Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  But what could she do? She could not go after the bounty hunters to retrieve Arilou. She would unravel even more with every step away from Ritterbit.

  ‘Well, neck-wringing it is,’ she whispered to herself, then wormed her way out of her hiding place and headed around the wall, looking for somewhere to climb. Her lean brown hands found easy purchase on the flowering creeper, and soon Jimboly was peering over the top of the wall, bright eyes a-flicker with malice.

  Ah – but there were guards standing by the palace, guards who would certainly spot Jimboly if she tried to clamber into the courtyard. She was about to drop back down outside the wall when a curtain was tugged aside at a top-storey window of the building, allowing her a glimpse of a small man. His arms were stretched out to either side, and tailors fluttered around him, pinning a lavish travelling robe. One had clearly pushed aside the curtain to let in more light.

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t I come?’ the little man’s voice floated down from the window, with a curiously tremulous bravado. ‘I never travelled more than twenty miles from Jealousy while I was alive. What good am I doing here? I can hardly govern the city while playing dead. Besides, what if another assassin should come here and find me without my Lace bodyguard and with half my guards missing? No, heroically leading this endeavour sounds like the only safe and prudent course.’

  Jimboly’s face broke into a grin and she let herself drop from the wall.

  ‘Oh, there’s fun and games being played here!’ she muttered as she fled back to the safety of her ditch. ‘There’s a ghost being measured for new clothes, is there? You crafty old toad! But I can scotch you. You’re easy. You’re a thread I can use, old man.’

  Crackgem seemed to have noticed that madness was afoot in Jealousy and had woken up to watch it properly. His geysers went off all at once, throwing little rocks so high that they fell on the town, clattering on the roofs like birds in clogs. And at last the volcano trembled so much with laughter that he shook the village of the Sours to pieces, and sent them hurrying with frantic stealth down the mountainside, their precious flag rolled into a sausage and thrown over the shoulders of three strong young men.

  The Sours were quite sure that their flag had not lost its power to hide them from Crackgem, but what good was it being invisible to him if he kept fidgeting like that? There was nothing for it but to come down and join their Laderilou in the valley.

  Therrot took it upon himself to tell them where Arilou had gone, and why. He came back with a bruise above his eye, and Jeljech by his side. She had taken custody of his sleeve, as if afraid he would break into a run, and was frowning like thunder.

  ‘I told Jeljech what happened to Arilou, and she . . . she hit me with a pestle. Then their village had a big meeting, and apparently they decided that Arilou’s one of them and they want their Lost back. So now Jeljech says she’s coming along with us to rescue Arilou. She keeps saying that Crackgem’s laughter will wake up the other mountains and that there’s not much time.’

  It was late afternoon, and the Superior surveyed the massed ranks of the counterfeit ‘Stockpile’. There was no way to disguise Dance’s prodigious build, but she had been dressed as a man, and grubby bandages covered her face and concealed her wealth of dreadlocks. Some other members of the Reckoning were too recognizable to join their ranks, and it was decided that they should stay behind in Jealousy with the bulk of the ‘real’ Stockpile.

  Nonetheless the numbers in the false Stockpile were impressive. The persecution of the Lace had swollen the Reckoning’s numbers overnight. For every village burnt, a handful of fugitives sought the tattoo. For every child or parent lost, a revenger had been born. Minchard Prox might have trembled if he had seen how his decrees had fed the Reckoning, given it new passion and strength.

  The ‘Stockpile’ practised looking woebegone, hunched in their ragged clothing.

  ‘But how are we to conceal weapons under such meagre clothes?’ asked the Superior after looking them up and down.

  ‘Actually, sir, they already are carrying their weapons.’ There was a percussion of clinks, scrapes, rattles and hushes as knives slid from wrist straps, bracelets became garrottes, swords and machetes emerged from back-mounted sheaths.

  ‘Ah . . . ah good,’ mumbled the Superior, glancing around at the pictures of his ancestors for reassurance.

  Evening came, and Hathin strayed restlessly among the true Stockpile. Even though they had not been told of the Reckoning’s plans, they seemed to have picked up on the excitement and tension in the palace, and they all wore apprehensive, curious expressions.

