Gullstruck Island

  It was her turn to laugh at Hathin’s expression.

  ‘Laderilou tell us you two rabbitrun away coast. She have none eye, none ear. You carry Laderilou. You push . . .’ The girl furrowed her brow and made broad elbowing motions, as if shoving her way through a crowd of giants. ‘Push many mountain to side. Laderilou feel mountain tremble, rock give way.’

  Hathin ducked her head to hide the fact that her eyes had filled with tears.

  That terrible chase across the King of Fans and Sorrow had taken every ounce of her will and courage. Thinking back, it had felt a lot like she was struggling against the very mountains themselves. And Arilou, the dead weight in her arms, had not been oblivious to it after all. She had known; she had cared.

  Their feet had taken them in a circle. The rocky shelf came into view. The children were squatting on its edge, leaning over to spit. There was no sign of Arilou.

  ‘Where Laderilou?’

  Jeljech repeated the question in Sour. An answer was given by a young man whom Hathin had seen sitting next to Therrot when she left.

  ‘She go with friend belong-you.’

  ‘What?’ Why would Therrot and Arilou leave the village without her?

  Jeljech continued questioning the young man. It emerged that some time after Arilou had sent her mind down to the town, she had suddenly given a joyful noise of recognition. All she had said was ‘friend from beach home’ over and over in Sour. Then she had made a strange noise which seemed to mean a great deal to Therrot, for he had leaped to his feet, his eyes bright. His tone was fiercely questioning and he pointed down towards the city repeatedly, but of course the bystanders had not understood a word.

  Then he had taken Arilou’s arm, heaved her to her feet and led her quickly away down the path towards Jealousy.

  Hathin listened in horror. Had Therrot gone mad? Why would he drag Arilou down into the tinder-tense streets of Jealousy in broad daylight? Dazed, she listened as the young man tried to imitate the sound which had had such an intense effect on Therrot.

  It was a soft rasp of sound, half sigh, half surge. This time Hathin knew immediately what it was meant to be. The next moment she was sprinting through the village to find Jaze.

  ‘Jaze! Therrot’s gone! He’s taken Arilou to Jealousy! She was searching the town with her mind, and she didn’t see Jimboly, but she found somebody else – somebody from the Hollow Beasts. Alive and in the city, just the way you said. Arilou tried to tell everyone who it was. The Sours heard her making a strange sound, like a wave stroking sand. Only Therrot realized it was a name.

  ‘I know who it is now. I should have known before, but I was so sure she was dead. And now Therrot knows she’s alive he’s running down to find her before we do, probably because he’s afraid we’ll kill her as a traitor. And she must be the traitor, and he’s taking Arilou right to her.

  ‘It’s his mother, Jaze. It’s Whish.’

  30

  The Sound of Waves

  The young man who had witnessed Arilou’s conversation with Therrot had not heard much, but what he did remember was useful. When trying to describe the place where she had seen the ‘friend from beach home’, Arilou had been talking of ‘red houses’ and ‘black goat go round-round on top’.

  ‘I know what that is!’ Hathin exclaimed. ‘It’s in the craftsmen’s district. One of the Dukes of Sedrollo built it as a stables, but then all his horses died of fly-plague so now it’s just shops. It has a black weathervane shaped like a horse on top.’

  Jaze flicked impatiently at his knife sheath as they began the scramble down the mountainside, looking all the while for their missing companions.

  ‘So . . .’ Something had set in Jaze’s face, like a new blade fixing in a haft. ‘Tell me about this Whish.’

  Scrabbling breathlessly over the treacherous rocks, Hathin told Jaze all about the old feud between Whish and Mother Govrie, and then, reluctantly, about finding Whish ready to dash Arilou on the rocks of the Lacery.

  ‘On the day all the Lost died,’ Jaze said with icy gentleness, ‘somebody tried to kill the one Lost who ended up surviving, and you didn’t think it was worth mentioning?’

  ‘I thought Whish was dead! There was this drowned hand in the Path of the Gongs, and it was wearing her shells . . . it was like I’d seen her body. Only of course I never did. And there was Therrot . . . I couldn’t rip through his memories of his mother. I couldn’t bear to.’

