Gullstruck Island (40 page)

‘Tomorrow! But—’

‘Hathin . . . thanks to you and your sister we now know how our enemies have been trading messages with each other so quickly. And we have been having interesting conversations with four very frightened men who never thought they would find themselves our guests.

‘They’re all officials.’ Dance sounded neither outraged nor surprised. ‘All Doorsy men, instructed to report on Lace and Lost activity. They claim they did not know that the Lost would die, but they admit on the night of the deaths they were ordered to stay away from their local Lost and find themselves alibis. What is remarkable is how little they
do
seem to know. They do not even know the identity of their immediate leader. But they all seem certain of one thing. He is an agent of Port Suddenwind.

‘Until now, we’ve been thinking ourselves faced by two bands of foes. On one hand, the secret killers of the Lost. On the other, the forces of law and order. Now we have to face the fact that they may be one and the same. Small wonder this woman Jimboly turned up at the same time as the Ashwalker.’

Hathin’s skin went cold. Was it possible? If Port Sudden-wind was behind the murders of the Lost, then what hope did she or her friends have? Powerful enemies. Men with warrants and Ashwalkers at their fingers’ ends. Perhaps even the ‘Lord S’ mentioned in Skein’s journal was one of them.
Lord S will return when the rains end or soon after
. Return for what? Another grand strike? Another wave of deaths? What had poor Bridle tried to warn against before he died? She had nursed some frail hope that once they’d unravelled the mystery she and Arilou could prove their innocence to the authorities, stop the Lace being used as scapegoats and complete her quest by having the culprits brought to justice. If the authorities were the true murderers, then even this was hopeless. The butterfly wing on her arm suddenly seemed absurd. How could a twelve-year-old Lace fugitive avenge herself on the government itself?

‘Dance – was there nothing else the pigeon men could tell you? Did they know anything about the lists in Skein’s journal, or who “C” might be?’ Hathin could not quite keep a touch of desolation from her voice as Dance shook her head. ‘Well . . . they must have had orders from their leader from time to time. What did he ask them to do?’

‘They did receive orders, yes. In particular, they were told to gather carpenters, masons and mining experts to be transported west in secret. Also gunpowder, picks, shovels . . . everything you would need for a mine. But these supplies were not delivered at the usual mining outposts. They were taken to the Coast of the Lace and then north somewhere. That was all they knew.’

They still had no answers.

‘One of our prisoners told us something else,’ continued Dance. ‘He seemed very sure that there is a Lace spy working for the organization. And that is the other reason that your Stockpile troubles me. They are all Lace, and all strangers.’

Hathin was silent for a moment. The suggestion of a spy again called up the phantasmal image of her village filing into the cave of death, but for one furtive figure . . .

‘Dance,’ Hathin said carefully, ‘the Lace spy might not be a stranger. Jaze . . . Jaze thinks that someone else from the Hollow Beasts might be alive. Someone who told Jimboly about the escape route through the caves. Someone who didn’t die because they were expecting the attack. A traitor.’

There was a long silence.

‘If there is such a one,’ rumbled Dance at last, ‘and we find them . . . they are yours.’

‘Mine?’ The marble tiles chilled Hathin’s bare calves.

‘Yours. Whatever happens to Jimboly and her masters, it is fitting that you are the one to take away the traitor’s name.’

Hathin felt as if she had promised to leap a ravine, and had just now halted breathless at the precipice, feeling her stomach tumbling down and away towards water-chilled rocks.

‘Dance . . .’ She could barely squeeze out a whisper. How could she tell this giantess that the Reckoning had risked all for nothing, because she, Hathin, could not bring herself to crush even a cockroach? The revengers were her only friends – how could she see their eyes cool as Eiven’s had when Hathin had failed to find a way round the Lost Inspector’s tests? How could she be less than they expected? ‘I . . . I will take the traitor’s name.’

Dance put out a hand and rested it on Hathin’s boot. For a moment Hathin thought it was a gesture of acceptance, camaraderie. The next instant, however, she noticed the sudden tension in the older woman’s posture, and heard what Dance had already heard, the tiniest metallic creak from the next room.