  The Superior’s secretary, presumably on the instructions of the Superior, was trying to take an inventory of them, a task that seemed to have driven him almost to the end of his tether.

  ‘My good fellow, all I need to know is how you spell your name.’

  An elderly Lace man frowned slightly and shook his head.

  ‘Look – a pictogram will do. Your mark. Anything. How do you write your name?’

  ‘He doesn’t.’ Jaze had appeared at the secretary’s shoulder. ‘None of us do. Our names are not meant to be written down. Our names are meant to be forgotten when there is nobody alive who remembers us, so they must never be written down. Paper has too long a memory, you see.’

  ‘But how am I supposed to keep records? How can I keep track of them all and make sure none of them go missing?’

  Records. Missing.

  Hathin covered one hand with her mouth, then tugged timidly at Jaze’s sleeve, and drew him aside.

  ‘He’s right,’ she whispered. ‘That’s what we do. That’s what we Lace are always doing. We go missing. Jaze, do you still have those pages of Inspector Skein’s journal?’

  The papers were quickly retrieved from Jaze’s pack, and at Hathin’s request Jaze consulted the list and found mention of his own village.

  ‘“Seagrin – two eagles, three storms, one join R, one smugglers.”’ Jaze looked a question at Hathin.

  ‘And the words afterwards – the words that aren’t words – can you sound them out? Please?’

  Jaze struggled in mouthing the unfamiliar syllables. Even after he had pronounced the final, short word, it took a moment or two before either of them recognized it. It was a mangled version of his own name.

  ‘No wonder you couldn’t read those words,’ breathed Hathin. ‘They were never meant to be written down at all. They’re names. Lace names. And Inspector Skein was trying to spell them out with Doorsy letters. Jaze, I think you’re in the list because you disappeared to join the Reckoning. “One join R” – that’s you.

  ‘Carried off by eagles, drowned by storms, killed by smugglers, joining the Reckoning – they’re all reasons why people might vanish overnight and never be seen by their village again. Poor Inspector Skein’s letter to Sightlord Fain talked about deaths and disappearances on the Coast of the Lace – and that’s what the Inspector was looking into. Lace deaths. Lace disappearances. He was visiting all the Lace villages, making a list of everyone who’d vanished suddenly, and even noting down why the village believed they had disappeared.’

  ‘So,’ Jaze said, very quietly, ‘you’re saying that there’s another reason for these disappearances? That our enemies were behind it all along, and the Inspector was investigating them?’

  ‘I think we need to talk to Uncle Larsh,’ said Hathin.

  Master Craftsman Larsh was kept locked in a buttery, partly for his own safety, for there were many among the Reckoning who were sickened by his continued existence. He looked up as Jaze and Hathin entered, his eyes very tired and old.

  ‘Disappearances,’ said Jaze, without preamble. ‘Disappearances on the Coast of the Lace, these last few years.’

  Larsh sighed, and his gaze dropped to the floor.

  ‘I never had much part in it,’ he said wearily. His hands fidgeted, tweaking and plucking at his bread ration, fashioning a little figure from it. ‘They came past the Hollow Beasts cove sometimes at night, convo
ys with Lace prisoners. Sometimes I hid them in the caves. Once during some bad storms I had to guide a convoy up the coast, but only as far as a quay at Pericold Heights. I don’t know where they went after that.’

  Pericold Heights, the place where the Lost sent their minds so that they could judge the coming winds by the wavering of the banner of steam from Mother Tooth. The closest point on the coast to Mother Tooth . . .

  ‘I know where they take them,’ breathed Hathin. ‘Mother Tooth’s island.’ In her mind’s eye she was remembering Bridle’s map of Mother Tooth, with its strange rectangular shadows. Not rocks, not lakes – no, shapes made by the hands of man. No wonder the charts of the Safe Farms had reminded her of them so strongly.

