The Hush

by Skye Melki-Wegner

For several long seconds there was nothing, not even the sound of breathing. Then he heard Sam release a long, slow breath. Chester opened his eyes.

  The Echo was gone.

  The shock rang in his ears and his wounded arm throbbed like hell from holding up the flute. ‘I’m all right,’ he managed. ‘It didn’t touch me.’

  ‘I know. If it’d touched you, you’d be a corpse by now.’ Sam said it so matter-of-factly that the words sent a prickle down the back of Chester’s neck. ‘Deadlier than rattlesnakes, those things.’

  ‘Why couldn’t it touch you?’

  Sam didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Long story.’

  Silence.

  ‘I gotta get back to steering.’ Sam turned towards the driver’s cabin. ‘I can stop the boat for ten minutes or so without too much damage, but if I don’t start it up again soon it’s gonna lose all its charge from the train.’

  Chester followed him. ‘Then what will happen?’

  ‘Then we’ll be stranded out here with an uncharged echoboat,’ Sam said. ‘Here’s a free bit of advice, Hays: if you’re anchoring an echoboat, do it on a railway line. Easiest way to recharge the engine with Music when you want to start it up again.’

  He wrenched a lever and the boat shuddered back to life around them. The cogs clanked, the metal thrummed, and they blasted like a cry into the dark.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  After dusk, the warning bell chimed.

  The Cavatina was passing through a line of empty fields and Susannah had left the wheel unattended for a minute – just long enough to grab a plate of dinner. The echoship’s kitchen was a comfortable room, lit by sorcery lamps and warmed by a crackling stove. Pale floral wallpaper decorated the walls and the scent of sweet syrup and hot corn griddlecakes wafted through the air.

  Susannah skewered a fork into a griddlecake and drizzled a hefty serve of syrup across the top. They had stolen the corn from a wealthy farmer in Bremen. The flour had come from their food pantry, which was regularly replenished with the proceeds of minor thieving jobs.

  ‘Mmm,’ Susannah said, as syrup burst across her tongue. ‘Nice job, Dot. You’re officially the queen of griddlecakes.’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t all my doing, Captain,’ Dot said brightly. ‘I have a theory that cookery pixies sneak under my fingernails and direct the nicest ingredients into the mixture.’

  Susannah snorted. Personally, she tended to put Dot’s behaviour down to an overactive imagination and leave it at that. Travis, however, stared at the tiny blonde girl as though she was a bow tie that he couldn’t quite figure out how to knot.

  ‘I do hate to break it to you, Dorothy,’ he said, ‘but there’s no such thing as cookery pixies.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Dot said. ‘They just appeared tonight, especially for me.’

  Travis just stared at her. As the newest member of the gang, he was still uncertain how to deal with Dot’s peculiarities. Finally he shrugged and settled for slicing off a petite segment of griddlecake with his knife and fork.

  That was when the bell chimed.

  Songshaper.

  Susannah almost choked. ‘Dammit!’

  ‘What is it, Captain?’

  ‘Proximity bell,’ Susannah said. ‘Someone’s picked up our trail …’

  Susannah and Dot hurried back into the driver’s cabin, the griddlecakes forgotten. Susannah nervously ran her fingers along the levers, down a row of buttons, and glanced upwards. The bell was stirring again. Now that the initial warning chime was over, its volume would fluctuate to indicate the distance of the danger. Right now, the bell was merely trembling – a faint little quiver of metal, barely enough to produce a chime. But something nudged at the edge of its range …

  ‘What do we do?’ Dot said, alarmed.

  ‘We go faster!’

  Susannah slid into the driver’s seat. She cranked up a lever and the echoship lurched forwards; Dot grabbed the wall as they shot onward with a new burst of speed. There was a distant crash and a shout of indignation from down the corridor. Clearly, Travis wasn’t thrilled by the lack of warning.

  The bell chimed again. Susannah swore under her breath. ‘How the hell did she catch up?’

  Dot shook her head, eyes wild. ‘I don’t know, Captain! Her boat must be a newer model; it’s a lot faster than ours.’

  Susannah cranked up the speed, changed gears, and shoved a handful of levers forwards.

