Poison (4 page)

Poison did not reply to that. Instead, she said: “Do you want a sausage? I think four is too many for me anyway.”

 

She lay awake for a long time by the fire, listening to Bram snore inside his blankets and jumping at every sound in the night. Small insects flitted around the glow of the blaze, and things shuffled and cracked twigs in the trees that surrounded the bare clearing. The discomfort of the floor did not bother her; it was the fear of the small, venomous things that infested the marsh that kept her awake. She marvelled at how Bram could be so careless.

She cried a little, after she was sure Bram was asleep. She could not help imagining her father's face as Fleet broke the tragic news to him. He had not been up when she returned from Fleet's hut to gather her belongings, nor had she seen Snapdragon. She suspected, knowing her stepmother, that she had slipped back into bed with him and would pretend she had slept soundly all night. Hew was always a deep sleeper; if he had slept through Snapdragon's hysterical scream on discovering the changeling, he would not have woken when she slid under the blanket with him.

More than anything, she regretted not leaving him a note or a message. The guilt she felt at the cowardly way she had slipped out of the village was bad enough; even though she was afraid that seeing him might change her mind and make her stay, he deserved better than to hear about his daughters' fate from a virtual stranger. But if only she had thought to leave him some words of comfort, something to let him know she was not deserting him, only leaving him for a time.

Too late now. She could see him weeping, trying to find meaning in what had happened as Fleet stood glumly by. Taken why? Gone where? Coming back when? She pictured Snapdragon trying to comfort him, all the while knowing that she could not tell him the truth just as Poison could not, secretly glad that the violet-eyed girl was out of their lives. Hew had lost two of his daughters at a stroke; but worse was the knowledge that the phaeries had one of them, that they had left a monstrosity in her place, and now he and his wife would have to care for it if they wanted to keep alive any hope of seeing their daughters again.

But that was the way of things in the Black Marshes.

Eventually, Poison got up from the fire and went to the cart. Beneath the tarpaulin was a space where Bram kept travelling supplies and food. She lifted them out and dumped them by the fire, then crawled with her blanket into the gap where they had been and pulled the tarpaulin over her. The metal jars clanked about as she wrapped herself up, but soon she had fashioned herself a warm, cramped cocoon, and she fell asleep to the soughing of the grint's breath and the faint whispering of the marshwraiths as they darted about inside their prisons.

 

Poison lost count of the days remarkably fast as she travelled with Bram. It was only by the most intense calculation that she worked out that it had been a week since Azalea had been taken by the Scarecrow. A week that had passed at the plodding tempo of the grint's webbed feet slapping in the mud, broken only occasionally by stops to camp or when the cart became stuck and they had to lever it out. She thought about Azalea, what she must be going through, but she found that she could not even speculate. She knew nothing of the ways of the phaeries. All the legends and stories of changelings made no mention of what happened to the children that were taken.

And though it gave her a guilty feeling to think it, she was enjoying herself.

Oh, it was hard and uncomfortable, that was for sure. The midges and flies bit them during the day, and every morning she woke up stiff from another cramped night curled up in the cart. Bram never made any mention of the way he found his travelling gear in a neat pile on the ground every day, but he never stopped putting it back in the same place, and Poison never stopped unpacking it to make space for herself under the tarpaulin. Last night it had rained hard, and she had heard him cursing as he flailed around the campsite, trying to find shelter for the packs and blankets she had displaced; he had pulled back the tarp that she lay under and glowered down on her, water drooling from the brim of his hat.

“My supplies are getting wet!” he blustered.

“So am I, now,” she said sleepily. “How's the floor, by the way?”

He huffed indignantly and threw the tarp back over her. She never did find out how he kept them dry, but she heard him rummaging around at the other end of the cart and presumed he'd taken out his tent and replaced it with the supplies. She didn't care; at least she was dry. One for the marsh folk, she thought mischievously as she fell asleep.

And yet all the discomfort could not sour the pride and excitement in her breast, for she was really away: away from Gull, away from Snapdragon and the villagers who disdained her; and soon, away from the Black Marshes. She tried to keep her feet on the ground, but she could not resist spinning off into heady fantasies of witches and trolls, strong heroes and quick-witted heroines.

