‘Will, what happened when she touched him?’
Kay was awake and murmuring, though her eyelids remained slack and shut, and her arms limp where they draped round Ell’s shoulders.
‘He came apart, Kay. And he was dispersed.’
‘Bring him.’
The two hooded wraiths approached the crumpled form, one on either side, stooped, and with the utmost gentleness lifted it to its broken height. The man’s head lolled on its neck, spluttering through the filth of mucus and blood that caked its face. Whoever he was, he did not look up. He was ready.
Ghast held wide the oak door to the Imaginary as the wraiths guided the shuffling form between them, and together the four of them descended the sloping stairs of the tower. Their progress was painfully slow.
At the base of the tower Ghast put his hand on the heavy rope and collar where for centuries they had hung on an iron hook. How often had he imagined lifting it, in waking visions as in his dreams! The collar was plain iron, a band of about two inches in width, hammered flat, with a tight hinge to one side and a clasp opposite. The clasp was mounted with a heavy ring, long ago welded to its base with huge slugs of black iron. He knew before he touched it what its weight would be, how its hinge would demand forcing. Beg for it. The inch-thick rope had been twined with a thread of steel, then spliced to the ring and the rope ends woven seamlessly back upon the cabling. He drew it slowly from the hook, allowing its mass and heft to shift slowly, coil by coil, into his other palm, each coil a distinct pleasure. To each filament he gave his thumb, but delicately, noticing every ridge and hair as it slipped with its own weight between his hands. It would end too soon, he thought.
It ended too soon.
The head hung before him, its spare remaining tufts of hair clotted with filth. He had no inclination to touch it. He nodded to one of the wraiths, who grasped the hair firmly, lifting the head far enough to expose a band of grey flesh beneath the chin. Ghast broke open the collar with a single sharp tug, then placed it around the neck, as lightly and reverently as if he were crowning a king. In a way, he thought, he was. The reverence was for himself.
As the little group moved through the rough-quarried passages, Ghast always leading, the rope pinched tenderly between the tips of his squat fingers, he thought of the great triumphs of an earlier age, of the generals returning to the imperial city in chariots crowned with golden victories, of the captives paraded in chains, or cages, through the jeering tumults of the streets. He imagined the trumpets, the velvet cushions on which the emperor, seated, would receive with gracious condescension the submission of his enemies. Courtiers lapped up his yawns as cats do milk. With every step he felt the drums pulse up his dwarf calves. He did not need to close his eyes; the vision settled on him waking.
With no haste they gained first the great cavern of the mountain, hung with tapestries, then by a little passage the door to the library. The lights flared along the walls as Ghast shuffled his prisoner in behind him.
There they stood. They were ready. All he would have to do now, he thought, was wait.
Spiders wait in their webs, but neither, he thought, as patiently nor as silently as he. Soon his daughters would see the great Builder; but the Builder would not see his daughters. For he no longer knew them. To what desperation and recklessness this would drive them, his enemies, Ghast needed not imagine – for he had plotted every step of it already. The girl would break. After that she would do anything to get her father back. And when she learned that only Ghast himself had that power, why, she would give him anything he demanded. She would give him a golden crown.
For now, he would wait.
Dispersal
Kay woke to hands on her shoulders. Why? she thought in the moments before she forced her eyes open.
It was Will. He was crouched above her, arguing with Flip. Kay saw his mouth moving, and understood the metallic clang of his angry tone, understood the hard clamp of his eyes, like a vice, as he volleyed words over her head. But she couldn’t make out the meaning.
And he was pinning her down. She pushed against his hands before she found her own. Then she ground them into the stone beneath her, writhing in his grip. Somehow they were up on the floor of the quarry, in the large space, and there was movement – she struggled on to one side, thrashing beneath Will’s hands while he pushed her down – and she saw a knot of wraiths moving away across the quarry floor and towards the great stairs.
‘I don’t care about the thread,’ Will was saying. ‘He doesn’t have the right.’ He was hardly paying attention to her as she pushed against him with all her strength.
