Gullstruck Island (51 page)

Her own voice sounded small and distant, even to herself, and the slash of machetes through the vines and the crunch of trodden undergrowth became a lullaby. She could not help closing her eyes, and when at last an answer came she barely recognized Dance’s voice. It held the solemnity of prophecy.

‘It is too late for them. Perhaps it was too late the first time they laid brick on brick in the Wailing Way. Hatred of the Lace was born in Mistleman’s Blunder, and hatred of the Lace will destroy it. The story has been waiting to end this way for two hundred years.’

And Hathin thought that she stood in the streets of Mistleman’s Blunder, looking up at Spearhead. The mountain roared with a wide red mouth like that of a jaguar, and from its crooked lip poured a tide of light. As it drew closer she realized that it was not a sheet of fire, but a racing army of flaming figures, each holding a torch from which blazed a quivering blackness. All around them grass fizzed and wilted, timber walls burst into flames, glass windows popped and tinkled. People ran before the army, but it caught them and they flared and were gone in an instant with a sound like paper tearing. Their coins and keys and watch chains fell to the ground and lost their shapes, becoming gleaming puddles like molten butter. Hathin was immune. The flame men ran past on either side, and Hathin felt nothing but a cool breeze as they did so. Not far away she saw a man collide with one of the fiery strangers and fall to his knees, screaming and clutching his own cheeks. Her feet took her closer, and he looked up at her with a pair of familiar brown eyes, letting her see the terrible burns to his face. He reached out trembling, imploring hands towards the great shell of water she held . . .

‘Hathin, stop wriggling!’ said Therrot. ‘You’ll make me drop you.’

‘I can’t – I have to . . .’ The little patch of troubled water was back in Hathin’s brow as she tried to disentangle herself from Therrot’s arms and her own sentence. ‘His face – I remember what he looks like,’ she chirped hopelessly, and then tailed off and stared desolately down the slope towards Mistleman’s Blunder. ‘There’s . . . There’s a whole town . . . Please understand.’

Hathin could feel Jaze’s eyes boring into her face, and had a feeling that perhaps he
did
understand, and did not like what he understood.

‘There’s no time to go back,’ he said, his tone decidedly cold. ‘The Lord won’t stop to listen to you a second time. And the towners won’t listen to you at all.’

‘Hathin, how many of them do you think would cross the street to help a Lace in trouble?’ asked Dance.

‘I don’t know. Maybe none. But maybe one or two. And there only needs to be one. Put me down, Therrot.
Please.
’ As he set her down, his expression almost broke her heart. He looked as if he had discovered her bleeding to death and could do nothing about it. And Hathin, who seemed to have used up all her words on the volcano, turned from her friends and pushed away through the jungle.

Something crashed after her, pushing aside the tree ferns she ducked, stepping over the leaning logs she crawled beneath.

‘
Stop.
’ There was such velvet authority in that one deep word that Hathin’s weak legs halted against her will, and she turned to face the speaker.

‘Dance,’ she said, ‘I’m going to talk to Mr Minchard Prox.’

‘No,’ said Dance, with soft but absolute firmness.

‘We set him adrift on a little boat, Dance, and when he came back he was different. I don’t know – I don’t understand – but when I first met him he was
kind
.’ Hathin thought of his pink face, his bright, bewildered eyes. ‘Kind, but lost. Like a coconut rolling to and fro in the brine, tossed about and not knowing why. I have to hope maybe he’s still like that, still kind underneath, only . . . lost.’

‘If anyone can make Minchard Prox listen, I think it would be you. The mountains themselves bend their ears to you. And that is why you will not stir another step towards Mistle-man’s Blunder.’ There was no mistaking the menace in Dance’s tone now. More than ever she reminded Hathin of a volcano, her movements slow and relentless as lava. Until now this inexorable force had been behind Hathin, supporting and protecting her. This was no longer the case.