  ‘Dance told me the pigeon men were sending mining supplies to the coast. Those shapes on the map of Mother Tooth – I think they’re mines.’ Mother Tooth, more fitful and dangerous even than Crackgem. Nobody would live there, let alone dig into her shuddering rock by choice. But what if the miners had not gone there by choice? What if they had been stolen from their villages in ones and twos? What if they were Lace, who were expected to go missing, who would never be missed? And for how many years had this been going on before a man named Inspector Skein got suspicious and started taking notes? Was this discovery the reason for the deaths of the Lost?

  Jaze’s face reminded Hathin of a naked blade, and she guessed that his thoughts were running parallel to her own. She wondered what expression she herself wore.

  She looked at Larsh and felt only numb. He had shrunk – she could look right through him; there were much bigger foes to find.

  ‘You can’t follow the trail back,’ sighed the craftsman. ‘My orders came from Port Suddenwind, and if you try to trace anything back there you go mad. Even the man I report to in Mistleman’s Blunder is nobody. Suddenwind is a mountain of paper laws and orders, full of faceless people.

  Faceless people.

  Faceless. A man without a face had done all this.

  Hathin thought of Minchard Prox and realized that she could remember only his scars, and the flick of his pencil as he struck out Lace villages. He no longer had a face. At last she felt something through the numbness. At last she knew the calm madness of the revenger.

  33

  The King of Tricks

  The next morning everyone woke to find that Lord Crackgem had stopped laughing. The very air felt as if it was caught in that half-second between a breath and someone starting to speak. Everything including the volcano seemed to be waiting, listening.

  The early-morning streets were hushed when the palace gates swung wide, letting out the bleary guards with their unfamiliar muskets and their red-looking, newly shaven chins. The Superior was riding in an absurd little carriage like a giant perambulator, pulled by three elephant birds, all of which seemed to have strong but different navigational viewpoints. He too seemed headachey and sluggish.

  In contrast, Hathin felt restive, unable to settle on anything. The other Lace seemed just as bad. There was also a fitful stirring within Ritterbit’s cage, and a warning fidget in the songs of the birds in the hedge and brush. The package train of elephant birds continually shrugged and huffed their flanks, bouncing their packs. This was a day when the earth might open as silently as a fish mouth and pour out mysteries.

  Hathin herself had been given a new disguise, though still a boyish one, and slunk along beside the Superior’s tottering carriage. A rough hooded cape covered her face, her form and the flickerbird cage in her hand, so that they could not be recognized by Jimboly. Not far away she could see Jeljech, her hand still resting on Therrot’s arm as though he was her prisoner, her green Sour garments traded in for less distinctive clothes. They walked with the other members of the Stockpile, flanked by guards.

  Overnight, the rain-pitted mud of the track seemed to have cooked into lizard ridges, and the irrigation channels were all dry. It was strange to walk the Obsidian Trail against the flow of heat-dazed families staggering past with their buckets of black glass. Roadblocks melted before their party’s liveries and muskets, questions evaporated before the petulant authority of the Superior. Granted, at the roadblocks nearest to Jealousy some consternation was caused by the appearance of a Superior who showed no signs of being dead. As the convoy travelled further from Jealousy, however, the guards they met seemed less startled by this. Clearly news of his ‘death’ had not reached everywhere.

  Afternoon came, but the heat and oppression of the air remained relentless, and the sky unclouded. For the first time in weeks, the monsoon rain missed its daily appointment.

  All the while, the Reckoning kept an eye out for traces of the bounty hunters that had taken Arilou. Near evening they found the remains of a campsite. On a slab of black stone, Hathin found the white imprint of a long-palmed hand. Instinctively she recognized its shape, and saw a meaning in the way it had been laid so carefully, so cleanly, against the rock.

  ‘It’s Arilou!’ Hathin felt a pang, amid her excitement and pride. ‘Look – she must have used bonfire ash. She left it for me. She knows – she can see me coming for her.’

  That night, in spite of her weariness, Hathin sat up for many hours, close to the campfire. Arilou’s mind would come looking for Hathin, she was sure, and be drawn to the light. Over and over Hathin performed the same mime, while staring upwards towards the stars. She pointed to her sleeping companions one after the other, counting them, and then held up a stick and made the same number of notches with her fingernail. When at last she slept, a pile of such tiny sticks pillowed her head, and etched grooves into her cheek.

