The Book of Storms

by Ruth Hatfield

  “They won’t have time to think, though,” said Sammael to himself. “They’ll see, in one blinding flash, before they all die, who they really owe thanks to. I’ll show them the most beautiful, the most impressive and inspiring, thing on earth, and then I’ll kill them all. They’ll see what I can be responsible for.”

  He dug into his pocket again. Another lump of wood joined the other two.

  “They think I’m a demon,” he said up to the bunching sky. “Then I’ll show them what demons do.”

  He chucked another taro down onto the pile. And then it was simple. He knew the call. He’d known it since he’d found that first taro and made the Book of Storms from it. He didn’t even have to say it out loud, but sometimes he liked to hear his own voice, staining the storm’s words like poison onto the air.

  “The world is deadly, the world is bright,

  The creatures that use it are blinded by sight,

  But there’s no sense in crying or closing the page,

  Sense only battles in fighting and rage.

  So come all you soldiers and answer my call,

  Together we gather, together we fall!”

  The clouds began to scream. Gathering, swarming, they tumbled faster and faster toward a central point in the sky, directly above the pieces of wood that Sammael had thrown. Not for them the slow, threatening rumble over hours and days, the gradual buildup of pressure. This time they were being dragged forward by a call three times as strong as the normal one, pulling them viciously toward each other.

  The clouds crashed together, boiling and seething; they were squashed and stretched and yanked through the air. Inside them, electricity crackled, fighting for space. Raindrops began to swell and pour down in streams, bursting like waterfalls from the mouths of the darkening sky.

  The wind around Sammael roared up into a hurricane, tearing trees from the earth. He stood, letting it rip through his hair. It wouldn’t shift him. He wasn’t some lowly tree or flimsy house, to be blown off his moorings and sent hurtling into the sky. He was made of air: he could stand exactly where he liked and command it not to move him.

  The storm, too confused to remember its usual voices, began to shriek. A million cries shriveled out above the crashing groans, twisting like agonized snakes devouring their own tails. Lightning set fire to the rain; sheets of flame spewed onto the mountainsides. Within seconds, the land and sky were ablaze.

  Sammael stood exactly where he had first planted his feet, and watched the fire. Flames reflected in his black eyes. He caught a piece of burning twig and ate it, but the sensation of burning wasn’t a thing he could feel, no matter how much of it he pressed against himself. He could only watch the fire and listen to the dying screams of the trees, the plants, and the grasses. He listened for a long while as they grew louder and more anguished, and then he smiled.

  When he had heard enough, he began to climb up one of the sheets of flame into the sky. If only Kalia hadn’t been a mortal dog, she could have followed at his heels. She’d have liked that, haring up a branch of fire, her spindly legs reaching out toward home.

  Ah, Kalia, he thought. If only all creatures were more like her, there’d be no need to destroy everything with fire. He’d be master of it all already.

  But then again, fire was fun.

  * * *

  The lurcher still wasn’t back by the time he reached the room. Everything was just as he’d left it: the boxes of sand stacked up by the far wall, the box of taros starting to look respectably full. A few more storms and then he’d have enough.

  But where was Kalia? He missed her, with a strange feeling in his insides that he’d ordinarily only noticed when something was going wrong somewhere. What if she was away talking to old friends, to other earthly creatures who might try to sway her loyalties away from him?

  He’d never questioned her loyalty, although he normally held it as a rule never to believe what earthly creatures said. They were notoriously fickle. Not Kalia, though. The great gray dog was a steadfast coward who watched him with her huge eyes and didn’t approve of half the things he did but who pressed her head against his leg and tried never to leave his side unless he sent her away with kicks and curses. Kalia was too stupid to leave, he told himself. Although he knew she wasn’t stupid at all, not in the common way. She’d been born knowing where he was, and she’d found him the minute she was old enough to leave her mother. And she’d said to him …

  Sammael didn’t want to listen to his thoughts. Where was Kalia? Damn dog, always running off when he had things to do, and refusing to find her way back home by herself. Now he’d have to go find her.

