Gullstruck Island (47 page)

Overnight, the rain-pitted mud of the track seemed to have cooked into lizard ridges, and the irrigation channels were all dry. It was strange to walk the Obsidian Trail against the flow of heat-dazed families staggering past with their buckets of black glass. Roadblocks melted before their party’s liveries and muskets, questions evaporated before the petulant authority of the Superior. Granted, at the roadblocks nearest to Jealousy some consternation was caused by the appearance of a Superior who showed no signs of being dead. As the convoy travelled further from Jealousy, however, the guards they met seemed less startled by this. Clearly news of his ‘death’ had not reached everywhere.

Afternoon came, but the heat and oppression of the air remained relentless, and the sky unclouded. For the first time in weeks, the monsoon rain missed its daily appointment.

All the while, the Reckoning kept an eye out for traces of the bounty hunters that had taken Arilou. Near evening they found the remains of a campsite. On a slab of black stone, Hathin found the white imprint of a long-palmed hand. Instinctively she recognized its shape, and saw a meaning in the way it had been laid so carefully, so cleanly, against the rock.

‘It’s Arilou!’ Hathin felt a pang, amid her excitement and pride. ‘Look – she must have used bonfire ash. She left it for me. She knows – she can see me coming for her.’

That night, in spite of her weariness, Hathin sat up for many hours, close to the campfire. Arilou’s mind would come looking for Hathin, she was sure, and be drawn to the light. Over and over Hathin performed the same mime, while staring upwards towards the stars. She pointed to her sleeping companions one after the other, counting them, and then held up a stick and made the same number of notches with her fingernail. When at last she slept, a pile of such tiny sticks pillowed her head, and etched grooves into her cheek.

The second day was hotter than the first. The air trembled and the shadows blackened, and now the invisible denizens of the world of mysteries seemed almost as real as the palpable.

And was Jimboly out there too, scampering alongside the road with the half-seen imps of Hathin’s imagination? No, surely not – hopefully she would not know that Hathin and Ritterbit had left the town with the convoy; Hathin had changed her disguise for exactly this reason. Jimboly would be lurking in Jealousy, watching the palace, fidgeting with the uneasy sense that loop after loop of her soul’s cloth was pulling away from her.

Sometimes Hathin almost thought she saw the fine scarlet thread of Jimboly’s soul stretching from Ritterbit’s cage. At other times she imagined a thicker, duller purple strand tethered to her own heart and pulling her down the road. At the other end was Arilou. She knew now that however angry, frightened, tired or despairing she became, the tug of that thread would always bite through the numbness, pull her across plains and over mountains and through rivers.

Could souls become entangled? Could she have somehow snagged a soul thread from a man called Minchard Prox, a woman called Dance, a lost brother called Therrot? It was as if they were all caught up in a great web and could feel each other’s motions as tremors through their own spirits. Fate was starting to pull the threads taut, drawing them all towards one another.

That evening the revengers discovered their quarries’ next camp. By the bonfire lay a single green stem, clumsily scored with seven thumbnail creases. Arilou had marked it as Hathin had shown her. Arilou had seven guards.

The Reckoning made camp, the sun went down, and for hours Hathin had a new dance. She would pluck rough seed heads from their stems and then advance, taking care to drop them so that each head pointed in the direction she was walking. She might have gone through the same motions all night if Jaze had not intervened.

‘Get some sleep, or you’ll be no good to your sister when you find her.’

Just after sunrise on the third day the cloud bank that had been sliding towards them split and they could see the barbed and blackened tip of Spearhead. It appeared to rip upwards like a claw through gauze. Before now only Dance had filled Hathin with the same awe, the same sense of something momentous and unforgiving.

At first the jungle was a distant smear of murky green, but by mid-afternoon the road had curved close enough to its tangle for the travellers to make out plaited vines, orchids fading like wrinkled silk, and occasionally a monkey flinging itself so fast from bough to bough that it seemed to fly through the green. The jungle could easily have offered cover for a dozen spies or attackers, but it was not this that kept every hackle raised, rather the continuing sense of blood-level strangeness.

