by Caro King
Somehow Right Madam had given him the slip. He couldn’t believe it had happened. He, Skerridge, Chief Bogeyman and Champion Kid-Catcher, given the slip by some nasty girl-brat. He stopped to scream with rage, sending billows of hot mist spurting into the early-morning air. Then he threw the sack on the ground and pounced on it, shredding it with his bone-yellow claws. When it was a rag he chucked it aside and stared again at the horizon.
Dawn. BMs hated the dawn. They loathed the sun. Despised its nasty, sizzling glare that gave them no place to lurk.
Skerridge bellowed again. The steam hissed above him in a cloud, faintly golden in the growing light.
Thing was, he had a reputation to keep up. Other BMs might lose kids, but not Skerridge. Never Skerridge. Even the half-eaten one didn’t count as a loss. Exactly. His mind made up, Skerridge stood his ground.
The rising sun crept above the lip of the world, flowing over empty streets and sleeping houses and one creature of yellowed bones wearing torn trousers and a fancy waistcoat, its red eyes blinking warily in the light.
When it was fully day, Skerridge got moving.
5
Dandy Boneman
y now the sun was up and a cool breeze blew white clouds across the blue expanse like ships fleeing before a gale. Nin squinted up at them.
‘They’ve got sails. A bit ragged, like, but still sails. And portholes!’
They settled on the outskirts of the copse, where Jonas arranged some stones in a ring and began building a fire in the centre. He lit it with the help of a box, dug out from his bulging pockets, then crouched next to the flames, feeding them with twigs and chunks of branch. Nin watched him, glad he was there. She didn’t like to think how she would be feeling if she was all alone right now, homeless, with no one to help. Soon she would have to decide what to do next, but for now, sticking with Jonas seemed like a good idea.
‘Right, I want you to sit here and warm up. I’ll fetch some water from the stream and see about making you a hot drink …’
‘What of ?’
‘Water and honey. ’Cept the honey and my brewing can are in my pack, which is down by the stream where I left it when I went to watch for you. Get used to it,’ he added, seeing the look on her face. ‘No cups of tea or bottles of fizzy pop here. Drift honey is probably more nourishing than your average dinner, though. It’ll warm you up.’
Nin was about to tell him that she wasn’t cold, then realised she was shivering. Must be shock, she thought, it’s not every day you get your life stolen. She giggled, feeling light-headed.
‘I need the bathroom.’
Jonas pointed to a bush. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’
In fact, he was back in five. Nin was huddled over the fire, trying block out the memory of her mother’s voice demanding to know who she was. She stared up at Jonas miserably.
‘It’ll get better,’ he said, ‘believe me. You might not want it to, you might want to hang on to feeling bad because it ties you to what you’ve lost, but it will get better anyway. You won’t be able to help it. And one day it’ll slip so far into the past …’
‘NO!’
‘OK.’ Jonas gave her a warm smile and set about putting a large can of water on to the fire to heat up. ‘I’ve only got one mug, we’ll have to share.’
Nin gazed over the landscape. It was beautiful, no doubt about that. The colours were vivid, without being harsh, and the air was so clear it filled her head with light. Without the ever-present trace of car fumes, she could smell grass, cool water and the smoke from the fire which had an odd scent, like roast apples. Soon the musky-sweet smell of honey drifted into the air too.
‘Would you like some cakes to go with that?’ asked a voice behind her. ‘I’ll do you a deal.’
Jonas, who had been paying attention to the fire, sprang to his feet. Nin looked round, startled.
A man was standing a little way up from them, on the slope of the hill. He had been walking in the shadow of the trees and now he stepped into the light. He was short and wiry with a pointed, foxy face and ginger hair twisted into tangled ringlets. He wore a long coat of green silk over a yellow top and leather trousers with knee-high, brown boots. All this Nin saw in a flash, but what really got her attention was the thing in his hand.
It was taller than a man and the top end was fashioned into a snarling dragon’s head engraved with complicated symbols. The whole thing gave off a silver haze that evaporated in the sunlight. It looked like it was made of bone and she wondered briefly what kind of animal had bones that big. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jonas give the thing the sort of look you might give to a Samurai sword in the hands of a lunatic. Then she caught sight of the objects lined up behind the stranger and forgot all about the bone.
