Teeth clenched with concentration, Hathin eased up the lid of the ottoman, and winced as it came to rest against the wall with a faint clunk. She clambered out, feeling painfully exposed, and scampered along the wall to the wooden steps that led to the gallery. Every creaking step sent an ice needle of panic through her heart.
At the top of the steps she snatched up two tall pewter flasks from a little altar and leaned over the balustrade of the gallery. Where was the Ashwalker? Had he heard her? Was he following her up the stairs?
No. The dance was continuing below, and now the unheard music had increased in tempo. And yet, maddeningly, the dancers did not move beneath the gallery, beneath the two flasks that Hathin now held over the drop in her trembling fists.
A leap, a lunge, and a pedestal tottered, dropping the chalices entrusted to it. The silence shivered into fragments and lay with stars of glass and china upon the floor.
Two guards ran in from the corridor, summoned by the smash. From her eagle-eye view, Hathin saw them rush into the deadly shaft of moonlight, then fold and fall, their drawn swords clattering to the tiles. The Ashwalker had barely favoured them with a look as he killed them. His attention was entirely fixed on Dance. So he did not notice the way that the guards’ ill-fated charge had pushed him back a critical few paces, bringing him closer to the gallery. And he did not notice two arcs of perfumed water sluicing down from above until they struck him in the head and shoulder-blades.
A shiver went through his whole frame, as if it had been a blade or arrow that had hit him in the back. Dance swung in again with new energy, and the Ashwalker stepped aside, but now his footwork was less sure, his motions more hasty. He was blinking blue dribbles out of his eyes, and puddles of indigo marked his wake as though he was melting.
The heavy door to the Superior’s quarters swung wide, and three guards strode out, swords at the ready. Two steps behind them hobbled the nightcapped Superior himself, moustaches unwound and trailing down to his chest, a candle in his hand.
The instant the Ashwalker saw the Superior, it was as if he had been unleashed from a bow. He broke from the skirmish and sprinted for the small, yellow-robed figure, barely seeming to register the three guards that stood in his way. With a sick feeling in her stomach, Hathin saw the guards falter and then each step neatly aside, parting like curtains to allow him passage to their master. They had no will to stop Death going about his business. The Superior’s eyes widened, appalled.
Then something broke upon the Ashwalker like a wave, something horse-heavy that landed behind him with a whirl of dreadlocks. A black-toothed blade keened downwards through a shaft of moonlit, and at last choked on more than cloth.
The Superior stared at the knife which the Ashwalker’s lunge had pushed point first into his breast pocket, then watched as the dead weight of its owner dragged it down, rending the cloth as it went. Only when the midnight-blue figure collapsed to the floor did anybody release their breath. Still nobody dared speak or take their eyes off the fallen figure. The Superior’s hands fluttered helplessly up and down his chest to make sure that the knife had left no holes in him.
‘Wha—?’ he said at last. ‘What . . . ? Who . . . ? How did this . . . ? Why did nobody . . . ?’
He jumped immoderately when Hathin tottered down from the gallery steps, hands raised to show her harmlessness. The guards, clearly feeling that they had to make a belated show of valour, promptly presented their weapons towards her.
‘Oh, blood belied, put those things away! How dare . . . ? What’s wrong with you, men? You stood aside, you would have let . . .’ The Superior stared at Dance, who now had one hand clamped to the gash in her thigh. ‘You men – run for my barber–surgeon! Now! If this woman hadn’t been here . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Wait – who are you, good wife, and why are you here?’
‘Stop!’ bellowed Dance in Nundestruth as one of the guards neared the door. ‘Milord, call man back. If leave room, ten ticks all palace know got dead Ashwalker here. Dead Ashwalker dangerous, muchas alive.’
‘But he made an assault upon my person – upon a governor of Gullstruck!’ exclaimed the Superior. ‘Without a commission!’ He stared at Hathin. ‘He was supposed to be after you! And your friend!’
