted like a flower in a candle flame. She dropped into a crouch against the wall, her knife now tucked away, her long face stretched even longer by uncertainty and fear. ‘You’ve made good time travelling from Sweetweather though. I wasn’t expecting to see you yet. In fact, I wasn’t expecting to see you here at all. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I didn’t want to hang around Sweetweather.’ Jimboly’s voice was now unmistakably a whine. ‘The town was getting mopey and remorseful. I’ve got no patience with a town that gets all its powder used up in the first big bang.’

  ‘Well, we’ll let that pass. Now tell me – the Lady Arilou . . .’ Camber saw Jimboly flinch. ‘I suppose there is absolutely no chance that she is nothing but a simpleton?’

  ‘She’s Lost all right. Oozy-brained Lost, but Lost.’ Jimboly’s eyes were hard and bright, but her hands stirred uncomfortably in her lap. ‘I’ve heard people talking in the streets; I know she’s passed through here. I can still catch her if you point my nose the right way . . .’

  Camber said nothing. He said it quite loudly as he leaned back against the wall and looked at her with his eyebrows slightly raised. Jimboly squirmed as if he had subjected her to a ten-minute diatribe.

  ‘You’ll have to be fast,’ Camber said at last. ‘You’ve an Ashwalker three days ahead of you.’

  ‘Are you giving that blue man my fee?’ Jimboly’s mouth sagged into a scowl.

  ‘I might, if he had the slightest interest in your fee.’ Camber let his tone harden, and once more Jimboly’s ill-temper melted into unease. ‘Fortunately for you, he doesn’t, and he isn’t on our commission. He walked right out of our physician’s house three days ago, spent ten minutes prodding the earth around the towers and then headed off down the road without a word to any of us.

  ‘The Ashwalker will find Arilou. It is what he does. It is all he does. But I will need you a step behind him, to perform a very important mission.’ Camber hesitated as Jimboly’s eyes went quite mad with greed. For her, important could only mean money. He knew her well enough to guess that she had no ideas for spending it, she was just blinded by a future bright with golden glare. ‘The Ashwalker will only strike at Lady Arilou, her companions and anyone else who gets in his way. I need you to find out if she has been inconveniently talkative en route. Following the Ashwalker’s trail shouldn’t be hard – he is blue, after all �
�� and he’ll lead you to them.’

  ‘And you’d like them “mopped”?’ It was amazing how quickly Jimboly could recover her good temper if offered a chance to cause chaos.

  ‘Yes, if necessary. But, Jimboly . . . try not tear too many towns apart. I’d like to keep a few of them on the map, just in case we need them later.’

  18

  Hunters

  The next morning Hathin and the other revengers woke to find that the damp of the forest had seeped into their muscles. It was a sodden, stiff, miserable group that rejoined the other walkers along the Obsidian Trail.

  Increasing numbers of bird-back messengers overtook them on the road, and Hathin watched them nervously, wondering what message they were carrying to the next town. Pictures of Arilou, perhaps? Warrants for their arrest? Or news of the battle in Mistleman’s Chandlery?

  Hathin even saw one of Gullstruck’s rare horses, a skinny-shanked, fly-bitten nag laden down with packs. As her eye fell on its harness she remembered the name in Skein’s journal. Bridle. Bridle believes that Lord S will return when the rains end or soon after. Bridle was a Cavalcaste name. If they found him, would he prove a friend or foe?

  As the sun started to dry the revengers Therrot fell into step with Hathin.

  ‘I’ve been giving your problem some thought,’ he said quietly. Jaze, Arilou and Tomki were far enough ahead to be out of earshot. ‘The killing problem. I was thinking . . . we don’t know that it’s going to be a problem. After all, that frog never wronged you, did it? It just might make a difference to the revenge you choose, that’s all. You might find human beings easier than you expect. Little sister . . . I’ve never told anyone but the priest who marked me how I completed my butterfly. But I’ll tell you – if you like.’

  She watched him narrowly, noticing the continual twitch in his cheek. Little sister, big brother. Aside from Arilou, he was all the village she had now, and yet, was he really more than a stranger?

  ‘You must remember what my sister Fawless was like. She was . . .’ He gave a painful little smile. ‘She drove me mad, running about by herself. One day she ran off to the mountainside collecting blissing beetles.’

  Therrot glanced at Hathin and noticed her look of astonishment.

  ‘No . . . you wouldn’t know about that, not being a diver.’ There was a pause, and Hathin could almost feel Therrot bracing himself to give voice to yet another taboo. It was hard to break the habit of silence, even though they knew that there were no Lost left to listen in, and there was little left to lose. ‘It’s the way farsight fish are caught,’ he said after a few moments, in little more than a whisper. ‘You trap a blissing beetle inside a hollowed-out coconut shell and seal it watertight with pitch, wax and resin, then you lower it into the sea on a long string. You see, a farsight fish sends its mind to take a look at anything before it gets close – it can spot a shark, a diver, a hook in a lure, a net sweeping towards it . . . but when it pushes its mind into the coconut to find out what it is, then it hears the blissing beetle and goes to sleep with its gills open. And then a good diver plunges down and grabs it before something else does.

  ‘Anyway, a Doorsy landowner was sitting up on the mountainside with a musket, looking out for Lace moving his boundary stakes. He saw a fourteen-year-old girl in Lace clothes and yelled at her to leave, but Fawless didn’t hear him – her ears were stopped up to protect her from the beetles. So he shot her dead.’

  Therrot’s voice was perfectly level. Hathin knew that it had to be to recount such facts.