Jonas stepped forward, putting himself in front of Nin. She peered round him, still staring at the whatevers.
‘Dandy Boneman,’ the stranger said. ‘No need to worry. Just travelling, like you.’ He smiled, showing teeth that were broken and black on one side.
‘Sure,’ said Jonas, his voice guarded. ‘We were just having breakfast.’ He didn’t offer their names.
‘I saw,’ Boneman turned, beckoning to one of the objects at his heels. ‘I have some cakes, but no honey. You appear to have honey, but no cakes. How about we combine resources?’
Nin gaped. Trotting forward with a huge pack balanced on its head was … well, she wasn’t sure what it was exactly. It stood about thigh high, was roughly man-shaped, but grey in colour and crumbly in texture, and had two glowing red eyes.
‘Mudman,’ said Jonas shortly. ‘Sort of like the Quick legend of golems, only not.’
The mudman came to a halt in front of Boneman and stood there while its owner rummaged in the pack, finally pulling out a package of greasy paper wrapped around a handful of small cakes. He held them out. His hands were slim and very white and Nin noticed an ancient-looking ring on his middle finger. It had a large red stone and a lot of symbols that made her skin prickle to look at them.
‘A half-dozen, plenty to go round.’
‘Thanks!’ said Nin brightly. She hadn’t realised it before, but she was hungry. It didn’t seem right to want food when your life had just been turned upside down, but the small, golden cakes looked good and the stranger was smiling at her, his blue eyes bright and innocent of harm. She thought she heard Jonas sigh.
Boneman walked around to the other side of the fire and Nin got another look at his mudmen servants. There were five of them, all burdened with pots, pans, blankets and packs. Boneman sat down with the mudmen ranged in a row at his back. Jonas stirred more honey into the boiling water.
‘Um … don’t they want to put those things down?’
‘They don’t get tired,’ laughed Boneman. ‘They are just lumps of earth, you know.’ He gave her a look that she didn’t understand. Like he was working something out in his head. Calculating.
Nin looked at the creatures, which stood there, unmoving. Their red eyes had dimmed a little, but that was all. One of them was crumbling on the left side, a chunk of its mud had fallen away leaving a hollow. There was no expression, no self-awareness, not even in the ember eyes. She shuddered.
‘Are you newly stolen?’ asked Boneman. ‘You’ll get used to it. What do you think of my staff ?’ He nodded at the bone rod, which was now lying close to his side, then began to divide the cakes.
‘Is it, like, magic?’
‘Sure. It’s a sorcerer’s staff.’ He gave her two cakes, then turned around and pulled a tin mug from the jumble piled on mudman number three, handing it to Jonas.
‘Are you a sorcerer, then?’
Boneman laughed gently. ‘I wield a sorcerer’s power.’
‘All the sorcerers are gone,’ explained Jonas, handing back mugs full of steaming liquid. ‘Except possibly one and that’s only a story. A staff like that has the last of its maker’s power stored up in it, like a battery, see.’ He pointed to a symbol like a fancy T running along the
back of the staff ’s carved head. ‘That’s the mark of the sorcerer who made it. All sorcerers had their symbols, their trademark, that would be branded, carved or burnished on to anything they made.’
‘But an ordinary person can still use it?’
‘Sort of. The sorcerer who owned this could have cast fantastic spells with it, but all a Quick can do is force the remaining energy outwards in a blast of power. And that’s hard enough. Eventually the stored-up magic will run out and then the staff will return to what it was before the sorcerer shaped it, just an old bone.’
Nin, halfway through a sip of her honey tea, glanced up and saw the look Boneman sent Jonas as he talked. She coughed. When she looked again the expression, like he could have willingly put a knife through Jonas’s heart on the spot, had been replaced by an affable smile and a nod of agreement. She thought she must have been mistaken, but her nerves were still jangling with shock.
‘It makes a fair weapon, for those Quick who can master it.’ Boneman’s voice was calm, unconcerned. ‘I found it abandoned in one of the old northern castles.’ He put down his mug while he ate.