  ‘No,’ said Jaze simply. ‘You’re a child.’ There was no venom or anger in his tone, but Hathin knew that in his mind she was no longer Doctor Hathin. ‘You haven’t spared Therrot anything by your silence. He has worse coming to him now.’

  ‘What . . . ?’ Hathin’s throat tightened as she was overcome by a new fear. ‘You’re not going to hurt him, are you?’

  ‘That depends what he’s done,’ Jaze said grimly, ‘and what he does when we find him.’

  The coloured mud pools of the volcano’s lower slopes had been drying out and cracking, and now they seemed to stare at her with the frightened faces of old men. Jaze’s countenance in contrast was smooth and untroubled. Fractured youth has its own special kind of cruelty, and looking into his face Hathin understood it better than she ever had before.

  Therrot had that cruelty too. He had tried to teach the art of it to her, so that she could kill anyone who stood in her way. But now the one standing in her way was Therrot.

  He can’t hurt me, Hathin thought desperately. I’m his little sister. The wind roared down in ragged gasps about her, as if Crackgem was laughing.

  The Superior’s supposed death had galvanized the thoroughfares of the craftsmen’s district. Outside every workshop a blanket was strewn with offerings suitable for his tomb. Miniature soldiers, less-than-grand pianos, diminutive musicians, their reddish varnish sticky as blood. Hathin and Jaze had to push through the crowds of people haggling over the models with sombre eagerness.

  There were the ‘stables’, a long building cobbled from rounded red bricks so that its walls looked like slabs of bubbling meat. During a long-forgotten earthquake the stable had shrugged its front facade into rubble. Now you could see inside, where every stall of the stable had been converted into a tiny shop. At this moment the weathered wooden door of each stall was pulled to, for the sky had deadened to a deep violet-grey, and the daily onslaught of rain was expected at any moment.

  Jaze strode to the first door and stooped to peer in between the cracked slats. Hathin tensed for the door to be flung open, but Jaze passed to the next door and peered again, then the next, and the next.

  The rising wind blew grit into Hathin’s eyes. As she turned her head to shield them she suddenly caught sight of two figures hugging the wall of an adjoining building, perhaps once the treasured home of some Master of the Stables. She knew in an instant Therrot’s jacket with its coarse twine braid, Arilou’s Sour garments, her loose green belt given life by the wind. Therrot was trying to guide Arilou around the corner when he looked up and saw Hathin.

  The expression on his face told her instantly that she was no longer his ‘little sister’. She had been a small floating spar for him to cling to after the shipwreck of his life. Now she was simply a threat.

  There was a bigger threat for him to face, however. Therrot’s eyes widened as Jaze sprang past Hathin, and he sprinted off around the side of the building, pulling Arilou after him. Hathin raced to keep up with Jaze, and turned the corner in time to see Therrot drag Arilou in through a door and try to close it behind them. Jaze had his foot in the gap before it could shut. Both men were shouting, but Therrot was a helpless storm of noise, while Jaze’s words organized themselves into tight, angry rows like teeth.

  ‘Let me in, Therrot! You know it has to be done—’

  ‘Leave us alone, Jaze! I mean it! You touch her – you touch a hair of her head and you’re dead!’

  ‘Dead! Yes, I’m dead! You’re dead! Listen to me – a dead man has no family, no mother! We all gave up being alive for some
thing greater that had to be done.’

  ‘What do you want from me? I can give up my family, but I can’t give up loving them. I can’t give up killing or dying for them! What if it was your mother?’

  When Jaze spoke again, something sharp had curled out of his seeming calm like a cat’s claw from the dead grey skin of its sheath.

  ‘I would drive a knife through her throat if my mother mysteriously survived a trap laid by a traitor. If her shell bracelets were found planted upon the corpse of another woman. If I knew she had always hated Arilou and her family. If I knew that on the very day of the Lost deaths she had lured Arilou to the water’s edge and tried to dash her brains out on the rocks . . .’

  The door opened abruptly, catching Jaze’s face. It was closely followed by a tidal wave of Therrot. The suddenness of his attack bore Jaze backwards. A blot of blood on his shoulder reminded Hathin that Jaze was already injured.

  Then Hathin’s breathless, horrified helplessness was extinguished by a single thought.

  Arilou. Whish must surely be somewhere in this house, and so was Arilou.

