‘Look what I’ve found.’ Jimboly’s smile was a multicoloured parade. ‘Down in the workroom. Hiding inside a giant clam. Does that make her a pearl?’ One of her arms was curled around Arilou, almost protectively, but her other hand held a sharp-looking saw to Arilou’s throat. Arilou’s eyes were misty with tears, not distance, and her mouth made soft panicky shapes.
Hathin raised the lobster.
‘I’ll . . . I’ll smash it . . .’ Her voice weakened as she spoke. Her angry strength had burned itself out. She felt herself pale and become paper-frail before Jimboly’s grin. Jimboly was tidal wave, vulture beak, wet-weather fever. There was no pity in her. There was no stopping her.
‘Good,’ said Jimboly. ‘Smash it. Smash everything in this shop. Smash everything and everyone in this whole town. I’ll stop you when I start caring.’
‘You should start caring right now.’
Both Jimboly and Hathin lost their eye-lock and looked towards the voice. Larsh was standing in the doorway, a string in his hand. At the other end of the string fluttered Ritterbit. Jimboly reached eagerly for the leash, but Larsh stayed back, watching her with mute, wary enmity.
For a long moment all three stared at each other, Hathin still poised to shatter the lobster, Jimboly with her knife to Arilou’s throat, Larsh with the flickerbird’s leash in his fist.
‘Now this is just getting silly,’ Jimboly said at last.
31
A Lost Lost
‘What’s got into you?’ hissed Jimboly in Lace. Hathin watched the lines in Larsh’s face deepen. Clearly the animosity she had always sensed between Larsh and Jimboly had not simply been an act to hide the fact that they were secretly working together. No, they genuinely despised each other.
‘A little cloud of dust just told me that there was a plan to silence me,’ said Larsh.
Hathin felt the hatred of Jimboly’s dark glance slide over her skin like the flat of a blade.
‘Friend of yours, was it, this little cloud of dust?’ snapped Jimboly. ‘Somebody you trust? Somebody who wishes you well?’ But her voice was shaking. Her eyes were on Ritterbit, and her face twitched each time he fluttered, as if she could feel an invisible thread tug-tug-tugging, pulling it loose one row of stitches at a time.
‘And who’s Jimboly then?’ Hathin echoed her enemy on impulse. ‘Somebody you trust? Somebody who wishes you well?’
‘She and her friends want you dead, fish-wizard. I’m the only thing keeping you alive.’
‘Wrong.’ Hathin could not prevent her eye straying to Arilou, whose arms were stiff with panic. ‘You’ve served your paymasters’ purpose. Now you’re just a danger to them. We’re the ones that need you alive. It’s your masters we’re after, and you can help us find them.’
‘You’d hardly think two minutes ago she was smashing your damselfish, would you?’ Yes, it was undeniable – Jimboly’s words had lost some of their confidence, some of their sly, serpentine power. ‘Listen – if that brat leaves this house, she’ll bring the whole Reckoning down on us. If not, then we have Arilou and her little nursemaid. The reward’s ours. All you have to do is keep your head.’
‘The Reckoning’s already coming,’ said Hathin, praying it was true. ‘But they’ll do what I say.’ Very carefully she pulled back her arm binding. Both Larsh and Jimboly stared in astonishment at her tattoo. ‘It’s my quest. If I say you live, nobody else can say otherwise. You’ll be safe. All you have to do is keep Jimboly’s bird away from her – and give it to me.’
‘Larsh?’ Jimboly’s voice held a warning as Larsh advanced into the room. He hesitated, then took a rapid step towards Hathin, slipped Ritterbit’s leash into her hand, scooped the lobster from her willing arms and placed himself behind her.
‘Now . . .’ Hathin stopped to swallow, a little apprehensive at having an enemy of Larsh’s size behind her. ‘Now we swap, Jimboly.’
Jimboly’s eyes flickerbirded around the room, over the bedroom door by which they had all entered, across the balcony door opposite. They flickered up and down Hathin’s diminutive figure, making plans, appraising.
‘No,’ Hathin said as Jimboly took half a step forward. ‘The three of us are leaving that way.’ She pointed to the bedroom door. ‘You leave Arilou next to it and step away from her, and I’ll tie Ritterbit to this bedpost. Then you’ll walk to the bed and we’ll walk to the door.’