Ell, she thought. Her eyes rebounded wildly around the huge space, her head lurching from side to side. Ell. Ell.
‘Right or no right, Will, for the time being he has the voices, and there’s nothing you can do about it. We have to make the best of what we can. Don’t get too involved with this.’ That was Flip. Where is Eloise?
‘She’s only a tiny child. She can’t be more than six years old.’
‘She’s eight,’ Kay corrected him. It came out like a howl.
Now, at last, she had Will’s full attention. She pushed hard to the right, then rolled immediately to the left. Will’s right hand slipped, and Kay sprang on to one foot. She kept low in a crouch, like a dog. A wounded one. About a metre away. She watched Will’s hands.
‘Where is she?’ she said. ‘I promised I would stay with her.’
‘Foliot came and took her to see Ghast,’ said Will. ‘And I tried to stop him, and my friend Flip here stopped me.’ He was steady, and kind, and like always. But his hands. ‘We thought you would wake up,’ he added, almost apologetic. ‘And the way we plotted things, we were afraid you might try to go after her.’
Kay glanced quickly at that knot of wraiths still moving across the floor of the Quarries, now very close to the stairs.
‘You mean Ghast wanted to see her?’ Kay asked. ‘I thought Ghast wanted to see me. Take me there now.’ She didn’t move. The wraiths didn’t move. They said nothing, but she could sense from their intense silence that there was going to be a problem. The wraiths across the quarry floor reached the stairs, and began to ascend out of sight. In among them as they climbed, Kay caught the flash of Ell’s red curls.
Her whole body flinched.
‘We can’t leave, Kay. Ghast’s orders,’ Will said finally, softly, and Kay crouched on the ground again, her hands pressed palm down on either side of her, and looked out into the distance, to the other side of the quarry, beyond the stream where it gushed up from below. There were other wraiths coming and going here and there, silently in the shadow. ‘The truth is,’ Will said, ‘they want me to lock you up.’
‘The truth is,’ said Flip, ‘he wants me to lock you both up.’
Kay ignored them. ‘What does Ghast want her for?’
‘I don’t know,’ Will said.
Kay turned. ‘She’s scared. I promised I would stay with her.’
For a long time they just watched one another – or, rather, watched the spaces in between one another. Around them shadows flitted in and among the rocks, and soft footfalls echoed from the tunnels that led out from the cave, so distant and muted that they reminded Kay of the sound of stones settling in the silt of the river when, the summer before, she had gone swimming underwater with her father. Her dispersed father. Ell had been throwing stones from the bank, and Kay had watched them plummet down, making the lightest thud as they half dropped, half settled into the weedy mud. She had decided at the time, as she held her breath and squinted through the murky water, that it was the sound of fairies stamping. She hadn’t been far off, she now thought with grim satisfaction; it was the sound of wraiths walking. Kay felt a stiff and brittle rage steel through her shoulders: it was the sound of wraiths walking off with Ell, she thought, while she slept, while Will did nothing. While her mother cried.
Kay stood up. ‘Well, I don’t care. I’m going to Ghast. You’re going to have to stop me.’<
br />
She was off and running before they could react. This gave her a few seconds to get ahead. She ducked behind a cleft, darted up through a narrow channel in the rock, then doubled back down some stairs, through one of the quarry pits. They couldn’t have seen her go down, she knew, because she was light and low, and had had enough of a start; and at the bottom of the stairs she waited to see if one or both of them would chance it – but they seemed to have gone in the other direction, towards the tunnels. She was now too far down to see them, but there was a glow where the tunnels opened up into the cave, and so she headed in the opposite direction, picking her way as quietly as she could and always looking out for other wraiths. She was hoping that there would be another exit, some way to slip past Will and Flip, get to Ghast and … well, at least be with Ell. Even if she couldn’t get her out, at least she wouldn’t be alone.