‘I can’t help it,’ whispered Hathin, feeling about as inexorable as straw.

‘I will not see you rescue
these people
. These are the same people that hanged our priests in the Chandlery two hundred years ago, the same who killed your village, the same who have hunted us throughout the island. Different faces, different names, but the same souls. No. They have turned a blind eye to our fate – we shall do the same to theirs. That is
justice
, Hathin. That is the meaning of our quest.’ The vast woman stooped beneath a balcony of vines and drew closer, ferns throwing shark-tooth shadows down her cheeks. Her eyes were ink.

‘It’s not
our
quest, Dance,’ Hathin said in a very small voice. ‘
It’s mine
. I can’t be a warrior like you. This
is
my way of questing. Your quest was over years ago.’

Even while the words were still in her mouth, Hathin seemed to taste something odd in them. And then when Dance reached for her left-hand widow’s arm binding, Hathin knew suddenly what she would see when it was peeled back.

The fractured moonlight shone on the unblemished skin of Dance’s left forearm. It bore no second tattoo.

‘But . . . you killed the Ashwalker who killed your husband! And the governor!’

‘It was never enough for me. My husband had two hundred assassins. Everybody who refused to speak up for him or hide him. Everybody in Mistleman’s Blunder. Cruel, frightened little people. Well, I have given them lessons in fear. I have given flesh and steel to their nightmares of the deadly Lace that will come for them in the night. And I have waited fifteen years for something like this, Hathin. This is my night, Spearhead’s night. Do not stand in our way.’

The black bead in Hathin’s stomach seemed to have torn itself apart in the scream that had sent Jimboly to her death. Hathin’s legs would not hold steady, but would not buckle. She could not take a step, could not slump. What was left for her to do but stand?

‘So how many deaths do you need, Dance? Will a town be enough? Will that make the pain go away? Or will you still need the Reckoning so you can live through other people’s revenges? There
is
no “enough”. Nothing finishes with this night. If we let Spearhead eat up the people of Mistleman’s Blunder, then the story doesn’t end,
it goes on retelling itself.
Their revenge and ours, feeding each other, rolling over and over like fighting cats forever. And my village will die again and so will your husband, over and over and over. Different faces and names, but for all the same reasons.

‘No revenge will ever be enough for us. All we can do is try to stop others dying like those we lost. Even if that means taking up arms against the volcano.’

It was a strange stand-off, like a staring match between a mountain and a sea poppy. The jungle stirred restlessly around them, but neither woman nor girl moved, even when a brown snake slithered hurriedly between the feet of one and then the other.

Only the jewelled cicadas were witness when one of the two combatants lowered her eyes and bowed her head in consent.

There was always a clock on Prox’s mantelpiece. It broke up his time, and served it to him once an hour in tiny silver pieces. It was his only companion, and so he felt a sense of betrayal when, just after it had ‘tinged’ its way through its four o’clock greeting, it juddered sideways and threw itself on the floor.

Reflexively he looked up from his papers towards his sediment bottle and pendulum to judge the severity of the earthquake. He was just in time to see them both plunge off the sill.

His chair bucked, as though resentful of his weight, and he stood, steadying himself against his desk, only to feel it galloping under his palms. And then, just as he thought the spasm was ending, the whole house began to shake around him, the floorboards jumping like xylophone bars.

In his ears there was a colossal roaring as if his head was being held under water, but it came from outside the house. He staggered, falling against the window frame, and saw through his window a dawn like the end of the world.

Spearhead was alive with light. One of its hunched peaks was missing, and in its place was a vast, leaping flame-coloured orchid. Over the volcano an enormous black cloud was forming, under-lit by the coppery light of the torn mountain below. From time to time, flaming balls fell out of the cloud and bounced down Spearhead’s slopes.

‘No . . .’

There were maps under his hands. Carefully shaded with parallel strokes. The Safe Farm. Safe. The camp for the children up in the Ashlands. Once again he seemed to see a troop of tiny figures walking along the hilltop, carrying pails, but suddenly they had faces.

