Tall Tales From Pitch End

by Nigel McDowell

  He and the Temperate faced one another.

  ‘Well done,’ said Temperate Thomas. ‘So rightly-noble, and in front of all of Pitch End too.’

  But although the Temperate’s arm swept to include the townsfolk, draw them back into affairs, Bruno thought the Pitch Enders not there at all. They were only bland reaction; as in the Discussion Chamber, only what the Temperate wanted from them, what he needed them to be. Bruno wished he could tell them otherwise. Shake them into thinking, doubting, fighting.

  ‘Ye can have my youth,’ said Bruno. ‘Just let the other children go.’

  ‘Oh dear me no,’ said Temperate Thomas. ‘This isn’t one of Dr Bloom’s Tall Tales. No noble sacrifice here, no heroic exchange. This is no story. And if it were, there’d only be one ending – what I decide.’

  The Temperate stared skywards, to the storm cloud squirming, separating, dark tentacles snaking up and out across the bowl of the sky, intent on the horizon.

  ‘And this,’ said the Temperate, his Talent entirely enclosing Bruno, his hand reaching to reclaim the pocket watch, ‘is the most important pocket watch, ye know. The one Dr Bloom took most pride in. The one that matters most.’

  ‘Ye don’t know what’s going to happen,’ managed Bruno. ‘When ye restart it. Dr Bloom never told ye.’

  ‘I know enough!’ the Temperate told him, and for the first time Bruno saw anger. ‘I know that I need The Book of Black & White.’

  An Elder approached, limping, grey-eyed, and from beneath worn robes he lifted The Book of Black & White and settled it on the Temperate’s hands. It opened, spine snapping like small bones.

  Bruno had enough will only to turn his eyes – to look down on Nic, who’d stopped, eyes shut. To his mother, who was just as still. No one to help him, no one to save or be saved by. Bruno could only witness. The Temperate returned Bruno’s pocket watch to its place in the Clocktower and with one of his long, precise fingers turned the hands to midday, midnight, matching the Clocktower.

  A single strike from the Clocktower: a hard, colourless note.

  ‘Ye see how important yer watch is?’ said Temperate Thomas. ‘How I couldn’t have done it without ye.’

  Bruno stared.

  Another blow then, no echo, and more again as –

  ‘Elders!’ called Temperate Thomas. ‘Free the children from their cage and be bringing them before me! Now we’ll be seeing what Dr Bloom’s Clocktower can do.’

  XXXIV

  One-Footed Ravens

  Bruno counted twelve dull strikes, then everything moved – cobbles wriggled loose, cracks opening the town square like something dormant beneath was waking; Pitch Enders were forced into toppling, desperate hands snapping out for support and then returning to useless prayer as their children – released from their cage, near tears, no comfort – began to separate, unanchored vessels on a tempestuous sea.

  ‘Don’t be afeared!’ Temperate Thomas cried to all. ‘We are favoured! We have knowledge and therefore power!’

  But even Temperate Thomas couldn’t remain grounded as the Clocktower itself moved – rising, twisting like a screw releasing itself, its tip intent on the storm, it struck louder and deeper. Then stopped. A weight of silence.

  Bruno wondered: will it work? After ten turns, what’s going to happen?

  An answer came when the point of the structure split and one-footed ravens inside were thrown upwards like tossed gravel. They were eaten by the storm.

  ‘I see now,’ Bruno heard the Temperate say to himself. ‘Just like in yer precious Tall Tales, Jonathan. I see how you imagined it. Just like that accursed Cinder-Folk woman indicated to that old fool, all those turns ago.’

  Clara? thought Bruno. The Cinder-Folk woman from the Tall Tale. He remembered the raven she’d kept, the one she’d looked to when the old man had demanded the secret to youth. And another man at the close who’d stood and watched the old man burn – Temperate Thomas.

  ‘And now …’ the Head of the Elders began, but didn’t finish – no more was needed. Closing his eyes, one of his fingers went to the page of The Book of Black & White. Bruno heard the tear of skin as the Temperate began a journey across paper, through memory and imagination, paths opening that would allow his Talent to accomplish anything.