  She scrambled past the two thrashing revengers and in through the door, which promptly blew shut behind her, unsettling her and cutting out the daylight. She blinked the sudden darkness into meaning and found that Arilou was nowhere to be seen . . . and that the room around her was at the bottom of the sea.

  Tiny windows with blue-tinted diamond panes gave the whole room a dusky ocean glow. Along the wall-shelves glowed elaborate pink-and-gold conches. Before her lurked a great turtle, its shell a gleaming mosaic. Above her floated shoals of iridescent angelfish and pouting trumpet fish, all hanging motionless as if sheltering from a strong current.

  For a dazed moment Hathin could only wonder what magic ruled this place. Then she saw the threads suspending the shoals, the wood-grain in the turtle’s shell. More models, more shrine offerings.

  Her chest was tight as her trembling hands worked her knife free from its hidden sheath. No more time to prepare. No more time left to become the killer everybody needed her to be. She had promised to take the traitor’s name herself, and the traitor was here. And so, somewhere, was Arilou.

  Hathin advanced cautiously through the crowded workshop. Shadowy benches, anvils . . . lean, angry Whish might be skulking behind any one of them, perhaps with her hand over Arilou’s mouth.

  There was a faint sound from the other side of the room, a shuffle like that of wicker shoes against stone. Hathin snatched up a murderously realistic swordfish with her free hand and spun to face the noise.

  There was a great tree of creamy coral near the opposite wall. A shadow-patterned face was peering through its lattice, straight at Hathin. As she recognized it, suddenly she felt she was back in the cove of the Hollow Beasts.

  She could hear the rasp of the waves. Coming in with a whish, and going out with a . . .

  Larsh.

  Poor Arilou had tried. She had opened her unpractised mouth and made a sound like waves. Therrot had heard what he wanted to hear, Hathin had heard what she dreaded to believe, and both had thought it the same name. But it was Larsh, not Whish, who now skulked in his cave of coral like a scorpionfish and watched Hathin with unblinking, unfriendly eyes.

  There was a pause, and then the traitor stepped out from behind his coral screen. He was every bit the distinguished tradesman now, in his dark blue waistcoat, his poor pink-lidded eyes hidden behind wire-frame spectacles, a novice moustache waxed to curling points. Even the jewels seemed to have been removed from his teeth. But for all that, it was still Larsh the fishmaker, with whom she had shared secrets on the night of the mist.

  A memory flashed across her mind. Larsh standing on the beach alone, freeing a pigeon from its cage. Not out of pity or kindness. No. Those birds must have carried his secret reports to the men who would mastermind the destruction of everyone he knew.

  Larsh, with a look of recognition dawning in his eyes. Boyish disguise or no, he knew her now.

  ‘Where’s Arilou?’ Hathin’s voice was louder than she expected, and shook as if tugged by a fiddle bow.

  Larsh flinched as she opened her mouth. Then as the echoes died he seemed to relax. Perhaps he had been expecting her to call for help. Perhaps she was shrinking before his eyes into a small girl with a patch of troubled water on her forehead, a girl who had stumbled into his workshop alone.

  ‘Please put that down,’ he said calmly, nodding towards the fish.

  ‘Where’s Arilou?’

  ‘I never thought I would hear you shouting. It doesn’t suit you. It makes you ugly.’

  Grief was ugly. Rage was ugly. Fear was ugly.

  ‘You made me ugly, Uncle Larsh.’

  ‘Oh, I never had any quarrel with you, Doctor Hathin.’ He gave a short but weary sigh. ‘If things were different, I would be very glad to see you alive.’

  Beyond the walls, a sound like the fizz of a wavelet, rapidly swelling to a rumble. Outside, sky had declared war on earth and flung down a million spears of rain. The noise filled Hathin’s brain so that she could not even hear the words in her own mouth.

  ‘What?’ Larsh’s brows twitched. ‘What did you say?’

  Shakily, to strengthen herself, Hathin was whispering the names of the Hollow Beasts: Mother Govrie, Eiven, Lohan, poor maligned Whish, each a little louder than the last, until Larsh blanched under his greyish tan.

