‘Tell me about the thread,’ Kay said. ‘You keep talking about it.’
‘Tell yourself about it,’ said Will, gesturing out to the mountains before them. He instantly realized that he had sounded curt, rude, dismissive. ‘No, I really mean it. Look at what’s in front of you. I think you’ll understand.’
He hunched down to mark the wispers. Kay looked out from between two stones. In all the mountains and low hills that stood before her she saw nothing but rock and low scrub. The rock lay brown, in places reddish under the glare of the noon sun, and the scrub looked winter-beaten and dry. It patched and clumped on the slopes as if huddling against the wind and cold. Everywhere the cold had left its marks – not just in small lingering fields of snow on higher and sheltered ground, but in the stains on the cliffs, on the tumbling scree of loose stones and rubble that she knew had been broken and cast down the mountain slopes by ice, freezing and thawing, then freezing again over the years. Threads. The landscape before her was entirely uniform, bland almost. Nothing stood out. Threads. But for one thing – the river. She watched it from the point where it issued from the rocks of the mountain, pooled, and then flowed downwards, uncoiling among the low slopes.
‘It’s the river.’
‘Yes,’ Will answered over his shoulder. ‘Tell me what you see. Tell me what the river does.’
Kay stared at it, and saw its bends and turns – like the joints of a long, impossible arm. The more carefully she looked, the more tiny bends and turns she discovered in its course. It turns at every moment. Of course. Every moment is a turn in the flow of water. Every moment of flow is like a choice. It keeps choosing the best way. ‘It finds the shortest way down,’ she said. She thought of the carving on the passage walls earlier, how the carving had comforted her, how it had gone from complex knots to a simpler single course, to a lone line waving, then to a straight channel that ended in the very height. The thread. She thought of her mother, back when she was younger, before all the arguments, sitting at the table with a needle in her hand, picking out its course through the threads of a piece of cloth. ‘The cloth has its way,’ she would say. ‘The cloth sews the needle, and not the needle the cloth.’
‘The water finds its own way, the best way,’ Will agreed. ‘It goes the way it always has.’
‘That’s the thread, then,’ said Kay. ‘It’s the way things work best, the shortest and the easiest way, the way things have always been, the channel they cut, the way things smooth out in time, always growing simpler, growing more definite, straighter, easier. It’s the way everyone does it together.’
‘Complexity and change can be beautiful,’ said Will, ‘but, like the river in the mountains, they can sometimes be dangerous. There is sometimes white water. Over time, things settle. The order of things comes into being over time, gets simpler, becomes easier to understand. That’s one reason why we honour tradition together, and that’s why we prefer to do some things the way we’re expected to do them. It’s a comfort, and it’s simple. That’s the thread.’
Will went back to observing the wispers. He was clearly watching their patterns as they swept across the mountains, looking for a moment when they might break free unobserved.
But Kay suddenly had no interest in the wispers. Instead her eyes were riveted to the river opposite, and to a barge that was floating – so slowly, so far away below – down its smoother lower waters. From her height it seemed tiny, but she knew that was only the distance, that it was a huge thing, and it seemed to be swarming with wraiths. She tried to count, and reached something like fifty.
‘What is that? What are they doing?’ she asked.
Flip had climbed up to the lookout to join them. ‘They’re leaving the mountain,’ he answered. His voice was almost a whisper, barely audible over the wind. Kay looked hard at him. He seemed shocked. ‘They’re taking the river out of the mountain.’
At one end of the barge – its stern – Kay could see a sort of raised area where there was no movement, no scurrying or hurrying forms. But perhaps there was a chair, or several chairs, and at the highest point –
‘Ghast is leaving the mountain on a throne,’ said Will – to none of them, and to all of them.
‘And what is that building at the front?’ Kay asked. She was mesmerized by the barge’s slow, meandering motion down the silent river, by the rhythmic flow of bodies moving across its deck – rowing or punting their way, perhaps fending off the unseen rocks.
