Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘That’s what our priests thought two hundred years ago,’ said Hathin quietly. ‘And they were wrong too.’

  ‘And I hate to break this to you,’ said Prox, raising his voice against the roar of the stone-shower outside, ‘but as far as the waking of the volcanoes is concerned, I think the cat’s out of the bag.’

  ‘Mr Prox!’ A cry from outside in the street. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Break down the door!’ Camber called out before anyone could stop him. The door burst inwards, and as Prox, Hathin and Dance turned towards the crash, Camber slipped deftly back into Prox’s study, closing the door behind him. They heard the ‘ting’ and ‘spang’ of glass being kicked out, and when they opened the door the room was empty and one window a jagged wreck.

  ‘What . . . ?’ The two men who had burst in wore singed nightshirts under their coats, and their hair was full of grey dust. They stared in bewilderment at Dance and Hathin.

  ‘Never mind, it’s all right.’ Prox wiped both hands hard down his cheeks, trying to force his mind to work. ‘These people are all right. Get everybody ready to leave the town. Everyone. Immediately. And if you see Mr Camber, he’s under arrest. And . . . don’t let him even start to talk to you, or he won’t be.’

  On any other night, the people of Mistleman’s Blunder would not have liked being kicked out of their beds and told to leave their houses. They would have liked it even less if they had known that they were doing so at the behest of a small Lace girl and the leader of the Reckoning. However, tonight the world was ending around them, and everybody wanted orders.

  Soon they were appearing in their doorways, shielding their heads with tea trays, upturned chairs, thick blankets. Obsidian buckets were handed out and used as makeshift helmets. Everywhere, small grey stones dropped from the sky and danced on the road, skittish and oddly light, like foam turned rock.

  Prox struggled to organize things above the clatter of the falling pebbles. People had to be told to leave things behind; one old woman had to be carried in her own wicker chair. Dance had spoken of overgrown temples in the jungle foothills that might shelter them. But would there truly be room for all these people?

  It was nearly time for dawn, but the sky was darkening, not lightening, and the wind was changing direction.

  ‘Stop! What are you doing?’

  As Prox stormed up like a short bristling tornado, a local goldsmith and an obsidian foreman looked around without loosening their grip on the barrow with which they were playing tug-of-war. They shouted contrary explanations over the rain of stones. Both were trying to pile the urns of their household ancestors into it, flinging the other’s dead into the road to make space. Further down the street Prox could see families struggling to carry great chests away from the dead heart of the city, each bearing funereal seals.

  ‘That’s it! We leave the dead! All of the dead! No exceptions!’ There were gasps and then howls of protest. Prox stooped next to a small girl who had fallen to the ground nursing a scalded ankle, grabbed her beneath the armpits and held her up to the goldsmith’s face. ‘Your ancestors can’t be reduced to ash a second time, but she can. Leave that barrow, or you’ll all be ash by morning.’

  The girl began to wail and the goldsmith reluctantly released his barrow.

  ‘Good. Now carry her.’ Prox thrust the girl into the man’s arms. She threw her arms around his neck. In her mind, he had clearly just rescued her from the scary man with the scarred face.

  Through a deepening twilight the crowd struggled from the town, Prox bellowing himself hoarse at those who wanted to flee the easy way down the road, along the base of the treacherous valley. His face was red and his hair rebellious, but nobody was in the mood to laugh. The panic-stricken fugitives began scrambling up the tree-covered slope, out of the valley.

  Far, far above in Spearhead’s crater, ash had frosted everything, and turned the surface of the steaming lake to porridge. Occasionally cart-sized rocks that had been flung high dropped from the sky and smashed into the lake, leaving gashes in the gruel-like surface, the naked water gleaming like burnished copper as it reflected the hectic clouds above.

  Half submerged in the lake jutted the great bulging mound of rock that had frightened Hathin. Each time the mountain shuddered, the bulge deformed a little more, a divide starting to appear in it like a cleft in a chin.

  And then, somewhere deep below the surface of the lake, the great bubble of boiling rock split.

