Gullstruck Island (44 page)

Then Hathin’s breathless, horrified helplessness was extinguished by a single thought.

Arilou
. Whish must surely be somewhere in this house, and so was Arilou.

She scrambled past the two thrashing revengers and in through the door, which promptly blew shut behind her, unsettling her and cutting out the daylight. She blinked the sudden darkness into meaning and found that Arilou was nowhere to be seen . . . and that the room around her was at the bottom of the sea.

Tiny windows with blue-tinted diamond panes gave the whole room a dusky ocean glow. Along the wall-shelves glowed elaborate pink-and-gold conches. Before her lurked a great turtle, its shell a gleaming mosaic. Above her floated shoals of iridescent angelfish and pouting trumpet fish, all hanging motionless as if sheltering from a strong current.

For a dazed moment Hathin could only wonder what magic ruled this place. Then she saw the threads suspending the shoals, the wood-grain in the turtle’s shell. More models, more shrine offerings.

Her chest was tight as her trembling hands worked her knife free from its hidden sheath. No more time to prepare. No more time left to become the killer everybody needed her to be. She had promised to take the traitor’s name herself, and the traitor was here. And so, somewhere, was Arilou.

Hathin advanced cautiously through the crowded workshop. Shadowy benches, anvils . . . lean, angry Whish might be skulking behind any one of them, perhaps with her hand over Arilou’s mouth.

There was a faint sound from the other side of the room, a shuffle like that of wicker shoes against stone. Hathin snatched up a murderously realistic swordfish with her free hand and spun to face the noise.

There was a great tree of creamy coral near the opposite wall. A shadow-patterned face was peering through its lattice, straight at Hathin. As she recognized it, suddenly she felt she was back in the cove of the Hollow Beasts.

She could hear the rasp of the waves. Coming in with a
whish
, and going out with a . . .

Larsh.

Poor Arilou had tried. She had opened her unpractised mouth and made a sound like waves. Therrot had heard what he wanted to hear, Hathin had heard what she dreaded to believe, and both had thought it the same name. But it was Larsh, not Whish, who now skulked in his cave of coral like a scorpionfish and watched Hathin with unblinking, unfriendly eyes.

There was a pause, and then the traitor stepped out from behind his coral screen. He was every bit the distinguished tradesman now, in his dark blue waistcoat, his poor pink-lidded eyes hidden behind wire-frame spectacles, a novice moustache waxed to curling points. Even the jewels seemed to have been removed from his teeth. But for all that, it was still Larsh the fishmaker, with whom she had shared secrets on the night of the mist.

A memory flashed across her mind. Larsh standing on the beach alone, freeing a pigeon from its cage. Not out of pity or kindness. No. Those birds must have carried his secret reports to the men who would mastermind the destruction of everyone he knew.

Larsh, with a look of recognition dawning in his eyes. Boyish disguise or no, he knew her now.

‘Where’s Arilou?’ Hathin’s voice was louder than she expected, and shook as if tugged by a fiddle bow.

Larsh flinched as she opened her mouth. Then as the echoes died he seemed to relax. Perhaps he had been expecting her to call for help. Perhaps she was shrinking before his eyes into a small girl with a patch of troubled water on her forehead, a girl who had stumbled into his workshop alone.

‘Please put that down,’ he said calmly, nodding towards the fish.

‘Where’s Arilou?’

‘I never thought I would hear
you
shouting. It doesn’t suit you. It makes you ugly.’

Grief was ugly. Rage was ugly. Fear was ugly.

‘
You
made me ugly, Uncle Larsh.’

‘Oh, I never had any quarrel with
you
, Doctor Hathin.’ He gave a short but weary sigh. ‘If things were different, I would be very glad to see you alive.’

Beyond the walls, a sound like the fizz of a wavelet, rapidly swelling to a rumble. Outside, sky had declared war on earth and flung down a million spears of rain. The noise filled Hathin’s brain so that she could not even hear the words in her own mouth.

‘What?’ Larsh’s brows twitched. ‘What did you say?’

Shakily, to strengthen herself, Hathin was whispering the names of the Hollow Beasts: Mother Govrie, Eiven, Lohan, poor maligned Whish, each a little louder than the last, until Larsh blanched under his greyish tan.

