Impossible creatures, p.16
Impossible Creatures, page 16
‘We’re going to Antiok – to the Island of Centaurs, to find one who can make the potion.’
‘What?’ said Nighthand.
‘I’m going to remember.’
‘But you said—’
‘I know what I said. I’m not saying it any more.’
Nighthand strode closer to her, his huge bulk moving fast across the deck, his shoulder knocking a lamp off the wall. It shattered; nobody glanced at it. ‘What do you mean?’ He made no effort to try to keep the hot hope from his voice.
‘I mean I’ll take the potion, and I’ll remember the way into the maze. I’ll go to the centre, to the dark, and I’ll find whatever evil creature it was that sent that man after me – and I’ll destroy it.’
‘Are you sure?’
She nodded, a jerk of her chin upwards, and the wind lifted her hair and made it nod too. ‘If I don’t, it won’t just be Gelifen,’ she said. ‘It will be everything. I can’t let any more be lost.’
There was the briefest silence, filled only by the noise of the sea – and then Nighthand gave a great roar.
‘To battle then! To the unknown! To nobody-knows-what, together!’
And Irian pulled the map on to the deck and unrolled it, and Ratwin bent over it, and Nighthand put his hand to the glamry blade and moved to stand beside Mal, where every inch of his blood and bone had told him he belonged, and Christopher tried to smile at her.
And she smiled back. It was war, that smile. Her face as she turned to the horizon had the kind of look that ought to come with a warning sign: Stand clear: danger.
A PIECE OF COMPLICATING AND UNWELCOME NEWS
But it was not simple. Very little, after all, is ever simple.
For half a day, the voyage flew. The boat moved fast and sharp across the waves, skimming like a skipped stone. The water turned turquoise, and the weather was hot, of the kind that makes the skin between fingers and toes turn slippery with sweat. They paused, seven hours in, for Ratwin to fish, and Nighthand swung himself over the edge of the boat after her and into the water.
‘Little dip?’ he called up, and Christopher and Mal joined him in the ocean.
‘I don’t swim,’ said Irian. She ran her hand through her close-cropped hair and looked away.
Ratwin watched her from the sea, her squirrel face sceptical. ‘A sea-biologist who doesn’t water themselves?’
‘Somebody’s got to stay on the boat,’ Irian said.
The water was full of life – darting fish in blues and oranges, something flat and silver-grey moving along the bottom of the ocean bed beneath them – and Ratwin caught twelve large prawns, spitting them one by one on to the deck with a soft pfft, and then sitting back to wash her horn with her forepaws.
‘Too much salt water makes it brittle,’ she said. ‘Dirt-horn is a terrible insult to a ratatoska.’
They roasted the prawns on the deck, and Christopher and Mal were covered to the wrist in shreds of pink shell when a spot appeared in the sky.
‘Look out above!’ called Ratwin. ‘Something incoming.’
The spot took on shape, and colour, and clarity: the long green wings of a longma. It circled lower and closer, and Christopher’s whole body stiffened in shock.
It was Anja. She wore navy silk riding clothes, and sapphires, and an expression as inscrutable as the sea.
Nighthand’s glamry blade was at once in his hand. ‘Anja? You dare show your face here?’
The old woman called down to them. ‘Don’t kill me, Nighthand. It would be a waste of good information.’ She kicked the longma, and it dropped closer.
‘Get out of my sight,’ said Nighthand, ‘or I swear I’ll cut you down into the sea and leave you there to rot.’
Mal watched, her lips pressed together, and her eyes hot with rage.
‘I warn you, I am going to fly closer,’ said Anja. ‘I can’t shout across this distance.’
Irian breathed, ‘You handed her to a murderer.’
The old woman did not apologise. Her heavy-lidded eyes blinked, once. ‘I did not know he was a murderer. I heard – from the fortune teller, and a ratatoska – that the child was the missing Ever-Soul. I heard what you wanted her to do: to drink the potion, to remember all that the Immortal ever knew. I wished to stop it.’
‘Why?’ said Mal.
The old woman nudged the longma to move away: away from Mal, and her small, set face. There was a twitch in the woman’s eyes; whether repulsion or fear or guilt, or some bleak mixture of the three, Christopher couldn’t tell. ‘I am the city’s primary landowner; head of the guild—’
‘We were told that. You own the city,’ said Mal.