  There was a hush-half-second like a gasp, a sense of some tiny but momentous change, of something cracking silently like a heart. The next instant, through that hidden crack beneath the surface, an oozing, millennia-old fire met dark, lucid water. And in that meeting, water and fire loved each other to destruction.

  Something was born in the moment of their touch. It roared, and flung half the lake towards the hidden stars. It kicked a deep gash in the crater rim, then tore free and crashed its way down the narrow gorge that led to the Wailing Way.

  Hathin felt the change before she heard it. A moment of weightlessness, as if the world had decided that down was up, and then changed its mind before anything could move. A crescendo, a great door swinging slowly open upon a world of roar.

  Hathin turned her head to stare towards the mountain. There was no tide of fire. No, it was far worse. A raging, roaring wave of nothingness, a blackness denser than shadow, surged down the mountainside with unimaginable speed. She watched it reach ridge after jungle-cloaked ridge, and each vanish, eaten by the darkness. As she stared, paralysed, the wind changed and a searing wall of force flung her backwards to the ground. From all around her came the cannon-cracks of trees bowing and snapping before the same unseen shock, hissing with heat and dropping their branches.

  She had taken up arms against the mountain, and the mountain had struck back. Before she could draw breath the world around her was swallowed by a hot and stifling darkness full of screams and the choking taste of ash.

  38

  The Wailing Way

  For a second or two Hathin thought there was no more Hathin, no more world left to save, but the screaming all around brought her back to herself. Then something bounced off her shoulder, which a second later started to burn. Her lungs scalded and she throttled, throwing one arm across her mouth and stinging eyes. Everything remained pitch black.

  ‘Keep going! Keep going up! Follow my voice!’ It was Prox. She thought it was Prox. His voice was high and harsh and it was hard to be sure. ‘Keep climbing!’

  Eyes clenched shut, Hathin scrambled towards the sound of his voice, struggling through the mesh of invisible fallen trees. All around were other cries, threatening to drown out Prox.

  ‘Somebody, please help me . . . my leg, there’s something on my leg . . .’

  ‘Alyen, where are you? Alyen! I let go of her hand, I let go . . .’

  ‘I can’t breathe . . .’

  And somewhere else a young child’s despairing cry drew its serrated edge across Hathin’s soul. Perhaps Camber the Ghost had been right, perhaps these people would have been safer in their houses . . .

  ‘Quiet!’ Prox’s bellow was almost a scream. ‘Everybody! Quiet!’ Hathin could hear him taking a few ragged gasps, then he began to shout again, his voice so strained that a squeak crept in now and then. ‘I’m going to call out names. Answer your name, so we know where everyone is, and who needs help. Jelwyn family? Good. Crayfools? Good. Black-mire? All right, all right, don’t try to move it, keep talking, I’m coming to you.’

  But now there were new voices sounding from the choking darkness, a sibilant music that seemed to come from all sides at once. These strange voices had much the same effect on the frightened refugees as the stink of fox has upon a chicken coop.

  ‘Fathers protect us!’ Hathin heard one of the women scream. ‘We’re surrounded! They’re coming for us! Lace! Lace in the forest!’

  To judge by the scrape of steel, several of the beleaguered refugees had actually drawn blades. All they knew
was that they were ringed about by the hiss and lilt of Lace voices. Hathin, however, could understand what those approaching voices were actually saying.

  ‘Hathin! Dance! Are you there?’ Therrot’s voice.

  ‘Here, keep hold of my belt so we don’t get separated.’ Tomki.

  ‘You heard that? They’re drawing knives.’ Jaze’s voice, a pool of cool in the raging chaos. ‘If they make a move on Hathin or Dance . . .’

  ‘It’s all right!’ Hathin screamed in Lace before Jaze’s own knives could leap to his hands. ‘I’m here! Dance is here! We’re all right! These people will not hurt us!’ As if to contradict her, incoherent exclamations of terror and hostility erupted from the refugees around her. Was this surprising, given that someone in their midst had just started shrieking in Lace? ‘Mr Prox!’ She switched quickly to Doorsy. ‘Mr Prox, please tell everyone to put away their weapons, or my friends will think they’re under attack! They can help us to the temples – we need them. You have to trust us, Mr Prox.’