Silly girl
, she told herself.
They're just stories.
But somehow, she never quite believed it.

And Bram was good company for her as well. He was a taciturn fellow, but he was perfectly willing to answer questions that Poison asked him. Her interest in what she called the “outside world” was insatiable, and she listened attentively to even his most mundane anecdotes. But while he talked long about places he'd been and people he'd met, he never asked questions of her – perhaps because he wasn't interested, perhaps because he was being polite – and that suited her fine. And he was good man, she decided. Gruff and solitary, but honest and decent. She was not so naïve that she had never thought what might happen between a man of his size and a young girl, in the depths of the marshes where nobody could help her. Bram had never made her feel threatened that way.

It was midday, and uncharacteristically sunny, when Bram announced they would be coming into sight of Shieldtown any moment. Poison felt her heart leap and craned forward in the seat, peering at the trees ahead. They had been thinning out all day, and the ground was firm enough to be almost called a road now. She waited eagerly, with Bram stealing amused glances at her out of the corner of his eye. The cart wheels creaked on.

Finally Bram could stand it no longer. “You'll fall off your seat if you lean any more, girl.”

“Where is it?” she demanded, still staring furiously at the unyielding trees ahead.

He tapped her shoulder and she glared at him irritably. He gave her a wink and then pointed with a stubby, gloved finger.

“You didn't look
up
,” he said.

She did so, raising her gaze to the canopy where the trees meshed their branches overhead, and she took a sharp breath in amazement as she laid eyes for the first time on Shieldtown.

 

It was at that moment, more than any, that Poison realized the true scale of things.

Her entire life had been spent below the canopy of the Black Marshes, her vision hemmed in by the dank leaves overhead so that she never got to witness the full expanse of the sky. The marshes were flat, too, and hills such as the one that she and Bram had camped on that first night were rare. There were few vantage points from which an observer could gaze out over the tops of the trees and see the sprawling immensity of their surroundings, and Poison had not been to any of them.

And now, suddenly, she saw this.

The trees peeled back, cut away in a wide semicircular clearing, and towering above them was the most immense wall that Poison had ever seen. It stretched up so high that Poison had to tip her head back to the point of dizziness just to see the top. To either side it seemed to go on for ever until it was lost behind a curve or a fold in its vast length. Its surface was dark rock, jagged and pleated by the ravages of millenia of weathering, pocked and scabbed with bumps and ruts. This was no man-made wall, but the implacable strength of nature. The land –
all
the land – rose by a thousand feet or more. It was as if she had lived her whole life on one stair of a stairway, and had just come to the base of the next one up.

To say that she was staggered was an under-statement.

“Something of a wake-up, eh, girl?” Bram grinned, unable to conceal the relish in his voice at the sight of his precocious companion stunned to silence.

She could see very little of Shieldtown itself, for the angle was too steep. What she could see were the enormous elevators that winched up and down the wall, disappearing into steaming buildings of metal as they reached the ground before emerging again to ascend up to the dizzying heights. There, she could see a fringe of exotic buildings crowding over the edge of the precipice, some of them leaning dangerously or projecting cranes out into the air: tantalizing glimpses of the wonders of the town to come.

Bram nudged her. “Put your jaw back together,” he said. “You look like a snake trying to swallow an egg.”

She cast him an irritated glance, embarrassed at being caught gawping. They were heading across the clearing now, towards the cluster of buildings at the base of the wall. Other carts were there, as well as foot-travellers in all kinds of attire, watched over by helmeted guards with long, hooked swords hanging from their belts.

Poison gathered herself a little, annoyed that she had betrayed her naïvety by her reaction. If the world was as frightening and cruel as Fleet had warned her, then she could not afford to let anyone know how little she knew of it. She suddenly felt like a small child again, consumed by wonder and frightened of the unknown.

Bram brushed his bushy moustache with one gloved finger and harumphed. “They call it Shieldtown because of that great big wall there. It's called a shield wall, when the land rises sheer like that. You know, the Black Marshes are completely surrounded by this wall. It's like a great big section of the world, hundreds of miles wide, just suddenly dropped a thousand feet. The marshes are below sea level now; that's why they're always wet.”

