Tall Tales From Pitch End

by Nigel McDowell

  ‘Good,’ Bruno heard Conn say. ‘Coz Cinder-Folk aren’t afeared of a fight either.’

  And he moved – a snap of the hand and flame from the nearest building was torn from its devouring and fell across the Enforcers’ path, looping and enclosing them, its movement guided by Conn’s Talent.

  ‘Now, boys!’ Conn called.

  Bruno saw two low, swift shadows race from darkways on either side and fling coils of fire into the air, lashing the rifles from the Enforcers’ hands. Bruno heard the Enforcers cry out, leap free of the circle of flames and run back into smoke, upwards, towards the town square. Conn didn’t try to stop them. He would’ve had every right to destroy them, thought Bruno, after all that had been done to the Cinder-Folk. But on he let them go, just a low, crackling laugh for a farewell.

  Suddenly Bruno felt less afraid of the flames. He held the white coal tighter in his hand. Dominic and Donal appeared beside, both grinning, both having to shout to make themselves heard over the flames.

  ‘Did good, Da, dint we?’ said Dominic.

  ‘See them Enforcers running!’ said Donal. ‘They won’t mess with us again.’

  ‘Let’s not be too proud,’ Conn told them. ‘But ye did well, boys, no doubt there.’

  Their mouths widened all the more, feasting on their father’s approval.

  ‘Now,’ said Conn, turning to Bruno. ‘Ye need to be going.’ He looked at Nic, took in his injuries. ‘But first…’

  Without being told to, the twins lowered themselves on either side of Nic. Both took small parcels from their belts and opened them, Donal rubbing something thick against the wound in Nic’s shoulder, Dominic pressing small seeds between his lips.

  ‘It’ll help him,’ said Conn.

  ‘Yer father,’ said Bruno. ‘Is he alright?’

  ‘He’s grand,’ said Conn. ‘Would take more than this to end him.’

  ‘The other people,’ said Bruno. ‘Families, won’t they—’

  ‘All safe,’ said Conn. ‘Got everyone to safety quick-smart, soon as we saw them making their pyres. They were getting ready, and so were we. We have our own ways and means under Pitch End.’

  Dominic placed a final seed on a finger, pushing it deep into Nic’s mouth, Donal still prodding Nic’s shoulder, then both smiled, satisfied.

  ‘That’s him,’ said Donal.

  ‘He’ll be grand for now,’ said Dominic.

  Conn cocked his head. Had he heard more voices?

  ‘Somewhere high we need to get to,’ said Bruno, helping Nic to stand.

  Conn paused, then said, ‘This way.’

  As they walked, any threatening flame was sent slithering, cowering behind cracked windows, clearing a way ahead. ‘Why don’t ye just stop the flames?’ asked Bruno, feeling Nic’s legs reclaim the weight of his body, strengthening.

  ‘Can’t stop a thing when it gets going,’ said Conn. ‘This is the rage of Temperate Thomas, his Talent keeping it going. And that can’t be disappeared in a tick, even by one of the Cinder-Folk. All we can do is try and

  tame it.’

  Conn stopped. Bruno faced a building with wooden stairs clinging to its side and, like all things in Old Town, already crumbling, keen to collapse.

  ‘Hold that coal high,’ said Conn, ‘and yer friend on the flying contraption will see.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bruno. ‘That’s a second time ye’ve been saving me. I—’

  ‘Being alive is thanks enough for me,’ said Conn.

  Then a thought came to Bruno. ‘Ye said ye know ways under Pitch End. Do ye know a way under the Clocktower?’

  Conn said, ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘There’s a girl under there,’ said Bruno. ‘If ye can, then help her. She was taken by the Elders. She’s the Marshall’s daughter. If we can get her to safety, show Pitch End…’

  Conn looked at him, and understood. ‘I’ll try my best,’ he said. ‘Now go.’

  Bruno took to the steps and gradually conquered them, Nic walking taller but still slowing him.

  ‘Ye should’ve been leaving me,’ said Nic.

  ‘Shut up,’ Bruno told him. ‘Stop trying to be a martyr.’

  He saw Nic smile, then grimace with it.

  And when they finally stepped out onto a sagging flat roof and looked out over Old Town, Bruno saw a world unravelling, ribbons of smoke drawn taut by rising winds. He held Nic close and the Cinder-Folk’s coal high, waved it, its own bright trail curling into the sky.