  Then the ravens returned. Like shreds of ash they tore themselves from the storm, the same but different. Still one-footed, but Bruno saw one long claw, sharpened. A queasy crackling of grubby, grey wings brought the birds in an arrow downwards. Bruno glimpsed beaks clean and white as one raven detached from the flock and landed on the shoulder of one of the children. The boy’s head eased back. Bruno noticed a look in the child’s eyes – or a lack of a look, as though he’d vacated his body – of pure dreaming. The boy’s jaw jutted, and the raven with gleaming beak delved into his mouth.

  Cries of protest from the cage of adults.

  The raven shifted its claw, wrestling with something inside the boy’s mouth.

  ‘Entirely painless, I assure ye!’ Temperate Thomas cried to the crowd.

  But Bruno could see doubt, saw hands clench the bars of the cage, shake them, testing their strength.

  Finally, from the boy’s mouth the raven plucked a something. Nothing so crude as flesh or blood but something deeper, harder to define – something small and glowing and twisting like a hooked worm, faint one moment and then rebellious and brilliant the next. Something that flickered between powerful and weak but all the while fighting to release itself.

  ‘Childhood,’ Bruno heard Temperate Thomas whisper. ‘Youth itself.’

  The Temperate raised an arm and the raven took off.

  The boy returned, dazed, and then toppled to the ground.

  A flash of grey and the one-footed, one-clawed raven landed on the arm of Temperate Thomas. And like the boy his jaw extended, but gratefully – the raven deposited the squirming shred of youth into his mouth.

  In one moment Bruno saw two transformations –

  Like Sabitha, age washed over the fallen boy, face sagging, skin loosening like damp cloth to gather in folds, eyes smaller, clouding, body gravitating inwards as though being bullied into a smaller space. And in Temperate Thomas, the opposite effect – youth regained, he stood taller, face working to dispel wrinkles.

  ‘Ye see!’ he cried then. ‘Ye see what we can achieve, my fellow Pitch Enders!’

  But his audience was no longer captive. Something extraordinary to Bruno – the faith of Pitch End in their Elders was crumbling. All attention, all outrage, was focused on the boy the raven had stolen so much from – smaller, quieter, smaller again, he was soon a fossil of a child, an abhorrence. The worries of the townsfolk went to their own children –

  ‘Cecil, get away from there! Run home!’

  ‘Fight them off, son! Don’t let those ravens come

  near ye!’

  ‘Martha! Come to me!’

  So many cries Bruno couldn’t tell them apart as he saw Martha Tilly run to her mother whose arms snaked out between bars, reaching –

  Temperate Thomas shouted, ‘No!’ his Talent springing across the space between mother and child. Martha fell backwards. The other children brought her back, clustered close to one another.

  ‘Ungrateful!’ the Temperate shouted. ‘Rightly-disobedient behaviour towards yer Temperate! If ye’ll not be decent enough to comply, then ye’ll be decent enough to give whatever youth ye have to yer Elders, however many turns old ye are!’

  Bruno struggled from his bones outwards, thinking that Temperate Thomas’s Talent might have weakened with having to throw so much at Martha. But still it held him.

  The one-footed ravens began a descent in a swirl tightening to a funnel –

  And then a new presence in the town square.

  Bruno saw and then looked away, then flicked attention back to see. He thought his own imagination had summoned something – behind the Marshall stood a tall, dark figure. Not stood – hovered. Wavered? Bruno found it easier to say what the figure
wasn’t than what it was – not smoke, not storm, not ash or fire … then a voice everyone heard, unable to be ignored – ‘Ye’ve done too much, Ignatius Thomas.’

  This voice silenced everything, even the storm. Ravens stalled, then scattered.

  ‘Too much to be forgotten about.’

  Bruno blinked. More figures, hovering, wavering. And then he realised what they were, though another voice named –

  ‘It’s a Shadow!’

  Martha Tilly. She remembered, thought Bruno. And in his memory he heard words, a Tall Tale –

  ‘We linger on still. Shadows, our presence everywhere and nowhere, as long as we remain in the minds of the ones who loved us. And at times we can rise. Face any great evil, put a stop to what is not right—’

  Recognition arrived on the faces of the other children – they knew what a Shadow was, recalled that it held no threat. They knew – like Bruno – why the Shadows had come, and they had no fear of them.