Poison digested this without showing anything on her face. She had been mistaken in her perspective. It was not that Shieldtown was higher than the marshes; it was that the marshes were lower than Shieldtown. Shieldtown was the same height as the rest of the land. And that meant that her entire life she had been living in one vast, immense pit.

“Does anyone know why it happened?” Poison asked. Bram looked across at her with a questioning murmur. “Why the land fell like that?”

Bram turned his eyes back to the plodding grint that was hauling them ever closer to the outbuildings of Shieldtown. “There's legends and stories. There always are. I don't pay much attention to them.”

Poison felt vaguely disappointed, but the feeling lasted only a moment, for by that time they were near enough to the base of the wall for a guard to come striding over to them. He was wearing a half-head helmet which left only his mouth and chin visible, and his uniform was a scuffed assemblage of metal greaves, hide and leather. It was not exactly the shining armour that Poison had envisaged a guard wearing.

“State your business,” he said.

“Bram of Oilskin, wraith-catcher,” Bram announced. “And this is Poison, my daughter.”

Poison did not so much as twitch an eyebrow at the lie. The guard looked up at her with calculated suspicion. She met his scrutiny with her disconcerting violet gaze.

“Poison,” he said, deadpan. “That's an unusual name to give your child. You must love her very much.”

“She's a treasure,” Bram agreed, blithely ignoring the sarcasm.

The guard gave a long-suffering sigh and went to the back of the cart, pulling open the tarpaulin and looking inside. He picked up one of the metal jars within and held it to his ear. Then, apparently satisfied, he tossed it back in with the others.

“You can go,” he said, dismissing them rudely as he walked away. Bram snapped the reins and the grint squawked before ambling into motion again. They went a few dozen feet in silence, until they were out of earshot of the guard.

“
She's a treasure,
” Poison mimicked, and Bram burst out laughing.

 

The interior of the wheelhouse was a noisy roar of machinery, hot and dark. They had to queue for a short while behind other carts, waiting while the lifts were loaded up each time one arrived. When it was their turn, Poison watched as their ride clunked down from above. She was glad of the darkness, for it concealed her trepidation. The lift seemed such a fragile thing, merely a cradle of metal with a flat floor and a few pitifully inadequate railings running all around it. Bram urged the reluctant grint on to it as a team of sweat-streaked attendants held it steady. Two more carts, both pulled by horses, were crammed on to the same lift as Bram and Poison dismounted. For some reason, it seemed safer to be standing on the metal floor than sitting atop a cart. Poison felt a slight nausea as the gates of the lift were clanged shut, and then there was a great lurch as the mighty cogs in the wheelhouse bit together, and they were carried upward.

For the first few moments, they were surrounded by the darkness and the din of the wheelhouse; and then suddenly all noises ceased as they rose through the roof and out into the sunlight and open air. Poison saw the buildings dropping away beneath her at a terrifying rate, the trees that had previously seemed so high bowing forward as perspective made them tiny, and for the first time in her life she was above the canopy of the Black Marshes, and her breath was stolen anew.

It was vast. Every moment of her life, every beat of her heart had been played out beneath that awesome, never-ending eternity of green, an undulating blanket of dank marsh-trees cut through by sludgy rivers that she did not even know existed. The flat plane of the marshes seemed to tilt downwards as she rose higher, exposing more and more of its back, disappearing into a swampy haze in the distance. She could not even see to the other side, where Bram had told her the shield wall rose as high as this one. It was swallowed by the curve of the horizon.

“I feel so small,” she said aloud.

“We
are
small, girl,” Bram said, leaning on the railing of the lift, apparently heedless of the inconceivable drop below.

Poison shuffled warily to the edge of the lift and looked down. “I wish you'd stop calling me
girl
,” she said, more to distract herself from the strange terror she felt than because it bothered her.

Bram grunted. “Better than Poison,” he said. “What possessed you to come up with a name like that?”

“What do you care?” she replied. “You were happy enough to tell it to that guard.”

Bram frowned. “Just couldn't think of anything better on short notice, that's all. Didn't want him getting suspicious. If I'd have said you were from the marsh. . . Well, not many folks come from the marsh, they don't like to leave their villages. And if you were anything other than my daughter . . . and us travelling together. . . Hmm. . .” He blushed beetroot behind his white moustache, and tugged his hat rim down a little more. “Don't like awkward questions.”

