by Lian Tanner
The old man lowered his eyebrows in warning. He glanced at the old woman, then looked back at the children. ‘Do not be so quick to offer up your lives.’
Now it was Duckling who stepped forward, and Sooli too. ‘Our lives?’ they said, in unison.
The old woman smiled horribly. ‘The lives you would have lived. The stories that would have been yours.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Otte.
But the four Old Ones would not tell them, and when Duckling looked to the great Bayam for explanation, she shook her head. She didn’t know either.
It was only then that Duckling realised she was getting colder. The fire was burning low, and most of the wood was gone. On the edge of the circle of light, the Harshman was snatching things out of midair, or skewering them with his twisty fingernails and tipping them into his mouth.
‘He’s eating ghosts again,’ whispered Pummel. ‘He’s getting bigger.’
The four Old Ones didn’t turn. Instead, they watched Duckling and the other three children with unblinking intensity. It didn’t hurt so much now, but still Duckling wished they would look somewhere else.
Beside her, Pummel made a desperate sound, like someone struggling for air. ‘I’ll give up my – my story,’ he said, in a voice not at all like his. ‘Whatever that means. I’ll give it. I agree. Now, how do we wake the Grimstone?’
‘You must all agree,’ said the old woman, with another of those horrible smiles. ‘You came to us as six, so six must choose.’
The flames sank lower, and Duckling felt as if they were taking her courage with them. Give up her story? Give up the life she would have lived? Did that mean she was going to die? Or did it mean something else? How could she choose when she didn’t know what she was choosing?
The great Bayam stepped forward. ‘I have lived far beyond my given years. Whatever it is you are asking, I agree to it.’
Sooli stared at her with white-rimmed eyes. Then she nodded and said, ‘As – as do I.’
‘Aand meeee,’ said the cat, sounding as if she was choosing nothing more important than a place to sleep. ‘Agreee.’
Duckling and Otte looked at each other, and everyone else looked at them.
‘Hurry,’ whispered Sooli. ‘I do not think the fire will hold him for much longer.’
It was an impossible choice, and Duckling hated every single person there for forcing her towards it. She didn’t want to die. She wanted to live.
But Otte was nodding now. ‘I agree,’ he said, and his voice rose to a squeak. ‘I will give the – the life I would have led. The story that would have been mine.’
Despite the squeak, he sounded so brave that Duckling took heart. We’d probably die anyway, she reminded herself. The Harshman won’t leave me and Pummel alive, that’s for sure. At least this way we take him with us.
And with her knees and ankles and fingers and toes and every other part of her trembling, she said, ‘Me too. I agree.’
There was just time for Pummel to hug her, and whisper in her ear, ‘I’m really glad to have known you, Duckling.’
Then the Old Ones stood up. Or rather, one moment they were sitting, the next they were standing, though Duckling didn’t see them move.
On the edge of the circle of light, the Harshman stiffened, like a dog on the hunt. His twisty fingernails clacked together. His eyes burned brighter than any fire. ‘Give … Me … The … Heir,’ he whispered. ‘Give … Him … To … Me.’
The old woman stamped three times on the rock.
Beneath Duckling’s feet, the ground twitched, as a horse’s skin will twitch when a fly annoys it. The hollow where the fire burned grew a little deeper. The ridge where Duckling stood rose a little higher. All the parts of the rock underwent the slightest of changes. But when she looked at it again, she did not see a rock at all.
She saw a massive old man, lying on his back, sound asleep.
It was as if the sky had suddenly turned to milk. Or Duckling’s own fingers had become solid silver. Everything she thought she knew about the world was tipped up and tossed out, and she couldn’t breathe for the terror of it.
If she could have run, she would have. But her legs would not obey her, and besides, there was nowhere to go. It was the old man’s cheekbone she perched on, and the bushes at her back were his eyebrows. His body stretched far, far away from her into the darkness; his gigantic chest, the cloak wrapped around him, the feathers in his hair …
‘He’s – he’s the Grimstone?’ whispered Duckling, as squeaky as Otte.