Once Hathin thought she saw a shadowy figure waiting for them by the road ahead, a creature with a bird-like head and long black fingers. But half a mile became a quarter of a mile, and as she drew closer the shape pulled itself apart like a cloud. Its slender body became a carved black tethering post, its fingers and the plumes on the back of its head became wavering fern fronds, its beak two leaves rubbing tips. And yet as she passed it she felt her skin tingle as if the Gripping Bird really was standing right there in the light of the sun, too bold to be seen, and watching her pass with eyes of sapphire blue.

Miles passed without conversation. No Lace could help twitching a glance about them every couple of seconds, as if their wits were flea-bitten.

‘What is it? What? What is wrong with you all?’ asked the Superior at one point, his voice squeaky with tension. His face was flushed and queasy from the jolting of his little carriage.

To do Jaze justice, he really tried to explain what every Lace was feeling, although there were hardly words to describe it, even in their own language.

‘This sun is not our sun. This sky is not our sky. Behind all this gold and blue and green there is the jet blackness of the deepest caves. We cannot see the ancient things that walk alongside us . . . but we can feel them licking our faces.’

The Superior did not ask for another explanation.

The roadblocks were now more frequent and better organized. Each time they halted, Hathin kept her mouth bitten into a narrow line. It was becoming easier to suppress her smile. Now the questions were more searching, and there were precarious moments when someone looked as if they might search the ‘prisoners’. Hathin could see the Superior’s own guards swallowing and exchanging looks, clearly unsure how they had found themselves in this situation. Although the guards did not know about the plan to rescue the infamous Lady Arilou, they were quite aware that their prisoners were not real prisoners, and that for some reason they were playing a part in a strange charade.

The Superior’s presence saved them. Soldiers who might have caused problems stood cowed by the ancestral lace of his sleeves, the dusty embroidery of his silk travelling cap, the mildewed campaign tent bundled on to the backs of the pack-birds. Even the fact he was so tiny and crabbed seemed to speak in his favour. The pressure of his inheritance had squashed, like a blob of warm, pink wax beneath the cold weight of an ancient signet ring.

Just after sunset they found the remains of the bounty hunters’ camp, but this time there were signs that it had merged with another, larger camp, spreading across the crushed grass like a double-yolked egg. Hathin swallowed drily and stooped to pick up a green stick. She tried to count the thumbnail creases that striped it, but they were too densely packed and her eyes blurred.

Jaze knelt and prodded at a stripped stem with only the seed head left untouched. The seed head did not point along the well-trodden track, but along a narrower path.

‘It looks as if they took her straight to the Safe Farm, not to Mistleman’s Blunder. This is last night’s camp – she’ll be there by now.’ Jaze looked up at Hathin, and the evening light shifted in his eyes in a way that resembled sympathy. ‘It might buy your sister a little time. If Minchard Prox is in Mistleman’s Blunder, perhaps nobody at the Farm will work out who she is . . .’

Hathin could suddenly feel every ache of her journey, every blister from her new boots, every lost hour of sleep. She staggered over to a roll of cloth that had been unloaded from the Superior’s carriage, sat heavily upon it and dropped her face into her hands.

She did not raise her face again until bonfire smoke stung her eyes. She looked about her, and found that there were only a handful of Lace still sitting up around the fire. The Superior had retired to his tent, his guards to the perimeter of the camp. Jeljech had apparently fallen asleep against Therrot’s shoulder, her face locked in a frown, one of his arms still imprisoned by hers.

‘That’s right,’ Therrot said gently as Hathin came closer. ‘You’ve got to eat. Come and join us . . . Hathin, what are you doing?’

Tears streaming down her face, Hathin was scooping up the loose earth, making a mound.

‘She’s watching me, she’ll be scared, she’ll want to know what to do, what I’m going to do, what’s going to happen . . .’ Hands trembling, she was fashioning a little mountain, just as she had when she was helping Arilou find herself. She gave her little volcano a crater, with a kinked lip and a barb like a spear’s head.

She stood up and spent a few seconds staring at it. Spearhead in miniature, the mountain that had carried off Arilou. She recovered her breath, and then kicked her mountain so hard that she staggered and fell over sideways. She scrambled to her feet again, stamped in the lip of the crater, started avalanches with her heel, ground crags to rubble. She kept kicking until the mountain scattered into the undergrowth.

