by Webb, Holly
‘Hold the torch in front of his face,’ Rose whispered to Bill, but he turned to her worriedly. ‘What are you going to do?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing bad! What do you think I am? I just want to show him the ship!’
Bill sniffed, but he turned back and held up the torch, and beckoned to their gondolier. ‘Hey!’
The boy frowned, but then his mouth dropped open, and he almost let go of the oar, muttering under his breath, and casting an awed glance at Rose, before he went back to gazing at the torch.
It was smoking now, the tarry wood sending off a black odd-smelling cloud, which formed itself into a sailing ship, and sped off across the lagoon.
‘Follow it!’ Bill pointed, stabbing urgently in the direction of the smoke-ship. ‘Go! Go!’
The boy spoke no English, but he understood that clearly enough, and set off, digging his oar fiercely into the water, leaving a creamy swirl of bubbles.
Gossamer’s ship was anchored out where the water was deeper. It was silent, with no sailors on the deck, and only one lantern lit, shining in the window of the stern cabin.
‘How are we going to get on board?’ Rose murmured, as the side of the ship towered above them.
Bill shook his head, but Gus padded along the back of the gondola to charm the boy again, nudging him gently to row around the ship to the anchor chain.
‘You can’t!’ Rose hissed, as Gus perched on the side of the gondola, tensing his muscles to make the leap to the huge iron links. ‘You’ll fall!’
‘I will not!’ Gus stared back at her arrogantly.
Rose sighed. ‘Please be careful. And wait for us! Find us – I don’t know? A rope ladder?’ She shivered at the thought. ‘Don’t go chasing Gossamer without us, Gus,promise me!’
‘I promise.’ And he was gone, a swift white ghost flickering away up the chain.
They waited in the gondola, with the boy sitting curled up on the back, blinking confusedly at the dark water. Gus’s spell seemed to be wearing off – clearly he was wondering where he was. Rose felt cold to the bone in only her silvery dress. Huddled out here against the black ship, the glittering, dancing city looked so very far away.
A hiss startled them, and something bumped down from above.
‘It’s a swing!’ Bill reached up to catch it. ‘Or something like it. How’s he lowered it?’
They couldn’t see, the slope of the ship’s side was in the way, but Gus’s head appeared over the edge, looking disconcertingly tiny, and a cry of ‘Hurry!’ floated down to them. ‘And send the boy away.’
The gondolier was looking up at Gus, and frowning, as though he couldn’t remember something. ‘Thank you,’ Rose murmured, wishing she had something to pay him with, or even just that he could understand how grateful she was. Sadly she untied the ribbons of her glittering mask, and gave the jewels a last little pat. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing it, but it was all she had. She held it out to the boy, and he stared it at covetously, but shook his head, pushing it back to Rose, and giving her a graceful little bow. Rose smiled at him. ‘Go. Please,’ she whispered, pointing back towards the city. Oh, she wished she could make him understand. She didn’t want this stranger mixed up in what they were going to do. She fixed her eyes on his, pleading, and he nodded reluctantly.
Then she climbed gingerly onto the wobbly ropecontraption, and Bill squeezed next to her, holding the torch carefully out to the side.
‘Hold on,’ Gus mewed from above, and the whole thing bumped away up the side of the ship, Rose’s heart bumping with it.
‘Goodbye!’ she whispered to the gondolier, and he began to pole his craft away. They could see his white smudge of a face looking back at them as they inched slowly upwards.
As they rose to the ship’s balustrade and scrambled over, Rose gave a horrified squeak.
‘Quiet!’ Gus hissed back. ‘Do you want him to hear us? And I couldn’t do it by myself.’
Hanging onto the rope with hundreds of tiny claws were a gang of confused-looking rats, their tiny eyes blinking in a suspicious daze.
‘What did you do to them?’ Bill asked disgustedly.
Gus shrugged, and showed his teeth, and Bill shuddered. As soon as both the children were safely on board, Gus snarled something, and the rats disappeared across the deck in a wave of dirty brown.
‘So now what are we going to do?’ Bill asked sceptically, and Rose shook herself. She had been staring after the rats, her fingernails digging into her hands. She hated them. They reminded her of the orphanage, where the rats had roamed the attic dormitories, almost as hungry as the children.