  He knew where she liked to hunt. A short step through the land between the room and the earth and he was standing in an English hayfield, the late-afternoon sun drawing down on his back.

  “Kalia!” he snapped. No need to be loud about it: she had ears like radar. And she should know where he was, if she was thinking about him at all.

  She came racing up within minutes, a bundle held between her jaws. Tail wagging furiously, she fawned against Sammael’s legs for a moment, scrabbling over his feet with her purple paws.

  “What’ve you got?” He reached out for the lump in her mouth.

  Kalia released it. “Found it,” she said. “Think it’s got some news for you. It saw me and started muttering all sorts of strange things about dogs, big black dogs, and I thought it was talking about the Dogs of War. I thought, It must know about that boy, that boy with the taro.… Oh, I’ve missed you! You’ve been ages!”

  Sammael took hold of the lump and held it up by the scruff of its neck. It was a mangled, terrified cat with no whiskers and only one good eye. It looked like it had spent the night in a washing machine, although that was mainly because it was drenched in Kalia’s slobber.

  The cat twisted in the air, trying to claw at Sammael’s hand. He wasn’t surprised. His fingers sometimes felt like ice to warm-blooded creatures.

  “Stop creating,” he said to the cat, gripping it a little tighter.

  It stopped struggling and hung limply.

  “I know where you belong,” Sammael said, looking at its matted head. “You belong in the house next door to that boy, don’t you? You’ve come a long way from home. What are you doing here, I wonder?”

  The cat jerked and closed its eye, as if it didn’t want to look at him.

  “You came with him, didn’t you?” he asked.

  The cat gulped.

  “And you were chased by the dogs. But the dogs got him, didn’t they?”

  He didn’t miss the quiver of the cat’s tiny white throat, although it was trying very hard to be still.

  “You’re saying the dogs didn’t get him?”

  Sammael’s voice was so quiet that a fly buzzing past half a yard away wouldn’t have heard it, but the quieter it got, the more agony it seemed to cause the cat.

  She opened her mouth in a silent meow.

  “Cat, cat, cat,” said Sammael. “Whatever you’ve told my dog, you’d better tell it to me. The only reason she didn’t eat you was that she thought you might be interesting to me. You’re not being very interesting at all, at the moment.”

  He walked to the side of the field and put the cat down on the branch of a tree, just above the height of his head. The skin he’d been holding settled back down onto her shoulder blades, and she began to lick herself nervously.

  “Come on, cat,” said Sammael. “Out with it.”

  The cat stopped licking and blinked her eye a few times. A shudder ran down her skin. “We got away from the dogs,” she said. “He threw me—threw all of us—into a river. It was so wet. I nearly drowned.”

  “I’ll do worse than that to you if you continue to annoy me,” said Sammael. “Now spit it out.”

  “You already have,” said the cat, growing bolder from its perch. “You set fire to a shed and I got burned and trapped in a rabbit burrow. I used to be an exceptionally fine figure of a cat.…”

  Sammael
reached out his hand. The cat tried to back away, but her feet were stuck to the branch. His fingers closed around her back like the tentacles of a frozen octopus.

  “What happened to the boy?” he said.

  “He’s gone to find the Book of Storms,” said the cat, closing her eye again, trying to fight the cold that was hardening her veins. “He knows where it is. The other boy, I mean.”

  “The other boy? The one with blond hair?”

  “Yes. When the dogs came, he got left behind. But then the dogs ran off after some squirrels and he escaped. He’s tough, the other boy.”

  “Have they found the book?”

  The cat tried to wriggle out from under his hand. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything more. Please let me go.”

  “Do you know where the book is?”

  “No.”

  Slowly, Sammael released his grip on the cat. Kalia was sitting a few feet away, staring again.

  “Do you want to eat it?” he asked her.

