Gullstruck Island (20 page)

‘What . . . decisions?’

‘Well, this is unlikely to strike you as much of a silver lining . . . but your ordeal has made you something of a celebrity. You’re the “survivor”, you see. Politics is all about timing, and you’re a highly symbolic figure at a time when emotions are running very high. You have been told about the current crisis, do you remember?’

‘Skein . . .’ Prox tried to recall what he had been told during the days of fever.

‘Not just Skein,’ Camber said gently. ‘All of them. All the Lost are dead. At first we weren’t sure, but word has been arriving from the outlying areas in dribs and drabs, and it’s always the same story. The adults died on the same evening, within hours of each other. And then that very night every child known or strongly suspected to be a Lost passed away in exactly the same fashion. Oh, all but one, that is to say.’ Camber met Prox’s questioning gaze, and gave a short sigh. ‘Yes. Yes, you met her. Lady Lost Arilou of the Hollow Beasts cove. Of all the Lost in Gullstruck, only she survived. Strange, that.’

Prox thought of the serene-faced, grey-eyed young seer-ess. It pained him to imagine her a part of the conspiracy that had set him adrift. But her survival was too suspicious to ignore.

‘So what are you saying?’ he asked bluntly. ‘That the Hollow Beasts somehow murdered all the other Lost on the island so Lady Arilou would reign supreme?’

‘I am saying nothing,’ Camber answered quietly, ‘but one must look at the facts. Fact one: thanks to Inspector Skein’s letter we know that he was investigating some great conspiracy on the Coast of the Lace, and feared for his life. And his was the only Lost body never found. Fact two: the Hollow Beasts lied about his disappearance. Inspector Skein did not join you in the boat, nor did your mooring rope pull loose in the storm – it was cut. You were not meant to survive, Mr Prox, but you did, and thanks to you we have caught the Hollow Beasts out in two deliberate lies. Fact three: the only Lost left alive in the whole of Gullstruck is Lady Arilou of the Hollow Beasts.

‘I think we can be fairly sure that Skein found out a little too much in the cove of the Hollow Beasts, and the villagers had to kill him a few hours sooner than they expected. Which meant of course that they had to get you out of the way as well. Whoever else was a part of this great conspiracy, it seems obvious that the Hollow Beasts were at the heart of it.’

There was a long pause while Prox digested Camber’s words.

‘You need testimonials from me,’ Prox said at last, staring at his singed knuckles, ‘for their arrests. Is that it?’

Camber looked down and frowned slightly, as if something pained and embarrassed him.

‘If you are speaking of arrest for the villagers of the Hollow Beasts . . . no, we do not. We’ve just received some news about that. The fact is . . . by the time law and order had mobilized, the ordinary people of the area had taken justice into their own hands. There
is
no village of the Hollow Beasts now. It’s upsetting, I suppose, but it happened too quickly to be prevented . . .’ Camber spread his hands. They were long and elegant, well suited to the gesture. ‘The Hollow Beasts simply had no idea what they were unleashing on themselves.’

‘They’re all . . .’ Prox’s head was suddenly crowded with images – small fists waving shell necklaces at him, elderly creviced smiles . . . ‘Ancestors beyond, are you saying the village is destroyed?! There . . . There were
children
there – you’re not saying the children . . .’

Camber left a respectful silence before answering.

‘You’re a humane man,’ he said at last. ‘Of course this upsets you. It upsets me. Yes, innocence has suffered in the quest for the guilty, but that does not alter the fact that the guilty are still at large.’

‘But . . . if everyone there is dead . . .’

‘Not quite everybody. Nearly all of the inhabitants have been . . . accounted for. But their Lady Lost seems to be a very cool and practical young woman. It appears that as soon as trouble loomed she grabbed a companion and abandoned the village. There’s a warrant out for them, of course – the governor saw fit to hire an Ashwalker.’ Camber frowned for a moment and let the tip of his tongue show between his lips, as if testing the flavour of an opinion he might express and deciding against it. ‘But the fact is she’s disappeared. Which means of course that our problems are far from over.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Lost are
gone
, Mr Prox, and until it happened nobody really realized what a cataclysm like that would do to Gullstruck. We’re an island of provinces, separated by volcanoes, vicious ridges, swamps and jungles. Without the Lost, our communications systems simply collapse. We can’t report anything, we can’t find out anything, we can’t check anything. A hurricane could hit the north tomorrow, and
we’d
only know about it when it roared down the Wailing Way a few days later. Soon bandits, smugglers, pirates and cutthroats are going to realize that nobody’s mind is patrolling the hills to watch for them. Our fishermen and divers count on the Lost to spot shoals or delve through prime coral. Our merchants depend on being able to bargain with each other through the tidings huts – if they can’t, we’ll see some of our far-flung towns starving this winter.