‘And anyone brave enough to protect us,’ Hathin explained quietly but firmly. All eyes strayed back to the figure on the floor. Brendril’s face was utterly peaceful. The Superior gave a small, impatient gesture, and the guards closed the door and returned to the centre of the room.
‘Blood of my blood!’ the Superior continued in a quieter tone. ‘Just imagine – what if he had come in through my window?’
‘I wouldn’t have allowed that, sir,’ came a voice from behind the Superior. The little man started, marched back into his room followed by the others and pulled back his shutters. Jaze, who was crouched precariously upon his moonlit sill, raised two fingers to his forehead in salute.
The Superior flung open the next set of shutters, and boggled as Louloss’s deferential smile met his eye.
‘And we’ve a man and a woman up on the roof, in case anyone tried to slide down the chimneys,’ Jaze added helpfully.
The Superior looked around aghast and astonished at the respectful glitter of jewelled smiles.
‘Since when have I had a Lace bodyguard?’ he stammered at last.
‘Since you decided not to throw a young girl to an Ashwalker,’ Jaze answered calmly. ‘In these poison times, a little kindness goes a long way.’
28
Witch-hunt
Even after they covered Brendril with a rug, Hathin could not take her eyes off his shape on the marble floor. He seemed to have shrunk, and yet she still felt that at any point he might shake himself, get up and look around with white-ringed eyes. He had existed so long on the cusp between the living and the dead that it seemed quite plausible he might slip back across the divide without effort.
Of the three guards that had so singularly failed their master, two were now on their hands and knees wiping the floor of all evidence of the death-dance, and the third and youngest, who was receiving the brunt of his employer’s opinions, looked as if at any moment he might faint or cry.
In the end it was Hathin who went for the barber–surgeon, as the only trustworthy person who could trot invisibly through the darkened corridors of the palace without drawing comment. She knocked on the surgeon’s door, and told him that he was needed to attend to the Superior, which by that point was certainly the case. The Superior had reached a pitch of hysteria where he was convinced that only bloodletting would restore his mind.
The Superior’s personal barber–surgeon was a mild-faced young man with a cleft chin. When Hathin roused him he pulled his coat on over his nightgown with an air of weary good humour, as though accustomed to such interruptions.
‘I’m surprised he has any blood left in him,’ was his only comment as Hathin led him swiftly back towards the ballroom. His expression became less mild and drowsy as the vista within was revealed and he turned to find that Jaze had shut the door behind him and was standing against it. He walked over to the fretful figure of the Superior, keeping his tread steady but allowing his eyes to flit to the armed Lace lurking to each side. Kneeling beside the Superior’s chair, he started rolling up his master’s sleeve.
‘Are you a prisoner, sir?’ he asked in the softest of Doorsy whispers.
‘What? Don’t be an idiot, Staunch – these people are the only reason I’m still alive.’
‘And,’ Hathin whispered almost inaudibly, ‘some of us speak Doorsy.’
As if to prove the fact, Jaze cast a glance towards the barber–surgeon, who was now fitting a crescent-shaped little bowl against the Superior’s arm, to catch the blood from the ‘breathing’ vein. ‘Can we . . . ?’
‘Oh yes. Mr Staunch has had a razor to my throat every morning for the last two years – if I could not trust him I would know by now.’
‘Good. Milord, who else would you trust with this secret
?’
Precious few, it appeared, once the Superior had had time to absorb the severity of the situation. An Ashwalker pursuing a commission had been struck down in the palace. This breach of the law was bad enough, but if the dead Ashwalker was identified as the man hunting Lady Arilou, this would spell disaster for all of them. Everyone would assume that some clue had led the Ashwalker to seek Arilou in the Superior’s palace, and that once there he had fallen foul of Arilou’s secret conspiracy. The fact that he had been struck down by a weapon that had been illegal for two hundred years was unlikely to help.
And the Superior, despite his many years of dedicated and dutiful service to Jealousy, had few among the living that he could call friends. He faltered as he realized this, then had Hathin run for his secretary, his captain of the guard and one other close advisor. Dance gave orders that the Reckoning should be told what had happened. However, the Stockpile and the rest of the Superior’s staff and advisors were to be left ignorant. The three guards, who it was decided could not be trusted to be discreet, were stripped of their weapons and confined in one of the old butteries.
