Flip lowered his head into his hands – not, Kay thought, in despair, but in intense concentration. One hand, coming free, danced a little in the air, the fingers picking out rhythms and depths while the head, still bowed, rested motionless. Kay knew he was plotting.
‘What is it? What do you see?’ Will dragged a chair next to him. ‘We need a board.’
‘No,’ said Flip, looking up, dazed. ‘It’s something else. Something isn’t right. It’s as if we were working with the wrong information, as if Ghast were lying – but about what? I can’t understand why he would disperse this author, and on Twelfth Night, when we all know – when this Weave is so important. And that gimmick with the wheel – How dare he! He’s got to be playing at something.’
‘What do you mean? What’s a Weave, and who will come to it?’
‘The Weave is a grand assembly of all wraiths and phantasms,’ Will said, his own fingers now beginning to dance across the table and chair where he sat. ‘So, everyone will come – all the wraiths there are. We only call them in extraordinary circumstances; for instance, when the Honourable Society is changing officers. When we’re under attack. Or when, as legend has it, we crown a king. Which we have never, ever done. Which is why it’s only a legend.’
‘Ghast wants to be king?’ At first Kay was dumbfounded. But something was niggling at her just as, hours after waking, a half-remembered dream flashes through the mind and is gone, and flashes again, too fast to be handled. ‘That’s why he took Eloise,’ she said. She didn’t know why she said it.
Will looked at her sharply.
‘Maybe,’ Flip said. ‘That may well be right. Legend tells us that the crown must be placed upon his head by an author; not by a wraith who was once an author, but by an author. Most of the wraiths still take these matters seriously, and this little detail has kept Ghast in his place for some time.’ Flip looked ashen. ‘But he may at last have found his opportunity; which is why we’re wondering why he would squander it so recklessly, dispersing the very means by which he might at last satisfy his ambition. A king can act outside the Weave. A king can abandon the thread altogether. He himself becomes the thread. It is him; he it. And if that’s what he wants, if he really wants to be king, your sister should be just what he has been looking for, for quite some time.’
Will was watching Kay intently. It made her embarrassed. Flip was easier. He continued to rock his head up and down, his fingers tapping it and circling in tight patterns around his ears.
And then, all of a sudden, he slapped his hands down on the table before him, startling them both. ‘I just can’t see it, Will,’ he said – hard, impatient. Kay had never seen him like this, and maybe Will hadn’t, either. ‘There’s something wrong with our plotting, but I can’t see what it is. We’re going to need help if we’re going to stop this.’
Will spoke quietly. ‘What do you mean “we”, Flip?’
Flip suddenly looked up at Kay. His eyes were as hard and as black as a plotting stone. ‘This morning I had to let them take them. Your father, your sister. I had to stand here, in this room, and seal the order, and watch them go through those doors down there. There was nothing I could do.’
Kay stared at him. Hard.
‘I am ashamed to say it. I didn’t know until – Anyway, I did what I had to do. And now they are both gone.’
Kay’s eyes slipped out of focus and she couldn’t wrestle them back. ‘Gone.’ Why?
‘If I had refused, some other wraith would have been chosen in my place. Some other wraith would have done it. Some other wraith would sit where I sit now, and I would be under guard in the mines.’
‘Maybe,’ said Kay, hot with anger, ‘that would have been a better place for you.’
‘No.’ And Flip inclined his head to Will, and Kay saw that his eyes were not black at all, but marbled with green and silver. Everything softened. ‘No, the best place for us is anywhere on the move. There is something wrong with my plotting; I can’t figure with a free hand. Every time we move, Ghast has anticipated us. His eyes are everywhere here.’
Flip stood up abruptly, knocking his stool with a clatter against the wall. In a few paces he was at the rear door and had taken the heavy stone in his hand.
‘Kay, you were right. We have to run, and we’ll have to be sudden. Unpredictable. Spontaneous. Impulsive.’
With a heave he threw open the door, and the room flooded with freezing, dank, mossy air.
‘Are we going down to the mines?’