Whatever he was, he wasn’t waking. That monstrous chest rose and fell; that mouth opened like an abyss. But the old man slept on.
‘C-can you p-please stamp again, Old Ones?’ asked Sooli in a tremulous voice.
‘We told you, we cannot wake him,’ said the red man. ‘You must do it. You must give him your gifts. Your powers. The Saaf magic must come together as one.’
After a split second of shock, Duckling was the first to move. Not because she wanted to, but because she was deathly afraid of not being able to move. Of letting her friends down. Of being the one who ruined everything.
It was only a single step forward, but it seemed to take years. There was a buzzing in her head, and her knees felt like water. ‘How – how do we give it to him?’ she whispered.
‘The same way it was given to you,’ said the red man. ‘With an open heart.’
Duckling’s heart was shut up so tight with fear that she didn’t think she’d ever be able to pry it open again. But she did her best. She stumbled across the giant’s cheekbone until she came to the trees that were his hair. (Their trunks swayed as he breathed; the shafts of his feathers gleamed like starlight.) Then she grabbed hold of a branch and held onto it as she crept down to the crater of his ear.
She wanted to say something, though she wasn’t sure what. Maybe to ask him to treat her breeze kindly. Or to beg him to leave Sooli and the great Bayam with at least some witchery, because none of this was their fault, and it didn’t seem fair that they should pay such a high price for it.
But there were no words left in her. So in the end, all she did was lean forward and blow as hard as she could, right into the giant’s ear, just as an old Saaf woman had once done to her in the Berren marketplace.
The Wind’s Blessing went out of her like a bird flying to a new nest, with the old one left ragged and useless behind it. And oh, how it hurt! The pain was so great that all Grandpa’s training couldn’t stop Duckling crying out. At the same time, the Grimstone twitched again, and she had to cling to the tree branch to stop herself being thrown into the darkness.
When the movement stopped, she climbed back up to her friends, aching with the sudden loss.
Sooli was the next to step forward. She was weaving something – or maybe she was unweaving. Whatever it was, tears ran down her face and she sobbed aloud, but she didn’t stop. Her fingers twisted and turned, they darted over her head, they scooped up her tears and added them to whatever she was doing.
She tied a knot. She bit through an invisible thread. She cried harder. Then she took what she had made (or unmade) and dropped it into the giant’s open mouth.
He swallowed. He twitched. In the darkness, something moved.
It was a hand as big as a house. It rose from his side and swept up his chest until Duckling was sure it would knock them all flying. But it stopped beside the giant’s chin and opened flat, palm upwards.
Pummel’s breath went out in the quietest of sighs. ‘The witchery was never really ours, was it,’ he said to Duckling. And he walked towards the giant’s hand.
When he was standing right between that huge thumb and the enormous fingers, he took the leather pouch from his pocket and placed it carefully on the giant’s palm. The great fingers closed over it. When they opened again, the raashk was gone.
Otte hopped forward with his mice in his hands. ‘I do not know how to give him my witchery. No one gave it to me; I have always had it.’
‘Your witchery is a strange thing,’ said the great Bayam. ‘I do not think it is part of Saaf. I think it is yours and yours alone, and unless you learn otherwise, you should keep it.’
She was approaching the giant’s hand now, just as Pummel had done, and her face was grave. She grasped that enormous thumb and pulled herself upwards. Then she walked across the palm until she was standing right in the middle of it.
‘Thank you,’ she said, turning to the children, ‘for what you have done. I honour you all. Especially you, Frow Cat.’ She touched her brow, her chest, her belly. Then she shut her eyes.
Before Duckling understood what was happening, the giant’s fingers began to close around her.
‘Wait!’ shouted Duckling, and despite her fear she ran past that gaping mouth and across the rocky chin, and grabbed hold of the thumb. ‘Wait! What are you doing?’
The thumb and fingers paused. The great Bayam said, ‘I cannot give him my magic. After five hundred years it is wound through every part of me. I cannot separate it from myself. Stand back, Duckling.’