‘And the dark conspiracy surrounding Arilou clearly counted on all of this. They must have thought that we would have no choice but to turn to the Lace, to their Lady Lost and their farsight fish. Rather a nice chance to trade in their shell necklaces for governors’ chains, don’t you think? This is more than the actions of one village, Mr Prox. This conspiracy must have had agents in every village, every town, ready to strike down every single Lost, all at the same time. This “night of the long knives” must have taken a great deal of plotting and, whatever the conspiracy plans to do next, Arilou must be central to it. We are looking at a secret organization of Lace who have never forgotten the power their people once wielded, and who thought they saw a way to rise again. And in Arilou they have a leader, a sacred totem.’

‘She wasn’t more than a child herself,’ Prox murmured almost to himself. ‘Thirteen, fourteen.’

‘I’m sure you know what you’re talking about,’ Camber responded quietly, ‘but I’ve always found it hard to judge the age of Lace. They’re generally so small and slight for their years.’

‘Is there no doubt that she was involved? Could she be a pawn in all this?’

‘Well, I daresay you can judge that better than I.’ Again a sustained respectful pause which made Prox feel stupid. ‘I had heard that the Hollow Beasts had no chief or priest, but if you witnessed someone
other
than the Lady Lost running the village, then that would of course be useful for us to know.’

Camber regarded what was left of Prox’s face for a few moments and then stood. ‘Mr Prox, I am trespassing upon your rest. Let us leave this until tomorrow.’

‘Wait . . .’ Prox struggled out of his chair. ‘You still haven’t told me – what does everybody want me to do?’

‘They want you to
take charge
, Mr Prox. Somebody
must
, to stop anarchy breaking out, to make sure that everyone is working together against the Lace threat. Somebody needs to find Arilou, before she can rally her troops and do any more damage. You’re everyone’s hero at the moment, people will listen to you – and my superiors are impressed by your organizational record.’

‘But how? I’d need to check with Port Suddenwind, and . . .’ Prox trailed off. It was unnecessary to say more. If he wrote to them asking for authority to deal with the Lace threat, he would probably wait six months and then get a letter giving him permission to add lacework to his saddlebags.

‘There’s a way. Two hundred years ago, when our ancestors needed to find a way of purging the Lace for the good of Gullstruck, they discovered that the existing Cavalcaste murder laws prevented the purge only if the Lace were legally considered to be
people
. And so they drew up a new law stating that if the Lace became too numerous or troublesome then legally they ceased to be people, and were considered to be . . . well . . . timber wolves. And naturally, if there’s a plague of two-legged timber wolves you can declare a Time of Nuisance, and elect a Nuisance Control Officer with immediate and automatic island-wide authority to . . . control it. An officer who can act freely, without needing permission for everything from Port Suddenwind.’

‘So you think if I became Nuisance Control Officer . . .’

‘Oh, I don’t think. I’m merely a channel, a utensil. But right now I’m a utensil dedicated to making sure that nobody bullies you into a decision until you’re rested, Mr Prox.’

Prox stared at the mirror again. What kind of face would stare back at him when the blisters were no more?

You were not meant to survive
. . . With a pang Prox remembered Camber’s words. Again he recalled his vomiting in the boat, and wondered if the water in the shell had been poisoned. Had the village been planning his destruction even then? He tried to recall why he had felt a rush of affection and trust for the girl who had run to him with the water. But his mind was still dazzled by the white-hot madness of the three days on the boat, and he could not remember her features.

‘I don’t need to rest before making a decision,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll lead the hunt for the Lady Arilou.’