Dance’s eyes were plum-blood moons. There was barely a sound as she stood, and Hathin realized that her feet were bare. The painted veins on her arms wove darkly, as if rivulets of blood had trickled down from her shoulders and then dried.

The tall woman stooped, carefully lifted the lid of an ottoman and pointed within. Hathin obediently climbed inside and took the weight of the lid on her hands as Dance lowered it so it wouldn’t click shut.

The lowered lid allowed her a sliver of vision, and through it Hathin saw Death walk into the room, man-shaped but midnight blue. Her first thought was that he must be searching for Arilou and herself, and she watched bewildered as his steps took him in the direction of the door that led to the Superior’s quarters.

The Ashwalker was halfway across the ballroom before he seemed to sense Dance. Hathin saw his head turn to look towards her, and the tapestry behind her fluttered as Dance launched herself from the wall.

From one of her hands drooped a wood-handled club. As she circled the Ashwalker she let it twirl slightly, so that the loose leather bandage around it unwound itself and spiralled on to the floor, revealing a long row of obsidian blades jutting from either side of the long wooden shaft that formed its core.

With a lurch of her heart, Hathin realized that she was looking at something that few had seen since the time when the Lace were purged, their priests executed and their temples left to ruin. Once in a long-dead time elite companies of black-feathered Lace bearing such weapons would have hissed out of the darkness to storm strangers’ camps and carry off prisoners for sacrifice. The obsidian blades were volcano teeth, and blood shed by them was drunk by the mountain.

Rings of white appeared around the Ashwalker’s dark irises as he stared at the weapon. He was a head shorter than Dance, but his form seemed to drink light out of the dim hall. Now there were two figures slowly circling one another, one muscular and momentous, the other slender and deadly as a garrotte wire.

They swung into battle like leaves on a water eddy, and Hathin knew suddenly why Dance had been given her name and why she had no other title. There was a stillness even in her swiftness, a rolling agility as if she was a sea thing underwater. She
was
a dance. Each time she swung her weapon, the air buzzed between the obsidian blades with a sound like a dozen people humming.

The Ashwalker was also a dancer, but one full of hummingbird-like darts and retreats, a sliver of steel gleaming in each hand. Hathin held her breath and watched a waltz older than the ballroom, older than the dukes it honoured.

The pair vanished behind a pillar, and Hathin heard a rending, a thud, a release of air. When they reappeared at the other side, one of the Ashwalker’s knives was too dull to catch the light, and new dark rivulets were coursing down Dance’s arm. Only then did Hathin remember that although Dance had killed an Ashwalker previously, he had been river-dunked first, washed of his powers.

The Ashwalker made a brief lunge, which Dance seemed to dodge, but then Hathin heard the tall woman give a low growl in her throat and saw a dark patch forming on her thigh. When the moon started to peer its way in through one of the high windows Hathin could see that both combatants were leaving stained footprints on the white marble tiles. Those of the Ashwalker were faintly blue, but Dance’s were red.

Only as the Ashwalker slipped across a stripe of moonlight did Hathin realize that Dance’s broad swipes had not missed entirely. The serrated teeth of her sword had missed skin but caught cloth, and his garments now sported rents and ragged tufts like feathers. That was why the indigo was marking the tiles. Dance was losing, but the Ashwalker was at least perspiring.

An image flashed into Hathin’s mind – a blue figure crouching beneath his waxed parasol on the volcanic hillside, hiding from the rain . . .

There was a raised gallery that ran along the wall behind her, some ten feet above the ballroom. And on the gallery were small shrines to the ancestors, complete with offerings in ornate pots. Perfumes. Wines. Water.

Teeth clenched with concentration, Hathin eased up the lid of the ottoman, and winced as it came to rest against the wall with a faint clunk. She clambered out, feeling painfully exposed, and scampered along the wall to the wooden steps that led to the gallery. Every creaking step sent an ice needle of panic through her heart.

At the top of the steps she snatched up two tall pewter flasks from a little altar and leaned over the balustrade of the gallery. Where was the Ashwalker? Had he heard her? Was he following her up the stairs?

No. The dance was continuing below, and now the unheard music had increased in tempo. And yet, maddeningly, the dancers did not move beneath the gallery, beneath the two flasks that Hathin now held over the drop in her trembling fists.

