There was always a clock on Prox’s mantelpiece. It broke up his time, and served it to him once an hour in tiny silver pieces. It was his only companion, and so he felt a sense of betrayal when, just after it had ‘tinged’ its way through its four o’clock greeting, it juddered sideways and threw itself on the floor.
Reflexively he looked up from his papers towards his sediment bottle and pendulum to judge the severity of the earthquake. He was just in time to see them both plunge off the sill.
His chair bucked, as though resentful of his weight, and he stood, steadying himself against his desk, only to feel it galloping under his palms. And then, just as he thought the spasm was ending, the whole house began to shake around him, the floorboards jumping like xylophone bars.
In his ears there was a colossal roaring as if his head was being held under water, but it came from outside the house. He staggered, falling against the window frame, and saw through his window a dawn like the end of the world.
Spearhead was alive with light. One of its hunched peaks was missing, and in its place was a vast, leaping flame-coloured orchid. Over the volcano an enormous black cloud was forming, under-lit by the coppery light of the torn mountain below. From time to time, flaming balls fell out of the cloud and bounced down Spearhead’s slopes.
‘No . . .’
There were maps under his hands. Carefully shaded with parallel strokes. The Safe Farm. Safe. The camp for the children up in the Ashlands. Once again he seemed to see a troop of tiny figures walking along the hilltop, carrying pails, but suddenly they had faces.
‘Pull yourself together!’ he hissed at his reflection, which hissed back at him aghast, then shattered as his candleholder fell sideways and smashed the mirror. He had just time to watch what was left of him go to pieces before the slopped wax drowned the wick and left him in darkness.
Prox groped his way to his study door and opened it. Beyond lay the courthouse’s hearings chamber, which he had been using as a reception hall and meeting room. This too was lightless.
‘Camber!’ It was the desolate cry of instinct. Camber had been the cushion for his mind for months. Who else would he cry for now the world had disappeared? Who else did he have?
He heard the great door that led to the street swing open on the far side of the hall. A lantern appeared in the doorway, and swayed unsteadily through the room towards him. A hand holding it, a limber, elegant figure behind it. Camber, his gait weaving like one walking the deck of a ship.
‘Camber! The children . . .’ Prox gestured towards the window, the mountain.
‘It’s too late,’ Camber said gently, but firmly.
‘I sent . . . up there . . .’
‘And for good reasons you sent them. Come on, we need to leave.’ Camber took Prox’s arm and some of his weight, and pulled him towards the door. The candle made golden question marks in his eyes. ‘How else were you to keep the parents docile? Follow me – we’ll be safer in the old storehouse.’
There was a crack from above like a cannon shot, and plumes of plaster dust dropped towards them. Then the nearest window exploded into shards of metal and crystal dust, and something vast and bullock-black erupted into the room.
The great figure seemed to fill the space like a whirlwind, throwing tables against walls, knocking Camber back into a chair. The guttering lantern light caught a long blunt-tipped sword of wood, fanged at the sides with black glass shards. Camber, who had at first struggled to regain his feet, now froze at the sight of the weapon and carefully eased back into his seat, his hands raised an inch or so above the chair arms as if to soothe the new arrival, his face a picture of studied calm.
Prox was hypnotized by the sight of the toothed sword. It was an ancient Lace weapon. He had seen them in pictures. Prox had sent the Lace children to fiery death on the mountainside. The invading figure needed no face, it was vengeance incarnate. Prox could only stare stupefied at the sword, trying to make sense of what would be the last moments of his life. How had he got here? And what would he be in death, a martyr or a monster?
‘All right,’ he told the faceless figure, unable to manage more than a whisper. ‘All right.’
But the dark shape did not move, and Prox became aware of another smaller figure climbing in through the window. It picked up Camber’s dropped lantern and tinder, and a spark revived the spent wick. The weak flame revealed a small, boyish figure with badly grazed hands and knees, skin all but deathly in colour from caked dust. As he watched, it tugged back its hood to reveal a snub little face, with wide-apart eyes glazed from weariness. The corners of the small mouth curled upwards in a smile, an anxious little ruck appearing at one side. A thumbprint-sized patch in the centre of its forehead wrinkled uncertainly.
