Susannah felt sick. No wonder withdrawal caused such agony. They weren’t just quitting a nightly habit. They were quitting the song that had defined their entire existence.
‘It’s the Song,’ Dot said, looking stunned. ‘That’s what holds the fake world together, isn’t it? It’s just another piece of Music – like the Music of a sorcery lamp but on an enormous scale. The heartbeat of the world …’
‘Of course it is,’ Nathaniel said. ‘Why do you think we treat unlicensed Songshapers so harshly? We can’t afford to have amateurs interfering with our masterpiece. They could blunder in and play an off-key note into the sorcery. They could cause ripples in our melody, or even expose the truth …’
‘But why not just tell everyone the truth?’ Susannah said.
‘The Hush is still ripe with resources, my dear,’ Nathaniel said. ‘We can’t afford for anyone to interfere with its extraction.’
‘The Echoes!’ Dot breathed. ‘They’re made to protect the secret, to kill any trespassers they find in the Hush. They go into the most dangerous places, the places twisted and ruined by your pollution –’
‘– and tell us where to dig.’ Nathaniel was smiling again now, a tight, thin smile that looked more suited to a predator than to someone showing pleasure. ‘Oh yes, very good. They’re naturally attracted to Musical energy, you see – not only to the leakage that accumulates near cities, but to the natural Music of the earth itself. When they find a deposit of liquid sorcery, we set off in our echoships to harvest the loot.’
Nathaniel paused. ‘Unfortunately, over the centuries, the number of Echoes has slowly dwindled. Natural attrition, you see.’
‘That’s why you’ve started vanishing people.’ Susannah’s voice was hoarse. ‘To replenish your supply.’
Nathaniel nodded. ‘By the time I took over the Hush Initiative, almost half our Echoes had dissolved into the dark. It’s been a hell of a job replacing them. Unfortunately, the methods our ancestors used to create Echoes have been lost over time. A few … experiments … were required to refine the process.’
Susannah’s stomach knotted. Sam.
‘Eventually we got it right,’ Nathaniel said. ‘We selected people carefully to become our new Echoes. People with resilience, with drive, with courage. People strong enough to endure the transformation and to survive for longer in the Hush. We relied on informants in the towns and cities – people who could identify likely candidates, who could tell us who to vanish next.
‘In fact, that was where you found me, wasn’t it? In the shop of one of my ex-informants. Mr Ashworth. A loathsome little man, but he had his uses. In fact, he led us to your friend Chester’s father.
‘Of course, once Mr Ashworth’s usefulness ended, he had to be disposed of. I couldn’t leave loose threads, you see. I couldn’t leave clues behind. I’ve always prided myself on being neat and tidy in my work.’
Nathaniel adjusted his grip on the gun. ‘But Chester’s father … Ah, I have high hopes for that man. A great asset, he’ll be. The man has a real knack for survival. Just like his son. But he’s not as dangerous to us. Not too talented, you see. Not enough to pose a threat. Not like Chester.’
Susannah started. ‘Chester?’
‘Oh yes,’ Nathaniel said. ‘A very rare boy, that one. It took me a while to realise it, but he was never trained, was he? Just connected to the Song on his own, as though his subconscious latched onto the strongest piece of Music it could sense. A Natural, the historians call them. Hasn’t been a Natural born in hundreds of years. No wonder he turned up on my agent’s radar.’
He nodded towards the group of Songshapers behind him and one of them stepped forwards. It was a woman in her late thirties who wore her dark hair tied into an intricate knot. With a lurch, Susannah recognised the Songshaper from Bremen, the one who had chased the Cavatina through the darkness of the Hush …
‘She was working for you?’
Nathaniel gave a cold smile. ‘You don’t understand yet, my dear? I run the Hush Initiative. Everyone is working for me.’
‘Not us,’ Susannah said, throat tight. ‘We don’t do the recital. We don’t work for you.’
‘Oh, but of course you do.’ Nathaniel’s voice was patronising, as if he was a master speaking to a foolish pet. ‘You’re the ones who tested the security for me. You’re the ones who helpfully discovered the flaw in my defences. And you’re the ones who brought Chester Hays into my grasp.’