‘What makes those names so sacred? Why shouldn’t I sacrifice them? They sacrificed
me
. They sacrificed
you
. They took the best years of our lives and gave us nothing in return, not even recognition. Look around you – I can create fish-eyes from mother-of-pearl that will swivel to follow you. I can paint silk so like a moon wrasse’s scales that the gulls are fooled. I have always been the best craftsman on the coast – perhaps the best on Gullstruck – but I had to pretend to be a failed fisherman to protect the secret of the farsight fish. I wore the lustre off my eyes working in darkened caves, when I should have been the king of master craftsmen.

‘Everything you see about you I fashioned in secret, and had to hide. They are all I have to show for forty lost years. I am an old man, Hathin, and my life has been stolen from me. And then one day somebody gave me a chance to take back just a little of what my life should have been. All I needed to do was betray the village that had betrayed me.’

‘I understand.’ Hathin had found her voice again. ‘I understand it all now.
We died for fish
. Not even real fish that somebody needed because they were starving. Wooden fish. Shrimps made of clay.’ She stared down at the silvery lacquer of the swordfish in her hands. ‘So who died for this one? Eiven?’

The swordfish’s fragile blade splintered as she swung it against the heavy workbench. Larsh gave the shriek of a man that had seen his own child gutted.

‘And who was this? My mother?’ A cream-and-mauve conch smashed against the wall. ‘What about this one? Lohan?’ A delicate squirrel fish shattered into red-and-white shards. ‘And where’s Whish? This one?’ A high-swung stool knocked a tiny turtle from its string. ‘Father Rackan?’ Tinkle, skitter. ‘And where am
I
, Uncle Larsh? What was
I
worth? A prawn? A limpet shell?’

‘
Stop it!
’ All the colour had leeched from Larsh’s face, and he had snatched up a metal-headed mallet. Hathin knew that he meant murder, but somehow all her fear had abandoned her.

‘You’ll never live to enjoy it! You’re no use to them any more and you know too much – they’ll silence you, even after everything you’ve done for them!’

Larsh ran at Hathin, but she ducked the swing of his hammer and darted behind a table. She grabbed a huge lobster carved from ivory and blushed with paint. It lolled over her arm with a domino-clatter of intricately carved joints.

‘Get back! Not another step, or I’ll . . .’ She lifted the lobster as if to smash it, and Larsh halted. She had years of his life in her hands.

‘Now –
where is Arilou?
’

‘I have no idea,’ said Larsh with a new caution and meekness. ‘Why do you think that she’s here? If you’ll just be calm and . . .’ He was keeping his eyes rigidly on Hathin’s face. Rather too rigidly.

Too late Hathin heard the scrape of a sandy heel on the floor behind her. Two long, strong brown arms were flung around her, pinning her own arms to her sides.

‘Careful! Careful of the . . .’ Larsh’s face was frozen into a grinning wince, his eyes fixed on the lobster.

‘Hit her with your hammer, you dolt!’ Jimboly’s voice was hoarse but unmistakable. ‘She won’t be such a wriggly little fish with her head knocked in.’

Hathin’s knife was still in her hand. She aimed a slash at Jimboly’s elbow, and the older woman squawked and loosened her grip. Hathin turned about, just in time to be grabbed by the collar and pushed down backwards on to a workbench. Reflexively she lashed out with her knife towards Jimboly again, and felt a brief resistance, but only brief. She had missed. Or had she?

There was a long, desolate scream. The dentist’s hands were no longer pinning her down.

‘Catch him! Catch him!’

Trailing his severed leash, Ritterbit was flickering about the room, occasionally spreading a taunting tail. Hathin’s wild knife had cut through his rein.

‘Close all the doors, the windows!’ Jimboly croaked.

Hathin seized her moment and sprinted for the back door of the workshop, ducking a swing from Larsh’s hammer.

Arilou. Where are you?

Hathin found herself in a Doorsy little parlour. No Arilou behind the dresser. Still clutching the lobster, Hathin sprinted to the next room, a study with a woven grass sleeping mat spread on the floor. No Arilou in the oaken chest.