‘No,’ said Will. ‘He’ll expect that. We’ll never save her like that. Never let someone else plot you like a stone – not even Ghast. Maybe he thinks love makes us simple, easy to predict. Foolish. Maybe he thinks it makes us vulnerable.’
‘It does,’ said Kay, doubtful. Her heart and thoughts tore to the mines, and she longed to let her feet follow. She fought down the thought of Ell screaming, kicking, frightened; or scared, sullen, locked up in the dark and cold. She would gladly give herself up to hold her sister, to promise her anything –
‘Love keeps its promises,’ said Will. He held his hand out to Kay, and she stood. ‘Love that moves mountains, love that flies through the air, love that dares to imagine anything.’
‘Up,’ said Flip as they swept through the door, turned right and began to climb through the darkness. ‘By the air, through the air.’
‘The fox always runs to his den at last.’
Ghast leafed absent-mindedly through the papers stacked on his desk. He had no time now to sit down and deal properly with the hundreds of reports, proposals and analyses that his Bindery clerks had prepared for him. A few of them still toiled in the old business, collecting myths and histories, stories, poems, tales and fables – the eternal process of conserving all that is told. There were still a few scouts and wispers who roamed the world beyond the mountain, and from time to time returned bearing trunks filled with papers and scrolls and books of all sizes. These materials had to be enrolled, and copies lodged in the library. Yes, a few clerks still worked on these old tasks; but he had reassigned the rest to his own new project. This was still something of a secret, even in the mountain, for most wraiths would not yet be ready to surrender their plotting stones, or to shut up the doors of the Imaginary forever. But that day was coming. There would be no more need for plotting, or for imagining, when his Bindery clerks had finished their analysis. Very soon he would have an algorithm to create any sort of story he wanted.
For now, it all looked in order. He would have to trust that fear would continue to keep his servants in line.
Ghast surveyed the Bindery. Twenty-three junior left-wraiths, all squat and ugly like himself, hunched over their low tables, writing. To his left stood Foliot, a lean, tall, lithe form, but submissive. Ghast declared, to no one in particular, ‘Their love will make them careless.’ No one dared to acknowledge his words, though all had heard. He loved to speak to them in this way. To speak to no one at all.
As he crossed the threshold into his private closet, he motioned impatiently for Foliot to remain outside. Ghast closed the door and began to change into his travelling clothes. For many years he had covered and disguised himself carefully whenever he left the mountain – which was not often. One took precautions when one was being hunted, especially by imaginers. Especially by the oldest, most cunning imaginer of them all. Now the imaginers had gone, and his fear was less. Now he could walk freely, and like himself, and he intended to cut an ostentatious figure equal to his status.
He would never be king in the mountain. They underestimated his reach. He would be king in Bithynia, or no king at all. He would not just win the battle. He would not just win the war. He preferred not to destroy but to compel his enemies. They would serve him, even in the sacred precincts of their own temple.
And what could a dog and its two delirious bitch-pups do about that?
The Thread
Outside the Dispersals Room Flip’s torch punched a hole in the darkness. Kay could see well in both dir
ections – downstream from where, an hour before, she had blindly groped her way up from the Quarries, and upstream along the steeply winding course of the underground river. The water rushed grey and glassily by, about four feet below the ledge, which she could now see was broad, and continued to run uninterrupted along the stream as it rose upwards. Will was moving his hands in the air, his distant gaze absorbed with plotting.
‘How far does this path carry on?’ she asked, of no one in particular.
Will’s hands stopped mid-whirl and he looked directly at her. ‘The path goes all the way to the top of the mountain. And I think we should take it.’
Flip, who like Kay had been waiting on Will, staring patiently at the rocky ground, looked sharply up at his friend. His face was all criticism, concern, caution. Kay thought for a moment how much he was like a parent, and Will the child. ‘It will be much faster to go through the Quarries and down the mountain. You know where we’re heading. You know what we have to do. Going down, we can run. Going up will take hours of climbing – hours we don’t have.’
‘I know. But, like you said before, there’s something wrong with this whole situation. I don’t know what it is, either. I can’t quite tease it out; but one thing is for certain – they’ll be waiting for us in the Quarries.’
