When he’d swept the last of the girl’s sand into a box and balanced the box on top of a neat stack, he put his coat back on. The coat smelled of earth, rain, and age.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s go and see what that storm left behind.”
Kalia trotted after him. She had to press herself to his legs while they stepped through the doorway, so that he remembered to reach down a hand and take hold of her wiry hair. Sometimes he went too fast and she didn’t get to him in time, then she had to travel alone through places that no mortal creature should ever see, between the solid world of the earth and the high, thin air. They did odd things to a dog, those places. The last time she’d been separated from her master, she’d ended up with purple feet and ivy growing out of her toes and curling up around her legs.
Sammael had laughed and cut off the ivy, but he’d left the purple hair growing on her feet.
“Teach you to meddle, mutt,” he’d said. “Teach you to sell yourself into things you’ve no idea about. Although I suppose the purple does add a certain point of interest to your otherwise dull legs.”
She’d tried licking her feet. The purple hadn’t budged. Sometimes she looked down at it and thought it might be spreading up her legs, but it was hard to be sure.
No more mistakes, though. She leaned close up to his legs this time. Stretching tall out of scuffed old boots, they were as hard as lampposts.
* * *
By the time they’d walked the entire path of the storm, all the way from the hills where it had gathered to the island where the last raindrops had been squeezed from its clouds, Kalia’s purple feet were sore and stuck with thorns. She flopped down in the shade of a bush and began gnawing at her pads.
The bright June sunshine shone above them. They had stopped on a shingle beach, which fell flat and gray back toward the sea. A couple of terns sat dozing over their nests, but nothing else stirred along the beach, apart from the dry wind.
Sammael frowned. He fished out a notebook from his trouser pocket and flicked through it. Its pages were thinner than spider’s-web silk.
“The storm should have left another taro behind,” he said.
“A taro?” asked the lurcher. “Haven’t you picked it up yet? There’ve been loads of sticks and acorns and things—I thought it was always one of them.…” Her voice trailed off for a moment, and then, before she could sigh, she said very faintly, “Does that mean we have to go back again and look for it, all that way?”
“Of course not, you fool!” snapped Sammael. “I would have found it if it’d been there!” He ran a finger down the page of writing. “But I suppose one can’t always be sure with storms. What a waste of time. Except I did sort out those idiots.”
“Idiots? Oh … you mean those two humans in the cold-smelling house. What did they do?”
“They were dabbling in storms, trying to find out how to ‘control’ them. Control them! Hah! I thought I’d show them a little bit of what they were up against.”
His mouth twisted into a scornful smile. Kalia was about to ask what he’d done with the humans when an urgent twinge across her well-kicked ribs reminded her that he disliked too many questions.
Then Sammael’s head went up and his jaw clenched. Kalia hadn’t heard anything, although that wasn’t unusual. Sammael’s ears were sharper than those of any earthly creature. He listened for a while, the sunlight prodding at his thick black hair. When finally he relaxed again, Kalia stole another long gaze at him.
“It’s that flying ant,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”
The flying ant had come a long way from home to deliver its news. Although its tiny wings were exhausted, it shifted anxiously and tried to give over its message as quickly as possible.
“… The boy picked up a stick and spoke, right out loud, spoke so’s I could hear … and the grass went very still and the tree shook, so something must’ve gone on with them, too. Humans talking! How would that happen? It’s never happened before, not that I know of.…”
“A human talking? Indeed. And you heard him?” Sammael watched the ant on the back of his hand, treading at his pale skin.
The ant was too worried about leaving to give more than a glance back at him.
“I did. He said ‘hello.’ Just ‘hello,’ and a couple of other things that didn’t really make sense. But it must be because of something you’ve done, mustn’t it? I thought that when I was halfway here. I thought, I don’t know why I’m going off to tell Sammael—it must be something he’s done, anyway, given this human the power to talk in exchange for his soul. You’re the only creature who could do something like that. You made me able to fly farther than any other ant in the world—no one else could have done that, could they?”
“Hmm,” said Sammael. “A stick, you said. You’re sure he picked up a stick?”
“Just before he spoke, yes. A stick from the tree that had been struck by lightning.”
Sammael thought, for longer than the ant could bear. Visions of being grabbed by sentry ants and dragged before the queen began to screen through its mind—of being accused of that most heinous of ant crimes: Desertion of Duty. Its feet twitched. “But if it’s a problem, you can just take his powers off him again, can’t you?” it twittered. “I mean, like I said, I don’t know why I thought I should come and tell you about it, only I suppose it did seem so strange at the time.… Look, I really have to go.…”
“Scared of your little ant friends, are you?” Sammael raised an eyebrow. “But you can fly forever. Why don’t you just fly away from them?”
“I’m an ant,” said the ant. “I can’t live without other ants. Please … please, I have to…”
“Go.” Sammael waved his hand, and the ant flew through the air. As soon as it landed, it spun on its hind legs and scrabbled at the ground, then hurtled away.
Sammael didn’t bother to watch it go—it was just an ant. Instead he stared at his hands and faced a couple of unpleasant facts. There had been a taro. And somehow, although it was the kind of thing that ought never to have happened, it had been found by a human. Was it as the ant had said? Was the human beginning to uncover the taro’s power?
