Gullstruck Island (39 page)

‘My good girl, kindly stop quivering. Get yourself to the Lace quarters . . . and have all my Lace brought into the main building. Put them in the trophy room – we will be better able to protect them there.’

Hathin ran to the Stockpile to find the Lace readying themselves for fight or flight. Enough of the cries outside the walls had been overheard for panic to set in. Jaze, who had arrived back in Jealousy a couple of days earlier, was already giving curt orders. The Stockpile’s numbers had now swollen to about three dozen, including some entire families.

Hathin stared mutely at the terrified smiles of the children, and the gulls above sounded like Jimboly’s laughter. Hathin had made things easy for Jimboly and her friends, gathering all these Lace in one place when they might have scattered to the winds . . .

Grim and desperate resolution was legible in the faces of Therrot and Jaze as they shouldered children and shepherded the terrified gathering out of their hut. A few of the young men had skinning knives out and wore dazzled looks as if they were already running through imagined fights in their heads. The stragglers were halfway across the courtyard when there were shrieks, and Hathin turned to see heads and shoulders appearing over the courtyard wall.

The Lace broke into a sprint, but bottle-necked at the door of the main building. The Superior’s men had all been drawn to the front of the palace, and there was nobody to call to as figures hauled themselves over the wall and dropped into the garden.

All thought was burned away by brute terror. Everything was animal – the gaggle of Lace turning its knives and teeth outwards, their young in the middle, while the attacking figures lurched in like wolves. Somewhere in the crush a little child gave a scream, a white, raw, naked sound like a gash of chalk. Therrot turned to face their attackers, brutally shoving Hathin behind him.

She was caught in a crush of tall bodies and did not see the first blow struck, but she felt the crowd flinch one way, then surge the other like wild water, nearly dragging her off her feet. The screams striped her mind and confused her, and it took a while for her to realize that one of the screams was hers.

‘Get inside!’ she was screaming. She could feel the crowd yielding as the Stockpile looked to flee down the side of the palace wall, into the bushes, towards the walls. ‘No! Everybody inside!’ She could just glimpse the Jealousy men grappling some of the Lace away from the group, trying to break up the defensive line.

Oh no
, thought Hathin.
Oh no, no, no you don’t, Jimboly. Not again. Not this time
.

A blunder of fists, a snick, a cry, and then a wary space opened suddenly around Jaze and his knife. Through a gap between shoulders Hathin saw a brutish-looking local go down in a flurry of Therrot.

‘Everybody
in
!’ Hathin’s voice found a space in the noise and seemed to galvanize the crowd. Suddenly the Lace were not tug-of-warring to and fro, they were pushing through the door into the dim-lit hall.

‘Follow me!
This
way!’ Hathin stooped to scoop up a small child whose parents’ arms were already full of infants, and ran as fast as she could down the mosaic-floored corridor. The vaulted passages had no idea what to make of children’s screams, the patter of wicker shoes, frightened cries in Lace, and they threw the sounds back in confusion.

The Lace fugitives erupted into the great trophy hall, their entry watched by stuffed deer, peacocks and dust-matted jaguars’ heads. The hall had a heavy oak door with black iron bolts. But when to slam it? Should they wait for all the Lace to be within, or should they close it after the children and the old, and leave the rearguard with no retreat from the growing mob? Hathin’s heart plunged as she realized that Therrot was nowhere to be seen.

‘Shut the door! Shut the door!’ Jaze’s voice from down the hall.

Too late. Even as the Stockpile tried to force the door shut, half a dozen shoulders arrived to heave against it from the other side. The gap bristled with hands, knives, feet, elbows. Helplessly, Hathin watched as it started to gape once more.

Then something changed in the tone of the combat outside. The Stockpile all felt the change, and tensed to it, but could not understand it. They stared into the dark mirrors of each other’s eyes and listened as the baying outside was suddenly punctuated by sharper, higher cries of surprise and betrayal. The door lurched, buffeted against the defenders’ weight, then the clustering hands and feet were withdrawn and the door crashed to. The nearest Lace quickly flung down bars, drove home bolts. The door shook and jolted a few times, and then there was a pattering of receding steps and the cries took on a watery distance.