Jimboly scowled, but nodded. Slowly she guided Arilou to the doorway, then took two paces backwards. Heart beating, Hathin tied Ritterbit’s leash to the bedpost, her knife ready to slash the leash if Jimboly jumped at her.
‘Now –’ Hathin’s heartbeats felt almost like sobs of hope, of relief – ‘we walk past one another . . .’
Within the house there was a sudden crash of furniture overturned. Jimboly’s scowl was instantly replaced by a look of panic. She leaped forward, grabbed Arilou about the waist, placed her knife against her belly and dragged her backwards on to the balcony.
‘No!’ screamed Hathin, even as Jaze burst into the room.
‘What . . . ?’
‘Jaze, guard him! And – and that! Both of them!’ Hathin pointed madly at the cowering Larsh and the startled Ritterbit, then bolted after Jimboly. She burst on to the balcony and found it empty. Wooden steps led down to street level.
Even with the protection of her hat, the rain was blinding and deafening, a savage grey curtain of falling sky. Hawkers ran past in search of shelter, their wares on their backs. The roadway was a milky red soup, frothing and leaping with the falling water.
And where, amid this frenzy, was Jimboly? Where was Arilou?
It was a desolate Hathin that returned to Jaze a little later to report that she had failed to find Jimboly and Arilou. He listened to her story of events without interrupting.
‘So why keep this man alive?’ he asked when she finished, looking at Larsh.
‘We need him for now,’ Hathin said wearily. And because I promised him I’d let him live, she added in her own head. But I promised Dance I’d kill the traitor . . . Oh, I can’t think about that now.
No, now they had other work. The unconscious Therrot, whom Jaze had left lying on the workshop floor, had to be revived and told that he had been cruelly cheated in his hopes of finding his mother alive. On Hathin’s insistence they made a quick search, then climbed to the hayloft to claim the four pigeons roosting there.
‘If we take them, Jimboly can’t report back to her masters just yet,’ Hathin explained. ‘According to Tomki, her pigeons all escaped from her pack when the crowd broke her rattle.’
They were an unhappy little group as they walked back to the Superior’s palace. Therrot looked bruised both in body and mind, and could meet nobody’s eye. Larsh winced each time a passer-by greeted him sunnily as ‘Master Craftsman, sir’, his hard-won glory already slipping through his fingers. Hathin fidgeted helplessly, tears in her eyes and a furious flickerbird in her pocket.
Uncharacteristically, it was Jaze who offered her some comfort.
‘We’ll hear from Jimboly soon,’ he murmured. ‘She daren’t hurt Arilou or you’ll release her bird. And she can’t go far, or she’ll start to unravel. And that means that Arilou can’t go far either.’
As it happened, he was only partly right. And the news of Jimboly and Arilou that arrived next morning was in fact even worse than Hathin had feared.
Tomki, who seemed to have ears in every camp and alley, brought the Reckoning the story.
Arilou still in tow, Jimboly had fled to the edge of the city, where the shacks on its outskirts mingled with the new camps of the Obsidian Trail walkers waiting for Crackgem to become more peaceable. Here Jimboly had unexpectedly bumped into an old enemy. It was Bewliss, the man she had tricked into leading the riot against the palace.
He and his two friends had been delighted to have another chance to deal with the flickerbird witch. In the hope of winning allies, Jimboly had called out to the nearest gaggle of lounging ruffians, who happened to be
Mistleman bounty hunters. They had taken no interest in her plight until in desperation she had yelled that she’d come out to bring them a Lace, at which point their sense of chivalry had made a miraculous recovery.
‘Once Bewliss and his friends were chased off, it sounds like she tried to backslide and say she wasn’t selling Arilou,’ explained Tomki, ‘but the bounty hunters weren’t having any of that. So she got a thank-you and a little money, and off they trotted before anybody could tell them their Lace belonged in a Stockpile.’
‘“A Lace?” That’s all Jimboly called her?’ Jaze frowned. ‘That’s something then. She may be in the hands of bounty hunters, but they don’t know who they’ve got.’