There was really only one thing for him to do. And it had to be done quickly, before mere uncovering turned into full understanding.
Sammael clicked his fingers to Kalia. “Get up,” he said. “We’ve work to do.”
Kalia wasn’t sure she’d followed all the stuff about the stick and the talking and the lightning, but she’d managed to remove the final thorns from her paws. Her pads still stung. Standing up would be painful, especially on the sharp stones of the beach.
“My feet do hurt an awful lot.…” she whimpered.
“Fine,” snapped Sammael, turning his back on her. “Find your own way home.”
Kalia scrambled up and leapt after him. He’d already taken three giant strides toward the sea’s edge by the time she caught up. “Wait! I can’t go back without you! You know what happened last time!”
“Bah! You can turn into an entire forest full of purple ivy for all the difference it makes to me.”
Sammael’s face was motionless, his eyes tight and hard. As he strode over the shingle toward the sea, Kalia raced to stay with him. Once he started walking, unless he was kind to her, she could never keep up—he could walk faster than the wind if he chose to. Or he could just go back through the strange lands into the room and come out again wherever he pleased. Mostly he avoided doing that when she was with him, but Kalia hadn’t seen him this angry since he’d used the sand to put an idea for making a telephone into the head of a man called Bell. And then Bell had taken all the credit of course, and Sammael had been driven even wilder than usual; the lurcher suspected it might have been an idea he was particularly proud of.
There was nothing proud about him now. He reached a hand out to grab the back of Kalia’s neck so she could stay with him, but he didn’t look at her and he didn’t speak anymore.
* * *
<
br /> As they swept together into the whispering sea, her bruised pads and bony knuckles scraped over the pebbles and knocked against sharp rocks hidden just under the surface of the water. Sammael didn’t swim. When he crossed the sea, each foot touched the top of a wave and stayed firm against its crest. But Kalia had been born a dog, just like any other, and the waves wanted to swallow her up. Especially now, when Sammael was paying no attention to her.
She gasped for breath as the waves smashed over her nose. Sammael’s hand tightened on the hair at the scruff of her neck.
“How can some numskull blundering human have got his hands on that?” He yanked at Kalia’s neck as a large wave rose up, curling in front of them. She choked but was saved from the stinging spray.
“Does it—urgh!—does it matter?” She struggled for more air as his grip tightened so much that her own neck skin nearly throttled her.
“Of course it does!”
She should have saved her breath. He never got angry without good reason.
“But what could a human do with it?”
With relief she spotted the mainland thickening the horizon ahead. They’d be there in seconds. Kalia didn’t suppose for a moment that Sammael would answer her last question, but talking at least stopped her from thinking about the leagues of sea below.
However, once he’d dragged her up onto the next beach and begun walking over firm ground again, he let his pace slacken a little and, after a long silence, began to speak.
“A human could do all sorts of things with that stick,” he said.
The sand dunes whizzing by beneath them turned into scrubby seaside fields. Sammael vaulted over hedges and gates, as weightless as a paper bag on the wind. But Kalia wasn’t sure about the way his chin had sunk down into the collar of his coat. This was usually a sign of evil rage, the lasting kind.
She glanced nervously up at his face. A dark flame had begun to dance in the pupils of his eyes, and his skin flickered with shadow.
A cloud rolled over the sun. Kalia shivered as the breeze cut through her shaggy coat. She longed to sit on his feet and prevent him from going back to wherever this lightning was supposed to have fallen. Nothing could go well when Sammael gave himself up to white-hot fury.
“I’ll kill him,” said Sammael. “That brat is a walking barbecue already.”
“Couldn’t you just take the taro off him?” Kalia ventured, shuffling a little closer to his boots.
He landed a kick on her ribs, sending her flying sideways. She scrabbled to stand upright, shaking earth out of her ear.
“You forget yourself, Kalia,” said Sammael. “Do you think I need a dog to suggest ideas to me? The taro’s his now. If I yanked it from his dead fingers, it’d still be his. But at least if he were dead, he couldn’t use it.”
“I was only asking,” Kalia whimpered, licking her bedraggled fur where his boot had stuck wet mud to it.
Sammael continued walking toward some distant hills, leaving the lurcher no time to explore her bruises. She raced to keep up with him, ignoring the pain in her ribs. He was muttering to himself; it wasn’t until she’d sprinted right up close again that she heard what he was saying.
“Merry Old England.” The words, full of scorn and venom, barely reached Kalia’s ears before they were swept away on the breeze from the distant sea. “I’ll turn those gray clouds of yours jet black, as soon as I’ve dealt with him. That’s a promise.”
And Kalia the lurcher, who had been born in Shropshire and learned to love the wide-open green of the hills that she’d raced over as a young dog, had to close her eyes for the briefest of seconds against a sharp stab at her heart.
I’m his dog, she told herself. His dog. And I’ll always stand by him, no matter what.
“Good,” said Sammael, looking down at her with a nasty grin on his thin lips. “You know your place, dog. And now I’ll teach this human exactly where he belongs too.”