A leap, a lunge, and a pedestal tottered, dropping the chalices entrusted to it. The silence shivered into fragments and lay with stars of glass and china upon the floor.

Two guards ran in from the corridor, summoned by the smash. From her eagle-eye view, Hathin saw them rush into the deadly shaft of moonlight, then fold and fall, their drawn swords clattering to the tiles. The Ashwalker had barely favoured them with a look as he killed them. His attention was entirely fixed on Dance. So he did not notice the way that the guards’ ill-fated charge had pushed him back a critical few paces, bringing him closer to the gallery. And he did not notice two arcs of perfumed water sluicing down from above until they struck him in the head and shoulder-blades.

A shiver went through his whole frame, as if it had been a blade or arrow that had hit him in the back. Dance swung in again with new energy, and the Ashwalker stepped aside, but now his footwork was less sure, his motions more hasty. He was blinking blue dribbles out of his eyes, and puddles of indigo marked his wake as though he was melting.

The heavy door to the Superior’s quarters swung wide, and three guards strode out, swords at the ready. Two steps behind them hobbled the nightcapped Superior himself, moustaches unwound and trailing down to his chest, a candle in his hand.

The instant the Ashwalker saw the Superior, it was as if he had been unleashed from a bow. He broke from the skirmish and sprinted for the small, yellow-robed figure, barely seeming to register the three guards that stood in his way. With a sick feeling in her stomach, Hathin saw the guards falter and then each step neatly aside, parting like curtains to allow him passage to their master. They had no will to stop Death going about his business. The Superior’s eyes widened, appalled.

Then something broke upon the Ashwalker like a wave, something horse-heavy that landed behind him with a whirl of dreadlocks. A black-toothed blade keened downwards through a shaft of moonlit, and at last choked on more than cloth.

The Superior stared at the knife which the Ashwalker’s lunge had pushed point first into his breast pocket, then watched as the dead weight of its owner dragged it down, rending the cloth as it went. Only when the midnight-blue figure collapsed to the floor did anybody release their breath. Still nobody dared speak or take their eyes off the fallen figure. The Superior’s hands fluttered helplessly up and down his chest to make sure that the knife had left no holes in him.

‘Wha—?’ he said at last. ‘What . . . ? Who . . . ? How did this . . . ? Why did nobody . . . ?’

He jumped immoderately when Hathin tottered down from the gallery steps, hands raised to show her harmlessness. The guards, clearly feeling that they had to make a belated show of valour, promptly presented their weapons towards her.

‘Oh, blood belied, put those things away! How dare . . . ? What’s wrong with you, men? You stood aside, you would have let . . .’ The Superior stared at Dance, who now had one hand clamped to the gash in her thigh. ‘You men – run for my barber–surgeon! Now! If this woman hadn’t been here . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Wait – who
are
you, good wife, and why
are
you here?’

‘Stop!’ bellowed Dance in Nundestruth as one of the guards neared the door. ‘Milord, call man back. If leave room, ten ticks all palace know got dead Ashwalker here. Dead Ashwalker dangerous, muchas alive.’

‘But he made an assault upon my person – upon a governor of Gullstruck!’ exclaimed the Superior. ‘Without a commission!’ He stared at Hathin. ‘He was supposed to be after you! And your friend!’

‘And anyone brave enough to protect us,’ Hathin explained quietly but firmly. All eyes strayed back to the figure on the floor. Brendril’s face was utterly peaceful. The Superior gave a small, impatient gesture, and the guards closed the door and returned to the centre of the room.

‘Blood of my blood!’ the Superior continued in a quieter tone. ‘Just imagine – what if he had come in through my window?’

‘I wouldn’t have allowed that, sir,’ came a voice from behind the Superior. The little man started, marched back into his room followed by the others and pulled back his shutters. Jaze, who was crouched precariously upon his moonlit sill, raised two fingers to his forehead in salute.

The Superior flung open the next set of shutters, and boggled as Louloss’s deferential smile met his eye.

‘And we’ve a man and a woman up on the roof, in case anyone tried to slide down the chimneys,’ Jaze added helpfully.

The Superior looked around aghast and astonished at the respectful glitter of jewelled smiles.

‘Since when have I had a Lace bodyguard?’ he stammered at last.