  They waited, and he wondered if anyone could see them in such chaos and ruin.

  ‘Will they come?’ he heard Nic ask. ‘Will they have waited for us?’

  Bruno saw David (in his worst imagining) leaving them, deciding they were a necessary casualty of the continuance of the Rebels. A sacrifice. Regrettable, but unavoidable. He shook himself free of it and said, ‘They’ll come.’

  As though summoned by resolve, Bruno saw the Clegg. It charged from the smoke, Louise flying, a rope trailing below, David just behind on the second glider.

  The ground beneath Bruno and Nic dipped, began to fold –

  ‘Grab it!’ shouted Louise.

  The rope touched Bruno’s hands and, still holding Nic, he wondered if it would take them both, but Nic recovered enough of himself, clutched the rope as well and they left, the roof collapsing as they were lifted free of Old Town. They swung wild and wide. Bruno noticed Nic’s hand curled tight around his bag, the box inside. Bruno allowed himself to think, we did it.

  Gunshots followed them, distinct from snapping flame, small bursts of white.

  Bruno shouted up to Louise, ‘Get us away, quick-smart!’

  He didn’t hear Louise’s response, only felt the swerve of the glider as they turned towards the Elm Tree Mountains.

  Then Nic, with sudden aggression, shouted, ‘David!’

  Bruno turned and saw flames feathering the wings of David’s Clegg, racing along ribbed frames. A gunshot from below struck the belly of the glider, a stream of fuel catching, liquid becoming fire –

  Again Nic shouted, ‘David!’

  But Bruno knew there was nothing they could do. David was too far behind to leap to their glider, too high to throw himself to safety.

  David looked to all sides, rising to half-standing, then sinking. His last look reached Bruno. Despite what had gone before, Bruno felt a rush of respect for David then. Quick-thinking, knowing the extent of the situation and making a decision free of panic or emotion or pride – this was David. And the calm expression he always wore didn’t falter, even as he kicked a pedal and the fiery wings of his Clegg snapped closed and dropped him into darkness.

  XXVI

  Dr Bloom’s Gift

  How well Mount Tome held its secrets, Bruno thought. If he’d been flying the Clegg he wouldn’t have known where to aim for. The mouth, the cavern, the home they needed to return to – all were invisible, Tome widening till it was everything Bruno could see.

  But through habit or practice, Louise could direct them arrow-straight and Bruno recognised the mouth only moments before the glider – rattling and shuddering like it wanted to explode under them – deigned to enter and land, spindle-legs scraping stone.

  Nic was off without hesitation, his injury not forgotten but reduced – the box with the Rebel symbol and its contents was all that mattered to him.

  Bruno knew there was David to think of. But he knew also how much the loss of David was bound up in the success of their mission. He thought: please let the box contain the winding keys, or what has David been lost for?

  Nic ran to the edge of the mouth and fell to his knees.

  Bruno needed to see too. He looked at Louise, and they both leapt from the Clegg and went to Nic’s side, Louise dropping her gun, Bruno his satchel.

  All three were crouched.

  ‘Yer arm,’ breathed Bruno, eyes on the small, dark point in Nic’s shoulder, slapped over with what Donal had done – a yellowish membrane, transparent. ‘Is it—’

  ‘Leave
it,’ snapped Nic. ‘Stop fussing.’

  From his belt Nic took a small dark key. He pressed it to his lips, mouth muttering a silent prayer around it, and then added it to the small lock. Bruno heard a low whirr of clockwork. The lid of the box opened on its own.

  Nic shivered. Louise held both hands to her mouth. Bruno leaned closer.

  Winding keys.

  Nic sighed, smiled.

  Bruno looked closer: some were as large as his hand, some smaller – some fingernail-sized – but all dark. He saw his curiosity reflected: water from the mine had entered and made a mirror the keys were stranded in. Dark water, and not just reflecting night, Bruno thought. He saw his own worry there, a face full of a mind full of the usual series of doubts – what if … ?

  Nic smiled wider. He reached into the box.

  The first key held together in Nic’s fingers for so long Bruno’s worry receded, a little … Then the key crumbled as though a hand, unseen, had denied it, with iron intent crushed it, wanted it dust and memory.

  ‘No.’ The word left Nic in a whimper, but he took up another key without waiting.

