Gullstruck Island (46 page)

Everywhere the Superior’s guards asked after the flicker-bird witch, but Jimboly was nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, from a hiding place beneath a raised hut, a burning mind pictured Ritterbit’s blunt smiling beak accepting seeds from new, young hands.

Jimboly imagined Hathin and Ritterbit walking blithely through palace and town, the invisible gossamer of her own soul tangling in trees, slamming in doors, getting caught in the long legs of elephant birds, each step yanking loose a little more of her spirit.

She thought she could feel herself unravelling already. She lay on her stomach and peered out at the palace.

‘I’ll wring your sweet little neck,’ she muttered. A listener would not have known whether she spoke of Hathin or Ritterbit. ‘I should have done it a long time ago.’

She lived in dread of the bounty hunters working out Arilou’s identity. If any harm came to that oozy-brain, then her sister, her precious little sister, would think nothing of letting Ritterbit off his leash. And then Ritterbit would forget all about Jimboly and fly right off to the growling, steaming forest of Mother Tooth, where nobody lived but the birds and where axe never swung and sling never whistled.

But what could she do? She could not go after the bounty hunters to retrieve Arilou. She would unravel even more with every step away from Ritterbit.

‘Well, neck-wringing it is,’ she whispered to herself, then wormed her way out of her hiding place and headed around the wall, looking for somewhere to climb. Her lean brown hands found easy purchase on the flowering creeper, and soon Jimboly was peering over the top of the wall, bright eyes a-flicker with malice.

Ah – but there were guards standing by the palace, guards who would certainly spot Jimboly if she tried to clamber into the courtyard. She was about to drop back down outside the wall when a curtain was tugged aside at a top-storey window of the building, allowing her a glimpse of a small man. His arms were stretched out to either side, and tailors fluttered around him, pinning a lavish travelling robe. One had clearly pushed aside the curtain to let in more light.

‘Well, why shouldn’t I come?’ the little man’s voice floated down from the window, with a curiously tremulous bravado. ‘I never travelled more than twenty miles from Jealousy while I was alive. What good am I doing here? I can hardly govern the city while playing dead. Besides, what if another assassin should come here and find me without my Lace bodyguard and with half my guards missing? No, heroically leading this endeavour sounds like the only safe and prudent course.’

Jimboly’s face broke into a grin and she let herself drop from the wall.

‘Oh, there’s fun and games being played here!’ she muttered as she fled back to the safety of her ditch. ‘There’s a ghost being measured for new clothes, is there? You crafty old toad! But I can scotch
you
. You’re
easy
. You’re a thread I can use, old man.’

Crackgem seemed to have noticed that madness was afoot in Jealousy and had woken up to watch it properly. His geysers went off all at once, throwing little rocks so high that they fell on the town, clattering on the roofs like birds in clogs. And at last the volcano trembled so much with laughter that he shook the village of the Sours to pieces, and sent them hurrying with frantic stealth down the mountainside, their precious flag rolled into a sausage and thrown over the shoulders of three strong young men.

The Sours were quite sure that their flag had not lost its power to hide them from Crackgem, but what good was it being invisible to him if he kept fidgeting like that? There was nothing for it but to come down and join their Laderilou in the valley.

Therrot took it upon himself to tell them where Arilou had gone, and why. He came back with a bruise above his eye, and Jeljech by his side. She had taken custody of his sleeve, as if afraid he would break into a run, and was frowning like thunder.

‘I told Jeljech what happened to Arilou, and she . . . she hit me with a pestle. Then their village had a big meeting, and apparently they decided that Arilou’s one of them and they want their Lost back. So now Jeljech says she’s coming along with us to rescue Arilou. She keeps saying that Crackgem’s laughter will wake up the other mountains and that there’s not much time.’