  The Temperate though –

  ‘Back!’ He slashed the air with Talent as the Shadows drifted towards him. But they felt nothing. Neither dead nor alive, only memory made visible, un-Forgotten, they couldn’t be hurt. ‘Back to the place ye sprang from!’

  Bruno struggled again and was perhaps able to move, a little. He watched the other Elders retreat in their limp and stagger, to the town hall, Shadows accusing –

  ‘Timothy Horrfrost – ye had me murdered after I saw ye drowning a bag of kittens in the harbour!’

  ‘Marcus Pesters – ye had me arrested, starved to death when I refused to be giving ye half my land! Land that my family had been tending for sixty-six turns!’

  ‘Basil Writtle – ye took my son, Herbert. Took him, stole his childhood.’

  Enforcers too, blades still drawn for a battle that would never happen, were falling back to the steps of the town hall as the Temperate cried, ‘Ye think ye can haunt me?’

  The Shadows overlapped to one stretch of black, wrapped around the Clocktower. The world was visible to Bruno through their gathering, but darkly.

  ‘Ye can’t get to me!’ shouted Temperate Thomas. ‘Ye’re only memories, nothing more! Ye can be banished, Forgotten on my say-so like everything else in Pitch End! Marshall – drive them back!’

  Bruno saw the Marshall fight to his feet. Where his pistol had exploded his whole hand was a wound – open and livid and deep. He did nothing.

  The Shadows stopped, were silent, and Bruno’s hope left him as the darkness began to part, disperse, leave them.

  ‘Ye see!’ the Temperate called. ‘Nothing but mem-

  ories, nothing but words! Now gather those children up, Marshall!’

  But then more words, a voice low, strong –

  ‘I wouldn’t be hurrying to help him, Marshall McCormack – not after what he did to yer daughter.’

  Bruno could turn then, to the source of the voice – Conn, beside him his father and the twin boys Dominic and Donal, all standing at the entrance to Old Town. In the keeping of Conn’s father was a body, so shrunken Bruno thought it could’ve been supported by the breeze. And if Bruno hadn’t known what he did, he wouldn’t have recognised the person held there. But Marshall McCormack did –

  ‘Sabitha?’ he said. He staggered forwards.

  ‘No!’ shouted the Temperate. ‘It’s a trap, Marshall! They must’ve taken her. Don’t trust them, they should’ve been destroyed in the fire, they—’

  ‘The Cinder-Folk aren’t so easily destroyed,’ Conn interrupted. ‘And I’m thinking, maybe not the Rebels either.’

  Yet more sound, rising – something high, on the approach. A kind of splutter-grumble. A sound Bruno recognised from time spent in the skies with Nic, with Louise and David flying beside, with the world wide open.

  XXXV

  The Imagination of Bruno Atlas

  The Clegg swooped over the town square, David flying, in his wake a small, bedraggled, but hardy flock of Bird-Sentries, their mechanical wings spitting arrows at one-footed ravens, exploding them in black flame and charred feather as more Sentries bounded from Old Town – hare, wolf, fox, stoat – and flowed across the square, chasing Enforcers into darkways.

  An Owl-Sentry opened its claws and plunged towards Temperate Thomas, a Fox-Sentry leaping to the Clocktower, rusty-toothed and lithe, attempting to tear a pocket watch from the stone – both were snatched by Talent, crushed. Bruno went to Nic, to his mother, crouching in the place between.

  The Marshall approached and Bruno held tight the hands of Nic and his mother, like he might protect them, or they him. But the Marshall continued – walked to meet Conn’s father. In the pandemonium, a moment of quietness: the Head of the Enforcers took his daughter from the arms of the Cinder-Folk man, and then descended, holding Sabitha close, closer. Perhaps not close enough to be consoled.

  At the same time the Cinder-Folk twins ran forwards to lash amber flames at any Elders or Enforcers keeping them back. The Temperate faced their father, Conn. Talent from both men was flame then, knotting, rising and flailing as both tried to command and overpower the other. But too strong – Temperate Thomas drove Conn back –

  A recorded roar, like the Elm Tree Mountains given voice, stopped them all.

  Then the thing Bruno had been waiting for – the Tiger-Sentry – surged from Old Town, shocking in its reality, its size more than Bruno recalled, trailing mortar and glass, wound tight after ten turns of waiting, the thrash of metallic paws sending lamp posts into a lean, its spring and charge erratic but, on its back, almost guiding, was Louise.

