Gullstruck Island (23 page)

Dance nodded. ‘There’s no chance that his family survived?’

Hathin bit her lip. ‘I really don’t think so. His mother is dead – I am sure of that. And his younger brother – he was down on the beach . . . I don’t think anybody escaped the beach.’

‘Right. Right.’ Dance sighed again. As Dance turned Hathin found herself thinking of the slow rolling of a whale, muscular and momentous. Dance disappeared back through the creeper curtain, and for a while Hathin sat alone.

When at long last the curtain parted again, the man peering through seemed for a moment to be a stranger. Hathin had remembered Therrot as a taller, more muscular version of his brother Lohan, his laugh a little fiercer and louder, and with strange bulging tensions that moved in his cheeks when he was angry.

The young man before her had slender, wasted limbs, traced with a fine webwork of scars. His hair had grown long, and the little movements in his cheeks were now nervous and continual. He stared at her with something that resembled dread. Therrot had not come home, for there had been no Therrot left.

But his eyes looked like Lohan’s eyes, and Hathin felt that the whole of the village of the Hollow Beasts had risen up to reproach her for failing to save them.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all she could say. ‘I’m sorry . . .’

Therrot vanished in a mist of tears, and she heard the creepers rustle as he lurched quickly forward. Two arms surrounded her and lifted her from the ground, and Therrot was squeezing her so tightly she could hardly breathe.

‘Little sister,’ he said over and over. ‘Little sister. We’ll get them, we’ll get them, we’ll get all of them . . .’

‘Yes!’ Hathin held on to him as if she was drowning. ‘Yes, we will, we will . . .’

Ten minutes passed before they were capable of saying anything else. Then Therrot set Hathin down gently and led her back towards the vine curtain through which he had emerged. As she followed him she became aware of a grumbling buzz and dark beads of angry life that drew dowsing circles in the air. In among the great tangle of sticks, vines and daub were greyish protruberances like mottled urns.

‘Wasps’ nests,’ Therrot explained. ‘The towners won’t go near them. There are more on the branches below too, so they cover the sounds of our voices if we keep them low.’

‘Don’t they sting you?’

‘Of course they do.’ Therrot sounded surprised at the question.

Beyond the vine curtain was a round ‘room’ of sorts. The floor was a mix of dead vine, matting, packed straw and board. Around the edges of the room sat little lanterns on broad tin dishes. Hatchin felt Therrot’s hand settle protectively on her shoulder as they straightened to face the assembled gathering.

Dance reclined in a rocking chair of wine-red wood, a pipe between her teeth. Around her, eager, angular faces, the glitter of jewelled teeth, Lace voices weaving through one another with a sibilant urgency. The darkness smelt of the oil lanterns, the livid scent of the tree’s sap, rotting leather boots, fungus . . . but also something indescribably Lace, like a flavour in the air, something that Hathin had never noticed until she found it missing.

‘And here she is,’ Dance said. Hathin realized that she must have been relating Hathin’s story. ‘This woman has volunteered to mend a ragged great rip in the universe. Make space for her.’ A lean, long-toothed man with razor-edge cheekbones moved the machetes he was cleaning to make room for Hathin on the rug. A light blanket was wrapped around her shoulders, and a mug of something hot and sweet placed in her hands.

Therrot was whispering in Hathin’s ear, all the while gently squeezing her shoulder as if to anchor her.

‘That’s Marmar – he once killed a man with a pomegranate. That’s Louloss – she makes those.’ Therrot gestured at the walls, and Hathin glimpsed dozens of hanging faces, all plum-sized and carved from wood. ‘They’re likenesses of our enemies – we use them to track people down. And you’ve met Jaze.’ It was the young man with velvety black brows who had checked Hathin’s tattoo outside. ‘Jaze took on an entire gang of smugglers armed with nothing but a conch.’ Jaze grinned and held up his arms to show the outcome of the fight. The tattoos on his two forearms were mirror images, the butterfly completed, the universe satisfied.

Therrot ran through the names of the dozen or so men and women in the chamber, proudly listing their revenges like titles, and in turn the strangely scarred and painted faces lapsed into their Lace smiles, uneasily, as though their muscles had lost the habit. Hathin became aware of a warmth stealing over her. It was all new and alarming, but somehow it also felt like a homecoming.