Arilou, I am coming for you. The mountains themselves will not stop me.

She walked back, shaky and muddy, and dropped into her previous seat. Although she had said nothing, she sensed that the other Lace had guessed the meaning of her mime as clearly as though she had shouted her thoughts.

She looked defiant, and braced herself for the tidal wave of her friends’ common sense. The wave did not strike.

‘It’s time,’ said Dance. Her words were met with a silence that was agreement, and Hathin realized that a conversation had been hanging in the air, waiting to be had. All the Lace had known. Hathin alone had been too distracted to notice it.

‘I know,’ Jaze said carefully. ‘We’ll never get this close to the Farm again – not so many of us, not so well armed and provisioned.’

‘Let us look at the map.’ Dance reached into her pack and pulled out a rather familiar-looking picture of Spearhead seen from above. Evidently she had responded to Hathin and Jaze’s information by raiding Bridle’s shop. Hathin glimpsed a Bridle map of Mother Tooth in the backpack as well, complete with the telltale rectangles of the mine huts and compounds. Hathin wondered whether Dance was planning a rescue raid there as well.

‘How many are we thinking?’ whispered Louloss, casting a glance towards the barbed black hulk that Spearhead had become. ‘Arilou, of course – but how many more?’

‘Who deserves to stay up there?’ asked Therrot, folding his arms. Everyone else stared into the campfire and nodded slowly.

‘They are not just prisoners of Minchard Prox,’ murmured Dance. ‘The Lord –’ she nodded towards Spearhead – ‘won’t like it. He dislikes intruders, but now they’re there he’ll see them as his to sacrifice or punish.’ Her tone was antagonistic but with a hint of affection, as if the volcano was a cantankerous uncle.

‘There
is
a way of getting up the mountain without the Lord noticing us,’ answered Therrot. ‘In fact – Hathin’s sitting on it.’

Hathin jerked herself forward on to her knees and peered over her shoulder at the long sausage of rolled cloth she had been sitting upon. For the first time she noticed its faint smell of smoky damp. She snatched back a corner of the sacking cover and found herself staring at an inky cloth that left shadowy blue stains on her fingertips.

She stared around her, and found her flabbergasted look mirrored in every face but two. From under Dance’s bandages, a single dark eye was staring at Therrot, a little orb of storm.

Therrot looked rueful and gave the tiniest of shrugs. ‘The Sours insisted – they thought we might need it to get their Lost back.’

Faces locked in a wince, half a dozen Lace turned to peer towards the Superior’s distant tent. Everybody’s mind was busy with the same image: the Superior riding along in his little carriage, unaware that his esteemed ancestors were bouncing above him in a bundle of blue cloth.

‘It’s just a
flag
, all right?’ hissed Therrot. ‘He can’t tell how it was made by looking at it, can he?’

‘Therrot,’ said Jaze, ‘when you pass through the Cave of Caves you might find a great number of angry people waiting to talk to you about this.’

‘All right.’ Dance pulled off her bandages and pensively gave her dreadlocks freedom. ‘We use the protection of the flag. But this is a task for those who have finished their quests, and those alone. The others have work still to do before they pass through the Caves. They will remain with the Superior for now.’

A slow nod from Jaze, Therrot, Louloss, Marmar. Nothing more need be said to make it clear that those who climbed the mountain were probably not coming back.

‘What about me?’ Hathin asked. Nobody answered. Nobody met her eye.

Suddenly inspired, she fumbled at her belt pouch. Yes, inside there was still a piece of cloth twisted into a tiny bundle. She pinched it, and it gave a little between her fingers with a grainy lumpiness.

‘Wait, you can’t go without me . . . I’m
meant
to come. Even if the flag hides you all from the Lord when you’re climbing, he will surely notice when his prisoners start to disappear down into the valley. Dance, I think
I
can distract him. I have
this
. It’s a gift, sent to him by his Lady.’

It was her pocketful of Sorrow, the keepsake that the white mountain had told her to take to Spearhead. Spearhead was unforgiving, but he had a weakness, like the chink in his crater rim. Unlike the King of Fans, he had not chosen to forget the past. Instead he burned with the memory of it, and the heart of that memory was his love for Sorrow.