  Bruno saw a small carving, embossed metal shaped like a fox, telling the key’s Sentry counterpart. And it crumbled too. And the next, and again, Nic breathless as though trying to outrun disappointment, Louise too realising their calamity and disagreeing – ‘No, no, no’ – both hands leaving her mouth to cover her ears, her eyes snapped shut, denying.

  But Bruno watched. Saw each key taken, saw each disintegrate. It had been too long, he thought. The winding keys had waited, weakening, for ten turns. The water had been the last blow. Bruno might’ve wept himself if it weren’t for Nic and Louise. Same as after his father had gone – his mother steeped in black and permanent grief – he felt his own upset too small for consideration. At home, he’d needed to continue, his mother the one to stop living. He felt the same with Nic and Louise – he needed to be stronger.

  ‘Leave them,’ he told Nic, reaching in and taking one key for himself. Somehow it held. The largest, heaviest one, it carried the embossed form of the Tiger-Sentry. ‘Wait,’ said Bruno, and he removed others, slowly, and laid them aside. ‘Some are okay.’

  But Nic had turned away.

  After minutes of delicate rescue, Bruno had twelve whole keys salvaged, and bits of others. ‘We have some,’ he said, watching the side of Nic’s face.

  Nic looked at him, desperation edging into anger, same as Bruno had seen in the labyrinth beneath the town hall. ‘How would ye know?’ he said. His teeth were tight together. ‘How would Bruno Atlas who’s been in Pitch End all rightly-comfortable and well fed and well kept for ten turns – how would he know how much this meant?’

  Bruno wasn’t supposed to answer, he knew. He’d heard enough lectures – from Miss Hope, the Temperate, his mother when she’d been bothered – to know he was to provide an audience only. To be the person Nic could rage against; just a person to be angry with.

  ‘Ye think this is a game?’ said Nic. ‘Do ye? Just all playtime and whether we defeat Elders or not doesn’t matter, one way or the other?’

  ‘I never said that,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Ye don’t say anything!’ cried Nic. ‘Nothing useful anyway!’

  Bruno didn’t reply. He said to himself: he’s just angry. Doesn’t mean it.

  Nic slumped against stone, arms slithering around his knees. Louise stood, sobbing, pacing the mouth end to end.

  ‘We can still fight on,’ said Bruno, his voice not feeling like his own – too loud, too alone in the silence dictated by Nic and Louise’s disappointment. ‘We might not need Sentries to fight with, we can think of another plan or—’

  ‘Or what?’ said Nic. ‘Dr Bloom left us that army to fight with.’

  ‘Maybe he left more things,’ said Bruno. ‘Maybe in the Tall Tales he—’

  ‘For Pitch sake, Tall Tales are for children, not us!’

  Something in the statement made Bruno stall, look at Nic more clearly. Nic looked away, rose again but went nowhere. Louise had stopped.

  ‘We are children,’ said Bruno. ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘You might be,’ said Nic. ‘Still just for daydreaming, just like yer da.’

  ‘Tall Tales helped us find our way to the keys,’ said Bruno, and he rose too, slowly. ‘And they helped me when I was ten turns, gave me something else to think about than what the Elders were saying. Even David, he believed in them.’

  ‘And look where it got him,’ said Nic.

  ‘He died fighting for what we’re meant to be believing in,’ said Bruno. ‘Isn’t that the point of the Rebels?’

  Nic sighed, and spoke slowly. ‘Look, maybe it’s all too complicated for ye, Bruno. Being a Rebel isn’t rightly-easy, but Dr Bloom always told us—’

  ‘Maybe Dr Bloom isn’t the bloody beginning and end of everything!’ shouted Bruno, and he felt as though some deep anger, long-waiting, had been tapped. ‘Maybe he wasn’t this genius that ye all thought he was!’

  ‘Right,’ said Nic, and he turned away. ‘And where did ye get that bit of good wisdom from? The Elders? Temperate Thomas hisself?’

  ‘I saw something,’ said Bruno. ‘When we were in the town hall.’

  Nic said nothing.

  ‘Another book by Dr Bloom,’ Bruno continued. ‘Not Tall Tales.’

  He looked to Louise. She was staring at Nic, and she was shaking.

  ‘It had a picture of the Clocktower,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Dr Bloom designed it,’ said Nic. ‘Thought ye might’ve worked that out already. No big news there.’