Poison had been looking over the edge at the ground below; she was surprised to find that the initial fear had died, and she was not in the least bit scared, though they still clanked and clattered and swayed higher and higher and the world fell further and further away. She glanced at Bram and gave him a quick smile. “I think I'm enjoying this,” she said.

“Ha!” he barked. “I can tell
you
weren't made for the swamp. Never met a marsh-dweller who wouldn't have fair soiled themselves if they ever got up this near the sky.” He blushed again, suddenly. “Pardon my language.”

Poison looked at him in frank surprise. “Why Bram, I do believe there's a gentleman hiding behind that moustache!”

Bram went a deeper shade of red and then excused himself and made a great show of seeing to the grint.

 

Poison did the best she could to hide her amazement at Shieldtown and its inhabitants, but she suspected she was not particularly successful. Bram seemed to be greatly pleased with himself, casting sneaky glances at her and then chuckling into his collar when she scowled at him. They rode their cart down the main thoroughfare, jostling with traffic. Poison had never seen so many people, nor heard such a noise as they made when they were all together, gabbling and shouting amid the bray of horses and the growl and squawk of grints. She was accustomed to the drab fashions of the marsh-folk, where fabrics were made from the rough resources they had to hand and bright colours attracted flies and wasps and other, more deadly creatures. Here there were no such restrictions, and the outfits that she saw were dazzlingly gaudy. Billowing dresses with puffed sleeves; open-throated shirts with pleated hems; tall hats and soft leather shoes: far from impressive, she thought they looked ridiculous.

She was much more awed by the town itself. Metal, a rare and frankly half-useless commodity in the marshes, was all around her. Great towering spires of iron jutted out towards the sky. Domes of tarnished bronze were surrounded by steaming pistons that pumped up and down, making them seem like the dancing legs of a bloated metallic spider. Streets seemed to crowd in haphazardly, houses overlapping each other as if parts of the town had melted and flowed like wax into other sections before rehardening. There were nothing like the uniform huts of the marsh here: the dwellings were each and all different, some rounded and lumpy like a heap of mudballs in a pile, some rigid and tall and triangular, some flat and low and unassuming. Signs outside the shops on the thoroughfare fizzed and blinked with a strange energy, flashing bright and then dim even in the daylight.

“Is it what you expected?” Bram asked.

“I didn't know what to expect,” Poison replied. “Not this, though.”

“Do you know where you're going?” he asked. “Want me to take you anywhere?”

“I need to find a man called Lamprey.”

“Ah,” Bram said. Then, surprisingly, he asked: “And what do you need to find him for?”

Poison gave him a strange look. “We've been in the same cart together for a week now, and that's the first time you've ever asked me why I was going to Shieldtown.”

Bram shrugged his massive shoulders. “Not my business.”

“That's right, it's not,” Poison said.

They were silent for a short time, Bram nudging the grint through the sluggish flow of the traffic.

“Do you think you might know where he is?” Poison asked at length.

“Maybe,” Bram said. “I thought it wasn't my business.”

“It's not,” Poison replied. “I can find him on my own.”

“I'm sure you can. You don't need me.” Bram nodded as if at his own wisdom and shook the reins idly.

More silence passed.

“So you
do
know where he is?” Poison prompted.

“I never said that,” he replied.

“But if you did, you'd tell me?” she queried.

“If you asked,” he replied.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well where is he?”

“How should I know? I've never heard of him.”

Poison gritted her teeth and swallowed down a retort. Bram gave her a sidelong glance and pulled his hat brim down over his bushy eyebrows.

“I'll do you a deal,” he said.

Poison studiously looked the other way, pretending that she didn't care. “What kind of deal?”

“I'll help you find him. You give me
two
silver sovereigns when we do.”

“What kind of deal is that?” she snapped, amazed at his audacity. “I can find him on my own.”

“You could,” he agreed. “But you don't know this town, you don't know these people, you don't know their ways. Now maybe you'd do fine; you're tough, and you've got a quick head on you. But likely you'd end up face down in an alley, and for a lot less than the silver sovereign you offered me, or the other coins I hear jangling in your pack.”