Opposite the door in the wall, a stand of willow and alder offered cover.
‘This will do,’ she said. Salt ran his fingers over the bark – the trees’ unease was still growing. ‘Give a wave,’ she added. ‘You’ll know it’s coming before me.’
‘“It”?’
‘An ice-dragon from the other place – it was kept near the white tile and now I know why: it’s coming to seal the river.’
‘But it’s sealed already—’
‘Not firmly enough. A quake is coming; there’ll be rocks on the move.’
‘That fits,’ replied Salt.
‘You’ll know what to do.’
‘If we succeed, won’t the tremor’s effects be worse?’
‘I hope they’ll only be different.’ That Bole had only buildings in town in mind troubled her – how could any of them matter this much? She unpacked the Fury’s bow and the single arrow.
‘What a wicked-looking thing,’ said Salt.
‘Wicked does as wicked is.’
‘Would you rather I . . . ?’
‘No, you take cover. I’ll wait on the river.’
He knew better than to waste time on a pointless argument with Valourhand. He sat on a stump, his kind of chair – dead leaves at his feet, brittle and curled by the frost, starfields above – and let Summer’s memories wash over him: the bubble careering through the wormhole, the flower entwining his forearm, his few hours as the Green Man. His mind drifted.
In contrast, Valourhand had the stillness, stamina and concentration of a sniper. She strung the bow and crouched, white on white, the weapon resting across her thighs – one arrow, one chance. Across the river she could hear Salt singing quietly to himself, an old Rotherweird folk song about hope and despair:
‘Corn has an ear,
The moon a face,
Sadness can cheer
But Hell is a place . . .’
An hour passed before Salt snapped upright, sensing a ferocious presence. He caught what the trees and grasses felt: not the slow chill of frost, but a scything blast of cold. Fish below the ice were cauterised, insects too, as beyond the east wall, a cloud of crystal splintered the air. Salt waved, but he hadn’t needed to; Valourhand had already nocked the arrow.
The ice-dragon had come.
Salt watched her in trepidation – one arrow? Now a child of the mixing-point, he could feel the creature’s progress, skimming low over the river. But if he recognised it, would it not recognise him once in the open? Of course – that was why he’d been Valourhand’s choice. You’re different, she had said. A decoy. Salt mustered a smile; ‘could be dangerous’ had been something of an understatement.
The crystal cloud moved on, enveloping the South Bridge. Valourhand was still crouching mid-river.
Salt checked his spikes; a slip would be fatal. The trees, kindred spirits, masked him for the moment. He signalled Valourhand, palms down. The creature had landed by the South Bridge. Gusts came and went as it worked the arches; not an inch of river was escaping its attention.
Moments later, the river ahead turned the colour of lead; flying pins of ice stung the cheeks and blinded Valourhand. Salt edged on to the river, his camouflage slipping as he did so. The smog abated and the ice-dragon prowled into view, head questing this way and that – Salt had achieved surprise. He questioned how this creature with such symmetry and coherence could be from the mixing-point, then moved to the harsher realities: the head looked too armoured for an arrow to penetrate – which prompted him to understand his role. He ran back to the trees, and the ice-dragon turned, following him, exposing the left shoulder.
‘Now!’ screamed Salt, twisting his head round. ‘For God’s sake, now!’
Valourhand froze, as she had before the blaze in Mrs Banter’s tower. The monster was magnificent, too magnificent, its hold hypnotic – the uncompromising belligerence, the bone-ribbed face and serpentine body, the glowing meridian line, the glacial eyes: a throwback to a lost age.
‘No,’ she cried, seeing in her mind’s eye the beast reduced to ruins by the acid. Her arm dropped; the arrow fell from the bowstring.
A second time Salt cried out as he clambered up the bank into cover, and too late, Valourhand realised her mistake. She fumbled for the arrow as an explosion of smoke and ice-needles enveloped her. Blue frost-fire belched into the shore and engulfed Salt’s stand of trees in a single sweep. Aim just behind the frost-fire for the head, she directed herself, but a second blast swept her feet away. She careered across the ice into the roots of a willow, where she found relieving darkness.
