Gullstruck Island (33 page)

What had Hathin hoped to find here? Someone with answers. But the school was just another heap of abandoned riddles.

Hathin climbed down to join Therrot. She found him sitting on the ground, staring into his palm.

‘I’ve found someone to interrogate. Look – it’s one of your little friends.’ He held up a small, bright yellow object on his palm, and Hathin saw it was a frog, like the one she had hidden in her hat. After a moment she realized that it was made of wood, and that Therrot’s face wore a wry little smile. He drew a wooden baton down the sharp ridges that lined its back, and it made a
crrrrk
noise not unlike a living frog. ‘Well, that’s more answer than we’ve got out of anyone else.’

‘Why’s it got shiny silver crescents on its back?’ she asked.

‘You heard the lady. What do your crescents mean?’ A stroke of the stick, and the frog gave another enigmatic
crrrrrrk.
‘Did you get that?’

‘Where’s everyone gone, frog?’ Hathin glared it into submission.

Crrrrrk.

‘Who dragged them away down the hill?’

Crrrrk.

‘Why do we always get everywhere too late?’

‘Why did the Lost die?’

‘Why does everyone want to kill us or send us up volcanoes?’

Therrot and Hathin looked at each other, and their mock stern expressions suddenly spread into grins of helpless, hopeless hilarity. Everything was
too
grim,
too
horrible. They dropped eye contact, but it was too late. In her peripheral vision Hathin could see Therrot shaking with helpless laughter.

‘Soap!’ spluttered Therrot in a small, high-pitched voice unlike his own. ‘They sent us up here with
soap
. . .’

‘A blue man wants to turn me into a sock!’ squeaked Hathin. They looked at each other, threw themselves on to their backs and cackled.

And it was wonderful to let go, to unbraid her mind and let it blow loose. There was a lightness in Hathin’s head and a warm throb behind her breastbone. All her usual worries melted away. Just for once she could almost ignore the tiny, tyrannical part of her brain that still yanked at her worry-leash, trying to pull her together, to tell her something . . .

There was a rising rushing sound like a cauldron coming to the boil but she barely noticed it, and so the echoing bang took her completely by surprise. Reflexively she slapped her hands over her ears, and watched uncomprehending as a boulder the size of her head bounded down the slope past her. The next instant her face was tingling and she was dragging in her breath in great squeaking heaves, suddenly realizing that her lungs were desperate for air. Desperate because only moments before she had not been breathing, and had forgotten that she even needed to do so.

There was a warm throb behind her breastbone, and at last Hathin could remember what that meant.

‘Therrot! Cover your ears!’ In desperation she stood and kicked out at his ribs while he giggled at her. ‘Therrot! Can’t you feel it? In your chest?
There are blissing beetles here!
’

Seriousness seeped back into his expression. He hastily stopped up his ears, and immediately gasped for breath. As he staggered to his feet, Hathin was suddenly aware that the land and sky were pulsing and wavering with each beat of her heart.

They sprinted and scrambled and tumbled down the mad, flexing mountainside. They hurdled a pile of kindling, leaped steaming streams, and finally lost their balance to slither into a heap on the rough ground. There they lay panting until their blood was no longer thunder. Hathin felt drained and sick.

‘Poor frog,’ she said after a long time. ‘He told us everything he knew – we just didn’t understand. He had the answer: crescents. It’s so obvious what a crescent means really – it’s the moon. Untrained Lost follow light, so one of the first things you teach them is not to fly towards the moon or they’ll be wandering in darkness forever. For Lost, the moon is
danger
.’

‘So the frog was marked with crescents because it was poisonous. But then the crescent on the roof . . .’

‘I think someone managed to hide when the school was attacked, saw what was going to happen, and had time to get on to the hut and draw the symbol, hoping it would be visible by the light of the beacon pyre. But I guess it wasn’t.’ Hathin hesitated and wound her arms round one of Therrot’s. Once again she felt a sadness that seemed to belong to someone much older than her. ‘The Lost children’s minds would have flown in from above – the symbol was meant to be a warning for
them
.’ She sighed, and rested her cheek against Therrot’s rough sleeve.