CHAPTER 3
THE NOTEBOOK
At three o’clock, Danny ran the entire mile from the schoolyard to his own house. When he arrived at the front gate, panting hard, he didn’t look at the house, because houses always looked still from the outside. However silent it seemed at first, there’d be people inside, he knew it.
Next door’s cat, a long-haired tabby with a white front and a tail as bushy as a feather duster, was lying along the fence that separated the gardens, basking in the sun. She blinked at Danny as he went past.
He put out a hand to stroke her plushy side, getting his breath back. Even though he’d run home so fast, a small part of him wanted to put off going inside for a few more seconds. Just in case.
“Hey, Mitz.”
The cat was called Mitten, which had only suited her when she’d been about the size of one. Under his fingers, her fur was warm and familiar. She pushed her head against him, wanting a scratch behind her ears.
“Are they there, Mitz?” he whispered. Of course she didn’t answer.
“Right.” He forced his feet to the front door, unlocked it, and stepped inside. “Mum?” he called. “Mum?”
Nothing stirred. Danny went through to the kitchen and his stomach went cold. The bowl of pale orange mush with the spoon beside it lay on the table. There was no use pretending any longer. No one had been in the house all day.
And there was the stick. That piece of twig, the size and shape of a pencil, waiting for him. What would happen if he picked it up? Probably something odd, like before. Oddness and aloneness weren’t easy to deal with together.
If baby Emma had stayed alive and grown up to be his sister, the two of them could have been jumping on the beds by then, throwing stuff down the stairs, dragging food out of the cupboards, making dens out of the furniture in the front room, and waging war through the house. They could have done whatever they liked, with no parents around to tell them to keep quiet or tidy up. But what would be the point on his own?
Or maybe, if Emma had been alive, she’d have just gone out and found them already. She wouldn’t have been scared and stupid and run off to school.
Danny stood by the table, looking at the stick. He could feel its contours under his palm, as vividly as if he were already holding it. It would be warm, like the cat’s fur. It would fit him somehow.
So he picked it up and listened.
At first there was silence again. Then a thin whine wheedled out from somewhere to his left, over by the window.
“… It just isn’t right, all of this. Staying in the same place every day, staring out there at all that.… What is all that?”
Then another voice, slightly rougher in tone. “It’s grass, innit? But out there’s a battleground. You don’t wanna be out there.…”
“We should be fighting! We should be fighting the good fight, standing up for ourselves, striving against all that horrible, bitty, stringy stuff! Who will fight if we don’t? And then there’ll be none of us left, and the world will be covered in those … those strands. Except we’ll still be here, looking out at it, powerless to help our brethren.”
“’Xactly,” said the other voice. “We’re better off in here.”
It was the two potted plants on the windowsill. Danny could even understand which one was which—the furry-leaved geranium was the first voice, while the spiky aloe that his mum squeezed goo from to heal burns was the second, quieter one.
“How can you say that?!” the geranium shrieked. “What would the world come to if we were all like you? We should be marching! We should be shouting! We should be squashing that … that grass with our leaves until it goes white and rots in the soil! We should be murdering it as it sleeps! The world belongs to the plants, and we’re sitting here just staring!”
Danny opened his fingers sharply and dropped the stick back onto the table. It rattled against the cereal bowl and lay still. Potted plants, shouting at each other? Talking about murder? It was … it was just weird.
He stared at the stick. If the sycamore tree could talk and the plants coul
d talk … there must be other things that could too. Things that might have seen his parents leave. There could be a whole trail of them, along the garden path and the street outside and the roads leading out of town. He could just ask them all, one by one by one, and follow his parents like that. Except that the tree had been crazy and the plants were crazy and this whole thing was crazy. There weren’t sticks that made you hear things talk—they didn’t exist, and he must be still dreaming, in his bed.
But this was far too long to be a dream.
And then he thought, Mitz the cat, sitting outside on the fence. She stayed out all night, didn’t she? Last night she’d probably been sheltering from the storm, crouching underneath the bushes close to the houses and trying to keep her fur dry. What if she could talk too? Mitz didn’t seem like an angry sort of cat, so she might not start yelling loads of scary stuff about murder. And at least hearing animals talk might be a bit less strange than plants.
* * *
Mitz was still languishing on the fence, her fur spilling over both sides. Danny approached her, holding the stick in front of him like a sword. She watched, her great yellow eyes unblinking.
Perhaps she ought not to know about the stick. The tree had told him to be careful, after all. He put it in his pocket, keeping hold of it.
“Mitz?” he said, tentatively. “Mitz, can you hear me?”
The cat’s eyes stayed very still, fixed on his face. She said nothing.
So it didn’t work, then. The other voices must just have been a trick. Danny turned away, not knowing whether to be relieved or angry.
“Was that you?” the cat asked.
He turned back to her. She didn’t move her mouth or make any cat sounds when she spoke, but he heard her thin voice, as soft as milk.
“Was that you?” he echoed.
Mitz blinked and stretched out a paw in his direction. It didn’t alter her balance in the slightest.
The Book of Storms Page 2