  ‘We’ll have to hide from her sensors,’ Susannah said. ‘We’ve got a decent lead … if we can just find a place to anchor and let her pass by …’

  Travis raised an eyebrow as he entered the cabin. ‘I’m not sure whether you’ve noticed, Captain,’ he said, ‘but this is quite a large ship. It’s hardly a prime contender for the national hide-and-seek championship.’

  Susannah ignored him. Heart pounding, she checked the map. A cluster of trees and boulders lay ahead, marked clearly by illuminated symbols. Out of sheer luck, a shining line ran right through the middle. ‘There,’ she said. ‘A railway line, just up the slope.’

  ‘But Captain –’

  ‘We can’t outrun her.’ Susannah glared at Travis. ‘She’s too fast. Too nimble. But her sensors will only pick up active sorcery, so our best hope is to hide and hope she passes by. Got it?’

  Travis hesitated. ‘Very well, Captain.’

  Susannah eased the ship around in a gentle loop, avoiding the obstacles, and then carefully sailed uphill towards the railway line. The Cavatina hovered for a moment, like a roosting bird, before it slipped onto the tracks with a gentle bump.

  Susannah powered down the engine. The less Music their ship produced, the less likely they were to turn up on the Songshaper’s sensors. This option, however, carried risks of its own. They had an hour, perhaps, until the Cavatina would lose its Musical charge. If they lingered too long, they would have to wait until a train passed through in the real world and hijack its energy to restart the vessel.

  Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

  Susannah flicked a trio of switches. Lights flickered off and machinery fell silent until all that remained was the sorcery lamps. Although Susannah couldn’t hear their Music, she had memorised the tune to extinguish them. She brushed them with her fingers and hummed the required notes, leaving them to slowly dim. Soon she stood in a darkened cabin, with cooling globes of glass above her head.

  ‘If she finds us,’ Dot said, a little quieter than usual, ‘she won’t bother with handcuffs, will she?’

  Slowly, Susannah shook her head. They weren’t in a town or a city. There were no judicial processes here – no sheriffs or judges to decide their fate. The only law was the barrel of a gun. If the Songshaper caught them, they would die.

  In the dark cabin, all Susannah could see was the circle of light that surrounded her in the Hush: a bubble of faded grey, just enough to illuminate the others’ faces. She could see they were tense and strained, their eyes wide and their expressions haggard. It had been a long day, and it was about to get longer. All they could do now was wait.

  Somehow, Susannah had to distract them. She had to keep the danger off their minds, and keep the nerves out of their bellies …

  ‘Dot,’ she said. ‘Can you fetch my blackboard?’

  The blonde girl looked as pale as an Echo in the unnatural ebb of light. But she nodded and scampered back towards the kitchen, where Susannah kept a small blackboard and chalk at the end of the table. A moment later, she returned with the board under her arm.

  ‘Right.’ Susannah yanked the cover off the blackboard and balanced it on her knees, within her weak pool of Hush-light. ‘We need to talk about yesterday.’ Usually, she liked to perform a rundown after every job, to assess what their strengths were and the areas where they could improve.

  ‘Is this really the time, Captain?’ Travis said.

  Susannah glanced up at the proximity bells. They remained silent in the feeble light. The Songshaper hadn’t found them yet and no matter what, she had to keep the others cal
m. Right now, their greatest threat was panic.

  ‘No time like the present,’ she said, as lightly as she could manage.

  ‘But shouldn’t we wait until Sam’s back, Captain?’ Dot said.

  ‘Sam’s bringing an unlicensed Songshaper with him,’ Susannah said. ‘I don’t want to let a stranger in on the details of our plans until we know he’s trustworthy.’

  ‘Pardon my curiosity, Captain, but do we know anything about this Songshaper?’ Travis said. ‘We’re all rather young in this gang, you know. Personally, I’ve been finding the youthful angle rather refreshing; I hope we’re not to be joined by an old curmudgeon with a grudge against –’

  ‘Whoever this person is, he’s clumsy,’ Susannah said. ‘He let his unlicensed Song connection be picked up on a radar, and now Sam says he’s been arrested.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he’s probably young,’ Susannah said. ‘I can’t imagine anyone living long if they’re making mistakes like that.’

  ‘Perhaps it will be a beautiful lady,’ Dot said, in a daydreamy voice. ‘With eyes like peacock feathers, and hair the colour of sunlight, and coloured skirts that swish when she walks …’

  ‘Hope not,’ Susannah said. ‘We’ve got enough peacocks around here as it is.’