She said those last three words with such an air of command that Duckling took an involuntary step back.
The fingers closed. When they opened again, the great Bayam was gone, and in her place stood the chicken.
A sob broke from Sooli. Something moved beneath Duckling’s feet.
It wasn’t just a twitch, not this time. The giant had woken.
Sooli’s heart was breaking.
Her magic was gone, every thread of it, leaving a hole inside her the size of the Grimstone. She was no longer Bayam – and soon she would be dead.
I am glad, she told herself fiercely. I would not know who I was anymore. I would not be me.
She stood there, staring at the fire that had flared up again. The giant grumbled, and the earth shook. He growled, and the stars whirled so drunkenly above Sooli’s head that she closed her eyes.
She only opened them again when someone seized her hand. ‘The Old Ones have vanished, but the Harshman’s still here,’ cried Duckling. ‘We have to run!’
‘Run where?’ asked Sooli.
‘Back to the Strong-hold, that’s where.’ Duckling grabbed the chicken with her free hand, saying, ‘Come on!’
The cat was already racing towards the giant’s chest, leaping from his chin and landing on his breastbone. Pummel, piggybacking Otte, followed close behind, and Sooli, Duckling and the chicken followed Pummel.
Even without her magic, Sooli could see the labyrinth – what the others called the Snare. ‘There!’ she shouted, and Pummel and the cat swerved towards it.
Behind them, a howl rose up – a howl that shook Sooli even worse than the shakings of the Grimstone.
‘I thought – he was – supposed to be – dead by now,’ she gasped.
‘Me too,’ replied Duckling. ‘It’s not – fair.’
But fair or not, the Harshman was on their heels once again.
The entrance to the labyrinth looked like the mouth of a small cave filled with tendrils of mist. As the children dived into it, the Grimstone giant sat up.
They were thrown from one side of the cave to the other, all in a heap, but none of them were badly hurt. They scrambled to their feet and began to run again, heading into that strange mist – only this time they had no great Bayam to guide them.
Sooli glanced at the chicken as she ran. It was just a chicken now, squawking with fright in Duckling’s arms; its power had gone, along with the woman who had lived inside it for so long. And it did not like what was happening.
Beneath their feet the ground buckled and yawned. The children grabbed hold of each other, but they did not stop running. They could not. The labyrinth pushed them along, just as it had tried to slow them down them when they went the other way. When they fell, it tipped them upright again. When one of them strayed off the path, it squeezed them back into place.
But the Harshman was being pushed forward too, and so was his hawk. Sooli could hear them – she could feel the awful hunger of them.
And we have no powers to fight them with!
There were stone walls on either side of the children now, and the moon and the sun were whizzing over their heads in a continuous line of silvery gold. Time shot past them like an arrow. All the years of the Strong-hold; all the years of the Saaf …
But just as Sooli was beginning to think that they would run forever, with the Harshman on their heels, the labyrinth gave one final heave and pushed them out the other end, into the Great Chamber.
It was a very different chamber from the one they had left. The air was full of dust and screams. One of the outer walls had vanished entirely, letting in the light of early dawn. Even as Sooli stopped and stared, the ground shook again, and a huge block of stone tumbled down.
The Strong-hold was falling.
But it was not the destruction of that ancient castle that caused Sooli to cry out with horror. It was her hands. They had disappeared again.
Back on the rock, with the Old Ones watching her, she had almost managed to accept the idea of her own death. She did not want to die, but if it was the only way to destroy the Harshman and save her people, she would do it.
But the Harshman was not destroyed, her people were not saved – and Sooli was still tied to the Grafine’s path, which meant that hers would be no ordinary death. Her ghost would be bound to the Grafine’s forever, and she would never walk free. She would never wander the old ways and sing the old songs. She would never keep company with all the other Saaf ghosts.
She was lost. And this time the chicken could not save her.