‘They will,’ Hathin replied, with a miserable sense of urgency and helplessness. ‘Even if they don’t work it out, once they get to Mistleman’s Blunder Minchard Prox will recognize her. We have to go after them, rescue her . . .’
‘According to Tomki, there’s more than a dozen of these bounty hunters, and they’ll be heavily armed,’ Jaze said levelly. ‘We’d need to send a large part of the Reckoning after them – too large to go easily unnoticed. Also, the bounty hunters have a day’s head start on us, and they can walk in the open. With all the new roadblocks and checks, we’d have to take big detours, travel at night, skulk our way along ditches.’
Hathin hung her head, but was touched to notice Jaze’s ‘we’. He evidently took it as a matter of course that if such a dangerous mission took place he would be a part of it.
‘We’d have no hope of catching up with them before they reached Mistleman’s Blunder itself,’ Jaze continued. ‘And everyone there is coiled, waiting for a Lace attack. You can’t take a step without somebody checking your teeth. If that wasn’t so –’ he looked around with a hint of ruefulness on his face – ‘then I think half of us would be there already, trying to spirit people from the “Safe Farm” . . . or hunting down Minchard Prox to help Hathin finish her quest.’
Hathin felt sick. It was all true. She had an ugly choice. She could flounder in indecision while Arilou was taken ever further from her, and ever closer to Mistleman’s Blunder, or she could send half the Reckoning to their deaths.
But then, quite suddenly, the king of tricks hatched in Hathin’s brain, like a baby dragon.
For a while she could do nothing but stand absolutely still while she peered at the idea from every angle, tapping at it with her mind to test its soundness. At last she sidled up to Tomki.
‘Um . . . Tomki?’ She glanced at him shyly, then whispered the idea to him and watched his jaw drop.
‘Dance!’ he declared, rallying himself. ‘Hathin’s got an idea.’
Hathin swallowed, her skin prickling as the assembled Reckoning turned their gaze upon her.
‘If I’m right . . .’ she began slowly, ‘then the Reckoning can follow the bounty hunters. All of the Reckoning, or as many as we want. They can march by day, and they can use the road. And nobody will stop them. Nobody will even try.
‘What we do is this: the Superior sends one of his deputies to talk to the messenger from Mistleman’s Blunder, the one who’s waiting for an answer to Mr Prox’s message. And –’ she took a deep breath – ‘and the deputy will promise to do exactly what Prox wants: deliver the Stockpile to the Safe Farm. So if they see a big group of the Superior’s men setting off with lots of guns, and “guarding” a large number of Lace, they won’t be surprised.
‘Only the Lace they’re guarding won’t be the Stockpile. It’ll be us.’
32
Soul-steeling
From the moment Hathin spoke the idea aloud it took on a life of its own, as if she really had loosed a baby dragon. Within an hour it had become a full-grown-dragon idea, and she could see the flame of excitement reflected in every face as it caught and held. Even the Superior, after performing a few pendulum swings between bravado and panic, declared in favour of the plan.
Hathin was present in the great reception hall when Minchard Prox’s messenger received his letter of response.
‘The city of Jealousy is glad to assist in this time of emergency,’ read the letter. ‘Our Lace prisoners will be brought under guard to the Safe Farm of Spearhead forthwith. We would be grateful if nothing were to impede our passing.’
As the messenger put away the letter, Hathin felt her stomach lurch. The Superior, the Reckoning, the Stockpile – everybody had now heaped their stake on Hathin’s plan, and the die was cast.
But nothing was fast enough for Hathin. While orders were sent out for provisions, Hathin’s mind was on Arilou, Arilou, Arilou. Hathin was like a tiny cog in a great clock trying to spin twice as fast and force the rest of the mechanism to do likewise, and so of course she did nothing but rattle herself loose and get in everyone’s way.
In the end she gave up and went out into the courtyard with the caged Ritterbit to practise throwing knives at a cloven log.
Louloss had made her the cage, but had insisted on keeping her distance as Hathin cupped Ritterbit’s tiny, docile form in her hands and slipped him into it. She had told Hathin to be careful of Ritterbit, and had shaken her head when Hathin promised to keep her shadow away from him.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ she had answered. ‘I think he likes you.’