  ‘Nobody arrested the landowner,’ continued Therrot. ‘After all, he’d shot a “trespasser”, and she was only a Lace. So I took the revenger’s mark. Then I ran over to the landowner’s house in Sweetweather and gave him a piece of my mind – point first. But the knife missed his vitals and he lived.’

  Hathin nodded. She had heard this much in the village.

  ‘When I got out of prison,’ Therrot continued, ‘I learned that the landowner had run off north. I realized I needed advice, and went to Jaze.

  ‘The landowner knew that a butterfly’s wing was beating for him. By the time I next tracked him down he’d spent a year, and half his fortune, turning his house into a walled fortress. The garden had its own fruit and vegetables, its own well, its own cows and goats, even its own beehive. Nobody was allowed in unless he was sure of them.

  ‘One day he hired a gang of men to hack down the creepers and bushes around the walls, for fear of assassins using them to climb over. I still remember the terror on his face when he looked through his barred window and saw me among the workers. I was arrested, and the landowner’s word was enough to put me in jail. And then over the next week he wilted, wasted and finally . . . gave up his name.

  ‘They wanted to hang me, but they couldn’t prove I’d done anything. They let me cook in a cell for six months, and when I didn’t die of malaria they kicked me out, hoping I’d starve. But the Reckoning looked after me.’

  ‘Was it poison?’ Hathin glanced sideways at Therrot. ‘How did you get it into his food?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Therrot gave a thin, confiding smile in which there was a trace of shy pride. ‘My little helpers did. I knew I’d never make it over the wall, so I took a serpent smile herb with me and planted it on the verge nearby. A few days later the flowers opened, and bees carried the poison nectar back to the landowner’s hive. He always did have a sweet tooth.’

  Hathin felt herself go pale.

  ‘You see,’ Therrot added in what was probably meant to be a comforting tone, ‘revenge doesn’t need to be face to face. Maybe you’re not made for sticking a knife in someone . . . but would you feel the same way about planting a little fistful of leaves and roots?’

  Hathin tried to imagine herself using her sickle to dig root-space for a sly, slow killer. It did feel different, but she was not at all sure it felt better.

  ‘It sounds cold-blooded, doesn’t it?’ Therrot answered her wordless look with a rueful big-brother smile, and gave her a gentle biff on the shoulder as if she really was his younger brother. ‘But it won’t feel like that when the time comes. I mean . . . if you’ve got enough anger, then you just go mad. A calm, cool sort of mad. And then it’s all easy.’

  Perhaps she would try to go mad for her new big brother. She would turn herself into something white-hot, implacable and relentless. And then she would become . . .

  The Ashwalker.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Therrot as her hand tightened on his.

  ‘It’s nothing . . . I just thought . . .’ Hathin scanned the low hill, but saw only golden grass waving innocently. It must have been a sun blot on her eye making her seem to see a flash of blue among the trees. ‘I know Sorrow swallowed the Ashwalker, but just then I thought I saw . . .’

  She gave Therrot an embarrassed smile and he returned it, but a few paces later he switched sides with her, so that he was walking between her and the low hill. Ahead of them, they could see Arilou waving a weak arm, coughing gasps of sound up towards the sky.

  For the rest of the day Hathin could not help her eye stealing to left and right, but there was no sign of the Ashwalker.

  After several days’ hard hike, the Obsidian Trail curved to the east, towards the distant piebald peak of Crackgem the Mad. In the old stories, Crackgem had been sent far away from the other volcanoes because of the way he laughed. His fits of laughter shook him so hard that it dragged up his maddened stories and dreams and flung them into the air. And the other volcanoes could not hear them without starting to shake, with rage, with fear, with something else too terrible to be laughter. So Crackgem was sent away from the others to play with his coloured mudpools, but there was always a worry that if his laughter grew loud enough the other mountains would hear it and start to shudder in spite of themselves.

  However, it was exactly this position away from the other mountains that had made Crackgem ideal for the Beacon School. A tower like a lighthouse had been built halfway up the mountain, and at nigh
t a fire was lit at the top so that it could be seen from nearly everywhere on the island.

  The paddyfields had been left behind with the Wailing Way, and the plains were a patchwork of little farms bristling with newly stripped beanstalks and hedged about by stunted banana plants, interspersed with silent, ever-expanding Ashlands. Occasionally the road passed steam-haunted orchid lakes, where green, ginger and golden mud broke the surface in fat bubbles that burst to leave a collage of coloured rings.

  As one travelled away from the western coast, Lace villages became rarer and rarer. However there were odd settlements strung out along the road to Crackgem, and Hathin’s group hoped to stop at them for shelter and new information. As they were approaching the first such village, however, something halted them in their tracks.

  At first Hathin saw only an armed group of men tramping their way from the village to the road. Then she noticed the huddle of bruised and frightened-looking figures hemmed into the middle of the group. They were Lace, and some bore ropes around their wrists.

  ‘Nothing we can do here and now,’ murmured Jaze. Hathin noticed that his fingers were biting hard into Therrot’s upper arm. Therrot watched the parade of captive Lace pass, his face spasming like a puddle in the rain, but he did not break stride.

  Soon they saw other such gangs of armed men, each with their Lace prisoners. They swiftly learned that these were gangs of thugs or out-of-work labourers turned bounty hunter, tempted by the promise of a fee for every Lace they delivered to a camp near Mistleman’s Blunder. Non-Lace that passed such convoys stopped to peer at the captive Lace with cold-eyed satisfaction.

  The few Lace villages the revengers passed now were eerily deserted.

  Hathin remembered Minchard Prox frowning at the map and striking out Lace villages with little flicks of his pencil. But these latest villages were too far away to threaten Mistle-man’s Blunder. The madness of Lace hatred that had welled up in Sweetweather was seeping across the whole island faster than she and her friends could walk.