‘You –’
Nathaniel’s smile broadened. His teeth gleamed, spectral in the Hush-light. ‘I’m afraid that I can’t let a boy like that keep breathing. He’s a threat to the Song and to the order we’ve worked so hard to create.’
Susannah was enraged. It was all tied together: the lies and the poverty those lies had created. ‘You mean the system where only rich people can become Songshapers?’ Susannah snapped. ‘The system where you control who gets power, and you run roughshod over anyone who’s not lucky enough to be born with filthy rich parents?’
‘Why, yes,’ Nathaniel said. ‘That system exactly. The Hush Initiative is not cheap to run, my dear. We need students who can contribute to our cause – not the sort of riffraff who would dare audition with empty pockets.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘But now I come to think of it, where is our dear little prodigy? I have a score or two to settle with the boy.’
Susannah stared at him. Didn’t he know? Her heart hammered a little faster and she tried to hide the twist of hope that threatened to show on her face. If he didn’t know that Chester was here, that he was already inside the cage …
‘I said, where is he?’ Nathaniel repeated, and there was a new edge to his voice now. ‘I want him to be part of this little conversation.’
‘I …’ Susannah hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Liar.’ Nathaniel stepped towards her and raised his gun. It pointed directly at Susannah’s face now and she swallowed down a throat full of bile. She stared right down the barrel into that shadowed tube of silver metal and all she could imagine was the roar of a bullet to her face …
‘I don’t know! He didn’t come to the Conservatorium with us!’
‘You’re lying,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I know he auditioned. I know your plan. I was part of it, remember?’
His finger hovered over the trigger. Susannah flinched, thinking for a moment that he was about to fire, but she kept her lips sealed. Her heartbeat felt as fast as a rush of fingers on piano keys. There was still hope that Sam might find Chester somehow, might bring him out of this alive …
‘I don’t know where he is!’ she said, stronger this time.
‘You’re lying.’ Nathaniel ran his tongue across his teeth. ‘Interesting. You know that I could shoot you dead, but still you’re lying. You obviously care for the boy.’
He considered her for a long moment. ‘But how much do you care for him? More than you care for your friends?’
He swung the pistol sideways so that it pointed straight between Dot’s eyes.
‘Five seconds,’ Nathaniel said. ‘Five seconds to tell me where the boy is or I’ll blow dear Dorothy’s brains all over the marble.’
No one spoke.
‘Five. Four.’
Susannah tensed. She prepared to leap sideways, to shove Dot aside at the moment of firing …
‘Three.’
Susannah tightened her muscles. She felt as though the world was running in slow motion, and at any minute –
‘Two.’
There was an almighty crash. Lightning smashed across the bars of the cage and Susannah heard screaming. The next thing she knew, the world was a blur of bodies and clawing fingers.
The crowd surged around Chester, wild and frothing in the thrill of the lightning. He was knocked aside as a huge man barrelled past, then someone kicked him. The world spun around him like the curve of a fiddle.
A fiddle! Where was Goldenleaf?
He found the fiddle lying near the edge of the pond, mercifully untouched by th
e rush of bodies. Even in their half-crazed state, the Silencers knew to avoid the water; they poured around it like living molasses, a parted sea of frantic limbs. Chester clutched Goldenleaf to his chest and let the crowd carry him, stumbling and gasping as the silent bodies surged towards the bars.
At the edge of the cage, he was slammed against the bars. He let out a cry of pain as the metal bruised his ribs but, raising the fiddle above his head, he twisted aside and squeezed through a gap in the bars. They were still lit by sorcery, painting brightness into the Hush, and Chester strained his eyes for a sign of his friends.
The crowd had spat him out the wrong side of the cage. He whirled around and looked to both sides but there was no sign of the others. He tried to shove Goldenleaf back into its case, but the bodies surged again and his fingers lost the case and bow in the turmoil. He heard an awful crack and splintering as the case vanished beneath stampeding feet, and he was left clutching a naked violin in the lightning’s glow.
