Gullstruck Island

by Frances Hardinge

  For reassurance? But what was Therrot? He was not her big brother. He was just a shape behind her in the darkness, a man with blood on his hands, somebody she did not really know.

  Her eye dropped to Ritterbit’s cage, and a smile crept on to her face despite herself. She felt a little throb of fellowship every time his fantail bobbed between the bars. A black bead of an eye gleamed in the darkness within, and found an answer in the black bead in her stomach. Perhaps Ritterbit was her little brother now.

  A few of the trees seemed to fold and ooze like raw pastry, and had great holes in them. Climbing through one she laid her foot down, only to feel the ground tremble beneath it, like the flank of a vast animal. Occasionally there was a hint of panicked motion in the trees above, a monkey’s trapeze swing, a bird belting through the foliage like a slingshot. But they did not seem to be fleeing from her, rather she thought they were all moving past her towards the lower ground.

  She walked and walked, and her chest tightened as she started to see occasional blackened trees. They seemed to stand as warnings to the others around them, like courtiers who had said the wrong thing. Warnings to the other trees, and to Hathin herself.

  The ground grew steeper, the going more difficult, the air colder and harder to breathe. The mist-clouds came down and softly surged through the trees to meet her. Was Therrot still behind her? She dared not look back.

  A mist-filled ravine gaped unexpectedly to her right, trees leaning over it dangerously with their roots splayed as though it had just opened and they were bending over to peer in. From its depths came a fluctuating hiss and the damp, stinging fragrance of singed greenery.

  She began edging along the side of the crack, but flinched into a crouch as she felt the ground shift slightly again beneath her feet. There was a distant sound, which to her bewildered ears sounded like some great beast coughing, and then suddenly the leaves around her were shaking as something fell upon them like rain. Tiny grey rocks the size of birds’ eggs were falling and bouncing, light as hazelnuts. They stung her back and neck, and she ducked beneath one of the tipping trees.

  Lord Spearhead had noticed her. He would not let her talk; he would not even let her approach.

  To her right, away from the ravine, a phantom forest of stencilled grey ferns and boughs twitched and jumped with the stony downpour. And it was from this dancing, ghostly forest that Jimboly came leaping, her red bandanna like a war-flag.

  As the dentist’s weight slammed into her, Hathin lost her grip on the lantern and it bounced to the ground to light the world lopsided. It was all Hathin could do to throw one arm around the nearest stooping tree to stop herself tumbling backwards into the chasm. There was now only a frail net of dry vines between her and a long, dark fall, and these were creaking and starting to give as Jimboly’s weight forced her backwards. One of Jimboly’s lean, strong hands dug into Hathin’s face, forcing her back, and the other grabbed at the handle of Ritterbit’s cage. With a strength born of desperation Hathin yanked the cage free and beat Jimboly across the face with it, seeing her enemy’s eyes fog.

  Just as Therrot burst from the ferns behind Jimboly, the vines supporting Hathin finally gave way. She lost her grip on the tree, her nails gouging furrows in the lichen and breaking against the wood. The fall welcomed her, it had been waiting for her, her insides were become air already . . . then she felt a thick, woody, vertical vine graze her arm and snatched at it reflexively, ripping the skin from her hands and struggling to twist a leg around it.

  Below her she was faintly aware that she could see a curling green creeper quietly hissing itself to death, wrinkling and wilting as if time itself had grown impatient. Lower still she thought she glimpsed a dull, hungry glow of red.

  She could hear sounds of struggle over her head, but could see only maddened shivers of the leaf mosaic above, and beyond it the pale bar of the leaning tree. Hathin clenched her teeth, took a deep breath, then smashed Ritterbit’s cage against the rocky wall of the abyss.

  The scattering of wood was almost musical, a chorus of surprised plinks and patters. A wicked bit of shadow flew free, his wing-tricks quick as a whiplash, his path as changeable as a traitor’s smile. Up flew Ritterbit to land high on the tilting tree above, where he fanned his feathered cards and hid them, fanned them and hid them. There was a scream from Jimboly.