‘He’s in the lit cabin, isn’t he?’
‘You just want to walk in there?’ Bill sounded incredulous. ‘That’s your plan?’
‘He cannot have failed to notice that we are here.’ Gus was sitting on a coil of rope, washing his ears. He looked calm, but Rose was sure he only washed when he was worried.
‘So…so why isn’t he coming?’ Rose looked over hershoulder to the companionway.
Gus stretched elaborately. ‘Perhaps he is waiting to see what we will do.’
Bill was staring into the torch flame as though mesmerised. ‘I think we should fire the ship.’
‘No!’ Rose protested, but Gus looked thoughtful, and Bill went on, more enthusiastically. ‘We could lower a boat ready, so we get off safe, and he’d be trapped.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to do.’
Gus nodded. ‘It is.’ Then he looked over at Bill. ‘Go and lower the boat.’
‘You can’t!’
‘Rose, he’s tried to kill you about three times. He’s your enemy, don’t you want to get rid of him?’ Gus looked at her with narrowed eyes. ‘If you’re ever going to become a real magician, you’re going to have to harden your heart.’
Rose kneeled down by the ropes to look into his face. ‘I know we have to…’ She swallowed. ‘We have to kill him. But not like that…’
Suddenly Bill was there, reaching down a hand to pull her up. ‘I’ve already done it. Get up, quick. You need to help me lower the boat down. Don’t look at me like that. You were going to spend the next ten minutes fighting with your conscience, while that monster works out how to kill us. Anyway, Rose, don’t be silly. He isn’t just going to sit there and let himself be crisped, is he? But at least now he’ll have to come out and fight, and the only way out is through that hatch.’
‘And we have to fight him back, on a ship that’s on fire!’ Rose hissed, looking round furiously at the coil of rope that Bill had set alight with his tinder-box. It was smouldering, and little tongues of flame were starting to lick across the deck. ‘What about the crew?’
Bill shrugged. ‘There’s no one here, Rose.’
The flames had leaped up now to one of the furled sails, and they were spreading fast, fanned by the wind. ‘The old devil’s going to have to come on deck soon,’ Bill muttered. ‘There’s no other ways out, are there?’
‘Only the stern cabin window…’ Rose looked up at him, her eyes wide with horror, and then away to the back of the ship. ‘He did! He climbed up!’
White fingers were gripping the ship’s rail, horribly like bones. Rose moved closer to Bill, wondering what on earth they were going to do. The thrill of the chase, and her fury with this man who had killed her master, had brought her this far, but now she was suddenly aware that this was the magician who had cast London into winter, and snatched a princess away from her palace.
Gossamer heaved himself over the rail, and smoothed down his coat with those long pale fingers. He touched the mask delicately, checking that it was still in place. The white hands stroked the white cheek, and Rose shuddered. Then he strolled calmly through the flames, which sizzled and spat, as though he was casting buckets of water over them, and stood towering over the children.
‘Was he that tall before?’ Bill nudged Rose.
Rose shook her head. ‘I think the mask is making him different… He was right to be scared of
it.’ She was flickering her fingertips as she spoke, changing the hiding spell that Mr Fountain had taught them – for what would be the point of disappearing now, when Gossamer could see exactly where they were standing? Now, instead of mistingthem away, the spell would wrap them in a cloud of – well, Rose wasn’t quite sure what, but hopefully something that would deflect any spells Gossamer tried to use.
She finished it, gasping, just in time. The tall masked figure was pacing closer. He seemed thinner too, as though something had stretched him upwards. The mask was glowing now, with a strange bluish light that turned what could still be seen of Gossamer’s face a sickly sort of colour.
‘He most definitely does not have that mask under control,’ Gus muttered, backing away, his tail fluffing up to double-size.
Suddenly, the blue light exploded out of the mask, filling the air with shards of ice, dagger-sharp, like flying needles.
Rose’s protection spell did work, but not quite in the way she expected. Clearly the spell was ingenious, and she had asked it to protect them from whatever Gossamer might hurl at them. So the furled mizzen sail collapsed over the top of them, covering them in tough sailcloth.