  ‘And our pocket watches were beside it,’ said Bruno.

  ‘He made them too. So?’

  ‘And some writing. Some writing about – about experimenting on children.’

  Nic had nothing then. Louise looked on the verge of collapse.

  ‘He came up with the Clocktower and the pocket watches,’ said Bruno. He swallowed. ‘But it was him that came up with the idea of taking youth from the children too, wasn’t it?’

  Still no reply, so Bruno advanced –

  ‘He did it first, or planned on doing. And now the Temperate is for seeing it through.’

  Still no answer. But each moment of silence, each word unspoken, made Bruno feel more right, closer to the truth.

  ‘We should tell him,’ said Louise. She’d stopped crying, stopped shaking. Bruno thought she looked relieved. ‘Nic, we should tell him the truth.’

  But Nic didn’t move.

  Bruno looked between them, and then realised aloud. ‘It was the two of you, and David. You were the children he experimented on.’

  There was no disagreement.

  ‘How come ye’re not old?’ Bruno asked, moving towards Nic. ‘Sabitha, the girl I saw him do it to, she went older as Temperate Thomas got younger.’

  Nic sighed. And at last he turned, face not to Bruno but out to the night.

  ‘Because he abandoned it when he knew what he’d created,’ he said, in a voice barely heard. Bruno waited, sensing that Nic would start the story where he wanted, where it made sense to him, and out it would furl like the memory of a Tall Tale. Nic cleared his throat, and then began –

  ‘Before Dr Bloom started up the Rebels he was a Trainee Elder. Temperate Thomas’s best pupil, all in Pitch End said. Was well on his way to becoming Temperate hisself one day. But he was different – he read more than any of them oul fools. Studied, designed things, made them. Made anything he could out of clockwork, like the Cat-Sentries that the Elders use. He looked for things, deeper than anyone had gone, into the places under the town hall. He found The Book of Black & White. Became rightly-obsessed by it. Ye see, Dr Bloom had this fear of getting old. Not dying, he told me once, but just being old.’

  ‘The shame of it,’ said Louise, and then went quiet again, sinking to the ground.

  ‘Aye, the shame,’ said Nic. His fingers crept to his shoulder, to the wound given temporary repair by the Cinder-Folk boys. He began to pick at it.
‘And he thought that the ideas Arthur Pitch wrote about in The Book of Black & White – about Talent and what people could do if they put their mind to it, how if ye think a thing and yer Talent is strong enough, if ye have enough feeling behind it and imagination, ye can be doing anything – he thought he could use it all to stop time dead.’

  Nic swallowed. Bruno waited. Felt he would’ve waited forever for the rest –

  ‘So Dr Bloom started to plan,’ continued Nic. ‘A way to keep all of Pitch End young forever. He planned to build a Clocktower with eight pocket watches that would be given to eight key people in Pitch End: a fisherman, a farmer, shopkeeper, street-sweeper, market-seller, lamplighter, Widow, and the present lighthouse-keeper – yer father, Bruno. And with the pocket watches they’d be able to start the Clocktower. But only all together, all united. When they needed it, Dr Bloom planned, then Pitch End could come together as one to use the Clocktower, like he’d learned in The Book of Black & White, to channel their Talent and keep everyone in the town young. It was a gift. Something he’d be remembered for. Or was supposed to be. Everything changed when he told Temperate Thomas about his plan.

  ‘The Temperate agreed, to begin with. Only thing, he was wanting the eight pocket watches to remain with the Elders, not just common Pitch Enders. And then he said that maybe only the Elders should benefit, keep young, them being the people who looked after the Pitch Enders. They needed to stay young more than any, so they could continue ruling Pitch End. Dr Bloom didn’t agree, but he was given permission anyway to start his experiment. But on the condition that he test it on children.’

  Nic stopped again, but not for lack of remembering, Bruno knew. From a lack of … what? Courage? Determination? Or a surfeit of pain?

  ‘The first children he tried to make younger died,’ said Nic. ‘Dr Bloom realised he’d misread Arthur Pitch’s book, misread his own feelings, he’d said. Youth couldn’t be taken or given out just like that. He needed to take from one and give to another. Straightaway he gave up his plan.’

  Nic began to pace, fingers still scratching at the shoulder wound and powered (Bruno thought) by familiar, firm feelings: Dr Bloom and Rebels good, Temperate Thomas and Elders bad.