  “No, thanks,” said Kalia. “I’ve got a sort of burnt taste in my mouth just from carrying it here. Let it go.”

  Sammael flicked his fingers at the cat and it scrambled down the tree, shooting off into a bush. “You’ll never make a proper demon dog,” he said. “You’re supposed to want to savage everything you meet.”

  “All I want is to serve you,” said Kalia, trampling the ground with her forepaws.

  “Find me the Book of Storms, then,” said Sammael. “Before that irritating boy does. Go on, fetch!”

  “Don’t you know where the old man hid it?” Kalia stopped treading. Sammael was supposed to know everything.

  Sammael’s face had set, hard. “Touched as I am by your faith, Kalia,” he said, “if you question me one more time, I’ll throw you into the land between worlds and let the colors eat you up. Now shut up and let me think.”

  Why had he taken his eyes off the boy? He cursed himself for an idiot. After that stupid woman had missed with the axe, he’d been sure the sniveling wretch of a human couldn’t possibly have the mettle to escape the Dogs of War. But somehow he’d gotten away, and he’d thrown himself into the river. And rivers always knew more than they should. That was the trouble with water—it got everywhere.

  So he found the river.

  “Did you tell the boy about my coat?” he asked.

  “I told him what I knew,” said the river. It wasn’t afraid of Sammael.

  “Where did he go?”

  “Off to find a way to kill you, I don’t doubt. Is that what you’re scared of?”

  Sammael said nothing.

  “He’s looking for his parents,” said the river. “He thinks they’ve been taken by storms. They’ve disappeared, you know.”

  Sammael did know, and he cursed himself again. Then he caught sight of something. A rag, snagged on a clump of reeds at the water’s edge. A pale piece of cotton with a thin blue stripe running down it, and a pink stain splashing over the blue. They’d been wounded, and that was blood.

  “I’m a sight hound,” said Kalia. “I only follow things that I can see.”

  “Not now, you don’t,” said Sammael.

  * * *

  He stepped into the bird blind and felt it, still swimming in the air. It had been here recently and now it was gone.

  “They came here,” he said. “And they took the Book of Storms.” Think, he said to himself. How to kill the unkillable? The boy was protected by storms. He seemed able to thwart every attempt on his life that Sammael could throw at him.

  And now the boy had discovered about Sammael’s coat.

  Then he had it. The boy had the stick—a simple taro, made only of tree and storm. But the Book of Storms was more than that. It was made of tree and storm and one other thing—it was made of Sammael himself. He had hammered out that taro, he had bound together those pages, and he had sewn them inside their black cover.

  All he needed was the book.

  “Find them,” he said to Kalia. “And fast, or I’ll get a dog who’s better at finding things.”

  He gave her scrawny backside a kick with his boot, and she fled from the bird blind, sniffing frantically to catch the scent of horse on the forest floor.

  * * *

  The cat licked her wounds for a while and then lay in a ray of sunlight, letting the yellow heat warm her body. She closed her eye and rested her cheek on the ground, but there was no way of shifting the memory of those icy fingers holding her like a cage. What had become of Danny? Would she ever see him return from school again, have him pause to tickle her on his way from garden gate to front door?

  Perhaps. Perhaps not. But this wasn’t an adventure for cats. She needed to sit down, spend three days grooming herself, and then begin to think about idly swatting a mouse with one of her white paws.

  I may be wild by nature, she thought, but being wild is much better inside my own territory.

  She got to her feet and began to run. If she’d been any other creature, she might have needed to stop and look at the landmarks around her every now and again, in order to be sure she was still going the right way. But in Mitz’s head a single sound kept her straight and true and running, through all the miles and miles that lay between her and her eventual destination.

  It was the sound of an armchair, and it called her home.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE SWALLOWS

  The old barn was all but derelict. A farmer had used it for storing hay the year before, but too much rain had soaked through the holes in the roof over the winter, and the hay had been ruined. It was still there, moldering away, waiting to be cleared if the farmer ever decided that it was worth his while mending the roof and then running the risk of storing another year’s crop under the ancient structure.