Kay found herself at the low, sudden bank of the underground river. It flowed here silently, a bluish-grey column of glass laid in its cut bed like a massive dark jewel. Kay stood watching its apparent motionlessness, looking for some sign – debris, an eddy, a bubble – of its current, knowing that it must be motive and fluid. Mesmerized by its stillness, she crouched down and gingerly stretched out her hand to dip her fingers into the water. The moment of contact came as a shock: it was liquid ice, not water, and from the dead force of it against her fingers she knew that it was moving very fast. After a few seconds, her fingers already numb, she withdrew them and stood up. She backed off and reminded herself of what her mother would say: If it’s that cold on your fingers, Katharine, you certainly don’t want to fall in. Kay smiled; no, I certainly do not.
But with the tingling that was beginning in her hand as the cold leached out of her fingers came a thought. She spun round to face upstream, training her eyes along the embankment as far as she could see in the dim light. There was a curve in the course, slightly up and to the right, and some outcroppings that blocked her view; but she thought she could just make out, not too far away, that other tunnel out of the Quarries, a tunnel that had not been carved by wraiths, but scoured by the cold hands of the swift-running river. She ran along the bank, grateful to the wraiths for having left a path clear all the way to the wall. Flip and Will would be watching the quarry entrance, but perhaps she could slip out through the back door.
By the time she reached the gushing, noisy mouth of the stream, she was breathing hard, and had to stop to get her bearings. No one was following her, though it could surely be only a matter of moments before one of them plotted her escape, before one of them saw her hovering. She peered into the dark mouth of the underground watercourse, where it cut its way upwards through soft rock. The wraiths had obviously dug out the channel for some way into the mountainside – but how far? If she went in, would she be able to get out? Kay thought: The wraiths would probably have taken the trouble to cut the stream’s tunnel open only if they were using it for something. You don’t delve a dead end directly into a mountain. She might have heard footsteps. She didn’t look back; she dived in.
In the thick chill of the black tunnel she found she had to grope her way along, using her hands against the wall to guide her, and running her toes along the wall, too, with every step. She was terrified of putting a foot wrong and tumbling into the stream to her left. Her fingers remembered its heavy cold. Every step grew more tentative – what would happen if the ledged bank were suddenly to end, and she were to trip or fall into a river of ice? For a moment she stopped completely, too anxious to move forward, too reluctant to turn back. But the thought of Ell alone with Ghast drew her onward again. And someone must be following by now. They would figure it out. They would have lights. Kay forced herself to make progress – slow progress up a slight incline, but progress. The course, she noticed, was slightly inclined, and she felt the air growing cooler and cooler as she bored further and further into the mountainside.
In the darkness Kay suddenly recalled those final words of Will’s last story, which she had heard just before drifting off. He was dispersed, he had said. Orpheus, the poet, had been dispersed. Kay remembered the myth of Orpheus’ death, a story her father had told her a hundred times if he had told her once: how he had descended to Hades to redeem his dead wife, Eurydice; how he had lost her; and how, while singing his songs of lamentation and despair, he had been attacked by frenzied worshippers of the god Bacchus and literally torn to pieces. Dispersed. So this, then, was what Ghast had meant by ‘processed’.
In the dark of the tunnel, her arms splayed on the gently sloping rock face, Kay suddenly felt sick, disorientated, vulnerable – and she nearly reeled backwards. It was as if someone had just turned on a very bright, high-beam light right in her face – except that, instead of a light, it was darkness itself they were shining upon her; high-beam darkness, totally unilluminating her. She crouched. After removal, dispersal. And now they had taken Ell. Why? She had to go on.
By the time Kay found herself alongside a warm and suddenly very dry section of rock, she was so tired with her fear that she almost failed to notice it. A realization was only just settling in her mind as her hands brushed up against a new texture, one that was definitely neither dry nor wet rock. It felt like wood; and at the centre of it there was a metal knob or handle. The blood in Kay’s arms and legs flushed into her chest and neck, and she came up square against the door, the silent river running on behind her. Feeling round the frame of the door, she could tell she was going to have to push. So terrified and exhausted had she become that she hardly paused to wonder what might be on the other side; she just pushed with all her strength.