  The sounds of combat abruptly ceased. At the same time she noticed Jimboly creeping along the slanting tree towards the taunting, twirling shape of Ritterbit. Again and again he waited for her imploring hand to come within inches of him before hopping out of reach.

  The vine had never intended to bear something of Hathin’s weight. Queasily she sensed it giving, pulling away from the wall of the ravine. Therrot, Therrot. But the woman who had killed his family was up there, vulnerable, distracted. And Hathin was not really his little sister.

  A chip of bark fell into Hathin’s eye. Something was coming down towards her with a slither and crack, showering her face with leaves. She peered up and there he was. Therrot, his face mask-like with concentration, one of his legs hooked over a knob of roots, leaning down towards the vine that held her.

  Hathin’s grip slipped a little, and as the dry stem rasped in her fingers it caught Jimboly’s attention. For a moment the dentist turned her head to look at her. There was hatred in her dark eyes, and madness, but also a hint of incomprehension.

  You are dust, her eyes said. You are dirt. You are nothing. Why do you bother surviving? Why are you still alive?

  I am the dust in your eyes, was the answer in Hathin’s look. I am the dirt that will bury you. I am the nothingness waiting to open up under your feet. And I can hold on longer than you can.

  Hathin opened her mouth and screamed. It was not a scream of pain or fear; it was the explosion of the little black egg in her core which had been waiting to hatch. As the sound split the air Ritterbit bulleted skywards, and disappeared into the mist. And Jimboly, giving a croaking echo to Hathin’s cry, groped wildly at him as he passed, lost her balance and fell into the chasm.

  Crash followed crash followed crash, and then there was silence but for a long, hungry hiss. And not another sound rose from the earthy throat that had swallowed Jimboly whole.

  Therrot said nothing as he scrambled precariously down the side of the ravine, finding footholds and handholds among the splayed roots. At last he was on a level with Hathin, and could pull her vine towards him so that she could climb up him like a ladder to the top. He clambered up after her, and she could see for the first time the fingernail marks on his cheeks. She did not resist when he crouched next to her and almost crushed her with a hug.

  It took a minute or so for Hathin’s head to stop spinning, and for her to realize why the forest was so silent.

  ‘The stone rain’s stopped.’

  ‘Yes. I think the Lord’s willing to talk to you now, at least.’ Therrot glanced over his shoulder at the ravine into which Jimboly had fallen. ‘He understands vengeance. And revengers.’

  Hathin stood rather shakily, and Therrot followed suit. The mist had cleared a little uphill, and they could now see that they were approaching a steeper slope where the jungle thinned away. They had taken a few paces towards it when both halted and looked at each other.

  ‘It’s up to you.’ Therrot answered the unasked question. ‘I’ll walk with you to the crater’s lip and beyond if it means I can protect you. But if my presence would endanger you . . .’

  The same thought had dropped into both their minds at the same time. If Spearhead had been watching the destruction of Jimboly he might approve Hathin as a revenger, but Therrot was a different matter. The village destroyed by Jimboly’s machinations had been Therrot’s, just as it had been Hathin’s. And yet when he could have killed the murderess of his family, he had made another choice. He had left the fight to save Hathin. He had chosen his ‘little sister’.

  Hathin threw her arms around him again and squeezed with all her might. When she looked up his face was
hesitant and expectant.

  ‘The Lord might not understand,’ she whispered, and saw a look of desolate anxiety steal across his face. ‘And somebody needs to go back to the others and tell them that I’m near the top. But you’ll listen out all the time, won’t you? And if it sounds like he’s angry . . . will you come and get me?’

  Swallowing drily, she did her best to pull the leaves from her hair and rub the tree sap from her clothes and, having wiped her boots and done what she could to make herself presentable, Hathin walked up through the fraying forest to talk to Lord Spearhead alone.

  35

  Lord Spearhead

  As the upward slope became steeper, the living trees gave way to the dead. Solitary bone-white trees that time had stripped of their bark. The cloud breathed by Lord Spearhead was chill and blinding, for it was revenge that he exhaled.

