Gullstruck Island (16 page)

Jimboly had given the cove of the Hollow Beasts a mopping unlike any the coast had seen in centuries. Now she was wondering, with some trepidation, how to tell her employer that she had somehow missed a couple of important specks.

While she was pondering this, Ritterbit hopped through the ink and across the page to leave his own message.

‘Foot,’ the message ran. ‘Foot foot foot foot foot.’

Jimboly laughed a long laugh, her good spirits entirely recovered.

The governor’s hand trembled as he reached to pull the curtains back from his window. They were good thick curtains made for the chill, honest, snowbound climate of the Cavalcaste plains. But here on the Coast of the Lace their main use was as a shield against blame. If the governor did not see something past the curtains, he could not be blamed for it.

How hard it was to protect a tiny haven of order here! He looked sadly around at his carefully aligned paintings of distant hunts through pine forests, which he maintained with the fastidious reverence of one who had never ridden a horse or seen a pine forest.

Dealing with the village face to face had been the job of Milady Page, and he had hated her for it, for making him feel absurd and useless in
his town.
But now he had to step forward and try to fill the ragged hole she had left. He sighed and opened the door, letting in the world in a flood of flies, smells and voices. As soon as he did so he tasted volcano-breath on the breeze and knew that the town was no longer
his
town.

The governor held himself erect throughout the conversation with the crowd, but all the while he could feel the red earth of his world crumbling under his feet. There was nothing for it but to yield ground to their demands one step at a time, trying to dissemble his retreat from the approaching abyss.

He had done everything he could to avoid bloodshed. He had summoned the Lace’s Lady Lost to town hoping to test her, investigate her, perhaps arrest her, safely away from her village so that none of the other Lace could get involved. And his people had seemed happy with that. What had changed?

Confronted with the crowd and their bloody hoes, he told himself he had only one option. What had been done was brutal, horrible, but there was no undoing it. What was he to do – arrest the whole town as bloodthirsty murderers? If they turned on him too, farewell to all order! Better to side with them, ride the dragon and try to get a bit between its teeth.

And so he guided the townspeople’s halting, surly account of the doings in the cove.
When you say that you went to teach them a lesson
, he suggested,
I assume you mean that you followed the Lady Lost after she fled suspiciously, and tried to arrest her. But there was resistance, causing a regrettable fight?
A hesitation among the crowd, looks of suspicion and then slow nods.

But their rage had not burned itself out. It had found more fuel. A journal was placed in his hand, and eager, soot-grimed fingers turned the leaves to show him where two pages had been torn away. It had been done skilfully, the ripped fragments picked out, but the two corresponding pages were now loose and could be pulled out to show the frayed edge.

There was also a letter which came from a port further up the coast. As the governor read it his eyebrows rose and his cravat damped and started to chafe. Such a letter should have been sent straight to him, and he could not guess how it had fallen into the grasp of this hungry horde.

He turned the letter to and fro in his hands to buy time while the crowd hung like thunder. At last he made the decision they had forced on him, and tried to make it sound like his own.

When he shut out the world again, he sat down feeling older than his years. So Minchard Prox had survived. And his testimony showed the lie in many things the Hollow Beasts village had claimed.

Whatever dark fate had claimed Skein on the night of the storm, the Hollow Beasts had lied about it. Skein had feared for his life, and had said so in a letter to Sightlord Fain. Perhaps there really had been a conspiracy to kill all the Lost and raise the Lace once more to their long-lost position of power. Perhaps Skein had suspected something and come to the coast to investigate. That would make sense. He must have jotted his fears and discoveries down in his journal . . . forcing the Lace to tear out the incriminating pages after they had killed him.

And who had been the Lace’s ringleader in all this? The governor could not imagine a community without a single leader, and who better to run the great Lace conspiracy than their one Lady Lost?