  ‘All right.’ A muffled murmur from Prox. Then, much louder: ‘Quiet, all of you! Put your weapons away! These Lace are our guides – they’re taking us to safety. Now anyone who’s trapped or too hurt to walk, raise your voice . . .’

  Someone had been forgotten, and sat thanking all his nameless ancestors for that fact. He had mastered the art of sliding from people’s minds, and as the others fled the town he could almost feel the thought of him slipping away from them. He too had seen the raging nothingness surge down from the crater top, but he had the walls and roof of the stone storehouse to defend him from the clouds of ash and strange gases, the rain of stones and embers. He was safe.

  From the abandoned houses he had taken all he needed for a siege against the elements. Candles, tinder, water, blankets against the cold, a spade in case the little rocks mounded up outside his door, even a couple of pigeons in case he needed to summon someone to dig him out. And of course the storehouse already held the town’s supply of jar upon jar of olives, raisins, flour, wine.

  He was truly sad to have lost Prox. He felt he had been working for months painting a masterpiece, only to see someone pick it up with clumsy, innocent hands and mar the wet colours before he could shout, No, don’t touch it! It’s not ready. A month or two more and Prox’s mind would have been tough enough to deal with such truths, if weaned on to them like a child or a kitten. But coldness was the only way to deal with such cataclysms. Prox had been spoilt by the untimely interference of that strange little girl, and would have become a danger if he had lived.

  He cleared his mind of all unpleasantness and decided to think of the mountain doing the same thing outside the walls. A great hand smoothing away Prox, the Lost girl, the Reckoning and anyone they might tell, like letters drawn in sand. Then he could begin his good work again.

  It’s nothing personal, he told their memory. I’m not a personal person.

  But he was not alone. There was another figure standing in the room, tall but insubstantial. Camber blinked and realized that the ghostly column was a cloudy gush of ash, falling from some hidden hole in the roof. He was not safe after all. The volcano could get in.

  He dragged over some boxes, stood on them and found the little sliding wood panel that had been left open to let the hay breathe. And while he was balancing there, the roar of the mountain seemed to change. He could not resist raising his head out through the trap door. One quick glance, and then he would duck down and shut it.

  He straightened, gazed out across the roofs, and saw It coming for him. He did not drop back into the storehouse. He did not fumble for the catch, or throw his arms over his head. There was no point. He watched as something vast, deafening and gloom-grey fought its way with a battlefield bellow out of the false twilight of ashen clouds. A house-high wall of dull, mashing foam, devouring the road to the town so fast that his clinical mind had time for only a single thought before the deluge was gnashing buildings to flinders.

  I am a dead man.

  The dead do not blink. Death was just another cataclysm to be met coldly, and with eye contact, even as the winds went crazy around him and his head filled with sound.

  History will not remember me. I have not been missed, and I never will be.

  The trees were the first to hear the rumble from the valley, and they began to tremble. Then the bass bellow became audible to the fugitives, and grew louder and louder until it swallowed all other sounds.

  The winds shifted again, the ashen clouds puckered and plummeted, and everyone glimpsed something enormous plunging through the valley and the town below, sleek, grey-brown and muscular like an enormous serpent, its back strewn with timbers and trees that it did not notice. Not fire but water, a dragon of scalding, murky, terrible water. As they watched, chunks of the slope below them vanished as though bitten away by a vast, invisible maw. Bite after bite, working its way up the slope . . .

  Hathin turned away from the carnage as the clouds closed again, and slipped, falling to her knees. She tried to stand but the ground was giving under her feet, sliding down towards the gorge. She fell on to her stomach, grabbing at tussocks to stop her slide, her ears full of the roar that swallowed her own cries.

  Hands grabbed her arms and dragged her back up the slope, then heaved her on to her feet. She barely managed to remain upright as she was bundled along through the darkness. Ash was falling now, like hot insistent snow, settling on Hathin with an insidious, slumberous weight that threatened to bear her to the ground.

  Someone leaned her against a wooden wall. She found herself sliding down it, ash-laden. But now she was being helped through a door, which swung to behind her, muffling sound, completing the darkness. Ash was no longer falling on her.