‘Rose!’ Bill sounded squashed.
‘Sorry! I didn’t mean it to do that.’
The edges of the enormous sail were already blackening as they crawled out from underneath, and after that it was burning in seconds, spreading the fire over the whole of the stern deck, melting the tar between the decking, and sending sizzling little spurts of flame over the wood.
‘We never lowered the boat,’ Bill muttered, looking over the side at the dark, cold water. ‘We could jump, I suppose.’
‘I’d rather burn,’ Gus muttered, his eyes still fixed on Gossamer. ‘What is he doing?’
The thin magician was holding his hands cupped in front of him, and somehow in them was water, black water, like the sea that was suddenly starting to surge around the ship.
‘Is it him, making the water do that? Oh!’ Rose lost her footing as the deck seemed to slip sideways, and then lurched back again.
‘Water magic.’ Gus sprang into Rose’s arms. ‘I suppose it’s not much different to ice. And they’re known for it here, of course. He must have been studying.’
‘Criminy!’ Bill was staring over Rose’s shoulder, and Rose hastily followed his horrified glance. Coiling up into the sky above them was a tower of water, looking almost solid as it caught the light of the flames. It bobbed and danced on the surface of the sea, weaving perilously close to the ship.
‘What’s he’s thinking? If he sends that against us, he’ll be broken up too!’ Bill backed up towards Rose and flung his arm around her shoulders.
The waterspout was mesmerising, spinning around the ship, coming closer and closer.
‘He’s mad,’ Rose murmured, dragging her eyes away to look again at Gossamer.
He seemed hardly to have noticed the waterspout behind him, and his eyes were still fixed on that strange little handful of water. Rose pulled out of Bill’s grip suddenly, and ran at him, clutching Gus tightly in one arm, and flinging up her other hand to dash the dark water away.
Gossamer howled, his eyes wild behind the mask, and hit her. One long white hand, still dripping with the enchanted water, struck her across the face, sending her flying over the deck.
Sobbing, Rose crouched against the rail, her fingerssearching the tiny hanging pocket of her dress for the china doll. A little of her fear seemed to lift away when her fingers closed around it. Even if he killed her, a tiny drop of her blood would be left behind inside that porcelain body, and that was a comfort somehow. Rose had a feeling that even if the doll fell to the bottom of the sea, she would be found, and in a little Venetian child’s arms before too long. Wasn’t there a story about a magic ring, thrown into the sea, only to be swallowed by a fish and delivered up for breakfast?
Dazedly, Rose shook the stories out of her head, and stared around her, trying to work out what was happening.
‘Are you safe, Rose?’ Bill was darting warily across the burning deck towards her. ‘Did he hurt you?’ He flung an arm around her, and they staggered together as the ship rocked, shaking as if it had collided with another vessel.
The waterspout had collapsed into a foaming mass of spray, and Gossamer fell on his knees on the deck, moaning, and trying to catch the water droplets as they sizzled into the fire. Then he stood up – or rather, the mask pulled him up, so he looked like a gigantic leggy puppet. And then he came stalking across the fiery deck to Rose.
Still shaken from her fall, she stared up at him, dimlyhearing Bill shouting vain threats. Gus was standing over them hissing defiantly, but he seemed so small against the black figure loping towards the children.
Rose moaned in horror. Rising from the ship’s timbers behind Gossamer was another waterspout – or so it seemed at first. A black column of water and smoke, grown from Gossamer’s enchanted handful, and the fire of the ship, woven together by the power of the mask.
‘That’s not his work,’ Gus mewed, his claws scrabbling nervously on the deck. ‘That’s the mask, all by itself. There’s no smell of him in it.’
‘He should never have tried to use it,’ Rose whispered. ‘I don’t think he’s really there at all. Oh!’
‘What is that?’ Bill was behind her, his livery jacket charred by falling embers from the burning rigging, and a red streak across his face. He crouched next to her, one hand on Gus’s coat. The fire was all around them, but something far more dangerous was growing above Gossamer now.