He heard a scream in the distance, from the other side of the cage. Chester pressed his fiddle against his body and shielded it with his arms, then charged into the melee. Desperate and confused, he burst around the curve of the cage and through the crowd until finally, he saw them.
Susannah stood in the rain, her face half-lit by the glare of the cage bars. She was grappling with someone in the darkness: a fully grown man, with the glint of a pistol in his upraised hand …
Nathaniel Glaucon.
Chester charged. The pistol shrieked, blasting a bullet up into the air. Nathaniel swore and fumbled, struggling to aim at Susannah’s face, but Chester rode the crowd like a wave and in a second had hurled himself onto the man’s back and yanked back his arm, jerking the pistol skyward once more. His fiddle slipped from his arms.
Chester forgot the crowds, the dark, the rain. His whole world was just this moment, this clutching of limbs, this fighting for control of the gun. All he knew was that he had to grab that gleam of silver, to point it away from his friends, to –
All of a sudden, Nathaniel stopped fighting. He stood motionless and stared out at the Hush around them, as though he could barely grasp what he was seeing. Chester, still clutching at Nathaniel’s back, turned his blinking eyes outwards to survey the scene.
Hundreds of bodies stood around them. Hundreds of Silencers, freed from their cage, loomed in the flickering light of the cage bars. They stood still. They stood silent.
And their eyes were turned on the Songshapers.
Chester slipped down from Nathaniel’s back. The Songshaper seemed hardly to notice. His expression was numb with panic, as if he was barely able to comprehend the hundreds of haunted faces surrounding him.
Unable to think straight, Chester picked up Goldenleaf. The fiddle was damaged – its scroll was shattered, one of the tuning pegs was gone, and broken strings spiked outwards in a tangle – but his shock was too raw for any new emotions to register. He staggered back to his friends and felt the painful squeeze of Susannah’s hand on his shoulder. Her breathing was sharp and heavy as though she didn’t know whether to sob or shout. Chester felt the same terror building inside himself: a terrible mixture of fear and hope and something else. Something like the first bar of a folk song, just waiting for the melody to kick in …
The nearest Silencer opened her mouth. She was as tall as Travis and she shared his high cheekbones and thick black hair. She stood in front of Nathaniel looking thin and ragged but still she was beautiful. Her eyes glinted with the pale blue gleam of a Silencer.
Penelope.
‘You stole us,’ she said, and the words were not silent. The sound left her lips, hoarse and tight. ‘You did this to us.’
Her accusation hung on the air.
And as one, the Silencers charged.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Songshapers died quickly.
For a moment, Susannah thought they might all go down screaming – not just Nathaniel and his comrades, but her own friends as well. But they were buffeted backwards, carried on the sea of frantic bodies.
She didn’t see Nathaniel die. She heard his screams, then there was a moment of quiet broken by the howls of the Silencers as they charged into the darkness, voices returning, alive, free and unconstrained.
Susannah stumbled sideways but caught herself and grabbed Chester’s arm before he could be swallowed by the crowd. Before Susannah knew what was happening, she had wrapped her arms around him and she was breathing into his neck, his shoulder. There was nothing but the scent of him, his warmth against her, the knowledge that he was here, he was alive, he was Chester.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I never meant to go through with it, Chester. I thought we’d find another way …’
And then he was returning her embrace and his face was warm and damp against her cheek. ‘It’s okay. I know why you … it was the only way. But Sam …’
She didn’t need him to finish the sentence. If Sam wasn’t here – if the cage was broken and Chester was alive and Sam was missing … well, there was only one answer. Shock and sorrow welled in her like liquid fire and she pressed her face closer and breathed the scent of Chester’s living body. He was alive but Sam was dead. Sam. He had been like her brother.
She looked up and saw hundreds of Silencers. They needed her. They needed someone to lead them out into the light, into the real world – or the false world, or whatever you wanted to call it. To lead them back into Meloral. Their world might have been carved from a melody, but it was still real, in a way, wasn’t it? It was still a version of reality. And it was a hell of a lot better than this one.
