Sam swore. ‘How could they be so stupid?’
Chester glanced from the ship to Sam, then back again. ‘Um …’
‘Why the hell’d they try to cross the river?’
Chester looked at the crawling darkness. It didn’t look much like a river to him. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t water. ‘That’s a river?’
‘In the real world, it’s a river,’ Sam said. ‘First rule of the Hush: never ever fly your echoboat over water.’
Sam wrenched a lever and turned the steering wheel, and they began to cautiously edge towards the Cavatina.
‘Can’t trust water in the Hush,’ Sam said. ‘Not when it’s in a big mass, anyway. It’s reflective, you see? Got Music all of its own …’ He shook his head. ‘The ripples, the gurgles, the way it sloshes on the shore – all of that’s making a tune. A melody. In the real world, it’s just water, right? But in the Hush, if a chunk of water’s big enough to catch your full reflection, then …’
Chester’s throat was dry. ‘What?’
‘It grabs you,’ Sam said. ‘Drags you down, tries to suck you into its own damn melody. Water’s got too much natural Music. It ain’t quite right in the Hush.’ He swore again. ‘And the captain just went flying over a river big enough to reflect the whole damn Cavatina.’
‘Maybe someone attacked her and she swerved the wrong way,’ Chester said. ‘Or maybe she was distracted, talking to you on the communicator, and –’
‘If she was talking to me, she should’ve had one of the others steering.’ Sam’s expression darkened. ‘I bet it was Travis. That weaselly little rat.’
‘I don’t see any Songshapers,’ Chester said, trying to find something positive.
Sam shook his head. ‘The Shapers ain’t fools. They would’ve seen the crash; they’ll know this is their chance to take us down, once and for all. Bet they’ve nicked back into the real world to fetch some reinforcements. Give ’em twenty minutes and they’ll be back here shooting every soul on the blasted ship.’
Sam angled their boat towards the Cavatina. The ship took up almost the entire breadth of the river; barely a foot of water lay between the edge of the vessel and the shoreline. Not enough water, thankfully, to reflect their own tiny vessel.
‘Hold on tight.’
Chester steadied himself against the wall. Sam wrenched a crimson lever that Chester hadn’t noticed before. With a mechanical groan, the echoboat shuddered – and then it began to rise.
‘Can’t do this too often,’ Sam said, in response to Chester’s startled look. ‘Waste of engine power. But we got no choice if we want to dock the damn thing.’
With a rattling clank, their echoboat ascended to the Cavatina’s upper deck. A large platform, circular and smooth, lay beside the ship’s masts. The proximity bell jangled, louder than before, but Sam ignored it. His entire mind was focused on landing.
They touched down on the platform. A jolt – then a gentle little bump – before Sam jerked a lever and their echoboat fell still.
‘Come on,’ Sam said. ‘We gotta hurry.’
Chester followed him out into the swirling chill of the Hush. They stood atop the deck of the echoship, with their own small boat at rest beside them. The Cavatina’s masts rose high above, sails flapping in the dark.
As soon as they had clambered down from the platform, Sam wrenched a lever on a nearby railing. There was a clanking sound, followed by a hiss of steam, and a trio of metal claws shot up from the edges of the platform. They angled inwards, slotting neatly into the grooves of the echoboat, and clicked down to secure it in place.
Sam and Chester hurried across the deck of the Cavatina. Sam unlocked a metal trapdoor, and gestured for Chester to follow him down the ladder below. ‘Home sweet home,’ Sam muttered as he slipped down.
And so Chester took a shaky breath, and followed him into the ship.
The Cavatina was not what Chester had expected. A dark green carpet snaked along the corridor, and the walls were patterned with floral wallpaper. Sorcery lamps dangled from the ceiling – mostly orange, punctuated by the occasional blue or red – and the air smelt of honey and cinnamon. If he concentrated, Chester could almost make out the Music of the lamps: a myriad of overlapping melodies, tingling in the depths of his ears.