‘And were you told that my great-grandfather was its governor? That he was elected in honour of the vast donation he made to the city?’
Mal didn’t answer, so Christopher said, ‘What’s your point?’ He saw no need at all to be polite.
The longma beat its wings, and Anja’s voice grew flintier. ‘My great-grandfather had a business partner – a man he’d known since they were young, working in selkie-rock mining. My great-grandfather had him killed, and took the profits of his work. I spent years hunting down and burning all written records of it. And everyone who knew him is long dead. But the Immortal knew.’
Ratwin’s whiskers were quivering with anger. ‘You said you likes the high-bloods, the ready-made-eliters, the born-on-tops. You told them so.’
‘I did.’
‘And you’re not. You’re the bloodline of a crook.’
‘I –’ and the woman’s nostrils flared – ‘chose to make an exception for myself. But I couldn’t allow anyone to know. Not I wouldn’t – I couldn’t! It would end everything – not just for me, but for so many whose livelihoods rely on me—’
‘Oh, you were being charitable, getting me killed?’ said Mal.
‘These are nuanced questions, far beyond your comprehension! My social position, my financial security …’ Her voice tailed off. ‘So I took the necessary steps.’
Irian rose. ‘You need to get yourself out of here, before I kill you myself.’
The longma dropped lower, hovering over the ocean, beating its wings in long slow beats.
‘I didn’t realise!’ said Anja, and her voice quavered and cracked. ‘I didn’t understand his plan! I swear, in my heart—’
‘Oh, please. You ate your own heart with a knife and fork long ago,’ said Nighthand.
‘I believed only that he would take her somewhere. He said she would be taken to one of the western islands, and kept there. He said he wouldn’t harm her. And I believed him. Or … I chose to believe I believed him.’
‘Quite.’
‘And so I owe you a debt. And I pay my debts!’
‘Do you?’ said Nighthand. ‘Or do you pay what you choose to pretend is your debt? Who is your debt-accountant? Your own conscience? Because your conscience is a drunkard. What you have done is not a debt that’s payable.’
‘I don’t want anything you can give me now,’ said Mal. Her mouth was thin and sharp as a knife.
‘Then listen, or don’t listen! I know what you’re seeking: the potion, made by centaurs. I heard it from a ratatoska.’
They waited, a row of upturned cold-cut faces. Nobody spoke.
‘I flew to Antiok earlier today, to tell them to make ready. What the centaurs told me was bad news. There is only one centaur who knows the potion lore and has the skill to make it. His name is Petroc. He is no longer on their island. He has been banished.’
Nighthand bristled. ‘So we’ll go wherever he is. We have a boat.’
‘My boat.’
He splendidly ignored her. ‘We have our bodies and our knives and our wits.’
‘He is on the Island of Murderers.’
There was a pause.
‘That, yes, might be a problem,’ said Nighthand.
‘I flew to the Island of Murderers too – I cannot land there, of course, nor get close, but I was able to speak to him. He says he’ll make the potion, but there’s one ingredient he doesn’t have.’
‘What is it?’
‘He requires gold.’
‘I have gold,’ said Nighthand, and his hands went to his earrings.
‘It must be plucked from the tree of living gold. The tree is on Areat, guarded by a jaculus dragon. There.’ She cocked her chin. ‘That is information worth having, no?’ And before anyone could speak, she kicked the longma, and circled upwards into the sky.
They sat on the boat, mid-ocean, rising and falling on the waves. Ratwin sat at the tiller, but the boat drifted. They did not know where to steer.
‘The Island of Living Gold is possible. It is guarded by a dragon, so it might involve being burned to death, but it is possible,’ said Nighthand.
‘The bigger problem is the Island of Murderers,’ said Irian to Christopher. ‘The island is impossible to leave. As Naravirala said, any boat can enter, but none has ever made its way out again.’
‘Has anyone tried to swim?’ said Christopher.
‘They have, and they have died,’ said Irian.
Nighthand’s whole face lit up. ‘That’s an idea, boy. I could swim!’
‘I just said, Nighthand. All who try it have died.’
‘But with the glimourie fading, the waters are changing. The power of the waters around the island may have faded too. I say, I risk it.’
‘And I say, I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
Her voice was quiet, but uncowed. ‘It doesn’t seem the most rational or reasonable route to take, Nighthand.’
‘Rational be damned!’