*
She raised her head, trailing a few commas of blood in the snow. She had a bloody nose, a cut cheek, a sore elbow and hip, but nothing worse. From the moon’s movement, she had been unconscious for less than an hour. She kicked to disengage her feet from the ice, which had acquired a mottled grey patina, and scanned the sky, horizon to horizon, but found no sign of life.
The bow and intact arrow restored the closing images: the ice-dragon’s magnificence, her inertia, Salt’s cries, the burst of frost-fire. She rushed to the trees and flailed her way through the ice-panels between them, calling his name. Two boot-spikes lay embedded in the ice. He had been shivered to pieces.
She had killed him.
Self-hatred racked her slight frame. She had never wept for anyone other than herself, but now she did. Rotherweird’s election, the Furies, Bole’s chosen mask, Wynter or no Wynter, what the spheres might do: these acute concerns shrank to irrelevance. She could not face anyone. After retrieving the bow and arrow, she trudged south towards the dark shadows of Rotherweird Westwood.
She needed the wilds. She fought to suppress a deeper, unrecognised desire: she needed Tyke’s reassuring presence.
17
Democracy’s Day
At dawn Bert Polk set off from The Polk Land & Water Company to Market Square. The charabanc bowed low to the cobbles under the weight of the ballot-balls in their huge leather baskets, while Boris and Miss Trimble wheeled The Thingamajig into the courtyard on a chassis designed for the purpose.
‘She should fly to Market Square and stop dead-centre,’ declared Boris. ‘She did last time. There she takes on the votes, then it’s off to the Island Field for verdict.’
Gorhambury looked on as the four rotors moved from a low whirr to a gentle high-pitched hum and the machine rose sedately over the rooftops, heading towards the Golden Mean.
Wrapped against the cold, the three of them followed in the vacuum-driven Umpire’s chair last used in the Great Equinox Race. The raised bench and telescope made for an ideal observation post. The near-soundless procession woke nobody. Early sunlight silvered the fuselage. Not a breath of wind disturbed the wisps of high cloud. With his brain tuned to the disciplined management of administrative challenges, Gorhambury felt the grip of contrary currents. How would Rotherweird change, for change she surely would? What defined a ‘modern improvement’? At moments during his brief interregnum he had privately toyed with what he might do.
En route he noted a curiosity: towers on the edge of town had acquired a blue-grey sheen on their outer faces. A freak hoarfrost, he concluded.
Boris anchored The Thingamajig by wires to grates in Market Square and fitted the four pipes, each running from a different cubicle, one for each quarter of the town: the Municipality (northwest after the Town Hall), the Oasis (southwest in honour of The Journeyman’s Gist & The Polk Land & Water Travel Company), The Understairs (northeast), and Scholars’ Corner (southeast, after the School). Municipal workers selected by Gorhambury for their incorruptibility distributed the three distinctive types of ballot stones, sufficient to accommodate a landslide in any direction, to the cubicles whose light timber construction featured a sprung door in and out and a canvas ceiling as proof against prying eyes.
Gorhambury distributed excerpts from the
Election Regulations to his chosen few.
‘Voting starts at eight and finishes at noon and we adjourn to the Island Field at three,’ he announced.
‘Time for a good lunch before we discover our fate,’ added Boris.
Miss Trimble, by now tuned in to her lover’s voice, caught anxiety beneath the bravado. She squeezed his arm. ‘The will of the people – we never know. That’s the point, isn’t it?’
*
Orelia watched the charabanc and the Umpire’s chair pass by, and glimpsed the fleeting shadow of The Thingamajig; but stood back, limelight-shy despite her candidacy.
Rotherweird’s electoral dynamic requires overhaul, she decided; one chance, one speech disadvantaged novices like herself, and with the passing weeks had encouraged the dark arts – poison-pen mail, addictive drinks, funding the Summoned. With no platform for counter-attack, a straight player simply succumbed. But, she recognised, she had been unimaginative – her exposure of Snorkel had been neither revelatory, nor a policy. The arts, the poor, equality for the Guilds and countrysiders, controls on the North Tower – there was so much more she could have said.