‘Pull yourself together!’ he hissed at his reflection, which hissed back at him aghast, then shattered as his candleholder fell sideways and smashed the mirror. He had just time to watch what was left of him go to pieces before the slopped wax drowned the wick and left him in darkness.

Prox groped his way to his study door and opened it. Beyond lay the courthouse’s hearings chamber, which he had been using as a reception hall and meeting room. This too was lightless.

‘Camber!’ It was the desolate cry of instinct. Camber had been the cushion for his mind for months. Who else would he cry for now the world had disappeared? Who else did he have?

He heard the great door that led to the street swing open on the far side of the hall. A lantern appeared in the doorway, and swayed unsteadily through the room towards him. A hand holding it, a limber, elegant figure behind it. Camber, his gait weaving like one walking the deck of a ship.

‘Camber! The children . . .’ Prox gestured towards the window, the mountain.

‘It’s too late,’ Camber said gently, but firmly.

‘I sent . . . up there . . .’

‘And for good reasons you sent them. Come on, we need to leave.’ Camber took Prox’s arm and some of his weight, and pulled him towards the door. The candle made golden question marks in his eyes. ‘How else were you to keep the parents docile? Follow me – we’ll be safer in the old storehouse.’

There was a crack from above like a cannon shot, and plumes of plaster dust dropped towards them. Then the nearest window exploded into shards of metal and crystal dust, and something vast and bullock-black erupted into the room.

The great figure seemed to fill the space like a whirlwind, throwing tables against walls, knocking Camber back into a chair. The guttering lantern light caught a long blunt-tipped sword of wood, fanged at the sides with black glass shards. Camber, who had at first struggled to regain his feet, now froze at the sight of the weapon and carefully eased back into his seat, his hands raised an inch or so above the chair arms as if to soothe the new arrival, his face a picture of studied calm.

Prox was hypnotized by the sight of the toothed sword. It was an ancient Lace weapon. He had seen them in pictures. Prox had sent the Lace children to fiery death on the mountainside. The invading figure needed no face, it was vengeance incarnate. Prox could only stare stupefied at the sword, trying to make sense of what would be the last moments of his life. How had he got here? And what would he be in death, a martyr or a monster?

‘All right,’ he told the faceless figure, unable to manage more than a whisper. ‘All right.’

But the dark shape did not move, and Prox became aware of another smaller figure climbing in through the window. It picked up Camber’s dropped lantern and tinder, and a spark revived the spent wick. The weak flame revealed a small, boyish figure with badly grazed hands and knees, skin all but deathly in colour from caked dust. As he watched, it tugged back its hood to reveal a snub little face, with wide-apart eyes glazed from weariness. The corners of the small mouth curled upwards in a smile, an anxious little ruck appearing at one side. A thumbprint-sized patch in the centre of its forehead wrinkled uncertainly.

‘Mr Prox . . .’ The voice was breathy and hushed, with the familiar sibilance of the Lace accent. ‘Mr Prox, I’ve come to save you.’

37

The Man without a Face

‘To save me?’ croaked Prox.

How could he be saved?

I give up on this life. Where is my next life so I can try to do better?

And the child before him had the wrong face. A face taken from someone else, somewhere else.

‘I know you,’ he said, ‘don’t I?’

‘Child,’ said Camber, his voice quiet and carefully unemotional, ‘you speak Doorsy, yes? And to judge from your large friend’s expression, she doesn’t. How much are you being paid to work for the Reckoning, and how much would it take to change your mind?’

Instead of answering him, the small figure turned to the vast shadow beside her, and musical Lace murmurs flowed between them, a duet between a piccolo and a cello.

‘Dance says I should tell you that I do not work for the Reckoning,’ the child answered in Doorsy at last. ‘She says I should tell you that the Reckoning is working for me.’