  ‘What makes those names so sacred? Why shouldn’t I sacrifice them? They sacrificed me. They sacrificed you. They took the best years of our lives and gave us nothing in return, not even recognition. Look around you – I can create fish-eyes from mother-of-pearl that will swivel to follow you. I can paint silk so like a moon wrasse’s scales that the gulls are fooled. I have always been the best craftsman on the coast – perhaps the best on Gullstruck – but I had to pretend to be a failed fisherman to protect the secret of the farsight fish. I wore the lustre off my eyes working in darkened caves, when I should have been the king of master craftsmen.

  ‘Everything you see about you I fashioned in secret, and had to hide. They are all I have to show for forty lost years. I am an old man, Hathin, and my life has been stolen from me. And then one day somebody gave me a chance to take back just a little of what my life should have been. All I needed to do was betray the village that had betrayed me.’

  ‘I understand.’ Hathin had found her voice again. ‘I understand it all now. We died for fish. Not even real fish that somebody needed because they were starving. Wooden fish. Shrimps made of clay.’ She stared down at the silvery lacquer of the swordfish in her hands. ‘So who died for this one? Eiven?’

  The swordfish’s fragile blade splintered as she swung it against the heavy workbench. Larsh gave the shriek of a man that had seen his own child gutted.

  ‘And who was this? My mother?’ A cream-and-mauve conch smashed against the wall. ‘What about this one? Lohan?’ A delicate squirrel fish shattered into red-and-white shards. ‘And where’s Whish? This one?’ A high-swung stool knocked a tiny turtle from its string. ‘Father Rackan?’ Tinkle, skitter. ‘And where am I, Uncle Larsh? What was I worth? A prawn? A limpet shell?’

  ‘Stop it!’ All the colour had leeched from Larsh’s face, and he had snatched up a metal-headed mallet. Hathin knew that he meant murder, but somehow all her fear had abandoned her.

  ‘You’ll never live to enjoy it! You’re no use to them any more and you know too much – they’ll silence you, even after everything you’ve done for them!’

  Larsh ran at Hathin, but she ducked the swing of his hammer and darted behind a table. She grabbed a huge lobster carved from ivory and blushed with paint. It lolled over her arm with a domino-clatter of intricately carved joints.

  ‘Get back! Not another step, or I’ll . . .’ She lifted the lobster as if to smash it, and Larsh halted. She had years of his life in her hands.

  ‘Now – where is Arilou?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Larsh with a new caution and meekness. ‘Why do you
think that she’s here? If you’ll just be calm and . . .’ He was keeping his eyes rigidly on Hathin’s face. Rather too rigidly.

  Too late Hathin heard the scrape of a sandy heel on the floor behind her. Two long, strong brown arms were flung around her, pinning her own arms to her sides.

  ‘Careful! Careful of the . . .’ Larsh’s face was frozen into a grinning wince, his eyes fixed on the lobster.

  ‘Hit her with your hammer, you dolt!’ Jimboly’s voice was hoarse but unmistakable. ‘She won’t be such a wriggly little fish with her head knocked in.’

  Hathin’s knife was still in her hand. She aimed a slash at Jimboly’s elbow, and the older woman squawked and loosened her grip. Hathin turned about, just in time to be grabbed by the collar and pushed down backwards on to a workbench. Reflexively she lashed out with her knife towards Jimboly again, and felt a brief resistance, but only brief. She had missed. Or had she?

  There was a long, desolate scream. The dentist’s hands were no longer pinning her down.

  ‘Catch him! Catch him!’

  Trailing his severed leash, Ritterbit was flickering about the room, occasionally spreading a taunting tail. Hathin’s wild knife had cut through his rein.

  ‘Close all the doors, the windows!’ Jimboly croaked.

  Hathin seized her moment and sprinted for the back door of the workshop, ducking a swing from Larsh’s hammer.

  Arilou. Where are you?

  Hathin found herself in a Doorsy little parlour. No Arilou behind the dresser. Still clutching the lobster, Hathin sprinted to the next room, a study with a woven grass sleeping mat spread on the floor. No Arilou in the oaken chest.

  ‘You search the hayloft; I’ll go through the workroom again!’ Jimboly’s voice, urgent but distant.

  Up some stairs, Hathin found a bedroom with its own balcony. No Arilou in the garderobe. No Arilou in the four-poster bed, which smelt dusty with disuse. No Arilou under it.

  The door suddenly swung wide, and Hathin scrambled up off her hands and knees.