It was late afternoon, and the Superior surveyed the massed ranks of the counterfeit ‘Stockpile’. There was no way to disguise Dance’s prodigious build, but she had been dressed as a man, and grubby bandages covered her face and concealed her wealth of dreadlocks. Some other members of the Reckoning were too recognizable to join their ranks, and it was decided that they should stay behind in Jealousy with the bulk of the ‘real’ Stockpile.

Nonetheless the numbers in the false Stockpile were impressive. The persecution of the Lace had swollen the Reckoning’s numbers overnight. For every village burnt, a handful of fugitives sought the tattoo. For every child or parent lost, a revenger had been born. Minchard Prox might have trembled if he had seen how his decrees had fed the Reckoning, given it new passion and strength.

The ‘Stockpile’ practised looking woebegone, hunched in their ragged clothing.

‘But how are we to conceal weapons under such meagre clothes?’ asked the Superior after looking them up and down.

‘Actually, sir, they already
are
carrying their weapons.’ There was a percussion of clinks, scrapes, rattles and hushes as knives slid from wrist straps, bracelets became garrottes, swords and machetes emerged from back-mounted sheaths.

‘Ah . . . ah good,’ mumbled the Superior, glancing around at the pictures of his ancestors for reassurance.

Evening came, and Hathin strayed restlessly among the true Stockpile. Even though they had not been told of the Reckoning’s plans, they seemed to have picked up on the excitement and tension in the palace, and they all wore apprehensive, curious expressions.

The Superior’s secretary, presumably on the instructions of the Superior, was trying to take an inventory of them, a task that seemed to have driven him almost to the end of his tether.

‘My good fellow, all I need to know is how you spell your
name
.’

An elderly Lace man frowned slightly and shook his head.

‘Look – a pictogram will do. Your mark.
Anything.
How do you write your name?’

‘He doesn’t.’ Jaze had appeared at the secretary’s shoulder. ‘None of us do. Our names are not meant to be written down. Our names are meant to be forgotten when there is nobody alive who remembers us, so they must never be written down. Paper has too long a memory, you see.’

‘But how am I supposed to keep records? How can I keep track of them all and make sure none of them go missing?’

Records. Missing.

Hathin covered one hand with her mouth, then tugged timidly at Jaze’s sleeve, and drew him aside.

‘He’s right,’ she whispered. ‘That’s what we do. That’s what we Lace are always doing. We
go missing
. Jaze, do you still have those pages of Inspector Skein’s journal?’

The papers were quickly retrieved from Jaze’s pack, and at Hathin’s request Jaze consulted the list and found mention of his own village.

‘“Seagrin – two eagles, three storms, one join R, one smugglers.”’ Jaze looked a question at Hathin.

‘And the words afterwards – the words that aren’t words – can you sound them out? Please?’

Jaze struggled in mouthing the unfamiliar syllables. Even after he had pronounced the final, short word, it took a moment or two before either of them recognized it. It was a mangled version of his own name.

‘No wonder you couldn’t read those words,’ breathed Hathin. ‘They were never meant to be written down at all. They’re names.
Lace
names. And Inspector Skein was trying to spell them out with Doorsy letters. Jaze, I think you’re in the list because you disappeared to join the Reckoning. “One join R” – that’s you.

‘Carried off by eagles, drowned by storms, killed by smugglers, joining the Reckoning – they’re all reasons why people might vanish overnight and never be seen by their village again. Poor Inspector Skein’s letter to Sightlord Fain talked about deaths and disappearances on the Coast of the Lace – and that’s what the Inspector was looking into.
Lace
deaths.
Lace
disappearances. He was visiting all the Lace villages, making a list of everyone who’d vanished suddenly, and even noting down why the village
believed
they had disappeared.’

‘So,’ Jaze said, very quietly, ‘you’re saying that there’s another reason for these disappearances? That our enemies were behind it all along, and the Inspector was investigating them?’

‘I think we need to talk to Uncle Larsh,’ said Hathin.