‘The enemy must have brought the blissing beetles here in those clay jars, all the way from the Coast of the Lace, and then set them free. The Lost . . . you kill them like farsight fish. You can’t get to them all, but you don’t have to. You just need to know where their minds will be.

‘The night the adults died, everybody knew they’d be checking the tidings huts for news. You’d only need to fill one hut with beetles, and then, all over the island . . .’ Milady Page tumbling from her hammock. Skein lolling back with a smile on his face. ‘But that still left the children.’

All over Gullstruck, children receiving goodnight kisses from their parents, then lying in bed or sitting cross-legged on wicker mats and sending their minds out to the Beacon School . . .

‘But then, Arilou . . . why not her?’

‘She can’t have been at school. I shouldn’t be surprised really. School would have been full of people telling her what to do and giving her homework, and I guess she didn’t like that much. So maybe she just stopped going and stayed with the Sours instead . . . I don’t know, I don’t know. I ought to cry and I want to, but most of all I just want to go to sleep. Is that horrible?’

‘No, no. You sleep, little sister.’ Therrot stared up at the sky with a look at once distant and dangerous, as if warning it against troubling her.

‘Therrot? Whoever did all this . . . they’re so much cleverer than we are.’

‘Maybe. But we’re still alive, still breathing.’

‘Only because Crackgem threw a rock at us to wake us out of the beetle-trance.’

‘Yes.’ Therrot almost smiled, and ruffled the tufted hair above Hathin’s forehead. ‘Lord Crackgem has a soft spot for those with weak minds.’

She drifted into sleep, but the breath of Lord Crackgem seemed to have drugged her dreams into madness. She tried to stagger away from him down the hillside, while underfoot crescent-marked rocks snarled like jaguars.

Far below Hathin could see the people of her village gliding silently into a cave, heads bowed. She called and called to them, but they did not respond.
Do not worry
, said the giantess beside her.
I will go after them for you.
And Dance was bounding away down the slope towards the cave of Death, heedless of Hathin’s desperate cries behind her . . .

Hathin jerked herself awake, almost knocking heads with Therrot.

‘Therrot, we have to get word to Dance! She’s heading to the Smattermast tidings hut! That’s the hut Skein was checking for messages when he died –
that’s
why he died before the rest of the Lost adults! She’s running straight into a pit of blissing beetles!’

22

Dangerous Creatures

When Therrot and Hathin staggered down to join her, Jeljech scrambled to her feet. There was, Hathin noticed, a touch of wary defensiveness in her frown. Their shaken and dishevelled state did not seem to come as a complete surprise to her, but there was undeniably a question in her hard, defiant eyes.

‘Jeljech? We go village belong-you. Scamperfast.’

When they reached the village, the Sour that welcomed the revengers wore the same expression as Jeljech. Inquisitive, cautious, slightly furtive. In return they received two haggard but unflinching Lace smiles.

‘We speak friends belong-us. Yes?’

When all of the Lace contingent except Arilou had formed a huddle at the edge of the village, Therrot and Hathin quietly spilled the news of the blissing beetle murders. There was a horrified silence.

‘It’s too big,’ Tomki said at last. ‘It’s so big I’m standing on it and I can’t see the edges. I can’t even look at it properly.’

‘Dance,’ said Jaze. It was the first time Hathin had seen Jaze look almost frightened. Dance was his idol, his guiding star.

‘Yes,’ agreed Hathin. ‘We have to warn her – but first we need to warn the Sours.’ She tried not to let her gaze flit to the villagers standing barely out of earshot. ‘They clearly know
something
. . . but not that they’re sharing a mountain with a horde of blissing beetles. They’d never have let Jeljech come with us to the school if they’d known. Come to think of it, they’d never have let
us
go there either, if they really want their barrow of food.’