‘That’s not a building,’ said Flip. ‘It’s a cage.’
When Kay screamed, her shrill and piercing cry shattered the silence of the mountains like the cry of a hawk. The wispers walking on the mountains below knew how to track great birds by their cries; tracking the screams of a girl, a girl they were looking for at that, and to a place they all knew well, was surely too easy.
Before Kay understood what they were doing, Flip and Will were handing her down the ledges on to the little platform where they had landed earlier. Then Flip seemed to vault over another low ledge, and disappeared from view. Following after, as Will practically dragged her behind him, Kay could see him half leaping, half running down a huge sweep of boulders and scree towards the north and east, away from the river, down to a far, narrow plain at the mountain’s base.
Kay dug her heels into one of the rocks and stiffened her legs against Will’s yanking arm.
‘No,’ she said. She said it as firmly and as loudly as she could.
Will rounded on her from below. She expected to see anger in his face, but there was only kindness.
‘I’m going down the other slope,’ she said.
‘I am going to tell you something you already know,’ Will said. He was speaking almost at a yell, to throw his voice over the blistering gusts of the north wind. ‘Something you don’t want to hear. You can’t do anything for them now. Not one thing. All you can do is join them in that cage. Or worse.’
Kay wanted to cry, but all her tears had already fallen. She yanked her hand loose from Will’s and stood facing him for a long moment. The wind buffeted her trousers around her ankles and seared her dry cheeks. She knew he was right. She knew that the courageous thing to do was follow him, and bend, and trust. Every bone in my body wants to be on that barge.
‘Down there –’ he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder – ‘Flip has a plane. It’s little, but it’s solid. He says he hates it, but he’s a brilliant pilot. And it’s the only plane on the mountain.’
She gave Will her hand again.
He reached out a long arm, gathered her legs into him and hoisted her into an embrace that allowed her to lean against him, looking down and out on the valley of stones below. He held out his other hand, pointing here and there –
‘You can see them, the wispers, running.’
Kay could see them, from the north and the south, from the west slopes of the two flat hills before them, running. Their paths would converge on the little plain towards which Flip had been loping only moments before.
‘We have to get to Flip before they do, or they’ll trap us all. And if they do, I can’t protect you,’ Will said. ‘And if I can’t protect you, you can’t save your sister.’
Or Dad.
‘Or your father.’
They ran down the mountain, hurling themselves from boulder to boulder like dancers on a stage, like bees between flowers – barely touching the ground, always looking for the next step, always pitching forward. In what seemed like seconds they had made the plain, and Kay ran behind Will, flagging, losing him, over the dusty, weed-choked flat earth to the south. In the corners of her vision she was sure she could see black shapes moving, but she didn’t dare look. She just ran.
Kay barely had time to dodge as Flip drove the little plane bouncing from behind a big boulder. He circled, and Kay heard the propeller start to drone as he opened the throttle into the gust swelling towards him.
‘Get in,’ said Will. ‘Fast.’ He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking past her, in
tently. Kay knew what that meant.
Anyway, she needed no prompting. Down the opposite slope a dark-robed wraith was vaulting over the last stones that separated him from the valley floor. It was a matter of seconds before he reached the plane. With Will’s help she clambered on to the wing, grabbed a handhold and slung herself over the edge of the rear seat. Flip started to move along the level ground, faster and faster.
Will wasn’t in yet. The plane was gathering speed, bumping but starting to race forward. Kay pushed herself low into the warm cushion of the seat, wedging her feet against the wall before her. There was a strap, and she was fumbling with it as a hand suddenly appeared to the side – above her – grappling.
‘Flip!’ shouted Will. ‘Let me climb –’
‘No time!’ shouted Flip from up ahead, pushing the throttle yet further. ‘We have visitors!’