  The swallows didn’t care about the holes. The rafters were still sound; there were plenty of places to build their nests high up in the eaves. Any creature who could fly for thousands of miles, sleeping on the wing, wasn’t going to be put off by the threat of a few drops of rain every now and again.

  They saw the boys and horses coming from far away. All four creatures looked like lame old dogs, hobbling on for miles with sore feet and aching limbs. A couple of the swallows took a flight out to have a better look, plunging and whirling like leaves on the wind. They feared very little; few other creatures could ever catch up with them.

  * * *

  “There!”

  Danny looked up to see Tom’s finger pointing toward the sky. He tried to follow its direction, but Tom’s arm was moving too fast, sweeping in circles.

  “See it?”

  “See what?”

  “The swallow! There’s another! Whee … they’re coming to have a proper look at us.”

  Then Danny saw them. Tiny darts of feather wheeling around his head, flying in great circles. They looked as if they weighed nothing at all, or just enough to keep them steady in the lightest of breezes.

  He put his hand in his pocket and called out. “Hey! Hey! Stop!”

  Ahead of him, Tom laughed. “Oh, quit, Danny,” he said. “D’you really think you can make swallows stop flying?”

  The swallows swooped and chattered, racing as close to the boys’ faces as they dared. One grazed Danny’s eyebrow with its wing tip.

  He didn’t want to speak again. It was terrible when Tom mocked him. Please, he begged the birds silently. Please stop. Just show him.

  “Show who?” said a swallow.

  He couldn’t tell which swallow; they were both still spinning through the air too quickly for his eyes to follow. But the voice was definitely a swallow’s, and it had heard him. He hadn’t spoken out loud, though. Unless he was going mad.

  “Can you hear me when I think?” he said inside his head, to the swallows.

  One came full tilt toward him, flapped its wings rapidly, and came to perch on his shoulder. “Ha!” Danny said to Tom, and pointed at the swallow.

  Tom stared, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. “Oh, this is ridiculo
us,” he muttered. “My head’s spinning. It’s the shock … those dogs.…”

  “Not when you think, silly,” said the swallow. “But I can certainly hear you talk. Most birds wouldn’t believe that sort of thing if it slapped them round the beak, but we swallows—well, there are so many things in the skies, who are we to discount one more, however unlikely it seems?”

  Danny could only just see the tiny bird out of the farthest corner of his eye. It weighed nothing at all, and its claws clung to his sweater like burrs.

  “Have you ever sat on a person’s shoulder before?” he asked it, again without using his voice.

  “Not once,” said the swallow. “But you’re not an ordinary person, are you? You can’t be.”

  “Yeah, I am,” said Danny. “I’m about as ordinary as people get. Or I was, anyway. I don’t think I ever will be again, no matter what happens.”

  So it did work! He could talk without talking out loud, just like they did. If only he’d known that before, he could have said far more to Mitz and Shimny, without having to worry about anyone else overhearing.

  “Where are you going?” the swallow asked.

  “To find you, actually,” said Danny.

  “To find me? Why me?”

  “Well, all of you, really,” said Danny. “But just you, if you can help me. I need to call up a storm.”

  “Lawks!” said the swallow, losing its balance and falling halfway down Danny’s chest, wings spluttering against him. It regained its composure and shot off into the air.

  Danny watched it go. Had he offended it? No—it had gone to find the other swallow. They came back to him together and landed, one on his head, one on his shoulder. He couldn’t tell which was which.

  Tom took a pace toward him and then stopped dead. Suddenly, Danny didn’t dare look at him.

  “I’m Paras,” said the swallow on his shoulder. “And this is my sister, Siravina. Now tell her what you just said to me.”

  It felt very strange, talking to a creature that was sitting on top of your head.

  “Hi, Siravina,” said Danny. “I need to call up a storm. I’ve … sort of … been told that you might know where it went?”