  The second day was hotter than the first. The air trembled and the shadows blackened, and now the invisible denizens of the world of mysteries seemed almost as real as the palpable.

  And was Jimboly out there too, scampering alongside the road with the half-seen imps of Hathin’s imagination? No, surely not – hopefully she would not know that Hathin and Ritterbit had left the town with the convoy; Hathin had changed her disguise for exactly this reason. Jimboly would be lurking in Jealousy, watching the palace, fidgeting with the uneasy sense that loop after loop of her soul’s cloth was pulling away from her.

  Sometimes Hathin almost thought she saw the fine scarlet thread of Jimboly’s soul stretching from Ritterbit’s cage. At other times she imagined a thicker, duller purple strand tethered to her own heart and pulling her down the road. At the other end was Arilou. She knew now that however angry, frightened, tired or despairing she became, the tug of that thread would always bite through the numbness, pull her across plains and over mountains and through rivers.

  Could souls become entangled? Could she have somehow snagged a soul thread from a man called Minchard Prox, a woman called Dance, a lost brother called Therrot? It was as if they were all caught up in a great web and could feel each other’s motions as tremors through their own spirits. Fate was starting to pull the threads taut, drawing them all towards one another.

  That evening the revengers discovered their quarries’ next camp. By the bonfire lay a single green stem, clumsily scored with seven thumbnail creases. Arilou had marked it as Hathin had shown her. Arilou had seven guards.

  The Reckoning made camp, the sun went down, and for hours Hathin had a new dance. She would pluck rough seed heads from their stems and then advance, taking care to drop them so that each head pointed in the direction she was walking. She might have gone through the same motions all night if Jaze had not intervened.

  ‘Get some sleep, or you’ll be no good to your sister when you find her.’

  Just after sunrise on the third day the cloud bank that had been sliding towards them split and they could see the barbed and blackened tip of Spearhead. It appeared to rip upwards like a claw through gauze. Before now only Dance had filled Hathin with the same awe, the same sense of something momentous and unforgiving.

  At first the jungle was a distant smear of murky green, but by mid-afternoon the road had curved close enough to its tangle for
the travellers to make out plaited vines, orchids fading like wrinkled silk, and occasionally a monkey flinging itself so fast from bough to bough that it seemed to fly through the green. The jungle could easily have offered cover for a dozen spies or attackers, but it was not this that kept every hackle raised, rather the continuing sense of blood-level strangeness.

  Once Hathin thought she saw a shadowy figure waiting for them by the road ahead, a creature with a bird-like head and long black fingers. But half a mile became a quarter of a mile, and as she drew closer the shape pulled itself apart like a cloud. Its slender body became a carved black tethering post, its fingers and the plumes on the back of its head became wavering fern fronds, its beak two leaves rubbing tips. And yet as she passed it she felt her skin tingle as if the Gripping Bird really was standing right there in the light of the sun, too bold to be seen, and watching her pass with eyes of sapphire blue.

  Miles passed without conversation. No Lace could help twitching a glance about them every couple of seconds, as if their wits were flea-bitten.

  ‘What is it? What? What is wrong with you all?’ asked the Superior at one point, his voice squeaky with tension. His face was flushed and queasy from the jolting of his little carriage.

  To do Jaze justice, he really tried to explain what every Lace was feeling, although there were hardly words to describe it, even in their own language.

  ‘This sun is not our sun. This sky is not our sky. Behind all this gold and blue and green there is the jet blackness of the deepest caves. We cannot see the ancient things that walk alongside us . . . but we can feel them licking our faces.’

  The Superior did not ask for another explanation.

  The roadblocks were now more frequent and better organized. Each time they halted, Hathin kept her mouth bitten into a narrow line. It was becoming easier to suppress her smile. Now the questions were more searching, and there were precarious moments when someone looked as if they might search the ‘prisoners’. Hathin could see the Superior’s own guards swallowing and exchanging looks, clearly unsure how they had found themselves in this situation. Although the guards did not know about the plan to rescue the infamous Lady Arilou, they were quite aware that their prisoners were not real prisoners, and that for some reason they were playing a part in a strange charade.