  Travis waved her remark away with a scowl. ‘I wouldn’t say no to a beautiful lady in this gang, either. Tell you what, Dorothy – I’ll fight you for her.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Dot said. ‘You could never take me in a fight.’

  ‘I’ll have you know,’ Travis said, ‘that I was Senior Boys’ Boxing Champion for three years running at my old –’

  ‘I’m sure you were,’ Susannah interrupted. ‘But Dot would build some kind of super peacock-wrangling Musical gadget from spare parts in the engine room, and you’d be on your champion arse in ten seconds flat.’

  ‘Five seconds,’ Dot said. ‘I’d just play an explosive waltz into the nearest sorcery lamp and light it above his head.’

  The others stared at her.

  ‘What?’ Dot gave an innocent smile. ‘All my sorcery lamps are explosive. You never know when you might need a bomb at short notice.’

  Susannah felt her jaw hanging slightly open. What other little Musical tricks had Dot hidden in her sorcery devices around the echoship? After a moment’s reflection, she decided she didn’t want to know.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t think –’

  The third bell stirred.

  Susannah froze. It was only a faint sound, the weakest tendril of a whisper, but a moment later it chimed again with a little more certainty. Dot and Travis stiffened beside her, their bodies tight and tense in the darkness. Then the bell sank back into silence and a trio of quiet breaths escaped their lips.

  ‘We should run for it,’ Travis said. ‘Captain, we should –’

  Susannah shook her head. ‘No,’ she said forcefully. ‘It’s too late now. We just have to keep calm and wait it out. So long as we don’t panic …’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Er …’ Susannah said eventually. ‘So we were talking about what went wrong yesterday, weren’t we? In Bremen?’

  The others looked at her, visibly torn between exasperation and gratitude. They knew full well what Susannah was up to; she wasn’t exactly being subtle. But even so, they seemed willing to play along. After all, what was the alternative? It was better than waiting in silence for death.

  ‘That’s right, Captain,’ Dot said. ‘And I know exactly what went wrong. A high-grade Songshaper showed up when we weren’t expecting her.’

  Susannah nodded and wrote Weser City Songshaper on the board. ‘She’s obviously on the trail of a fugitive,’ she said. ‘Hunting down that unlicensed Songshaper. Why else would she be lurking around with radar equipment in Bremen?’

  ‘It was supposed to be a simple job,’ Travis said, perking up a little. He leant over to peer at the board through a haze of greyish Hush-light. ‘I played my part perfectly, by the way. The mayor was utterly convinced of my credentials as a travelling aristocrat. By the end of the meeting, he was ready to offer me a permanent position as his –’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ Susannah said. ‘That’s one good thing, I suppose. We can add your acting skills to our list of what went right.’

  She drew a line down the board, dividing it into Successes and Failures, and wrote Travis’s acting in the first column.

  ‘You missed a word,’ Travis said, squinting at the board. ‘I believe you mean Travis’s excellent acting.’

  Susannah snorted. ‘Don’t push your luck.’

  ‘Travis’s spectacular acting?’ he suggested. ‘Or how about –’

  ‘I guess you didn’t have a chance to use my sorcery lamp, Captain,’ Dot cut in, looking a little anxious. ‘It works, though – I deliberately chose a quiet tune so the guards wouldn’t hear you.’

  Susannah shook her head. ‘Yeah, the Songshaper had gotten to you by then.’ But she added Dot’s lamp to the first column on the board.

  In fact, the entire plan had worked fine: except for the unexpected Songshaper, it had all been so simple, so easy. They had planned a dozen scams like it before and they had always gone off without a hitch. So few people knew about the existence of the Hush, the gang could slip in and out of their victims’ buildings like ghosts …

  The bell tinkled.

  Susannah took a tight breath and glanced up at the ceiling, half-afraid of what she might see. The bell was vibrating slightly, nudging back and forth in faint little quivers of alarm. Not close enough to produce a clear chime, but still too close for comfort, as though the Songshaper was prowling the dark, skirting at the edge of their proximity sensors …

  ‘She’s going to catch us,’ Dot said quietly. ‘Isn’t she?’