Camber inclined his head in a small, slow bow. ‘Then you will have the papers on your desk tomorrow morning, Mr Prox, ready to be signed. And I’ll make arrangements for the town courthouse to be turned over to you so you can use it as a base of operations.’

‘We’ll need to send armed men to Sweetweather,’ Prox muttered to himself. ‘No more massacres. No more mob violence.’

‘Of course. It will take time, through. Obviously there’s no path through the volcanoes’ domain, so from here the shortest practical route is due south, then west through Rogue’s Pass, and north up the coast to Sweetweather. Four days’ journey at least.’

Prox glanced towards the window and flinched as a lance of sunlight struck his eye. Something was troubling him, something to do with what he had just been told, something to do with the papers promised on the morrow. But he could not work out what it was. ‘Where . . . ? Where did you say we were again?’

‘New Warkbridge, or so the maps have it,’ came the answer, ‘but nobody calls it that. You’ll have heard of the town as Mistleman’s Blunder.’

Hathin was woken by sunlight in her eyes and sat up to peer out of the lava bubble.

The clouds that had cloaked everything had receded before the growing heat of the day. It was as if Sorrow herself and her weird white world had drawn back from them with a hiss of white skirts. The sky was a deepening blue, and the crumbly, creamy earth around them was dotted with small blue and pink flowers and little mounds left by burrowing birds. Somehow, miraculously, they had survived to see the sun again. To judge by its height it must be nearing noon. Dizzily she realized that it could only be a matter of twelve hours or so since she had fled the mob with Arilou.

Hathin emerged blinking into sunlight and found that she was standing on a promontory. Before her lay a vast, flattened vista. There below was the Wailing Way, the long trench that Spearhead had carved in his furious departure, the thread of the river meandering along its base. In the far distance the land rolled and rucked, and Spearhead himself could be seen amid his humpbacked army of hills, his head lost in the grey haze of his own anguish and rage.

But near the base of Spearhead she could also make out a haze of white smoke rising from a hundred chimneys and the brilliant green of fields that had been flooded for rice.

As far as Hathin knew, only one town had ever been built in the track gouged by Spearhead’s flight, the track he might retrace if he ever decided to renew his quarrel. Everyone knew it as Mistleman’s Blunder, after the name of the founder who had ignored the entreaties and advice of the Lace. Mistleman’s own daughter had been one of the first that the local Lace had quietly kidnapped and sacrificed in their attempts to appease the volcanoes and save the town, and so the thick jungle north of the trench had been nicknamed Mistleman’s Chandlery, a grimly humorous reference to the many trees and vines from which the district’s Lace had been hanged, like tallow candles left to drip. The Lace had never been trusted again . . . but nobody had ever built another town in the Wailing Way.

Mistleman’s Blunder, however, remained. It did so with grim defiance, testimony to the triumph over the Lace. And it was after all a fine location, conveniently close to the river, surrounded by flat grazing land and within easy reach of many of the obsidian and jade mining outposts in the ridge of mountains.

Hathin sank into a crouch, and for ten minutes she let herself watch the great eagles while they wheeled above and watched her right back. There were things that had to be done, and so there were things that could not be thought about yet. It was as simple as that.

The Ashwalker had come after them. Not just the maddened crowd and the crowd-witch Jimboly, but the
Ashwalker
. Which meant that he must have a licence. For days, Sweetweather had been waiting to see whether the governor would hire the Ashwalker to chase down the murderer of Milady Page . . . and now he had. Hathin swallowed and stared the fact down. The Ashwalker was hunting her and her sister as murderers. Which meant that even the governor must have believed those strange accusations that Jimboly had used to spark the crowd into frenzy, those poisoned hints that Arilou was the centre of a Lace plot to kill all the other Lost.

It was too late to think of appealing to the law and protesting their innocence. Sentence had already been passed. For now, with the help of the King and Sorrow, they had outrun it. However, in a few days others would arrive from Sweet-weather, taking the safe but slower paths that detoured down to the southern passes. They would come and ask after two Lace girls, one of them outwardly wander-witted . . .

Mistleman’s Blunder. Of all the places they could have fled to, perhaps the city least likely to look kindly upon a pair of vagrant Lace . . .