The first person Duckling saw when she tumbled out of the Snare was Grandpa. He and Arms-mistress Krieg were backed up against the Faithful Throne, fighting for their lives against a group of grafs, as the Keep fell to pieces around them. Brun was there too, swinging his sword. And Pummel’s ma, wielding a stool with the strong arms of a woman who had farmed all her life.
The grafs they fought were the same ones who had fawned over the Harshman. They took no notice of the noise and the falling masonry; all their thoughts were for their master, who had disappeared so suddenly, and for his enemies.
Grandpa didn’t see the children and the cat emerge from the Snare. But one of the grafs did.
He shouted to his fellows, ‘They have returned. Seize them!’
Krieg and Grandpa tried to stop them, but it was all they could do to defend themselves against so many. Four of the grafs broke away and grabbed the children before they could run. Only the cat escaped, by diving under one of the bears, where she could not be reached.
The graf who was holding Duckling shook her so hard that she almost let go of the chicken. ‘Where is he?’ demanded the graf. ‘He followed you. Where is our glorious Margrave?’
Duckling didn’t answer. She was trying to work out how they could get away before the Harshman turned up. She was trying to work out where they could possibly go, that he wouldn’t follow straight after and kill them.
But her mind was stuck on the fact that the Harshman was still alive. Hadn’t the Old Ones promised? Hadn’t the great Bayam said that he could only be killed if the Strong-hold fell?
Duckling had taken those words to mean that if the Strong-hold fell, the Harshman would fall with it. They had all believed that. They’d given up their witchery to make it happen. They’d promised to give up their lives, too.
And now it seemed it was all for nothing.
Because the Strong-hold was falling, there was no doubt about it. Or rather, the Keep was falling. There was space where there should not have been space. The air around them was thick with dust and noise. Even as Duckling watched, another wall began to crumble, and a stream of mice dashed past, trying to escape from the chaos.
But the Harshman was still on their tail.
A different graf shouted, ‘He will return and put everything to rights. He will rebuild the Keep, bigger than ever. Let us kill the children before he comes, and then he wil
l be pleased with us.’
‘No!’ cried Otte. ‘If you kill us, he will be very angry with you. He wants to kill us himself.’
Beside Duckling, Pummel whispered, ‘Why did you say that? You know he mustn’t kill you. Better to die before he comes.’
‘Better not to die at all,’ whispered Otte in return. ‘I am trying to buy us some time.’
But there was no time left. At that very moment, with a flurry of ice and a shriek of rage, the Harshman burst out of the Snare.
Duckling could see straight away that the fall of the Keep had made a difference. The Harshman was smaller and older than he had been. His skin clung to his skull; his nose had vanished. Some of his power had gone, too, but there was enough left to kill Otte with no trouble at all. And then his power would come back, greater than ever.
Frost crackled underfoot. Grandpa shouted wordlessly and the clash of swords grew more furious, but no one came to the children’s rescue. Beside Duckling, Sooli’s arms had vanished to her elbows.
The grafs bellowed with delight when they saw the Harshman, and stamped their feet. Then they thrust the children towards him, crying, ‘We held them for you, Your Grace.’
With a ghastly smile, the Harshman reached out and claimed Otte. A block of stone tumbled through the air behind him and crashed onto the Faithful Throne. More mice dashed past, their brown coats covered in dust. In Duckling’s arms, the chicken struggled frantically.
Sooli whispered to Duckling, ‘Death still knows him.’
‘What?’
‘The Harshman. He was brought back from the grave, but death still knows him; I can feel it in my hands. The Grafine’s path knows him too, and hates him. I think – if I could only touch him …’
Duckling understood immediately. And so, as the Harshman drew his sword to kill Otte, she opened her arms and let go of the chicken.
That frantic bird hit the Harshman full in the face, with feathers flying everywhere and her legs scrabbling for purchase. The Harshman shouted in fury, and the grafs instinctively stepped towards him. Their grip on the children loosened.
As the chicken fluttered to the floor, Sooli wrenched herself away from the man who held her, and seized the Harshman’s arm with her invisible hands.