At least the election had brought Everthorne, but the physical pleasure, though stirring, had left uncertainty in its wake. She could not see him staying beyond the election. His grandfather had atrophied in Rotherweird; so would he. Restlessness, bordering on mania, bubbled away in his genes; he offered the attractions and downsides of a richly talented drifter.
She lit the fire and made coffee, planning a quiet hour to prepare for Democracy’s spinning wheel, but within minutes rhythmic thumps on the shop-front window drew her to the door. Outside, Fanguin was headbutting the glass with his forehead. Even by his low standards, he looked unhinged – unkempt, red-eyed, collar half-up, shirt half-out, buttons and shoelaces undone.
Orelia glared and tapped her forehead. He stopped. She hauled him in like a fish, catching a waft of Vlad’s best malt. ‘You smell like a distillery.’
Fanguin collapsed into the nearest armchair. ‘Huge,’ he mumbled, ‘bloody huge.’
Pieces of paper spewed from his pockets – graphs and a diagram of Rotherweird Island sprinkled with arrows and figures.
‘Stay!’ she said, as if scolding a renegade pet. Mildly disorientated by his intensity, she seized the nearest cup on display, filled it with coffee and thrust it into Fanguin’s trembling hand.
He scrutinised the vessel’s incongruous daintiness like an auctioneer. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, ‘up since three.’
‘What’s bloody huge?’
The coffee worked at his scrambled wires. ‘My bat detector alarm went berserk,’ he stuttered, putting down the cup and tying his shoelaces. ‘Not a Fury: miles larger, and faster, with blue flanks like a line of toothpaste.’ He paused. ‘My machine sits on a neighbouring tower – the town walls blocked my view most of the time, but I saw it fly away south. They sent the ice-dragon to seal the river.’ Fanguin paused. ‘On my way down from the roof, I slipped and I thought I would fall. For a moment, I wanted to.’
Orelia’s gift for compassion buckled. ‘Cut the self-pity, Fanguin. We don’t have time.’ She picked up the hand-drawn map, where Fanguin had transposed his machine’s data on movements and timings.
‘Only an intelligent beast would work the arches one by one. And why does it come in from the northeast? The tile is to the south.’
‘If you were an ice-dragon, wouldn’t you want to come from the north?’ said Fanguin.
Orelia followed the creature’s course on the map, across the marsh, pausing to seal the ice beneath the North Bridge, then moving down the eastern side and sealing the South Bridge. She stopped, cheeks turning pale, eyes dampening, shoulders hunched. She earthed her despair on Fanguin. ‘This is the moment? Now, you give up? You really do? Look – look!’ She stabbed a finger at the western stream.
Fanguin looked. ‘So? It paused for a breather to recharge the ice-bucket.’
The unfortunate choice of metaphor passed Orelia by; she felt beset by horror. ‘It stops – it turns left – it moves left – that’s hardly a breather. What’s there?’ she almost screamed at him.
Fanguin followed her finger and shrugged.
‘It was only weeks ago, Fanguin – is it really such a fog? You and I?’
Fanguin fumbled and finally grasped the connection: Salt’s hidden door lay just above the dragon’s halt. ‘You mean—’
‘The scribbles in Straighten the Rope are full of references to the river and seismic forces – Valourhand saw the ice-dragon by the white tile. She knew it was coming in.’
‘She’s seen my book. She knows the river froze last time, when the monks came,’ Fanguin mumbled, head bowed.
‘Salt has a key, and Salt’s been in the mixing-point. He’s the perfect decoy.’ Orelia half-regretted her savagery, but her frustrations demanded it. They were all in disarray.
Fanguin, the target, felt an urge to make good. ‘We’ll go now.’
‘I’m a candidate, Fanguin. I have to decorate Market Square from nine to noon.’
‘Well, that’s one contest you will win.’
Orelia would have ordinarily welcomed the warmth behind the remark, but now his flippancy felt out of place. ‘They would have stood no chance.’
‘She’s resourceful – she survived the dragon once.’
Orelia, softening, folded the map and tucked it in his pocket. ‘It’s not your fault. We should all have foreseen this. And Valourhand – well, she is what she is.’
In truth, fear for Salt ravaged her more deeply. Her curmudgeonly companion in the bubbles on Midsummer Eve and the saviour of Lost Acre had in recent months striven to escape the clutches of the other place, but to no avail.