Sam shoved open a door at the end of the corridor, revealing a spiral staircase. The staircase cavity was a little cold, but Chester admired the rich wood panelling of its walls as they descended.
They hurried along a hallway, passing a couple of doorways. Chester wanted to ask what lay behind them, but this wasn’t the time. He could see now how the river had begun to take hold: the entire echoship was being consumed by shadow. Already the corridor was angled strangely, with a sharp tilt downwards on the side where the ship was sinking fastest.
The driver’s cabin was huge, at least six times the size of its equivalent on Sam’s echoboat. Chester stepped inside, skin tingling. Three of the walls were composed entirely of windows, so that for one terrifying moment he felt as though he was falling forwards into the dark swirls of the river. The ship was tilting ever more horribly as black tendrils crawled up towards them. He heard clatters and crashes from other rooms as loose furniture slid across the floor and crockery tumbled from shelves.
Then he saw the blood.
One window of the Cavatina was splintered into shards. On the floor a young woman sprawled in a mess of curling red hair and blood. She wore a rumpled white blouse and a pair of men’s trousers with a thick black belt. A wound pierced her torso, staining the blouse with a blaze of liquid crimson. She couldn’t be older than seventeen.
‘Captain!’ Sam hurried towards her. ‘What happened?’
Susannah was breathing but her face was pale. ‘Songshaper shot me through the window. She’ll be back soon, with reinforcements.’ She grabbed Sam’s sleeve. ‘Get us out of here, Sam.’
‘Why’d you steer into the damn river?’
‘Wasn’t deliberate,’ Susannah managed. ‘Lost control of the wheel, when … when she shot me.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘Trying to fix the engine,’ Susannah said, in a rasping voice. ‘It got knocked out of tune when we crashed. Dot’s doing what she can, but …’ She trailed off, eyelids flittering.
Sam swore, pressing a hand to staunch the flow of blood. ‘Dot ain’t got enough power to reset that engine!’
‘I know,’ Susannah said. ‘But we can’t just sit here and sink …’
‘Can I help?’ Chester said.
They both stared at him. Susannah’s eyes were unfocused, but he noticed for the first time that they were a pale, ghostly blue. Just like Sam’s. Under the tendrils of red hair, her face looked almost ethereal. Chester knotted his hands behind his back and attempted to look more confident than he felt.
‘What are you gonna do?’ Sam said. ‘You ain’t been trained.’
‘I know,’ Chester said. ‘But if Dot tells me what tune to play, maybe …’
‘You ain’t going into the engine room,’ Sam snapped. ‘Not when the Music ain’t stable. I just risked my life to save your neck, Hays – I ain’t gonna waste all that effort to let you kill yourself.’
‘I’m going to die either way, then, because this ship’s sinking!’ Chester said.
His fear was rising to the surface now, coloured by frustration. He might not know about the Hush, or echoships, or Musical engines. But he had survived for months on the road and he had never given up. Not when his money had been stolen in Leucosia, or when he’d been forced to beg on the streets in Jubaldon. Not when a bitter old man in Taminor had told him he was on a fool’s errand and that he should give up his father for dead. Not even in the prison cell, down in the dark under Hamelin. If Chester was to die today, he would do it on his own terms.
‘Where’s the engine room?’ he said.
Sam looked away.
Chester tightened his expression. Hopefully his scowl was one of righteous indignation, rather
than an expression of the reality of rapidly congealing panic. Convince the world you’re strong and you’re halfway to being there …
‘I’ve gone along with you for a day and a night without arguing or pushing questions you didn’t want to answer. But if I’m going to die here, I’ve got a right to fight for my life.’
Susannah gave a hazy smile. ‘You did well with this one, Sam. We could do with a little fighter.’
‘I’m not little!’ Chester said. For some reason, her patronising tone stung more than Sam’s outright refusal. ‘I’m not a child! Tell me where the engine room is, and I’ll get your engine running again. I swear it!’
‘Don’t make oaths you can’t keep,’ Susannah said, suddenly looking serious. She coughed, and a little spurt of blood trickled over her lips.