A battering at the door. ‘Open up!’ It took a moment for Hathin to realize it was Jaze speaking. ‘It’s me – open the door!’

When the door swung open, Hathin’s heart jumped as a stream of unfamiliar people burst in, drawn knives and bone coshes in their hands. However, instead of setting upon the flinching huddle of families, the newcomers scoured the room, hurried to windows or posted themselves like guards by the door. It was a moment before she was calm enough to recognize Marmar, Louloss and others she had met on that first night in the Wasps’ Nest.

‘Any of them make it in here?’ Jaze hurried in, clasping a bloody arm, Therrot a step behind him.

The Stockpile roused itself from paralysis and shook three dozen heads. Two bear rugs humped themselves ominously, and the frightened faces of small Lace children peered out from under them.

Hathin stared down the passage beyond the door. It was a mess of broken vases, bloody palm-prints and hastily abandoned clubs. Not a single rioter, however.

Jaze allowed himself a smile. ‘Funny, they lost their taste for a fight once they were trapped in a narrow passageway between a locked door and us. As soon as they saw an opening, they fled for the wall again.’

The calls in the passage were more distinct now.

‘. . . he’s not in the ballroom. You two – any sign of him?’

‘Nothing in the minstrel’s gallery . . . anybody see which way he . . .’

Marmar caught Hathin’s questioning glance.

‘We weren’t the only ones to follow that mob over the back wall,’ he said quietly. ‘I saw an Ashwalker vault in and vanish among the figs. And now we can’t find him.’

While most of the Reckoning continued their search for the Ashwalker, much to the confusion of the Superior’s guards, Hathin learned the reason for the Reckoning’s well-timed appearance. As it turned out, the maker of this miracle had been Tomki.

‘He tipped us off,’ explained Louloss, the head-carver. ‘He’d stayed with us a few days but was returning to Jealousy on Dance’s orders. Half day’s ride from the city he ran into a woman on the road. He’d never met her before, but he’d seen that little wooden head I’d carved to your description, and when he caught sight of a flickerbird on her shoulder he realized that this was Jimboly the tooth-puller, the crowd-witch.

‘So he stayed to chat with her, and found out that she was heading to Jealousy, travelling with an Ashwalker, and that she’d heard that Jealousy was “Lace-infested”. Apparently he had half a mind to ride straight back and warn you all, but the nearest Reckoning safehouse was closer, so he rode there like fury for reinforcements. By the time he got there, he’d nearly shaken his brain loose with galloping. His bird flopped right down, drank half a lake of water and hasn’t let him on its back since.’

Hathin felt a twinge of remorse as she imagined Tomki tumbling exhausted from his resentful bird.

‘What in the name of . . . ?’ The Superior had just appeared in the doorway to the trophy room and stood boggling at the scene before him. ‘How . . . ? Who . . . ? Who are all these people?’

‘They’re . . . They are
yours
, sir.’ Hathin gingerly advanced, feeling self-conscious in her use of Doorsy before so many Lace. ‘They’re your Lace Stockpile.’

‘
What?
’ The Superior’s jaw wobbled about for a few seconds like a cork on a stream. ‘What –
all
of them? How can we possibly need this many to push barrows up the mountain?’ Hathin could only hope that he had not noticed the weapons being tucked away as he entered, or the suspicious number of people with covered forearms. ‘Where did you even
find
them? And what are they all looking so happy about?’

Hathin’s spirits wilted before the prospect of explaining the Lace smile to someone with such a short attention span for the living. But the Superior was already occupied trying to shoo a pair of Lace children from riding his stuffed gazelles.

‘All right!’ he was shouting. ‘All right, these people can stay for now, but no more, you understand! Not a single Lace more!’