Sobered by coffee and circumstance, Fanguin began to tackle his shirt buttons and collar. The thought that the enemy had every square covered prompted a change of tack. ‘You do have the book?’ he asked. ‘Straighten the Rope?’
‘Sure – I checked last night. I always check.’
‘Check again.’
‘You remind me of my aunt,’ replied Orelia, happy to open the cupboard at the back of her kneehole desk. Bole would never choose Fanguin as his alter ego. Straighten the Rope was lying where she had left it, on a pile of ledgers.
‘Check inside.’
Orelia flipped the book open. The printed diagrams greeted her, but then, astonishingly, page on page of virgin white, as if Fortemain’s work had never existed. She gaped – so much horror in so short a time – and blurted, ‘It isn’t Everthorne, I promise, I checked it yesterday morning – it was here then. We spent . . . the rest of the day . . . and some of the night . . . Somebody else came in my absence—’
‘Nobody is accusing anyone,’ replied Fanguin gently. ‘May I?’ He took the book, the old Fanguin, wires rapidly reconnecting. ‘Same printer, same date, same binding. They prepared this switch centuries ago.’
‘You mean Calx Bole did.’
A grotesque thought struck Fanguin. They want us to think they’re only after Fortemain’s calculations. ‘Have you a microscope?’
‘I’ve three Bexter-Bunes.’ The microscopes, designed by and named after Rotherweird School’s Head of Biology in the 1930s, had been ground-breaking in their time and now served as staple tenth-birthday presents. She returned with her best working model to find Fanguin wielding a pen-knife. He expertly removed a sliver of leather from the cover and mounted it between two glass slides. He peered, and peered again. He gathered specks of leather from a nearby armchair and examined them too.
His pale face turned paler as he pushed the book away in disgust. ‘It’s mainly calf, but there’s human skin mixed in with rock powder.’
Orelia shuddered. She spoke more to the room than to Fanguin. ‘The binding – it’s not the book, it’s the binding. That explains the “unnatural attack” on Wynter
– Bole skinned his own master. The cells rebind and Lazarus rises, chrysalis to butterfly.’
‘That feels too precarious,’ replied Fanguin. ‘Surely anyone could go to the mixing-point and obstruct them? And all those particles swirling about – look what happened to Slickstone.’
‘Slickstone may have cleared the mixing-point – your theory, remember, at our picnic lunch at Wynter’s old house after the Hoy Fair.’
‘Or Salt’s merger with the Midsummer flower might have cleared it, but every working leaves residue – that’s what Slickstone’s death suggests. Process toxic waste and what do you get? More waste. And Wynter’s other cells – they’d have been cleaned out too. We’re missing something.’
Orelia’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Vibes was Bole – he needed to leave the book with someone who would guard it but not suspect. Remember the mangled cat-boy? Bole has enemies too. I’ve played the diligent caretaker to perfection.’
‘The rock powder – any child of the mixing-point would sense it. Bole wanted us to think the calculations mattered most.’
‘Everything matters, on past form, including the rotating sphere and Straighten the Rope. If only we knew what the first does and the second means – we’re missing bloody everything – the book, the stones, the plot. What do we do?’
‘First principles,’ said Fanguin, ‘start with what we do know. Scry is one of the Eleusian women. Her questions to Finch prove that she doesn’t know who Bole is, although she probably killed his familiar – remember the feather. She’s also unaware of the rebound Straighten The Rope, which is why she seized the useless copy in Escutcheon Place. Scry doesn’t know how Wynter returns.’
After this bout of decisiveness Fanguin patted her shoulder and made for the door. Orelia asked the question as he opened it. ‘Are you saying Bole is one of us?’
‘He could be anyone,’ replied Fanguin. ‘I’ll find you in Market Square.’
*
The Square took time to fill. The countrysiders kept away, and manual workers from The Understairs dominated the early arrivals, excited at being on terms with their masters and suspicious that the privilege might yet be withdrawn. They offered a rich variety in their manner on entering their voting tent: furtive, proud, embarrassed, nervous, serious, talkative or silent – but they all looked inscrutable on leaving. They valued their vote and its secrecy.
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