‘And what about the … mud … things?’
‘Oh those! Anyone can do that.’ Boneman waved a hand dismissively. ‘The magic is in the Land, all you need to do is use it right. Mud to make, fire to bake, words to wake. Simple. Once you’ve baked them hard, just tap them on the head, give them a name and tell them what you want them to do. You don’t need sorcerer power for that.’
Nin nodded through a mouthful of cake, then licked the crumbs from her fingers and returned to her drink, which was turning out to be pleasantly warming. She glanced up, feeling Boneman’s eyes on her. They were very bright, almost turquoise. He smiled.
‘So, girl, do you know where you are?’
‘It’s called the Drift,’ she said flatly. ‘But that’s it.’
Boneman laughed, gulping down the last of his honey tea. ‘Here goes, then. But I don’t want any of that, “don’t believe in faeries” stuff. You obviously do or you wouldn’t be here.’
Indignantly, Nin put on her grown-up face, though she suspected it just looked like she had swallowed a wasp. So she gave up. She was too interested to pretend.
‘What you have to understand,’ Boneman began, ‘is that everything you see around you is not made of atoms as you understand them. It is fashioned from raw magic. The clouds, the trees, the rivers,’ he swept an arm over the landscape, ‘even the animals that run in the woods and the birds that fly in the air.’
Nin was quiet, watching Boneman intently. He was on his feet now and his hands wove pictures in the air as he spoke, using the staff like a prop, to point or gesture. In the background, the lumpy shapes of the mudmen stood still in the sun, casting odd, misshapen shadows on the grass.
‘The Long Land, to give it its rightful name, is the way things are in people’s hearts. The essence of dread and desire made real. Take the gateways, for example. The Quickmares, as we call them, that link the two worlds always open up in places where dread or desire is strong.’ Boneman laughed. ‘Which is the reason that they are always moving from one site to another as people’s hearts change. But not their deepest hearts, of course. The fears and longings in their deepest, most unspoken hearts are always constant.’
‘So what lives here? Magical people?’
‘The Fabulous. Faeries and worse. Giants, dragons, elves, the lot.’
‘Sorcerers?’
‘Of course. Sorcerers were the most powerful of all, the rulers of the Fabulous. No witches, mind. They are just ordinary Quick who use the Long Land’s magic for themselves.’
‘Like you and that staff,’ put in Jonas.
Nin glanced at Boneman, looking for some sign of the malevolence that had shown on his face earlier. There was nothing. She must have imagined it.
He ignored Jonas and went on. ‘Like the Land and everything in it, the Fabulous are made from raw magic, but they are much more potent than the birds and animals because they have intelligence and power, terrible power. Although you might think you know what a giant, a goblin or a faerie is, you don’t. The Fabulous are creatures born from dread and desire, not just foolish Quick legends, so they might not be quite as you expect.’ He smiled, his blue eyes vivid. His voice dropped to a husky whisper. ‘You should see the tomb-folk, girl. Fear and desire all rolled into one awesome package.’
‘And death,’ snapped Jonas.
‘That too,’ laughed Boneman.
‘What are they? Like … vampires or something?’
‘And much more! They are so beautiful you would consider it an honour to feed them.’ As much as the words, Boneman’s soft voice gave Nin a chill up her spine.
‘Get on with it!’ Jonas scowled.
Boneman took up the story again, speaking more normally.
‘Back in the great days, the mighty days when magic ruled the hearts of Quick and the Fabulous were magic, the Long Land was a glorious place. The Fabulous called it Celidon and it was full of wonders. And terrors, of course. Never forget the terrors.’
‘But it changed?’
‘Of course. All things change.’
Boneman sighed, his face becoming solemn. Nin could have sworn that the turquoise of his eyes faded as his expression altered.
‘There was a plague. It came from nowhere and nobody knows how it began or why. But a terrible darkness swept through the land of Celidon, cutting down the Fabulous like a scythe cuts wheat. The faeries and the elves were first, along with the dragons. Then the giants and the wood and water spirits and so on. At last it reached the most magnificent of all the Fabulous – the sorcerers. They lived here, in the east and the south of Celidon, and when they realised that the plague had begun to take them as well, they took shelter in the beautiful city of Beorht Eardgeard. They barricaded themselves in, refused to let any travellers stop there and killed any Quick stupid enough to turn up at the gates. It did no good.’