So it was perhaps just as well that neither the Superior nor his guards noticed when Dance of the Reckoning arrived with the dusk and let herself in through the kitchens.

27

Death Dance

Nothing was to be found of the Ashwalker. He seemed to have melted into the palace like a drop of ink losing itself in a glass of water. By dusk, everyone said that he must have left as silently as he arrived. Yet an air of unease remained.

Hathin had no doubt that the Ashwalker who had been spotted must be the same one that had hunted her all the way from the coast. At the back of her mind she had always known he would return. Her only consolation was the fact that Arilou at least was safely tucked away in the Sour village. And yet, unreasonably, she felt that Arilou could not be really safe without Hathin herself to watch over her.

Hathin felt a fear of herself as she walked the nocturnal passages, the clap of her boots on the marble tiles too loud for her liking. She had started the Stockpile, and now the fates of dozens of innocents, even the fates of Dance and her Reckoning, all seemed to be teetering precariously on that one small decision, like an inverted mountain perched on its peak. How had it happened? Her revenge quest seemed to have taken on a very strange shape.

As she clipped through the passages figures detached themselves from the shadow to give her a small, lazy raise of the hand before concealing themselves again, so that she would not be startled by coming upon them suddenly. Despite their hell-for-leather run to Jealousy, many of the revengers had chosen to eschew sleep and stand watch throughout the palace that night in case of trouble.

It had seemed best not to bother the Superior with this plan. He had been flabbergasted enough at the discovery that his personal stash of Lace had increased to an army of nearly fifty souls. If he found that his Lace were leaking out of the trophy room and lurking fully armed in corners of his palace, Hathin felt that he might be downright upset.

In the ballroom Hathin found Dance, but only because she knew to expect her. Dance sat there alone with the patience of a mountain, her slow-blinking stillness rendering her unobtrusive despite her size. Around the room marble biceps bulged, painted armour gleamed and woven horse haunches flexed as the dead dukes paraded their victories on wall and pedestal.

Hathin took off her hat and sat down next to Dance, feeling like a rowboat beside a ghost galleon.

‘I expect,’ Dance said quietly after a few moments, ‘that your Stockpile have told you about the secret trail? It runs from the coast through the jungles and marshes all the way to Jealousy. Among our people, the whisper is spreading that in Jealousy there’s a haven. Right now there are probably dozens of Lace on the trail, all on their way here.’

Hathin swallowed and said nothing.

‘Whatever we choose to do, it is too late to stop them coming. Wave after wave of them will arrive.’ Dance rolled her shoulders slowly, easing out cramps. ‘What has your Superior promised? How sure is his protection?’

‘I . . . don’t know.’ Rather hesitantly, Hathin explained the peculiar nature of her agreement with the Superior. It sounded flimsy and foolish in the retelling.

‘We have two choices,’ continued Dance. ‘The first – we can all leave Jealousy, and abandon the town to this crowd-witch Jimboly. Scatter ourselves like sparks, so we can’t be stamped out easily. Take as many of the Stockpile with us as we can, and leave them on the Obsidian Trail to fend for themselves. The other choice – we stay. We make this the haven our people want, a headquarters for pursuing your quest and a new base for the Reckoning. We gamble everything.

‘If we choose the second . . . the Reckoning won’t take to it easily. We’re hawk-soldiers, we stoop, strike and fly. We don’t stand guard like dogs. Our strength has always been that daylight only borrows us – we come from darkness and return to it again, and nobody knows where to find us out. If we choose to remain here – we might as well be standing by a great pyre like the Beacon School.’

‘It’s . . . If we could stay here a little longer . . . perhaps the Sours can get more information out of Arilou. It could help us find out who our enemies are . . . or why . . .’

Dance turned her head slightly and looked down at Hathin.

‘Those little children in your Stockpile, do you know their names?’ Dance listened as Hathin falteringly recited a few names, then quietly interrupted. ‘Don’t learn any more of them. They’re becoming too real to you, and their protection is not your quest. If the Reckoning leave tomorrow, we take you with us.’