Hathin pondered this as she aimed at the log, threw, recovered her knife, threw it again.
‘You’re getting better.’ She turned to find Therrot slumped on the edge of a fountain. His tone was odd, a mixture of apology and accusation.
‘Yes.’ It was true. It was so much easier today. Before she had always imagined herself facing an enemy, with her friends’ gaze tingling against her back, waiting for her to strike the avenging blow. Now there was just a knife, and a target, and a thing she had to do with her arm, and a cold black marble in her stomach that told her to think of these things and nothing more.
Where had this cold little ball of obsidian come from? Suddenly she remembered struggling with Jimboly in Larsh’s workshop, and blindly lashing her knife towards Jimboly’s face and neck. And it had not been hard. She had not even needed to think about it. Was that when she had become a real revenger?
‘It’s about time, isn’t it?’ She walked back and took aim again.
‘Little sister . . .’ Therrot flinched as soon as the words had escaped him and seemed to be bracing himself for her outburst. Hathin realized that she did not have one to give him. With a deep sense of loss she realized that the little ball of cold would let her feel no anger towards him, and no fondness either. There was only exhaustion and impatience.
‘I’m not your little sister,’ she said, as kindly as she could. ‘Your little sister is dead.’ She sighted up, and her knife shocked cleanly into the heart of the log’s rings.
‘You sound like Jaze.’ Therrot’s voice was dazed.
‘I know you want to explain about running off with Arilou. I know you feel like you’re carrying around this big heavy rock until you can talk to me about it . . . only if you do then you’ll be giving me the rock. And it’ll squash me flat. I have too much to carry in my head already, Therrot. So please, don’t.’ She could be calm, she could be kind. But how could she make him go away? ‘There’s so much I have to . . . I have to be ready. I have to be all those things you told me a revenger has to be.’
If you’ve got enough anger, then you just go mad. A calm, cool sort of mad. And then it’s all easy.
‘I have to be good at this. For when the time comes.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Therrot said quietly. ‘You’re fine the way you are. Hathin . . . I want you to forget everything I ever tried to teach you. You’re not a killer like us . . . like me.’
She stared rigidly at her knife for a few seconds, then sneaked a glance towards Therrot. It was too late, he was already striding away. For some reason she found herself remembering the moment when she had been too slow to wave at Lohan, just before he had dropped out of her world and gone to his doom on the beach. If it had not been f
or the tight little marble in her stomach, and the comfort of Ritter-bit’s black bead eyes, Hathin might have burst into tears.
It was very lucky that Jealousy lay in the lap of Crackgem. In Jealousy it was believed that madness was something that came upon you like hiccups, because you had breathed in when Crackgem was breathing out. If you behaved oddly, everyone just tutted and waited for it to pass.
And so when the palace guards were sent out to confiscate every pigeon in the city, people simply muttered, ‘Crackgem’s breath,’ and went about their business.
If Jimboly could not be found, she could at least be prevented from contacting her masters to tell them of Arilou’s capture, Larsh’s defection. The pigeon coop where Tomki had first seen her had been raided, but nobody knew where she might have another stash of little messengers, so the guards searched haylofts, shacks, even the belfry of the stubby clocktower.
Everywhere the Superior’s guards asked after the flicker-bird witch, but Jimboly was nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile, from a hiding place beneath a raised hut, a burning mind pictured Ritterbit’s blunt smiling beak accepting seeds from new, young hands.
Jimboly imagined Hathin and Ritterbit walking blithely through palace and town, the invisible gossamer of her own soul tangling in trees, slamming in doors, getting caught in the long legs of elephant birds, each step yanking loose a little more of her spirit.
She thought she could feel herself unravelling already. She lay on her stomach and peered out at the palace.
‘I’ll wring your sweet little neck,’ she muttered. A listener would not have known whether she spoke of Hathin or Ritterbit. ‘I should have done it a long time ago.’
She lived in dread of the bounty hunters working out Arilou’s identity. If any harm came to that oozy-brain, then her sister, her precious little sister, would think nothing of letting Ritterbit off his leash. And then Ritterbit would forget all about Jimboly and fly right off to the growling, steaming forest of Mother Tooth, where nobody lived but the birds and where axe never swung and sling never whistled.