  A little flame guttered into life, and then a lantern glowed. The hand that held it was shaking. The face it lit was a ravaged map of pink and yellow, Hathin recognized the scarred face of Minchard Prox. Her gaze took in the curling, heat-wrinkled papers and crude mud-red pictograms that covered the walls around them, and realized that they were in a tidings hut.

  As if by unspoken consent, both slumped to the floor, Prox tentatively touching a trickle of red from his temple, Hathin retching against the ash in her mouth and throat.

  They sat without speaking for a long time, until the roar outside faded enough for them to hear the complaining creaks of the rafters above them.

  ‘The timbers won’t hold forever,’ said Prox at last, his voice rough as sawdust with effort. ‘It’s not the rocks, it’s the weight of the ash. It’ll be the ash.’

  He might as well have said, It’ll be the ash that does for us. There was a pause.

  ‘Others be well,’ Hathin said quietly in Nundestruth. It didn’t seem like a Doorsy moment. ‘Others reach temple. Hidemhole for night.’

  Prox looked up at her, then nodded.

  ‘We win,’ Hathin said. ‘We save them. We beat mountain.’

  There was a pause, and then Prox nodded again and smiled. His seamed face softened and rounded, and his eyes seemed to brighten and become his own again. That small smile was the last thing Hathin saw before the roof caved in on them, smashing the lamp.

  39

  All Change

  Dawn came grudgingly, and several hours late. A dull sun parted the clouds of steam and ash nervously, afraid perhaps of what it might find.

  It found Spearhead biting a new and jagged shape out of the sky. The spear in his crater rim had blown itself apart, leaving a crinkled gash. The nick in the rim had become a gaping V shape, through which steam still billowed. He had seared away his fury, and now stared bleakly at what he had done.

  What had he expected? Had he thought to see this, a world cloaked in soft, all-smothering grey? No birds circled in his sky any more. The jungles were gone, flattened by winds, burnt by giant falling embers, drowned in ash. The lush patter of leaf on leaf, the hoot and howl of monkeys, the drill and whirr of insects, all choked into a slumberous silence.

  Mistleman’s Blun
der was gone. The roaring dragon of lake water and boiling mud had swept it away, leaving only here or there a blue-crusted brass bell from a clock tower, an anvil adrift, the broken wall of an old storehouse. The rest was a slick of drying, steaming mud, dotted with black, pockmarked rocks like burnt loaves.

  There was a silence, but for a crackling rustle deep within what had been the jungle. Dozens of white-faced people were still struggling out of forgotten stone temples, pushing their way through the curtain of tough, straggling vines that had saved their lives. Now there were no Lace, no towners. The ash that covered their faces made them one race, bleached them into kinship.

  And then there was another sound. It was a terrible keening, croaking cry with the true ugliness of pain that does not care how it sounds.

  Arilou lay full length on the earth, wailing and thumping the ashen ground with the heels of her hands. The Reckoning stood in a circle around her, and did not know what to say to each other.

  They were all certain in their heart of hearts that Arilou was mourning the loss of her sister.

  As a matter of fact, Arilou was not doing anything of the sort.

  Dip down. Dance like a midge just above the earth, waver with the strain of make-myself-do-it. Charred shards of tree, spiralling white vapour, thick wind-rippled dunes of ash, getting closer closer closer almost touching. Feel roughness of stones. Flinch don’t want to. Want to send down eyes and ears but won’t do. Too dark. Have to feel the way.

  Rocks full of tiny foamy holes. Push into the ground, through the rocks, feel each raking through my mind as go into darkness. Want to thrash, want to scream, want to not do it. Deeper. Shard and shingle, splinter and spike, feel them all pass through. Like swallowing coals with mind.

  Ash gets in my thoughts, forget which way is up. Panic! Panic and plunge! Somewhere body I cannot feel any more is flailing. Plunging mind onwards, darkness, darkness. A strangling cord nearly cuts mind in two. Tree root. Follow tree root down and down, to mud, hot mud. Hot, hot, hot.