Chester felt his frustration fade and guilt welled up in his stomach. What was he doing, snapping at this girl? She was dying. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘please, just tell me. It’s got to be worth a try.’
Susannah made a small sign to Sam and, finally, Sam pointed. ‘Down the corridor, to your left. Just keep heading downwards.’
The doorway of the engine room was so low that even Chester had to duck his head. Opening the door, he was struck by a set of discordant tunes: a mixture of music, a jangle of wild noise – like a gunfight between melodies. Tunes ricocheted around the room, off the machinery, and back into each other, colliding with an explosion of sound.
Chester took a deep breath and scrambled inside. The air hissed with steam. He collided with various prongs of machinery, banging into clockwork contraptions and metal canisters, tripping through the dark and smoke as he navigated the increasingly tilted floor of the sinking ship. Black smoke blasted from pipes and metal spokes clanked like teeth across the ceiling. He barely ducked in time to avoid a mechanical arm that moved like a blade, slicing the air with a hiss of steam.
No wonder Sam considered this place dangerous. If you didn’t know how the machinery worked …
A jet of steam blasted towards him. With a cry, Chester dove to the side. He smashed his injured arm against a metal tank – but he considered it a better option than having his face burned off.
Taking the opportunity to look around, he saw a pair of figures down in the darkest depths of the room. One, a young man, was tall and slender, with brown skin and a pair of spectacles. He hunched over a segment of machinery, folding his spindly height beneath the low ceiling. He puffed awkwardly into a harmonica, looking about as comfortable as a librarian in a slaughterhouse.
The second figure was a girl with a crop of short blonde hair. She was banging away at the keys of a piano accordion, but the sound was lost in the din.
Between them sat a massive glass dome, buckled down with metal straps. Light fizzled through its innards like a thunderstorm with indigestion. Chester knew instantly that this was the source of the clashing music. He felt it in his fingers, in the static that tickled his neck, in the prickles of each tiny hair on his arms. Not just music, but Music. This was what gave the echoship its power. This was the engine.
And it was all going wrong.
‘Hey!’ Chester staggered forwards. ‘Can I help?’
The strangers looked up at him, alarmed. The young man staggered backwards, as though Chester might be an attacker, and the girl almost dropped her piano accordion.
‘Sam brought me here!’ Chester said quickly. ‘I’m a musician. I thought maybe I could help reset the Music …’
A look of horror crossed the boy’s face, which Chester privately thought was a bit harsh. Then he realised that the expression wasn’t directed at him. The boy raised a frantic hand to point behind him and, instinctively, Chester threw himself to the floor. With a fresh rip of pain, wet blood spilled out of the bullet hole in his arm. Stupid, stupid. He had reopened the wound, just when –
A metal girder clanked above him. It sliced the air with a violent hiss, missing his head by inches.
Perhaps ducking hadn’t been so stupid after all.
‘Over here!’
Chester crawled towards the glass dome, beyond the reach of swinging metal, and clambered shakily to his feet.
‘It’s safer here.’ The boy’s accent was rich and a little pompous. ‘There isn’t any moving machinery near the dome – it’s rather fragile, you see.’
It was a little less smoky over here, although the air still ran thick with steam. The discordant sound of the engine made Chester clap his hands over his ears – he had never heard Music so raw, so wild, so … not like Music. It didn’t sound like a melody. It was noise. It was chaos.
‘You’re a Songshaper?’ The girl’s voice was high and flittery. In a quiet room, it might have sounded sweet, like a bird or a lullaby. In here, though, it was barely audible, and Chester strained to decipher her words.
‘No … I mean, I’ve played Music by accident before, and I’ve got a flute …’
‘We’ve got to reset the proper melody for the ship!’
‘What’s that?’
She handed him a rumpled folder. Chester thumbed through the first few pages, squinting in the darkness. It seemed to be a manual for operating the echoship. Then he hit a page titled ‘Engine Maintenance’, with a run of staves, treble clefs and notes. Sheet music.