Master Craftsman Larsh was kept locked in a buttery, partly for his own safety, for there were many among the Reckoning who were sickened by his continued existence. He looked up as Jaze and Hathin entered, his eyes very tired and old.

‘Disappearances,’ said Jaze, without preamble. ‘Disappearances on the Coast of the Lace, these last few years.’

Larsh sighed, and his gaze dropped to the floor.

‘I never had much part in it,’ he said wearily. His hands fidgeted, tweaking and plucking at his bread ration, fashioning a little figure from it. ‘They came past the Hollow Beasts cove sometimes at night, convoys with Lace prisoners. Sometimes I hid them in the caves. Once during some bad storms I had to guide a convoy up the coast, but only as far as a quay at Pericold Heights. I don’t know where they went after that.’

Pericold Heights, the place where the Lost sent their minds so that they could judge the coming winds by the wavering of the banner of steam from Mother Tooth. The closest point on the coast to Mother Tooth . . .

‘I know where they take them,’ breathed Hathin. ‘Mother Tooth’s island.’ In her mind’s eye she was remembering Bridle’s map of Mother Tooth, with its strange rectangular shadows. Not rocks, not lakes – no, shapes made by the hands of man. No wonder the charts of the Safe Farms had reminded her of them so strongly.

‘Dance told me the pigeon men were sending mining supplies to the coast. Those shapes on the map of Mother Tooth – I think they’re
mines
.’ Mother Tooth, more fitful and dangerous even than Crackgem. Nobody would live there, let alone dig into her shuddering rock by
choice
. But what if the miners had not gone there by choice? What if they had been stolen from their villages in ones and twos? What if they were Lace, who were
expected
to go missing, who would never be missed? And for how many years had this been going on before a man named Inspector Skein got suspicious and started taking notes? Was this discovery the reason for the deaths of the Lost?

Jaze’s face reminded Hathin of a naked blade, and she guessed that his thoughts were running parallel to her own. She wondered what expression she herself wore.

She looked at Larsh and felt only numb. He had shrunk – she could look right through him; there were much bigger foes to find.

‘You can’t follow the trail back,’ sighed the craftsman. ‘My orders came from Port Suddenwind, and if you try to trace anything back there you go mad. Even the man I report to in Mistleman’s Blunder is nobody. Suddenwind is a mountain of paper laws and orders, full of faceless people.

Faceless people.

Faceless. A man without a face had done all this.

Hathin thought of Minchard Prox and realized that she could remember only his scars, and the flick of his pencil as he struck out Lace villages. He no longer had a face. At last she felt something through the numbness. At last she knew the calm madness of the revenger.

33

The King of Tricks

The next morning everyone woke to find that Lord Crackgem had stopped laughing. The very air felt as if it was caught in that half-second between a breath and someone starting to speak. Everything including the volcano seemed to be waiting, listening.

The early-morning streets were hushed when the palace gates swung wide, letting out the bleary guards with their unfamiliar muskets and their red-looking, newly shaven chins. The Superior was riding in an absurd little carriage like a giant perambulator, pulled by three elephant birds, all of which seemed to have strong but different navigational viewpoints. He too seemed headachey and sluggish.

In contrast, Hathin felt restive, unable to settle on anything. The other Lace seemed just as bad. There was also a fitful stirring within Ritterbit’s cage, and a warning fidget in the songs of the birds in the hedge and brush. The package train of elephant birds continually shrugged and huffed their flanks, bouncing their packs. This was a day when the earth might open as silently as a fish mouth and pour out mysteries.

Hathin herself had been given a new disguise, though still a boyish one, and slunk along beside the Superior’s tottering carriage. A rough hooded cape covered her face, her form and the flickerbird cage in her hand, so that they could not be recognized by Jimboly. Not far away she could see Jeljech, her hand still resting on Therrot’s arm as though he was her prisoner, her green Sour garments traded in for less distinctive clothes. They walked with the other members of the Stockpile, flanked by guards.