Perhaps a cliff would be convenient. Kay was sure she didn’t want to run into Ghast or those two skinny vultures, his servants Foliot and Firedrake.
‘Say we make it,’ said Kay, spinning round. ‘Say we make it out of the mountain. Do we go to Bithynia? Where do we go?’
‘We go home,’ said Flip. ‘Your home. Will, we –’
‘No,’ said Will. ‘We keep going. We need help. Nothing scares Ghast now.’
‘One thing scares him,’ said Kay. She was absolutely sure of it, as sure as anything. The claim poured out of her with a conviction that frightened her, because she had no idea where it came from, or why she was so certain of it. ‘Imaginers scare him. We need an imaginer.’
‘Yes!’ cried Will. ‘When plotting doesn’t work: imagining!’ Immediately he set off to the right, up the steep slope alongside the black glass of the silent water.
In the light of his lantern Flip raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips in disapproval. For a long moment he stood like this, then shrugged and motioned for her to follow. Kay felt like shrugging, too.
What seemed like hours of climbing followed. The walls of the tunnel gradually closed in around them, and the air grew drier and colder. The darkness seemed to close in and bind them as well, until Kay thought the tightness in her chest might suffocate her. At times the path was wet, and in places it was loose with stones and what felt like shards of broken glass under their feet; but always the surface remained clear and almost mathematically regular, and Kay wondered at it: at the skill of the stoneworkers and carvers who had dug out this passage through the mountain. And she wondered, too, as the light from Flip’s lantern occasionally swung behind her, its shafts bouncing along the walls, at the carving that adorned them: traceries of complex knotwork that simplified as they climbed and as the passage narrowed until it was just a single, definite channel, waving, then steady along the wall. And then, without warning, it ended.
Will had stopped just ahead in the gloom. He knelt on one knee and ran his open hands across the floor of the tunnel as if over still water.
‘Hundreds of years ago,’ he said, an intense look of concentration on his face, ‘we came to these mountains to quarry their stone. We took it down into Bithynia along the river – down the very same river that had first led us here, up from the fertile valleys and through the foothills to the west. When the river went underground, we followed it, because we had seen in its waters the telltale mineral traces that we knew came from the soft, carvable stone we craved for building. We delved most of this path through the mountain for transport, as far as the Quarries, and further. But this section – the part we have just climbed – was different.’
At that, Will came bolt upright and seemed to tug at something. Kay could see the glint of metal in his hands; it looked like a brass ring.
Flip carried on. ‘When the barbarians drove us from Bithynia, we had nowhere to go but here. No one knew these caves like we did; and few knew them at all, or even how to find them. We came up the river, taking only what we needed for our stories: the boards and stones, the books and the tapestries. Our tools we had left here long before, and in time we had transformed this shelled-out waste of caverns into –’
‘Not much more than a shelled-out waste of caverns,’ said Will, looking up in disgust from the floor, where he continued to heave back on the brass ring.
‘In any case, we came here. At first we expected them daily behind us – the warring tribes, hungry men and women who had neither time nor love for stories. They drove us from Bithynia. When they didn’t come, we thought they were preparing a siege. We did a lot, then, to make this a fortress, and self-sufficient, but we never grew complacent, and we always knew we might need a way out. Something remote, something unexpected. And that’s when we built this part of the tunnel up through the mountain – right here to the very steepest part of its peak. We call it the Needle. From here, like eagles dropping from an eyrie, we might in time of crisis escape. As it happened, our pursuers never came, and we never used the tunnel.’
Will looked up abruptly, and with a grim and pained look on his face said, ‘Back – move back.’
Kay and Flip shuffled back down the tunnel as fast as they could, watching Will struggle to his feet with a long chain in his hands, taut as he dragged it with a sort of shuddering, raspy groan from the floor. A sudden tremendous rumble filled the tunnel, and Kay had only a moment to turn before an explosion of gravel and dust shot towards them, pelting then engulfing her. The dust stung her eyes like wasps, and she felt her throat seizing, choking. She held her hands to her face, crying and screaming – and would have gone on trying to scream had Flip not doused her head with water, then firmly pushed her down towards the floor where the air was blissfully clear. She gulped breaths.