‘Mr Prox . . .’ The voice was breathy and hushed, with the familiar sibilance of the Lace accent. ‘Mr Prox, I’ve come to save you.’
37
The Man without a Face
‘To save me?’ croaked Prox.
How could he be saved?
I give up on this life. Where is my next life so I can try to do better?
And the child before him had the wrong face. A face taken from someone else, somewhere else.
‘I know you,’ he said, ‘don’t I?’
‘Child,’ said Camber, his voice quiet and carefully unemotional, ‘you speak Doorsy, yes? And to judge from your large friend’s expression, she doesn’t. How much are you being paid to work for the Reckoning, and how much would it take to change your mind?’
Instead of answering him, the small figure turned to the vast shadow beside her, and musical Lace murmurs flowed between them, a duet between a piccolo and a cello.
‘Dance says I should tell you that I do not work for the Reckoning,’ the child answered in Doorsy at last. ‘She says I should tell you that the Reckoning is working for me.’
‘Aah.’ Camber gave a slow sigh of revelation. He looked at Hathin with a new and acute interest, before giving a slightly rueful smile. ‘I see. Lady Arilou. So sorry not to have been faster on the uptake. You’re . . . rather shorter than I was expecting.’
‘I know this girl.’ Prox stared at Hathin, taking in every detail of her face. ‘But this is not Arilou.’
Taken aback, Camber turned to stare again at the small Lace girl before him. He narrowed his eyes, then slowly shook his head.
‘I’ve missed something important,’ he said, ‘haven’t I?’
‘You’re from the Cove of the Hollow Beasts,’ said Prox. ‘The girl on the beach. You gave me a shell.’ The shell full of poisoned water . . .
And the eternal Lace smile, which had been hiding exiled in the compressed dimples of her mouth, emerged and lit up her face.
‘You remember me,’ she said. There was no hesitancy, no furtiveness in her eyes, and for the first time in a long while Prox was touched by doubt. Was it possible that she had not known the water was poisoned, that she had really meant to do him a kindness? Or . . . could it even be that it had not been poisoned at all – that he had just drunk from it more quickly than his sun-wracked body could stand?
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s me. I’m Hathin.’
Outside there was a rattle, a bit like rain, but this rain broke tiles, smashed windows. There were screams, and the continued cavernous roars of the wakened mountain. The hulking woman called Dance murmured something impatient, and the girl nodded.
‘We don’t have much time,’ she said in a polite but hurried tone. ‘You’re going to die if you don’t get out of Mistleman’s Blunder. You have to leave the Wailing Way. All of you.’
‘We’ll die if we do leave,’ Camber countered mildly. ‘Those are rocks falling out there. Our only hope is to stay in our houses until it stops. If your people are out on the plains, then the best thing you can do for them is persuade them to surrender. They’ll be safe in the guardhouse. Out there they don’t stand a chance.’
‘Please listen to me. By dawn there will be no guardhouse. There will be no
Mistleman’s Blunder. There will be flat plains, and black rock setting like treacle over your heads.’
The same old Lace warnings, the same old Lace threats. And a child coming with a poisoned offer in the guise of a friend. And yet Prox could not help raising his head and looking up at her with an expression of appeal.
‘Up on the hillside – the farm – the Ashlands – you wouldn’t have come here first, not if the children – there are children –’
Hathin nodded. ‘They’re all safe.’
‘Thanks be to . . .’ Prox slumped, felt his insides melt. He stared at the lantern in Hathin’s hand and did not know who to thank. Groggily, he tried to pull himself upright again. ‘Look – I can see that I am not going to leave this house alive. But I will not betray the people of this town. I cannot lead them from the safety of their homes into the jungle so that they can be slaughtered by the Reckoning. If you need a sacrifice, well, you’ve found me. Leave it at that. Let that satisfy your need for vengeance – or your volcano, if you want to put it that way.’