The plane lurched and bumped for what seemed like an hour. Kay grabbed at the straps, forcing herself into them. Against the air rushing at them from the propeller, from their own forward thrust, Will strove with every tendon and sinew of his body. Kay watched in agony as an elbow, a shoulder, then his head appeared. His cheeks and lips were deformed by the rushing wind, and for a moment, as he heaved, he looked like a grotesque, a terrifying gargoyle on some ancient church. Then he sprawled head over heels into the seat on top of Kay, crushing her even as she snapped tight the buckle of her harness.
The plane took off, and suddenly, sickeningly, the jolting stopped.
Will’s face seemed to be buried in her shoulder. The plane climbed impossibly fast into the sun-shattered sky.
‘That went well, I think,’ he said.
The journey west would take ten days. Three of these they would pass in the high, rocky mountains, exposed to sun and wind. Three days they would pass in the high marshes, hidden from the wind by the singing reeds. And three days they would pass in the fertile low valleys of Bithynia, each one lusher than the last, until finally they dropped into the steeply wooded gorge where the wraiths’ great hall still stood.
Waiting for its king.
On that last day the barge would rest at the eastern gate. For a wraith who would be king there was but one way to enter the hall at Bithynia, and that was by the Ring. This circuit of the walls, which ascended from the eastern gate by an imperceptible grade to the raised plateau on which the hall stood, was adorned with carved tablets depicting the twelve sources of all story. He knew them as he knew his own face. Soon he would have them chiselled away.
It was said that that old hag they called the Bride had herself taught the first wraiths of the twelve sources. As if she were more than a story herself. In any case, she wouldn’t be back, and the guild of wraiths was restless for a leader. A strong leader. One who might give them a sense of purpose again.
Ghast smiled at the smooth current of the course lying between him and the great hall. His preparations had been precise. What is more, his old adversaries – they could hardly still be called that – had underestimated him. They had measured his cunning by their own. It had never occurred to them that he might desire their escape, that he might provoke their hasty flight, that he might have predicted even that which seemed unpredictable – because it was. So heavily did his warts hang upon his cheeks that his deepening smile had the effect of turning down the corners of his mouth. It hardly mattered if the mirror did not find his joy handsome. His satisfaction was his alone, anyway.
He looked with pride at the empty cage where it stood before him on the barge. Set beneath it, just out of sight, was the heavy, forged iron plate of the great wheel. That empty cage, that ancient timepiece – these were better witnesses of his beauty, or his cunning mastery. How he would savour the reports of his wispers, when at length they reached him in the night: how the stones had tumbled from the Needle at the top of the mountain; how the wraiths and the girl had climbed down with laboured caution; how the patient wispers had, as instructed, circled the quarry without closing on them; how the fugitives had watched from the Eagle’s Nest, then scrambled suddenly down to the Cut and taken their feeble little plane; how they took off, climbed, banked and flew south. How they thought themselves heroes.
But only he truly knew where they were going. Only he knew what it was all for.
Phantastes
Kay woke out of nothing. She hadn’t known she was asleep, hadn’t noticed falling into it, or even being drowsy. Now it was warm and dark. And loud. She was surprised at the warmth, and then, cracking open her eyes in pain, at the sun all around her lancing off the bright metal of the aircraft’s hull, and the long, angelic damsel-fly wings as they strutted and trembled to either side of her. The wind rushed by. In her ears she could feel the plane dropping, losing altitude, and she knew from experience this meant that they would be landing soon. She shuffled herself up a bit and pushed one of the folds of the heavy blanket off to one side. Will, who had been watching intently out of the other side, saw her hand move and waved with a smile, then looked back down at the plotting board he had been neglecting on his lap. He was making plans, Kay thought, and she was awake enough to want to know what they were.
‘Where are we?’ she asked, wiping with the heel of her hand a crusty piece of sleep from her left eye. Will gave her some dried meat and fruit, and while she chewed slowly, he gathered up the plotting stones, stowing them in his cloak.