‘You’re right.’ Tomki looked horrified. ‘We can’t have them dying, now that I’ve finally got myself properly wronged.’ He ran fingertips over his bruised eye with an air of pride. ‘What would I do if I came back with the tattoo and they were all beetled? I’d – ow!’

Hathin had grown better at spotting Therrot’s danger signs. However, on this occasion there was simply no time to react before Therrot gripped Tomki under the arms and flung him aside like a bundle of straw. Tomki stared up at him, his eyes round but not yet afraid.

‘Wronged?’ erupted Therrot. ‘You threw rocks at them, and nearly got us killed!’

‘Jaze!’ Hathin looked to the taller man, but Jaze held back. Evidently he saw no reason to stand in Therrot’s way.

‘You really want to be wronged, Tomki? You want a wrong that’ll keep you awake at night?’ One could almost hear the self-control hissing out of Therrot like grain from a split sack.

Hathin ran forward to place herself between Therrot and Tomki, who was gingerly getting to his feet. Then, before Therrot could move or speak another word, she turned her back to him.

Tomki flinched too late, and Hathin’s slap caught him across his nose and upper cheek. He sat back on a rock, clutching his eye and looking at her like a pained puppy.

‘It’s not a game!’ All the others flinched as Hathin’s voice echoed with cold clarity from the surrounding crags. ‘The tattoo isn’t something you wear to impress girls, like a . . . a . . . a hat! You see this?’ Hathin pulled off the wrapping around her forearm. ‘You see these? These?’ She dragged back the sleeves of Jaze and then Therrot to show their tattoos. ‘We didn’t
want
them, Tomki. They mean we’re . . . we’re
broken
. Broken so badly we can’t ever be fixed . . . and . . . and all that’s left to us is breaking something else.

‘You want to be with Dance?
Go
then. Find her and warn her. Then you can show your bruises to your priest and ask for your tattoo and do whatever you like. Just don’t bother coming back to us afterwards. If all you care about is getting the tattoo, then you’ve got no place with us. And you never will have.’

After a shellshocked Tomki had ridden off on his elephant bird, it took a few minutes for the Sours to overcome their alarm at seeing their visitors smiling broadly while yelling and hitting each other. But Jeljech and Arilou were brought out again, and with painful slowness the dangers of the blissing beetles were made clear.

The Sours boggled and scowled at the news and argued bitterly among themselves. At last they seemed to come to a decision, and after an awkward pause Jeljech began a slow, defensive account of the night the Beacon School’s fires went cold forever.

A group of heavily armed men had turned up unexpectedly at the Sours’ village, having followed an elderly Sour woman whose twisted leg left her unable to outpace them. These men had brought a map with them, but there were no paths drawn on it between Jealousy and the Beacon School. They held out a quill, inviting the Sours to fill in the blank space. When the villagers shook their heads and pretended ignorance the strangers had pointed to the flag, and then out to the Ashlands to show that they knew where the ash had come from.

The implied threat was clear, and two of the villagers had shown the men the way to the Beacon School. That night the beacon was lit as usual, but when the Sours dragged their timber to the school the following day, they found it deserted. Their main livelihood had literally vanished overwright, leaving only sinister traces. And so they had withdrawn distrustfully like a hermit crab, certain that whatever had happened, they would get the blame.

Those men you showed to the School – were they carrying anything?

Yes
came back the answer. Backpacks of corked jars. Some of them carrying so many jars it seemed their legs should give way.

‘The jars were probably sealed with nothing but air and the beetles inside,’ murmured Jaze. ‘No wonder they were so light. And then when the men reached the school they must have pushed plugs in their ears and pulled the corks out of the jars . . .’

‘Wait!’ Hathin was suddenly struck by a recollection. ‘I’ve just remembered – the Superior talked about some men who came to him asking for guides to the Beacon School. Perhaps he’ll know something about them.’