Chester read slowly, letting the notes drip through his head as though he was playing them. Automatically, he imagined their sound on a fiddle – then readjusted his mind to hear them on a flute instead.
‘Got it?’ the boy said. His glasses had steamed up and he wiped them clean with fumbling fingers. ‘I’m afraid I can’t play proper Music so I’m just adding a few background notes to boost the tune. I went to medical school, not the Conservatorium; my father always said my talents lay closer to mindfulness than musicality, you see, and –’
‘Got it,’ Chester said.
They all raised their instruments: flute, harmonica, piano accordion. Chester’s arm burned and he felt the blood crawl across his skin, but it was more a dribble than a flow. The injection Sam had administered the day before must have had a substance to clot his blood, as well.
Ignoring the pain, Chester balanced the flute below his lips. With the others, he began to play, pressing his fingers on the keys. He could barely hear himself over the din. He pursed his lips into a breath and focused on the music.
Dah, de dum dee dee daaah, de dum dee dee …
It was the tune of wheels clattering on a road. The tune of horses’ hooves, or hailstones on a tin roof. The sound of movement, of power.
The sound of an engine.
Chester let the sound wash through him. It trickled from the flute into his fingers, into his wrists. It was the sort of tune that built on itself, that grew layer after layer. It was strong and stout and powerful.
The rest of the world seemed to fade away. The steam, the hissing, the clanking metal … it all faded, like smoke on a breeze. There was just the engine song. It flittered from his flute. It strained and plinked from the piano accordion, and it wheezed – just a little off-time – from the boy’s harmonica.
And then the tune caught. For one glorious moment, they all played in unison, their shared note lingering in the air, and it snagged like a fishhook on the dome. Chester felt it happen; he felt the Music wrap around its players and he stumbled, yanked by an invisible rope, towards the engine. His eyes flew open and he saw it, just for a moment: a wild stream of light around the dome.
A flash of brightness. A flash of sound. Suddenly the engine was playing their Music back to them. The cacophony of the broken tune vanished, and there was just the pure, powerful roll of the engine’s rightful melody. It rolled around inside the glass, like flakes of glitter in a child’s snow dome.
Around them, machinery shrieked. Lights flashed in speckles, and sorcery lamps flared around the room. A field of fireflies, waking into life and light. Chester could now see the others’ faces clearly: nervous, sweaty, with foggy glasses and drooping hair.
The gir
l’s eyes lit up. ‘We did it!’
The machinery bellowed and she gave a wild laugh. It wasn’t a laugh of fear, exactly, but the cackle of some mad pixie in a fairytale. It bubbled up from her lungs, light and frothy. ‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘It’s so pretty, isn’t it?’
Chester followed her gaze towards the dome. It was pretty in a way, he supposed. In the same way that a griffin could be pretty from a distance – but up close, it would happily claw your brains out of your skull.
‘Shouldn’t we move?’ the boy said. ‘I don’t like the air in here.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the girl. ‘The air’s toxicity won’t reach a deadly level for at least,’ she paused to consider, ‘twenty more seconds.’
There was a moment’s silence.
The girl said, ‘Oh, right. I suppose we’d better move then, hadn’t we?’
And then they were running for the door: three stumbling figures in a haze of steam and machinery and curses in the dark.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chester burst back into the driver’s cabin, puffing a little. The darkness of the river had risen. It crawled up over the window glass, like a stain of oil or seeping mud, as the Cavatina tilted down to meet it. A pair of lovers – ship and shadow – in the coil of breath before a kiss.
Susannah clutched a syringe, piercing her own flesh near the bullet wound. Its end led to a tube, which fed into a strange glass globe propped up in a medical kit open beside her. Whatever the globe was pumping into her, it was clearly working: Susannah breathed more steadily now, and her face looked more determined than pained.
‘Engine’s fixed,’ the blonde girl said.
‘We know that,’ Sam said, yanking a lever sideways. ‘That’s why I’m trying to fly this thing! Five minutes ago, it wouldn’t even give a grunt of power.’
‘Don’t let it touch you!’ said the boy in spectacles.
The Hush Page 11