Most of the dead Lost were not the governor’s problem, but two of them had died within his personal jurisdiction. He had to be seen to do something, and his people had told him what they wanted.
Law and order must be protected
, he told himself, glancing about his tidy, candlelit parlour for reassurance,
sometimes at the expense of law and order.
He had sent a message to Port Suddenwind asking for instructions, of course – and perhaps decades hence one of his successors would actually receive the reply to his letter. And when it did arrive it would probably quote some ancient Cavalcaste law, maybe decreeing that the guilty parties should have their yak herds confiscated, or that the whole town should wear beaver fur hats out of respect for the newly dead.

So he reached for a pen to write out a licence for the Ashwalker known as Brendril, granting him the right to pursue the Lady Lost known as Arilou and any companions assisting her on a charge of Conspiracy to Murder Milady Page and the Lost Inspector Raglan Skein.

Brendril was not sleeping when the message came. There was a bright moon, so he was half reclined in the hammock behind his shack, grinding a murderous smuggler’s knuckle bones into a fine creamy powder with a pestle and mortar.

Laid out carefully on the ground near the hammock was a folded pile of the smuggler’s clothes. Brendril had spent the day washing the bloodstains out of them and darning the knife slashes, for he was nothing if not conscientious. In a leather bag on top lay the dead man’s earring, his water-skin and the shining blob of one metal tooth that had melted in the pyre. All of these he intended to take to the governor the next day. Brendril’s payment was the ash, and he was determined that he would take nothing more of value, or even allow it to be lost by his negligence.

It was a hazy, smoky, sultry night and his mind was at peace, the rhythmic grinding of the pestle sounding like a cricket in his ear, a little smoke still seeping from the pyre. He no longer smelt the acrid stench from the yellow, foamy broth in the dyeing vats and the crumbs of indigo mulch drying on the palm-frond mats, or the sickening stink of molten fat. He no longer felt the bite of the ticks beneath the clothes he never removed. His eyes were almost closed, little crescent moons in a face of midnight blue.

They widened in an instant as a loud clatter wakened the jungle beyond the clearing. In several directions he heard scuffled retreats through the undergrowth. Most were almost certainly wild turkeys frightened from their grit-picking. The loudest, however, was probably a human animal whose courage had lasted long enough for them to ring the wooden summons bell, but no longer.

Sliding barefoot from his hammock, the Ashwalker slipped into the jungle. He noticed no chafe of his clothing, for in his mind he wore only spirits sewn one to another piecemeal – each garment’s dye containing the cremation ash of a dead criminal. He seemed to feel the way the bandanna around his head blessed his sight, the dribbles of indigo that streaked his forehead and eyelids teaching his eyes to see in the dark. He did not even notice the briars, since a set of patterns in the clouds had once told him that his kerchief would numb the pain of all thorns and stings.

The wooden bell hung from a tree, nothing but half a barrel with a shinbone for a clapper. Beside it the other half of the barrel waited for messages, pleas, gifts. Today a small scroll in a leather case awaited him. He read it carefully, gripping the very corners so as not to stain them with the indigo that painted every inch of his skin.

He had been waiting for this. A licence to hunt down those responsible for the deaths of Inspector Skein and Milady Page. The killers were thought to have fled into the cave network. At the bottom of the paper he read the name of his quarry, and experienced a shimmer of what in another person might have been called excitement.

A Lost. Who could guess what powers a Lost would give him if persuaded into indigo?

Brendril slipped back to his hut and dressed quickly for the hunt. According to the papers he had been sent, the Hollow Beasts on the beach had tried to lose their pursuers in the network of caves that riddled the hillside. This Lace Lost would try to do the same. But there were several entrances to the cave labyrinth, and the largest was close by.

Soon Brendril was picking his surefooted way through the nocturnal thicket, in the direction of the Sweetweather shaft.

As Hathin and Arilou neared the Sweetweather shaft the ground started to dip and the trees grew in height as if determined to disguise the treacherous drop. The main shaft was a great, steep, funnel-shaped descent some thirty feet deep. However, Hathin avoided this and hunted out a much smaller cave entrance behind a splay of giant ferns, known only to the Lace, and pulled Arilou into the earthy-smelling darkness after her. A barely controlled slither down a steep tunnel, a squeeze through a narrow crevice, and they were in the cavern of the teeth.