Dance interrupted at last. ‘Sorry, Hathin, usually I would not have repeated your story to others until you were ready. But your tale involves the death of Raglan Skein . . . and that affects everyone in the Reckoning.’

‘Is it true?’ It was Marmar, the pomegranate assassin, a short man with a bulky, boxer-dog frame and a hook-shaped scar on his brow. ‘You saw his body?’

Hathin gave a flustered nod.

Marmar let out a huff of breath. ‘Even after we’d heard of all those other Lost deaths, I still hoped he’d survived somehow.’ He hissed through his teeth and brushed a wasp off his leg. ‘He always seemed to be prepared for everything.’

‘Nobody is prepared for everything,’ Dance rumbled quietly. ‘Not even Raglan.’

Hathin listened, bewildered. Surely a man such as Inspector Skein would be the revengers’ enemy of enemies? Surely the Reckoning must have lived in constant fear of being found out by the Lost?

Marmar turned back to Hathin. ‘What do you know about the way he died?’

Hathin flushed helplessly before his interrogative gaze. ‘It . . . It wasn’t us! I mean . . .’ Her sentence trailed away. She and Arilou were blameless, but there was still the possibility that someone else from the Hollow Beasts really had killed Skein. That imagined image of Eiven, stalking across the sand with an urchin’s spine . . .

‘No. We know that, Hathin.’ Dance’s rumbling baritone again. ‘Whatever the law thinks, we know you and yours had nothing to do with his murder.’ In the face of Dance’s tone of utter certainty, Hathin’s nightmare image of a murderous Eiven wavered and melted away, and she suddenly felt sick at the disloyalty of her own imagination. ‘Raglan’s death was part of something much larger, something that we do not really understand yet. But can you tell what killed him? Any cuts, bruises, anything odd?’

‘Nothing. Only . . . he was smiling a little.’

‘Just the same as the others,’ said Marmar. ‘Dance – that’s all of them gone. Every single one. The whole Lost Council, Skein and every other ally we had among the Lost. If any of them still had their name, they’d have contacted us by now. We’re alone, aren’t we? What happens when the governors find someone new to take over the job of hunting down outlaws like us? Whoever they are, they won’t be covering our tracks for us the way the Lost Council did. What the hell do we do now?’

‘You . . . ?’ Daunted as she was, Hathin could not stay silent. ‘You mean the Lost Council
knew
where the Reckoning was? They . . . ? They weren’t hunting you? They were
hiding
you from the law?’

‘Yes, Hathin.’ Dance eased her rocking chair backwards, dry vines crackling beneath the runners. ‘Understand this: nothing is the way most people imagine.

‘To begin with, the great alliance between the Lost and the governors has always been a lie. The two worked hand in hand, but each had their spare hand resting on their dagger hilt. The Lost have always had enemies, powerful enemies – governors who do not like sharing their power with people they cannot control; old Cavalcaste families who despise the Lost for coming from tribal bloodlines.’

Hathin thought of the Sweetweather governor’s house and Milady Page’s bungalow glowering at each other across the market square.

‘The Lost have always needed friends,’ continued Dance, ‘and at last the Council found us. Or rather . . . one of them found me.

‘There was once a man of the Bitter Fruit who loved arguments. He argued with his neighbours, his family and finally the local governor. So when a young girl in his town went missing, the governor blamed the Bitter Fruit man and hired an Ashwalker to stalk him, and nobody else spoke up for the accused. Nobody but his wife, and no one listened to her. He fled to the hills, but the Ashwalker found him, killed him, took his ash and moved on.’ Dance ignored a wasp as it pendulum-swung before her face for a few seconds and then dizzied its way upwards.

‘What nobody in the town knew was that although his widow did not look it, she was half-Lace and had been brought up in a Lace cockling village. She took the tattoo, learned the use of sword and sling, and set off to trace the Ashwalker. She had searched for a year in vain when a Lost Council investigator called Raglan Skein approached her and gave her the location of the Ashwalker.’

Dance took another drag from her pipe, and smiled a wide, smoky, mirthless smile.

‘Most Lost don’t like us,’ she said, ‘but they like the Ashwalkers a lot less. An Ashwalker doesn’t care about justice, only about getting the ash. And it’s well known that every Ashwalker secretly drools at the idea of getting the ash of a Lost. They’re perfect killers for the men of power who can put a licence in their pockets – you don’t have to pay them, or feed them, or give them reasons. They never stop hunting unless you kill them, and nobody’s willing to go up against them – except us.