  After an age the broken trees became sparser, and she no longer needed to clamber over fallen trunks. The tangling roots were replaced by a shifting, sinking slope of tiny rocks, puckered with holes like ocean sponges. Every footstep sank and slid into the slope, pebbles slipping into the lip of Hathin’s boots. One false step could send her sliding back, bringing down a torrent of tiny rocks to bury her entirely.

  She was high now – she could feel it through the singing in her head, the way her lungs heaved helplessly at the thin air. Spearhead was taller than any of the other mountains she had climbed. His cold mist bit through her thin clothes, and her face burned with effort.

  But then at long last she felt rock under her hand, a crumbling crag of it. She scrabbled for purchase and pulled herself upward, finding fingerholds and toeholds by touch. Finally she heaved herself on to the top of the crag with such determination that she nearly lost her balance. With an internal yelp, Hathin found that she had run out of ‘up’ and there was nothing but the sheerest drop before her.

  Hathin screwed her eyes shut, until she became aware of a brightness behind her lids. She looked around to find that the cloud on all sides had thinned to a gauze, leaving everything around her soaked through with moonlight. She could even make out the deep, meaty red of the stone on which she sat, and the tulip-shapes of blackened rocks that fluted steam into the air near her feet.

  Below and about her was a rolling landscape of thicker cloud, and jutting up from it a vast scattered ring of prongs and peaks. Hathin herself was perched on the highest. Her mind reeled as she realized that she must have clambered to the very tip of Spearhead’s ‘spear’ and now teetered on the brink of the Lord’s crater.

  The vapour beneath her swirled, and Hathin saw that there was a large lake down in the throat of the crater, turned by the moon into a ragged-edged mirror of mother-of-pearl. It was like finding a single perfect tear in the eye of a great and terrible beast, and for a moment Hathin could only stare entranced by the beauty of the scene. The next, the earth shook beneath her with a growl that she could feel vibrate through the marrow of her bones.

  Hathin was the first to feel the slight tremor, but not the last. The ripple passed onward and outward, making its dark and secret way through the earth.

  As it moved down the slope through the forest, flock after flock of birds erupted from the trees like soft-winged bombs, and monkeys filled the air with shrieking. The chasm that had swallowed Jimboly gaped a little wider, and two trees toppled into its darkness.

  Fence posts hiccupped out of their sockets. Down in the Superior’s camp, a servant trying to mop the Superior’s forehead ended up poking his employer in the eye. In Mistleman’s Blunder, diamond windowpanes rattled in their frame so that the moonlight scintillated in them like dragonfly scales.

  Working late in his study in the courthouse, Prox had to swoop to save his inkwell, and watched his rebellious pens skipping away from him across the table. He glanced at a stoppered bottle on his windowsill, and relaxed slightly. The quaver of the ground had barely stirred the reddish sediment in the base of the bottle. The pendulum on the stand beside it was swinging only with a slight and lazy motion. Spearhead stirring in his sleep, that was all. Nothing more.

  In his own study, Camber looked up as though somebody had knocked, and continued staring out through his moonlit window long after the tremor had passed.

  And down on the lower slopes of Spearhead, nine revengers who had been creeping through the darkness threw themselves flat and waited, a dark blue cloth shrouding their prone forms.

  Hathin held on tight, feeling the vast crag beneath shift slantwise a few inches. Then there was only a faint throb in the rock.

  Was it a growl of warning? She could only hope not. She could only hope that in his basalt tones Spearhead was talking to her.

  Face clammy with cloud and her own cooling perspiration, Hathin raised herself to her knees and tried to wipe the caked dust from her cheeks with her trembling, bleeding hands.

  ‘Lord Spearhead!’ It was the voice that she had always used as ‘Arilou’, for she knew no other way to make her voice ring out far enough to fill the great crater. But this time she spoke in Lace, for that was the tongue the volcanoes understood, and she drew out her words, for volcanoes’ thoughts were slow as lava. ‘I come with a message and a gift – from the Lady Sorrow.’

  ‘The Lord has seen us,’ whispered Louloss through a mouthful of undergrowth. ‘He knows.’

  Dance responded only with a short hissed intake of breath, an injunction to silence. The revengers hiding beneath the flag all tensed and listened for a while. The music of the forest had been given over to new instruments. No longer did the crickets rasp like saws through wood, nor the cicadas give their rising maraca echo. Now everything was bird-siren, monkey-roar.