The black shape dwarfed the magician it was draining. A huge dragon made of water and smoke and fire, and it was growing to the height of the mainmast. The creature roared a burning breath, then reached out one flaming claw and seized Gossamer, so that he hung limply, his legs faintly waving, the puppet of the mask.
‘I’ve changed my mind.’ Gus turned to Rose and Bill. ‘We jump. Now, while it’s occupied with him.’
He raced to the rail, the fire glittering on his white fur, so that for a second he was a glowing marmalade cat. Bill pulled Rose up, and they stumbled after him.
Rose’s head swam as she looked down at the water so far below, already sizzling as gouts of burning tar dripped from the ship’s side. Then Gus climbed onto her shoulders, and seemed to grow impossibly heavy, and she was falling, falling towards the blackness.
It was so cold it burned, more than the fire, and Rose sank under the water, her hair coming unpinned and floating in a cloud about her face. Strange creatures seemed to swirl around her, mermaids mingling their hair with hers, and a grinning, toothy water sprite, who resolved himself into Gus, his paws threshing frantically against the water.
Rose felt a sudden and horrible aching inside her as her body fought for air, and she twisted in panic, her fingers clenching desperately around the doll. The chill of the china skin softened in the water, and now the hands were bigger, and they were holding Rose’s, not the other way around. It was pulling, pulling, dragging Rose towards the flickering lights above. Gasping and spitting Rose fought herself upwards, the delicate little hands of the doll leading her on.
But when she splashed out of the water, shaking herself like a half-drowned dog, there was no china-white girl there with her, only Gus, coughing furiously. Rose gazed around her, bewildered. Had she imagined it? The tiny creature in her hand was only a porcelain doll again, and there was no sign that it had been anything else. Except perhaps that its painted smile seemed wider in the starlight.
Somehow it seemed colder than ever now they had broken the surface at last, and Gus’s claws tangled in her hair. He looked half-drowned, and huddled against her coughing.
‘Bill! Bill!’ Rose had never swum in her life, but she seemed to be able to float, although she had no idea how they were to get to shore. The burning ship was some distance away now, but the lights of the city were even further.
‘I’m here,’ someone spluttered, and a bedraggled pile of rags, clutching a
half-burned spar, kicked towards her. Bill’s hair was lying flat for once, plastered to his forehead with water. ‘The ship’s breaking up. Look! There goes that thing!’
Spiralling into the night sky went the fire dragon, and the ship exploded as it left the deck.
‘It still has Gossamer, I think,’ Rose murmured, gripping tightly onto the spar with Bill.
Gus, now balancing on her shoulder out of the water, craned his neck around, and nodded. ‘I can see him in its claws. But – he looks dead. Ah! It’s dropping him!’
There was the faintest splash, and the limp black bundle slid horribly quickly under the water, and was gone.
The boy poled them swiftly through the water, every so often casting wondering glances back towards the burning ship.
The gondola had come gliding towards them a few minutes after the dragon had disappeared. The boy had obviously seen it – the whole city must have done – and he had come back for them, muttering prayers of relief as he hauled them out of the water. Hehad forced them to drink out of a small black bottle that he had concealed in an inside pocket of his jacket, spirits that burned Rose’s throat wonderfully as she swallowed and coughed.
They scrambled out at the quayside, and Gus, looking half his usual size, purred loudly at the boy. He glanced up at Rose, and whispered, ‘Pull out one of my whiskers, and give it to him.’
Rose winced, but did it anyway, passing the thin white wire to the staring gondolier. ‘Keep it safe,’ she told him, folding his fingers around it, and pressing his hand against her own heart. ‘For luck, you see?’ And he nodded, wide-eyed, and kissed his fingers to herand Gus.
Then they slipped through the muttering crowd, all watching the ship as it burned down closer and closer to the water line.
The masquerade was over, and no music came from the palace windows. Half the lights were out, and a yawning guard was more interested in gazing out at the fire than he was in them.
‘We missed that ceremony, then, I reckon,’ Bill murmured, as they slid past the guard.
Rose nodded. She wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sorry. They had stopped Gossamer joining himself to the mask, at least. She had a feeling that if he’d tried to take part in the ceremony, the power of the mask might have swallowed up the whole palace, and them with it. But she wished she’d seen what happened, after all those strange stories.