‘You search the hayloft; I’ll go through the workroom again!’ Jimboly’s voice, urgent but distant.

Up some stairs, Hathin found a bedroom with its own balcony. No Arilou in the garderobe. No Arilou in the four-poster bed, which smelt dusty with disuse. No Arilou under it.

The door suddenly swung wide, and Hathin scrambled up off her hands and knees.

‘Look what I’ve found.’ Jimboly’s smile was a multicoloured parade. ‘Down in the workroom. Hiding inside a giant clam. Does that make her a pearl?’ One of her arms was curled around Arilou, almost protectively, but her other hand held a sharp-looking saw to Arilou’s throat. Arilou’s eyes were misty with tears, not distance, and her mouth made soft panicky shapes.

Hathin raised the lobster.

‘I’ll . . . I’ll smash it . . .’ Her voice weakened as she spoke. Her angry strength had burned itself out. She felt herself pale and become paper-frail before Jimboly’s grin. Jimboly was tidal wave, vulture beak, wet-weather fever. There was no pity in her. There was no stopping her.

‘Good,’ said Jimboly. ‘Smash it. Smash everything in this shop. Smash everything and everyone in this whole town. I’ll stop you when I start caring.’

‘You should start caring right now.’

Both Jimboly and Hathin lost their eye-lock and looked towards the voice. Larsh was standing in the doorway, a string in his hand. At the other end of the string fluttered Ritterbit. Jimboly reached eagerly for the leash, but Larsh stayed back, watching her with mute, wary enmity.

For a long moment all three stared at each other, Hathin still poised to shatter the lobster, Jimboly with her knife to Arilou’s throat, Larsh with the flickerbird’s leash in his fist.

‘Now this is just getting silly,’ Jimboly said at last.

31

A Lost Lost

‘What’s got into you?’ hissed Jimboly in Lace. Hathin watched the lines in Larsh’s face deepen. Clearly the animosity she had always sensed between Larsh and Jimboly had not simply been an act to hide the fact that they were secretly working together. No, they genuinely despised each other.

‘A little cloud of dust just told me that there was a plan to silence me,’ said Larsh.

Hathin felt the hatred of Jimboly’s dark glance slide over her skin like the flat of a blade.

‘Friend of yours, was it, this little cloud of dust?’ snapped Jimboly. ‘Somebody you trust? Somebody who wishes you well?’ But her voice was shaking. Her eyes were on Ritterbit, and her face twitched each time he fluttered, as if she could feel an invisible thread tug-tug-tugging, pulling it loose one row of stitches at a time.

‘And who’s Jimboly then?’ Hathin echoed her enemy on impulse. ‘Somebody you trust? Somebody who wishes you well?’

‘She and her friends want you dead, fish-wizard. I’m the only thing keeping you alive.’

‘Wrong.’ Hathin could not prevent her eye straying to Arilou, whose arms were stiff with panic. ‘You’ve served your paymasters’ purpose. Now you’re just a danger to them. We’re the ones that need you alive. It’s your masters we’re after, and you can help us find them.’

‘You’d hardly think two minutes ago she was smashing your damselfish, would you?’ Yes, it was undeniable – Jimboly’s words had lost some of their confidence, some of their sly, serpentine power. ‘Listen – if that brat leaves this house, she’ll bring the whole Reckoning down on us. If not, then we have Arilou and her little nursemaid. The reward’s ours. All you have to do is keep your head.’

‘The Reckoning’s already coming,’ said Hathin, praying it was true. ‘But they’ll do what I say.’ Very carefully she pulled back her arm binding. Both Larsh and Jimboly stared in astonishment at her tattoo. ‘It’s
my
quest. If I say you live, nobody else can say otherwise. You’ll be safe. All you have to do is keep Jimboly’s bird away from her – and give it to me.’

‘Larsh?’ Jimboly’s voice held a warning as Larsh advanced into the room. He hesitated, then took a rapid step towards Hathin, slipped Ritterbit’s leash into her hand, scooped the lobster from her willing arms and placed himself behind her.

‘Now . . .’ Hathin stopped to swallow, a little apprehensive at having an enemy of Larsh’s size behind her. ‘Now
we
swap, Jimboly.’