‘Oh no, you don’t understand!’ Hathin looked flustered. ‘Spearhead will destroy this town, not because of anger, but because things roll downhill, Mr Prox, and they do it the easiest way they can find. Nobody should have built in the Wailing Way – not because it’s sacred, but because that gorge out there down the mountainside, it’s a pipe, and when the crater spills over, everything will rush down it. My people knew all this once, but then we made up a story about it and forgot everything but the story.’
‘You’re asking Mr Prox to stake hundreds of lives on a story from a less than friendly source,’ Camber offered gently, as though trying to point out a spot on her jacket without embarrassing her.
The girl looked from one face to another, her expression stricken. When she started speaking again it was in an urgent monotone, her Doorsy stumbling in her hurry.
‘Mr Prox, I can’t stay. My people are heading to safety, and I have to join them. But first there are some things you need to know.
‘We didn’t kill Mr Skein or the other Lost. When Mr Skein died, my village panicked – we lied, and we hid the body, and one boy went off without telling the rest of us and cut the rope to your boat.
‘The people who really did kill the Lost are scattered all over the island. They send each other letters using trained pigeons. That’s how they’ve been getting word to each other since the tidings huts went down. We know their leader’s connected to Port Suddenwind, but all Arilou could tell us about him is that he lives in this town, and he . . . hasn’t got a face.
‘My friends all thought it was you, Mr Prox, but I don’t. I don’t think you’re one of these people at all. Because if Skein had died when he was supposed to die, you’d have been with him, back at the inn in Sweetweather, and you wouldn’t have had an alibi. All the conspiracy members made sure they were as far away as possible from the victims when they died.’
‘How . . . ?’ Prox cleared his throat, as the facts slid about and clicked into place like the lock and catch of a pistol.
‘They put blissing beetles into one of the tidings huts, and released them in the Beacon School as well. We’ve already been there – you can go and look for yourself. My sister Arilou only survived because, well, she has a really bad attendance record.’
‘And . . . their leader?’
‘I think the man without a face isn’t someone whose face is missing or . . . covered in scars; it’s just a face that’s hard to see, almost impossible to remember. The sort of man that you can meet and hardly notice, and when you think back you can remember that somebody was there, but . . . he has no face.’ There was a pause, during which Hathin stole a wary glance at Camber, who had suddenly become entirely impassive. ‘I think it’s your friend here, Mr Prox.’
Prox stood gripping the top of a chair back and stared at the carpet.
‘Prox . . .’ began Camber.
‘I’m counting!’ Prox responded sharply. ‘There’s one little thing that has always bothered me. I just never gave it the thought it deserved because it happened while I was still half crazy from the brainfever. We arrived here together, do you remember? And you told me all about the slaughter at the Cove of the Hollow Beasts. Maybe the sun did addle my brain . . . but I can still count, Camber. And when you gave me that news it was only twelve hours old. Even the Ashwalker, who took a short cut through the mountains, hadn’t reached us then. How did you know about it all so quickly? And how did you happen to have all the papers ready for me to become Nuisance Control Officer?’
An unruffled Camber opened his mouth as if to offer up a confident answer, but there was something in Prox’s gaze that seemed to silence him.
Camber. Hathin could hardly drag her eyes from his face. C for Camber. A suspicion formed in her mind that this was the very ‘C’ that had been mentioned in Skein’s journal. The ‘C’ who had arranged to meet the Lost Council and betrayed them to their deaths.
‘And all those pigeons.’ Prox continued not taking his eyes off Camber, ‘the ones filling our loft, the ones that come and go all the time. I wondered why we put up with them.’
‘Inspector Skein wasn’t on the Coast of the Lace to test Lost children,’ Hathin went on quickly, ‘or to investigate the Lace. He was looking into Lace deaths and disappearances over the last few years. And there were a lot of them, Mr Prox.’
An exchange of murmurs between the Lace, and the great woman with the spiked club pulled out a crumpled map.