  Enforcers and Elders were no worry then – off into the town hall, double doors shut, bolted.

  Temperate Thomas was deserted. He held The Book of Black & White like a shield as Louise turned the Tiger-Sentry to face him.

  ‘I’m warning ye,’ he said, but the threat was nothing to Louise Green –

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m warning you.’

  She leaned low. The Tiger’s eyes whirred, jaw opening, crammed with teeth. It charged, ground relenting into cracks, leaping, brass claws extending as Louise threw herself to the cobbles before the Temperate slammed the Tiger-Sentry into the ground on the force of his Talent –

  Shortened shotgun in her hands, Louise rolled to a stop and fired two shots –

  Temperate Thomas dismissed both with a flick but dropped The Book of Black & White. It landed beside Bruno, beside his mother, who discovered enough energy to fall upon it, embrace with eyes shut, infuse it with Talent – and The Book of Black & White imploded in her arms.

  Temperate Thomas saw, appalled.

  His anger went first to Louise as he threw the full force of his Talent. Her gun disintegrated but she discovered the depth of her own Talent and threw what she had back, all memory and emotion and imagination writhing in the place between –

  ‘Conn!’ shouted Bruno.

  The Cinder-Folk family rushed to help as blood pricked Louise’s hands, Talent gnawing at fingertips. But they were too far, too slow and Bruno was desperate in his looking, in his needing. He spied the Enforcer blade he’d used to free Nic and without thought or word and only instinct, a desperate flick of his own hand snatched the blade from the ground and his Talent drove it into the Temperate’s shoulder.

  All Talent died.

  Louise rolled over, didn’t move.

  Bruno watched Temperate Thomas stagger, hands flailing, trying to reach for the blade, the attack he hadn’t seen coming. But in the end he could only topple. He didn’t move, but Bruno continued to watch him for life.

  ‘Bruno,’ his mother said then. Her voice was too faint, too desperate to be ignored and he looked to her, crept forwards and lifted her. ‘Bruno – remember the last bit of the plan? Do ye remember what ye have to do now?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Bruno. ‘That was for you to do.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Destroy it. I know ye can.’

  Bruno shook his head.

  His mother tried a smile. ‘Always so disagreeable,’
she said. ‘Ye have imagination, ye could always see things others couldn’t.’

  Her hand was suddenly a firm pressure on his arm.

  ‘Go.’

  Hardest thing, returning to his feet, but Bruno stood. He looked up – the storm was failing, a dark coil at its heart; dry knothole surrounded by limbs of cloud dismembered, strewn across the sky like an unknown language.

  Bruno laid his hands flat upon stone, upon the Clocktower, and shut his eyes.

  He carved a route in his imagination to an idea,

  the thought of what Pitch End would be without the Clocktower. Couldn’t see it. He thought again, differently: of the Clocktower as something lesser, not stone but sand; childish, a castle on Diamond Beach he’d turned out with his father, triumphant, then broken by the tide … He ground his forehead against stone, but didn’t have enough emotion for it.

  Bruno opened streaming eyes and saw Nic, unmoving, Louise the same. He saw Conn and the final Cinder-Folk family. Final, but still living, still together. Then his mother. Reality ignored, imagination his solace – he saw Nic and Louise and David and his mother all surviving. A Pitch End without Elders and Enforcers.

  He breathed in, shut his eyes once more, and allowed images to harry him. Then emotion that held imagination fired his Talent; a dream, a happiness.

  A crack like the breaking of the earth. He looked – stone was separating, springing apart between his hands, a fault line scaling the Clocktower. He concentrated – it isn’t here, it’s nothing at all, a mistake, gone –

  A final crack, an explosion of glass, and he felt the Clocktower relent under his fingertips, coated with sand. With the last cries of the storm cloud Bruno kneeled to scoop his mother up, Conn and his boys there beside him to carry Nic and Louise to safety as the Clocktower sank, Bruno fleeing but needing to turn, watch, know –

  A colossal, crunching hiss and the Clocktower vanished into the ground. This was all he saw before he fell, shielding his mother as dust overcame, such a ruthless tide that it ended all his watching.

  XXXVI