  ‘No.’ Dance pushed herself up on to her hands and knees. ‘If he knew our minds, the sky would be bellowing and half a hundred broken crags would be rushing down the slope to meet us. Are your bones ash, Louloss? No? Then the Lord doesn’t know what we intend. Come on.’

  And so up they crept, a core few bearing the flag on their backs, the rest melting into the shadows. Above them, guards from Mistleman’s Blunder stood in the light-pools from their lanterns, scanning a dark countryside that was no friend to them. Below them, the city itself slept, dreaming centuries-old dreams of Lace – Lace creeping through darkness with unseen smiles and blades. Mistleman’s Blunder slept, not knowing that it had called its own nightmares home.

  Spearhead’s rumble had left the guards alert and troubled, listening for the telltale clatter of rocks above them that might warn of a landslide. But they heard nothing except monkey-roar, bird-siren. They were not ready for the land below them to come alive with knives. They were not ready for a vast woman to dance into their fragile pools of light, a tornado in worn leggings, her long dreadlocks falling against her back with a soft thump like a heartbeat.

  Two of them had just enough time to grab the poles on which their lanterns were perched and shake them as a signal to the town. But the lanterns were already swinging after the tremor, and it made little difference. Dance’s swords knew their path through the air, just as a gull’s beak knows its way through water to fish flesh. And, behind her, silence closed like a wound.

  The jungle had been cut back to make space for the Safe Farm, and the hewn wood used to make a fence around its perimeters. The guards fidgeted in their wooden guard-towers, and the wall of the stockade threw a long, toothed shadow across the slopes of the farm, the piles of battered pails, the heaps of mud-caked hoes, the raw ridges of the dry, ploughed soil. Deep in the shadow lay the ‘farmers’ themselves, Lace men, women and children, most with their cheek pressed to the ground as if listening for footfalls. They dared not speak, for fear that the waking volcano would hear them. They dared not move for fear of rattling the long chains that linked them.

  Only one prisoner shakily pushed herself up into a sitting position, grey eyes wide and full of strange moonlight.

  ‘Athh,’ she murmured. ‘Athn . . . Hatthhn . . .’

  ‘What?’ A guard walked over.
‘What was that?’

  ‘Me,’ answered a woman who sat next to the girl who had spoken. ‘No speak. Sneeze.’

  The guard looked down at the mosaic of sleepy, stubborn, bruised faces, their wide-apart eyes reflecting the lantern in his hand, and then stooped to wave his hand before the face of the grey-eyed girl.

  ‘What wrong her?’ he asked in Nundestruth. ‘Clutter-skull?’

  ‘Sun,’ answered the woman bluntly. She slapped the top of her own head, then rolled up her eyes and lolled her head to mime dizziness. ‘Work too hard.’ She picked up one of the girl’s hands and opened it like a book to show the blisters on the palm.

  ‘Hey!’ A call from an officer in the guard-tower. ‘What are you doing, socializing with the smilers? Keep your eye to your arrow slit.’ And so the guard returned to his post, watched by all the prisoners. Everybody was jumpy. A scout had sprinted back to the Farm, babbling of a blue creature with no head that ran on a dozen legs and whose back rippled like the sea . . .

  All the while the Lace held their tongues. Long before they reached the Safe Farm, the grey-eyed girl’s fellow prisoners had noticed her drifting eye and her stumbling walk, and had seen that they had a Lost among them. There was only one Lace Lost – the much-sought Lady Arilou. Voicelessly the news had spread through the Safe Farm, and the guards never noticed the way that one prisoner was always shielded from their view, always had her pail of rocks lightened by stealthy hands, always had new rags tied around her injured feet.

  Lady Arilou had come to the Safe Farm, and that could mean only one thing. She had come to rescue them. And so in silence they watched her, waited for a sign.

  Ath, mouthed Arilou to herself. Hathin.

  Swallowing, Hathin held up the little pouch of white dust. Some instinct told her that she should not give it immediately, despite the terrible impatience of the gaping crater. After all, she was there to keep the mountain talking.