‘Men of power hate us because they cannot control us. We are driven by our wrongs, not their orders. And nobody is above
our
law. Not even . . .’ she smiled slightly as if at a private thought or memory, ‘not even a governor.’

‘Did you . . . ? Did you find the Ashwalker?’ asked Hathin timidly. ‘The one who killed your husband?’

‘Yes,’ Dance said. ‘The hard bit was luring him on to the wooden bridge I had prepared. As I hoped, he had no magic for detecting sawn-through planks, or powers to prevent him falling into rivers. He scrambled out again, of course, but when the dye ran so did he. It was easy enough to follow the trail of blue puddles up the hillside –’ she reached out to tap the ash from her pipe into a metal vase – ‘and when I caught up with him the fight itself didn’t take long.

‘Raglan and I remained friends afterwards. The alliance between the Reckoning and the Lost community was as much his idea as mine. Skein said that the Lost could help point us towards guilty parties, but in exchange we had to promise to keep them informed of our doings and take every care to harm none but our quarry, to avoid burning up everything in our paths, like lava flows. I agreed.

‘And so for fifteen years the Lost have lied to the governors to protect us. We have been their secret hand in the world, and in return they have been our shield, our eyes and our ears. And now . . . they are all dead.’

Hathin could only stare at Dance as the world turned itself neatly upside down.

‘We can see only a little way into the murk of their murders, but those clues we do have are thanks to Raglan Skein. A few months ago, he told me that the Lost Council had found out something dangerous and important. But he said he would not give me details until he was sure. He said he was afraid I would be . . . upset.’

‘Upset’ seemed a funny word to connect with Dance. Hathin could not imagine her fainting or bursting into tears. But then again, Hathin suspected that that was not quite what Skein had meant.

‘The Lost Council realized that their discoveries had put them in danger, so they invented an “inspection of Lost children” and used it as an excuse to send their investigators away to the furthest corners of the island, where enemies wouldn’t find them easily. But Raglan told me that he was travelling to the Coast of the Lace so that he could keep on investigating at the same time.’

Hathin remembered the flurry of panic into which Inspector Skein’s visit had thrown the Hollow Beasts. And all the while Skein had just been going through the motions, not giving two whistles whether the Lady Arilou passed or failed her test.

‘Think back, little sister.’ Therrot had settled next to her. ‘Can you remember anything that might help us find out what Inspector Skein was investigating? Dance tells us that you said he was waiting for some sort of message.’

Hathin racked her fuzzy, exhausted brain.

‘Yes – he said so, just before he died. That’s why he had to send his mind away to look for it. And that letter of his the governor found said that he would be checking the Smattermast tidings hut every two hours for a message from Sight-lord Fain.’ Hesitantly she recited the wording of Skein’s letter as accurately as she could. As she did so, she realized that the mysterious ‘D’ mentioned in the letter had to be Dance.

After she had finished there was silence.

‘This is bad,’ said Jaze. Several of the Reckoning nodded their assent. ‘No wonder those townspeople went into a frenzy – that letter makes it sound like Skein was investigating
the Lace.
If that idea takes hold . . .’

‘I . . .’ Hathin looked from face to face. ‘I think it already has – in Sweetweather, anyway. Jimboly . . . well, she made sure of that . . .’

There was a cold, dark silence, and Hathin sensed that a typical Lace conversation-without-words was taking place. But for once she could not hear the unspoken, and it made her feel like a little child again.

‘I don’t . . . What will happen? What will it mean?’

‘Witch-hunt,’ rumbled Dance. ‘It won’t stop with your village, Hathin. They won’t be able to back down; they’ll have to take another step forward instead. Next thing you know, every governor on the island will be looking for the murderers of the Lost among the ranks of the Lace.’

‘This letter.’ Jaze frowned. ‘You say the governor has it?’

‘If the governors’ men are pawing through Skein’s papers,’ growled Marmar, ‘then we’re not safe here. Skein knew so much about us – what if he’s mentioned us in a journal or a letter?’

‘Raglan was always careful.’ Dance compressed her lips around her pipe stem. ‘He would never have set down anything about us in writing.’

Hathin suddenly remembered Eiven flicking through the pages of the book from Skein’s travel pack.