At about two in the morning, the ballroom hosted a very peculiar council of war. Chairs were set up for the Superior and his people, mats laid down for the Lace to sit upon.
It was Jaze who spoke for the Reckoning. Beside him Dance sat in silence, an inscrutable, uncertain hulk, crippled by language. Dance did not speak Doorsy.
The Superior sat in silence as Jaze recounted the story of the Hollow Beasts, the strange demise of Skein, the destruction of the village at the hands of Jimboly. He gave Hathin occasional troubled glances as he heard of her initiation into the Reckoning. Then, as he heard of the Reckoning’s discoveries, the murder of the Lost using the blissing beetles and the clues linking the assassinations to Port Suddenwind, he gradually went pale.
‘So,’ he began with a slightly tremulous attempt at briskness, ‘why would Port Suddenwind sanction the murder of all the Lost? Why would the government plunge the whole island into chaos?’
Murmurs and shaking of heads.
‘We still do not know,’ answered Jaze. ‘Our only guess is that the Lost Council found out something so incriminating that they had to be killed, and the rest of the Lost along with them.’
‘And who exactly do you say has been marshalling these activities?’ asked the Superior. ‘Who is giving orders to these “pigeon men”?’
There was a pause, filled with subdued mutterings and the exchange of glances.
‘We can hazard a guess,’ Jaze declared after a moment. ‘Lady Arilou says their leader is in Mistleman’s Blunder – and that he has no face. And we know of a man who fits that description. Minchard Prox. The “Nuisance Control Officer”. He’s a mass of scars with no face worth the name, and there’s nobody in Gullstruck chasing our people down as ruthlessly and tirelessly as he.’
Several of the Lace silently showed their agreement by turning their heads aside to mime a spit upon the floor. Hathin could not quite bring herself to do the same. Her first impressions of Prox were being eaten away, poisoned by everything she had heard of him since. His original features in her memory were distorting, marked by the scars she had seen on his face that day on the road outside Mistleman’s Blunder, but she still recollected a pair of bright brown eyes, thoughtful, exasperated, flustered and not unkind.
‘The Nuisance Control Officer . . . appointed specially by Port Suddenwind, they say. Well.’ There was a long silence, during which the Superior fretted at his own buttons. ‘Well, this traps me between two stories, doesn’t it? One story from you people, and a completely contradictory one from Port Suddenwind. But –’ he took a shaky breath, and then released it – ‘on balance I am inclined to believe the storytellers who are not actually trying to kill me.’
The tension in the room noticeably relaxed, and Hathin guessed that a number of the Reckoning had been bracing themselves in case they needed to fight their way out of the palace.
Disposing of the Ashwalker’s body was the first priority, but while all agreed that it should be burned, they couldn’t settle on where or how. Jimboly was still somewhere in Jealousy, and nobody knew if or when the palace would find itself under siege from another mob, so trying to smuggle the Ashwalker out could be a dangerous procedure.
‘If we burn the body on the grounds, everybody will smell the smoke and know that somebody here is dead,’ fretted the Superior. ‘Besides, the only suitable furnace we have is the one we use for the scions of our line. That would hardly be suitable.’
After Jaze had translated, Dance leaned across and murmured something in Jaze’s ear. Hathin watched his velvet brows rise slightly and then smooth as he listened.
‘It might,’ Jaze said with every sign of restraining an uncharacteristic excitement, ‘be very suitable indeed. Milord, nobody outside this room knows that the Ashwalker is dead – nor do they know that you are alive.’
The Superior stared from Jaze to Dance, as if wondering whether they meant to make him less alive.
‘Think about it,’ Jaze went on. ‘All anyone knows is that there was some confusion in the direction of the Superior’s quarters. The surgeon was called in and has not returned.’ He glanced across at Mr Staunch, who was now attending to Dance’s injuries. ‘Five guards are missing. And nothing has been heard from the Superior since.’