‘It still got in?’
‘Believe me, this plague could get through any wall. And when it did, it destroyed them so fast that in the end the dead lay piled in the streets!’
Nin shuddered.
‘Oh, they fought hard to stay alive, but it was no use.’
‘They all died?’
‘They all died or ceased to be sorcerers, which is more or less the same thing.’ A shadow crossed Boneman’s face and he turned away, but Nin caught a glimpse of something in his eyes like an old, bitter rage. When he looked back it was gone. He smiled wryly. ‘And when the sorcerers met their end, Celidon ceased to exist.’
‘You mean like, it went back to being the Long Land?’
‘Oh it’s always been the Long Land. Celidon was what the Fabulous called it. Like the Quick call it the Drift.’
‘The plague can’t have killed all the Fabulous? What about the … the bogeymen?’
‘Some Fabulous survived, but not many. And although the worst is over, it’s still out there, slowly destroying the few that are left. Even the bogeymen are a dying breed.’
‘Doesn’t stop them being horrible!’ grumbled Nin.
‘What happened next? Is there more?’
‘Sure there’s more. There’s the tale of the Seven Sorcerers, for a start. About how they tried to cheat Death. But that’s not really the story of the Long Land. The story of the Land is still going on, because after the plague had taken out the sorcerers, something worse happened. Something far, far worse.’ Boneman paused and leaned towards her, his eyes turquoise again, bright in his brown face. ‘The plague began to kill the Land.’
‘The Land!’ breathed Nin. ‘How?’
6
Quickmare
oneman smiled slowly. He straightened up, taking a firmer grip on his staff. ‘It’s mid-morning, we should be getting on.’
‘What!’
‘Best tradition of storytelling, girl,’ he said evenly. ‘Get them hooked and leave them on a cliff. Right?’
Jonas was sha
king his head. Nin burst out laughing. ‘OK! But I want the rest, you can’t just leave it. I HATE not knowing the end of a story!’
‘I’ll tell you on the road. Thought we might travel together a while.’ Boneman smiled, then turned to the mudmen.
‘Nemus, Enid, Senta, Crow, Dark, get moving.’
Underneath their burdens, the mudmen creaked into life, the reddish glow of their eyes brightening again. They shuffled forward and stood ready.
Jonas sighed. ‘Look, no offence, but …’
Boneman laughed and this time the chill was right there in his eyes. ‘Are you going to tell me that you prefer to travel alone? Well, I have other plans. You could be useful. She could be useful.’ He nodded towards Nin. ‘A girl child lost in a strange land. Believe me, it will open doors. You’d be surprised how much more people trust you when you have a kid in tow. They think it shows a caring nature.’ He laughed and Nin felt her skin prickle with fear.
‘No,’ said Jonas in a voice like steel. He flicked a look at the ring on Boneman’s finger, then at the staff, then fastened his gaze on Boneman’s face.
‘Don’t anger me, boy.’ Boneman’s eyes turned the colour of dark water, his hand curled more tightly round the staff. He seemed taller suddenly, taller and colder. ‘Mind your manners and I might let you live. For now at any rate. I could do with a Quick servant. The mudcrea-tures have their limits.’
Jonas was slowly backing away, his eyes still fixed on Boneman, one hand stretched out towards Nin. She reached for it. Jonas pulled her towards and behind him.
Boneman whirled the staff, aiming the dragon’s head in their direction. Jagged, blue fire danced across Nin’s vision. She heard it crackle and a smell like scalding water filled the air. The lightning bolt hit the ground just in front of Jonas and he leapt backwards, forcing Nin to scurry out of the way. Jonas landed awkwardly, slipping to one knee and staggering up again. The grass at his feet was a mess of ashes. Nin gazed in horror at Boneman, now gripping the staff with both hands. He smiled. It was a playful smile. Dandy Boneman was having fun.