In the first instant Hathin saw that none of the village was there waiting for them. In the second instant she saw why, and her blood ran cold.

Everywhere about her, the great hanging teeth of the cavern had been smashed from their roots and shattered, and the pieces piled up with diabolical care to form a heap in the black pool which led to the Path of the Gongs. The entrance to the underwater tunnel was completely blocked.

‘No!’

Stealth forgotten, Hathin staggered to the pool and waded in, losing her footing and scraping herself on the shards of rock. Her shaking, icy fingers grappled one jagged stone piece after another and flung them out of the pool. Even though she knew that the villagers would always send someone to check that the Path was safe, she could not help imagining her family and the other villagers trapped in the musical darkness of the underwater passage . . .

‘Arilou! Please! You’ve got to help me, you’ve got to . . . please, just this once!’ Many of the rocks were too big for Hathin to lift alone, even with the strength of desperation. There had clearly been several people busy there, making sure that this end of the Path was blocked before the attack on the beach. ‘Arilou! I can’t do this by myself!’ She ducked her head beneath the water, and tried to shift a great, molar-shaped rock away from the hidden opening. As she tucked her arms around it, she felt something brush against her wrist.

She released the rock and grabbed towards the trailing touch. With a shock she found that she was gripping an icy hand. For a moment she thought it had deliberately slid into her grasp, but the hand was too cold and the wrist had no pulse. Hathin jerked convulsively away from the contact, and her fingers caught in the bracelet which was floating in a soft ring around the other’s wrist. Hathin’s eyes and nose and mouth filled with water and she burst to the surface, choking and streaming and staring at the shark’s tooth bracelet that her sudden motion had torn from the cold wrist.

There had been no time for the villagers to send a scout ahead up the Path of the Gongs. The attacking towners had known about the cave of the Scorpion’s Tail, and with the sound of pursuit behind them, the Lace had had no choice but to slip into icy darkness and trust to the mercy of the mountain. And so the foremost had drowned, grappling desperately with the rocky barrier, the others behind her unwittingly blocking her retreat, knowing only that she did not advance, and unable to retreat themselves as the air died in their lungs . . .

The bracelet belonged to Whish. The best diver was always sent first along the Path, and Whish was the second best. Eiven had not even reached the caves.

Hathin staggered out of the water, feeling new cuts and scrapes chilling on contact with the air. Arilou leaned back against the wall with the serenity of a blind seer, her head a little tipped back so that stray droplets from the roof could fall into her slack, beautiful mouth. And this, more than anything, was beyond bearing.

‘I should have let the Death Rattle take you!’ The caves’ many voices joined Hathin in a chorus. ‘I should have let Whish push you into the sea! Then none of this would have happened! All of this,
all
of this, happened because of
you
!’

There was a sharp, palm-sized shard of pure white stone in Hathin’s hand, and something savage seemed to have control of all her muscles. Arilou stirred her head a little, as if she had felt rather than seen a shadow fall upon her, and then her throat moved clumsily, and she continued her parched and pathetic attempts to catch in her mouth the meagre drips from the roof.

Hathin hurled away the shard of rock, and saw it shock apart against the opposite wall. Once the stone was out of her hand the rage abandoned her and left her shaking. Unsteadily she knelt, cupped water from the pool and brought it over to Arilou. She could not help it.

Arilou had barely taken a gulp when Hathin jerked into alertness, her ears catching a distant sound from back down the tunnel. A spit and spack, the crack and tumble of tiny rocks. Somebody was descending the spiral path down the main Sweetweather shaft.

Could it be another fugitive from the Hollow Beasts? No. Any Lace would have used the small, secret tunnel. Whoever was coming, it was not a friend.

Hathin hurriedly heaved her sister to her feet. If any of the village had survived, they would have taken the route further into the mountain. So Hathin turned toward the darkness of the deeper caverns with the weight of her sister on her shoulder. Hope refused to die, and beat in Hathin’s chest like a fist.