‘We’re about to set down on the beach. It will be warm; we’ve come a long way south. We’re – No, it’s better if you don’t know for now. You’re going to have to keep your face covered, or we may attract attention. You’ll need to wear this,’ he said, pulling out from beneath the seat a loose cotton robe and passing it over to her. ‘See if you can put it on under the straps. We’ll be down very soon.’ Kay sat upright, and with some inventive contortions got the robe over her head, pulling the hood down the back of her neck and drawing up the ends of the fabric belt to lie ready in her lap. As the plane began its descent, Flip called out for steady, and as they banked slightly she caught sight of a bright sea heaving broadly into the distance to their right. Immediately she swivelled round to the left and peered – as much as she could – over the lip of the seat.
A moment before, looking out the other way, she had been able to see only water and sky. But from this direction the view was very different. A huge city loomed out of the ocean to her left, not so much tall as massive – toppling over with white buildings and green palms, heaped up along avenues that shot back from the sculpted seaside. To the right, a promenaded waterfront stretched for miles to a busy harbour, broken up by sandy bars and beaches where a few people walked – and some of them were pointing at the plane as it dropped.
‘We’ll have to stow it on the beach,’ Will called out merrily, just as Flip cut down in a last swoop to the broad, flat sand and rock left exposed by the tide. ‘By the air, through the air!’ he whooped, waving his long arm in the sky. The plane was light enough, after a few awkward bounces that made Kay’s heart shake, to settle and run itself out, pulling up short and with a sudden exhalation of noise opposite a clapped-up beach house. Kay and Will clambered out and jumped down, and Flip stowed the little plane unobtrusively between a long, crumbling shore-wall and a set of beach shacks. Kay got the sense that the two wraiths had done all this before. Whatever this is.
They walked up the beach towards the city. Kay’s short legs had to work double-time to keep up with Will and Flip, and in the bright sun the white buildings seemed for a long time to hang out of reach. Finally the two wraiths led her off the beach on to a cobbled alleyway that ran down between low houses into a larger square. From that point on, the city became more and more congested with buildings, pedestrians, noise, activity, cars and, above all, smells. Kay could taste alternately the acrid, then sweet, then again acrid waves of bus exhaust against the sweet of street vendors. Ripe garbage rotted in the heat on one corner, and at the next a woman drenched in perfume hailed a taxi. It must be morning, Kay decided, in this new and frenet
ic place, and she loved it. All the noise and talk, the bustle and haste, the joyful energy of the street absorbed her into its rhythm, and she felt she was bouncing in time with it as they strode through the waking city. This, she thought, was what it was to be alive – and not the quiet, sombre fear of the mountain, the subdued flows of murmuring wraiths, the still and empty halls.
But as they walked, she noticed that the wraiths did not seem to love it at all: they walked stiffly, their heads constantly swerving this way and that as they took in the crowds, the motion and, it might be, the threat around them. Kay felt no threat. She had never felt so alive, so glad to be free, to be walking, to be among people and noise and bustle. She caught a flash of herself in a shop window as they passed by and, without even quite meaning to, straightened her back and began to saunter. Take that, whatever place you are. She almost giggled – and crashed directly into a woman who had been hurrying past them, a daughter held tightly in each hand.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Kay said, blushing red and drawing back the hood of her robe.
Will turned, scowling, but the startled woman looked at her uncomprehendingly and said something out of the corner of her mouth that Kay could not understand at all. And then, beneath her brown curls, one of the little girls began to cry. Kay stared at her, and she cried harder. She looked at the mother, then at the girl. Ell. Mum. What am I doing?
Will got behind her then, and steered her – gently but firmly. Now she was walking between the two gaunt forms, blocked in from the rush of sometimes inquisitive faces passing them on the pavements. But Kay had stopped noticing. As she looked around for any sign of where they were, what they were doing, her thoughts raced. Nine days. Nine days to find you. And then, without warning, Will took her hand and, in the same motion, veered left under a low, dark archway, ducking gracefully and pulling Kay down a dim stone staircase. It was slick with dripping water, and she almost stumbled several times as they went down, and down, and down.
Twelve Nights Page 12