‘Are you suggesting I circulate a lie?’
‘Trust me, sir, circumstances have already laid a young lie in people’s heads,’ Jaze answered calmly. ‘We’re just suggesting that you don’t kill it in the egg. Listen, sir, you’re a marked man. Whoever our enemies are, they killed all the Lost but one and are hunting the last in case she saw something to incriminate them. Now that they see you as her protector, they will assume that you must know all she does. They cannot afford to leave you alive. More assassins and more bounty hunters will come. But if they believe you’re dead . . . that is a different matter.’
‘But the city! It needs a strong leader! It will fall into anarchy!’
‘I do not think so, sir. Your rioters wanted to string up Lace, but if they fear one of their number has assassinated a governor, that’ll put ice-water on their fire. They’ll back away from their battle-lines and look for someone to blame.’
Something uncomfortably warm was flowering in Hathin’s chest. She stooped and whispered into the Superior’s ear, ‘Sir . . . I know who we can give them to blame.’ The next morning the charade began. Jealousy woke at dawn to find the flag with the Superior’s heraldry was missing from the palace flagpole.
‘It has been taken down to be washed,’ was the official answer. Nobody believed it.
At nine Hathin ate alone in the long, dark breakfast room, the Superior’s chair empty at the head of the table.
‘The Superior will be eating breakfast in his room today,’ Hathin explained, and the maid looked at her doubtfully and cleared the Superior’s plate away.
After breakfast a set of letters and decrees went out, each signed and sealed by a different deputy, instead of with the Superior’s distinctive scrawl and signet.
‘The deputies are taking on some of the Superior’s duties for now,’ was the emissary’s explanation as he handed over the letters. Rumours started to run on rat-feet all over the city.
While Hathin and Therrot sent out orders to craftsmen for ornaments that might suit the richest of burials, the captain of the guard marched a troop of men down to arrest Bewliss, the young ‘spokesman’ for the riot the day before.
‘Let’s just say that that riot you led has caused a death,’ was all the captain grunted as Bewliss was taken into custody. Once he found himself in the jail without a crowd at his back, Bewliss’s fire did indeed seem well and truly dowsed.
‘Now,’ said the captain, when they were sitting face to face. ‘I know you – you’re good timber, from your clumsy feet to your wooden head. So what makes you fall in with murderers? What makes you turn traitor to your most honoured lord? Or sho
uld I say, who? Come, boy, don’t hang your head like you want me to slip a noose over it; we know it wasn’t your fault. There’s a vagabond woman with a flickerbird – folks say they saw her lay a hand on your arm and a strange light come into your eyes.
‘So . . . just tell us straight, boy. Was this rebellion of your making, or did she ’witch you somehow? When she had her hand on your shoulder, did you feel something strange shadow your mind and make you act against your nature?’
Blind with tears, Bewliss stared about him, and like many trapped animals decided to fight his way towards the only chink of light.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes – she ’witched me. I felt my arm tingle and my brain swoon.’ As he said it, he might even have believed it.
A little after lunchtime what seemed to be a young boy wearing good leather boots and a smile with a nervous ruck left the palace and walked through the Superior’s private gardens to where a teenage boy with a rounded, sunny face and an enormous limping elephant bird was waiting.
Hathin sat down next to Tomki rather self-consciously, feeling again the unfamiliar sting of her fingers when she had struck him across the face.
‘They said you wouldn’t come into the palace until you had permission,’ she began timidly.
Tomki noticed her gaze creeping towards his forearm, and held it up with a bright but serious smile. No tattoo marked the skin.
‘You were right,’ he said. ‘The Sours meant no harm – they were just frightened. If I’d taken the tattoo for that, I’d have been unworthy of it. I’d have been unworthy of her.’
‘You . . . You really do love Dance in your way, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Tomki simply. ‘She’s . . . so . . . big.’ He stood up and spread his arms wide, staring up and out, as if he was standing on a promontory and embracing the view. ‘She’s so big she pushes back the horizons – the world is smaller when she’s not there.’
Gullstruck Island Page 30