‘What – what was that?’ she begged him, inches away, in a whimper. ‘What is that?’
‘With luck, if the floor held,’ answered Flip, ‘that’s our way out of here.’
At that moment Kay realized that, riding on the cloud of dust and noise, there was light, floods of it, and it only grew now that the dust had begun to thin and recede. She and Flip crawled along the floor, taking metre after metre with agonizing care, until their hands reached what felt like a hole in the tunnel floor. Air was rushing past her in a crisp wind.
She dared to pull her head over the edge and look down –
And might have screamed again – had the view not sucked the air from her lungs. Under the floor was nothing at all: a vast, dizzying void of empty air, yawning for hundreds of metres along a sheer cliff face down to the rocks below.
Perhaps a cliff would be convenient.
Kay froze.
Flip put his hand gently on her shoulder, and then – mercy – drew her bodily back on to the solid rock. ‘For these last few metres the tunnel is at the top of the cliff, inside a large, single piece of stone jutting out over the valley below. We needed a door that no one would ever find from the outside. The sky is above us; but it’s also below us. And so there was a real risk that the floor would collapse when Will opened the door.’ He smiled. ‘But we didn’t fall.’
Kay laid her head on the grit, pebble and stone of the floor and closed her eyes as her head swam. Twelve nights, Ell. He’s given me twelve nights to find you, and twelve nights only.
It took them almost an hour to climb down the hidden handholds that, hundreds of years before, had been driven into the cliff face. Will had gone ahead, but Flip guided Kay’s every step from just below, easing her feet slowly down the face of the sheer mountain’s side. It was still morning, and though the air was warming, the wind jagged and gusted at them from the north, cold on Kay’s ankles; eventually her h
ands, too, became so chill that she could barely grasp the freezing iron bars. A single glance below her, though, was all she needed to renew her resolve.
‘Now, Kay, jump!’
Only three metres or so remained when she leaped free of the rock face and collapsed heavily into the two wraiths’ open arms. Firm ground had never been so sure, and she found herself sobbing on to the cracked brown stone where they had finally landed. The tears dropped down her cheeks – like climbers falling from the mountain, she thought – and smashed on the pebbles beneath her. One after another, in their dozens or maybe hundreds, they splashed into oblivion, barely staining the hard earth where they fell.
‘Welcome to the Eagle’s Nest,’ said Will. ‘I’ll check for company.’
Kay followed him with her eyes as he vaulted on to a ledge just beside them, then scrabbled into a carved niche – a concealed perch from which he could command a view not only of all to the north, but over the ridge to the mountains south and west of them, too. This vantage point had been hidden even during their descent. Before Flip could stop her, Kay had leaped up the ledges to join Will.
‘Kay – no – you don’t –’
But it was too late. She dug her fingers hard into Will’s sleeve to steel herself as the panorama wheeled below her and she wheeled above it. The openness made her feel sick, as if she were somehow flying, high, without wings.
‘Don’t look down,’ Will murmured. There was something fierce, settled in his voice.
Kay shuddered. Far off she could see endless blue, hard and unremitting sun, metals glinting in the sand-coloured mountains, snow. What was below?
It was the river. Its soundless, turbulent current tumbled from the mountain just opposite their perch, then snaked down a steep valley and curved in and out of sight miles away, until it disappeared at the base of a massive hunch of distant stone.
‘There are wispers abroad,’ Will said quietly, and he pointed to the left, then straight ahead, where up on a slope Kay could see a tiny black form descending. ‘Ghast’s scouts. Centuries ago they were rangers and pilgrims, the kind you read about in all the old stories, who roamed the world collecting tales, gathering poems, making records of all the new myths and song cycles. In times gone by they used to bring them back to Bithynia for the library. But now they’re just common spies working for Ghast. They can hardly tell a joke, let alone spin a yarn. They’ve lost the thread.’
Twelve Nights Page 11