She would finish the plan. She would get these prisoners out of here and give them a chance to take back the lives that had been stolen from them.
With a startled cry, Chester broke free of her embrace. Susannah’s heart stuttered. Had the full weight of her betrayal hit him? Did he want nothing more to do with her? But then she saw him slipping through the crowd, his hands outstretched as he lunged towards an older man with dark hair and gleaming eyes …
His father.
The man was limping and staggering about with a haggard look of sickness in his face. How long had he been down here? Months, from what Chester had told her. She helped Chester support the man and they hauled him up between their shoulders.
‘Captain!’ Travis shouted.
They met in a patch of open floor on a newly vacated stretch of marble, as the Silencers swarmed outwards in their desperation to escape. Dot and Penelope were in each other’s arms, lips locked in the tightest of reunions, filled with so much longing that they looked ready to dissolve from the sheer intensity. Dot was crying, tears streaming down her face.
Susannah was overwhelmed. They had done it. They had released the Silencers, they had Chester’s father, they had Penelope, and they had finally achieved justice.
But Sam …
She drew in a breath. ‘Start the melody!’
Travis placed one hand on Dot’s shoulder and the other on Penelope’s. Together, they began to hum. A run of quiet notes, bursting from pursed lips. Chester joined them and suddenly the music was spreading, ebbing outwards, floating like a wave through the crowd. One man would stop in his panic and pick it up, then another. Each person passed it to their neighbour like a secret on the tongue. Sweet and succulent, it rippled outwards, their twist on the Sundown Recital, the tune that would pull them back out of the Hush …
One by one, the people disappeared. Susannah watched them vanish, winking out of the Hush to return to their real world. As others saw what was happening – as they realised that the melody was their escape route – they took up the tune like a man in the desert grasps for water. The notes rolled outwards and bodies vanished into the haze of shadow as the cage behind them shone.
Susannah waited until they were all gone, every body, every soul. Just darkness hugged her. She let the Hush-rain play upon her skin.
She stared down at the Songshape
rs’ bodies. Broken. Crushed. For a second she could see their features, then the light from the cage behind her flickered out.
She had seen this cage once before. The last time, she had escaped when a fellow prisoner had tripped into the pool, when he’d let the water snare a taste of his ankle. He had crawled out again, dying slowly from the shock of the magic, but the water’s Music had broken for a moment – and in that moment, Susannah had slipped between the bars.
This time, Sam had bought the prisoners more time. He had thrown his whole body into the water, had let his Music churn and writhe in violent death throes through the dark, so that the spell would stay disrupted until the last of his body burned away.
Sam.
Susannah let the melody slip softly from her lips. He was gone. She would never see him again.
For Chester, the next few minutes were a blur. The marble floor was white again, and the beds and medical equipment punctuated the curving walls.
People were screaming, kicking over the beds, smashing canisters and trays and needles and tearing buckles free from the walls. Mirrors splintered and bodies shoved and all Chester could think was that it was so bright in here, after the black of the Hush. His eyes burned and he wondered how the Silencers would cope after months of darkness …
The Silencers.
His father.
Chester still had Goldenleaf pinned under one arm. With the other shoulder he supported his father. He looked like a broken man, hunched over, his breath ragged against Chester’s neck.
‘You found me,’ his father whispered. ‘Chester …’
‘Shhh,’ Chester said, and hoisted him a little higher. His legs felt like they were about to buckle under the strain but this was his father, dammit. Chester wasn’t about to let him fall, not even if his legs shattered and his arms turned to sawdust. No matter what, Chester would not let him fall.
When Susannah appeared he let out a little choke of relief. She was pale and dishevelled, her red hair a mess of tangles more than curls. When his gaze fell upon her, Chester was struck by how wild she was. Wild and beautiful. She looked back at him and there was a desperation in her gaze that made his insides flip. And he knew – in a tangle of hurt and hope and fatigue – that Susannah had told the truth when she apologised. She didn’t mean to go through with the plan tonight.
The Hush Page 32