‘That’s where the Lace go when they vanish,’ explained Hathin, pointing to the dim painted rectangles near the centre of the map. ‘Mines. Secret mines built on Mother Tooth. The missing Lace are taken there to work, and nobody ever sees them again, and nobody misses them – because they’re Lace. It’s been happening for years.
‘And then a Lost mapmaker called Bridle noticed. He’d been watching the volcanoes, Mr Prox, painting a new map of them every week, because he’d seen them starting to move, changing shape. And so he spotted the new buildings on Mother Tooth. I think that’s the reason the Lost were killed. They found out that there were secret forced mines on the volcanoes . . . and that the volcanoes were waking up.’
‘There are some things you need to understand,’ Camber said softly but hurriedly as Prox peered at the map.
‘Yes,’ said Prox, as he scanned the smudged rectangles. ‘Yes, I rather think there are, Camber.’
‘There was never anything selfish in this.’ Camber was speaking faster now, as if he could see Prox sliding away from him and was pattering to catch up. ‘Losing the Lost was more than regrettable – in some ways it was cataclysmic – but it could not be avoided. I would have told you about all of this sooner or later, but you were not ready. Most people are never ready for the most unpleasant kind of truth; they simply cannot see that some things have to be done. It’s a sort of selfishness, really. To say no to something, without offering any alternative solutions. That is exactly the way the Lost reacted.’
‘Forced-labour camps . . . ?’ Prox rounded on Camber. ‘You knew about this? How many people knew about this?’
‘I am not quite sure why you are looking so shocked, Mr Prox,’ said Camber with an air of infinite patience. ‘Have you forgotten why you set up the Safe Farms? Do you remember us talking over the problem of feeding Gullstruck, and saving it from famine? And you do remember what we – what you – decided?’
‘Yes,’ said Prox faintly. ‘Yes . . . yes, I do.’
‘You saw, as we did, that the volcanoes needed to be mined and farmed,’ Camber went on quickly. ‘Can you condemn us for realizing it years before you did, and for seeing that we could tackle the island’s Lace infestation at the same time? Of course, we only started to see the true potential of our situation after Lady Arilou survived the Lost purge, and we realized instead of a “Lost plague” the Lace could be blamed and dealt with even more effectively. But you, Mr Prox – your Safe Farms have gone further in addressing the land shortage and curb
ing and harnessing the Lace than we ever dreamed was possible. Better still, we could create a Nuisance Control Officer, who could act freely, unshackled by Port Suddenwind, and do what needed to be done.’
Prox flinched, and stared at the map in his shaking hands.
‘Our ancestors never meant Gullstruck to be a home for the living,’ continued Camber. ‘It was supposed to be an enormous cemetery, so they gave the best farming land to the dead.’ He sighed. ‘And year after year, the new dead take a little more and a little more. But the ranks of the living have been increasing too.
‘Everyone talks about the “bad harvests” we’ve had for the last few years, as if a good summer will sort everything out. It will not. The soil of our farms is tired out, and the dead are pushing us into the barren places. Even most of our jungles are already promised to the dead. People are hungry. If the volcanoes are not farmed properly, or mined for their treasures, then next year or the year after everybody will starve.
‘Gullstruck’s farmers were slowly overcoming their fear of the volcanoes, and building farms on their lower slopes. But it was too little and too slow, not enough to stop the island starving.
‘So, yes, we took drastic measures. A labour camp on Mother Tooth, mining sulphur which we could trade for food for the island. And, yes, we took Lace from their villages to work there for the good of Gullstruck, and to pay back their ancestral debt. After all, the worst that could happen if the Mother erupted would be a temporary reduction in the island’s Lace infestation. That tribe breed faster than mice anyway.
‘But the Lost Council noticed our . . . little projects. And they were convinced the volcanoes were waking. So they came to us with an ultimatum. Our secret mines had to go, and worse still – we had to declare the volcanoes unsafe and move everybody away from them.
‘The conflict was of their making. In the end, my superiors had no choice. If the Lost had told what they knew, the mines would have been closed, the farmers would have fled the volcanoes, and the whole island would have starved. As I said, some things have to be done.’
Gullstruck Island Page 38