  ‘No.’ Susannah forced her gaze away from the bells, away from the vast black maw of the window. ‘So long as we don’t try to run for it we’ll be fine. If we can just hold our nerve and keep the engine switched off until she passes …’

  ‘She caught us in Bremen,’ Travis said. ‘And we weren’t even using an echoship.’

  ‘She must have sensed us on her radar,’ Susannah said. ‘If it’s sensitive enough to pick up tiny fluctuations in the Song, it probably picks up other random bits of nearby Music too.’ She frowned at Dot. ‘But I didn’t use your lamp …’

  Dot shook her head. ‘Even if you had, those radar globes only hunt for fresh pieces of Music. They have to tune out existing sorcery objects or else there’d be a false alarm whenever anyone used a lantern.’

  ‘I hate to say it, Dorothy,’ Travis said, ‘but you’re the only one capable of Songshaping in this gang. You must have done something to set off the radar.’ He waved a hand. ‘In a town like Bremen, I’d imagine that even a tiny speck of decent sorcery would seem suspicious.’

  Dot looked confused, as though struggling to remember what she’d done. Then she blanched. ‘Oh!’ She clapped a hand across her lips. ‘Oh! I didn’t think! Captain, I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone nearby had a radar!’

  ‘It’s all right, Dot,’ Susannah said, seizing this new opportunity for distraction. ‘Just tell us what you did.’

  Dot looked down at her fingers, twisting them together. ‘Well, I was keeping watch, like you said, but I’d seen whip marks on some of the servants. They looked so miserable, you see. They had bloodstains on their shirts! I thought the mayor should pay for being such a horrible person, so I …’ Dot twisted her fingers tighter. ‘… I hummed an allergy spell into his flower garden.’

  ‘You what?’

  Dot looked embarrassed. ‘Just a little personalised tune,’ she said. ‘It won’t affect anyone else, I swear. Just to make him sneeze when he goes for a stroll outside.’

  Susannah stared at her. Despite everything, she found herself fighting back a laugh. Of all the things to have given them away …

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dorothy,’ Travis said. ‘That’s not how you
seek revenge on a wealthy man. You should have made him allergic to his money, or cravats, or shoe polish, or –’

  ‘Wouldn’t do much good to make him allergic to his money,’ Susannah said, ‘seeing as how we pinched it.’

  Dot brightened. ‘How much did we end up with, Captain?’

  ‘Three sacks of silver, and a pouch of fancy jewellery,’ Susannah said. ‘We’ll pawn the jewels in the next big town we hit. I was thinking Linus, actually, since we’re meeting Sam there.’

  ‘A splendid idea,’ Travis said. ‘I like Linus. They have an excellent tailor there; I’ve never had finer trousers sewn than in Mr Beaumont’s establishment.’

  Susannah squinted at the blackboard, hunting for an excuse to extend the conversation. Right now, she knew, nothing was more dangerous than silence. Silence led to doubt, and doubt led to restlessness. If they could just hold their nerve a few minutes longer … ‘All right, gang,’ she said. ‘I think we learnt something from yesterday.’ She looked at Dot. ‘Dot, if we’re in a small town, don’t risk any Songshaping in the real world unless it’s crucial for the job. In a place like Bremen, it sticks out like a sore thumb.’

  Dot nodded. ‘Yes, Captain.’

  ‘Travis,’ Susannah said, ‘if a job goes wrong, don’t run off in a panic and assume it’s all over. If you’d kept the mayor distracted a little longer, we might have found it easier to get away.’

  Travis clapped a hand to his heart, as though he was deeply wounded by this remark. ‘Ah, the vicious pangs of criticism! My self-esteem shall wither and perish under the weight of such a blow.’

  Susannah raised an eyebrow. ‘Done?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so,’ Travis said, more cheerfully. ‘What about you, Captain?’

  ‘I should plan better for emergencies,’ Susannah said. ‘It was my fault we didn’t have a backup plan. As captain, I take full responsibility for the danger you were placed in yesterday. And for that, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Captain,’ Dot said. ‘It was –’

  Above them, something moved.

  Susannah looked upwards. It was the third bell again, quivering with the promise of danger. This time, however, it failed to chime. It didn’t even tinkle. It simply swayed a little to the side, like a half-drunken cowboy, before it collapsed back into stillness.