Nothing happened. She pushed again. Nothing. Her whole head a throbbing mass of despair, she almost cried, and pounded with her fist on the wood.
Unstuck from its seal, the door finally swung open with surprising force, and Kay tumbled into what seemed a blindingly bright room. Her eyes seared by the change in the light, she was able to take in only that the room around her was warm and cluttered, though it was as silent as the passage she had left. She had fallen into someone’s arms, and the sleeves and coat up against her face were similarly warm, and smelled strongly of some spice she couldn’t precisely place – not mint, but as sharp; not aniseed, but as sweet. She was half on her knees. Another form – a black blur as she had fallen – had rushed across her to close the door, and she felt the draught, at first violently sucking out of the chamber, settle as the door was closed and then – it sounded – locked behind her. For a long moment nothing else happened, and she remained immobile, semi-prostrate, her head buried in the cloth of some stranger’s arms. Then he spoke.
‘It’s all right, Kay. I’ve got you. You’ll be fine.’
It was Will’s voice: unmistakably soft, almost a whisper, with that delicate unsureness that made his assurances so believable. She let herself go limp. But those hands.
‘Will, the thread.’
Kay stiffened a little again. It was Flip. She pushed herself up and tried to open her eyes. ‘How did you find me?’ she asked. ‘I need to find Ell.’
‘This will do for both,’ said Will, taking something out of his pocket and thrusting it into her hand. It was a small, smooth, cool stone. A plotting stone. ‘We plotted your run just now, and we can plot Ghast, too.’ Will smiled weakly and held up his hands. Those hands. ‘It’s our one advantage on Ghast – and we reckon we’ve got about thirty seconds till we lose it. Get up – quickly now.’
Will’s arms were around Kay, hauling her up, and then he and Flip practically lifted her in the air as, together, they drew back into the near corner of the small room, behind two tables stacked high with carpets, to rest beside an enormous trunk. To her left, she could see the door through which she had come in. It was flush and seamless with the wall except for a handle which, judging from its shape and size, was exactly like the one on the other side, protruding from its exact centre. She could now see that the handle was in the shape of a plotting stone – oblong, smooth and jet black –
but larger.
But to her right … To her right, she suddenly realized there was only gloomy air. Over a rail, a kind of balcony, her eye soared out into a chaos of shadows.
‘Into the trunk,’ said Flip. ‘Hurry.’
From a pocket Will produced a ring of keys, holding them up to the light just long enough for Kay to see how similar they were to some she had seen before – where? – and then, selecting one, he undid three separate locks on the battered, banded trunk. When its heavy lid swung open, Kay could see that the blackened interior was almost empty, and easily large enough to take them all. But, helping her in, Will quickly let the lid fall over the two of them, though without quite letting it settle into place. Through a crack Kay could make out Flip, still outside, striding away, the cloth of his cloak whispering urgently as his long legs made for the opposite side of the room. Away to the right, lights suddenly flared, and she realized that beyond the railing, below and all around, was the great library of the mountain through which they had walked the night before. Everywhere around them were shelves crammed with books, and Kay saw that they were in an alcove perched just above the hall. She shuddered, for no reason that she knew.
Flip bent rigidly over a table; just to his right was a stack of papers, which he was making a show of reading.
‘Will …’ Kay whispered in the dark within the trunk. Her breath rebounded hot against the tight space where they crouched. ‘What are we waiting for?’
‘We’re pretty sure Ghast is coming. And he will have Ell with him, or will know where she is. We worked it out on the plotting board.’
‘And that’s how you found me?’ Kay asked. She recalled, in the Quarries, looking over towards the entrance of the tunnels, and glimpsing a group of wraiths gathering around the light. No wonder they hadn’t been searching for her, she thought – or, rather, they had been searching for her in their own way. They had just been looking for where she would be, rather than where she was.
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