‘That’s easy to say – but your strategy might leave everyone dead on the seabed. We will find another way. Let me think.’
Irian’s eyebrows drew together, and her mouth tightened, and her whole face took on the look of an arrow pointed at a question.
At last, she spoke. She did no exclaiming; only a flicker in her eyes told that she had found her answer. ‘The sphinxes,’ she said, ‘told us that the Immortal had a dryad-wood boat. The last Immortal put it in the dining room, for Time to eat it.’
‘But Irian—’
‘And a dryad-wood boat is the only thing that can break away from the Island of Murderers.’
‘Irian, no matter what the sphinxes say, the boat cannot exist,’ said Nighthand. ‘I still vote for swimming.’
‘Why can’t it exist?’ said Christopher. ‘Until last week, I thought none of this could exist.’
‘Irian knows why,’ said Nighthand. ‘It’s because no dryad would give her tree for wood. It would be like giving your own skin.’
‘But think,’ said Irian, ‘of what we know of the Immortal. Back at the beginning, when they were a fish, a wolf, an eagle – why shouldn’t they have been a dryad?’
Nighthand’s face was slowly shifting, from resentment to light. ‘Irian …’
‘What if they made a boat from their own wood? That would explain its rarity, and its power.’
‘Brilliant woman!’ Nighthand clapped a hand on hers, registered the warmth and softness of her skin, and swiftly removed it.
‘And dryad-wood doesn’t age. So if we can find that boat—’
‘Ratwin!’ cried Nighthand. ‘Mark out the way for the Island of the Immortal!’
Irian frowned at his departing back. ‘It’s not so simple as he seems to think,’ she said. ‘If the island has been abandoned for a hundred years, it could be overrun. And not only with plants. With creatures. Creatures that can kill with a single bite.’
‘Well,’ said Mal, ‘so what. If I had to, so could I.’
THE ISLAND OF THE IMMORTAL
It took two days of harsh and violent storms to reach the island. At night, the stars were invisible beneath bulging thunderclouds, and there were moments when even Ratwin hesitated, unsure as to the way.
During the worst of it, Mal moved out of her room and into Christopher’s, and they slept side by side, waking when they were tossed against the wooden walls. The side of the boat sprang a leak in the cold dawn, and as they came in sight of the island Irian bent over it, her eyes narrowed, hammering in nails. All five were hungry and tired and sea-stained, but Nighthand’s face was alight with excitement.
‘Welcome,’ he said, his voice deep and sonorous, ‘to the Island of the Immortal.’ He spoilt the effect by leaping into the water to haul the rowing boat on to the sand and misjudging the depth, disappearing up to his neck.
Nighthand – wet but untroubled – hauled the boat to shore, helped Mal down to the sand, and offered Christopher his hand.
Irian, they had agreed, would stay on the Shadow Dancer. ‘If I don’t get this mended, we don’t sail,’ Irian had said. Ratwin stayed too, crouched beside Irian, her mouth full of nails.
They walked over soft, yielding white sand, which gave way to white pebbles and then to tall, silver-barked trees.
‘Does it feel familiar?’ Christopher asked Mal.
She shook her head. ‘I hoped it would. But, no – nothing.’
They walked up the beach, into the trees. Christopher kept up a steady turn of his head, left to right. The woods were strange; although there were the calls of dozens of birds, nothing rustled or moved at ground level. It was eerie. At last the trees thinned, giving way to a sweep of meadow, and they stepped out of the wood into sunlight. Mal stopped. Her mouth formed an O of astonishment.
‘And there’s your house, little Immortal,’ said Nighthand.
‘It’s a palace!’
The meadow led up to white stone steps, rising to an immense, flagstoned courtyard. From its centre the palace rose in deep yellow stone, crenellated and ornate, to the sky. Three towers, each topped with a dome in dusky pink, gave it a look of wit and knowing intelligence, and its vast arched windows with their broad sills gave it solidity and purpose. It had, clearly, once been lavished with time, and attention, and hope.
But time had taken it back. Its walls were barely visible for the sweep of red roses that climbed up its sides. The flowers, left untended for a hundred years, had rioted, and they were everywhere: white roses curling up window ledges and spreading across the domes, orange roses forming in bushes ten feet across, pink roses cascading across the huge slabs of creamy yellow flagstone towards them. Hundreds of birds nested across the domes, and as they approached took off into the sky, crying out in alarm.
As they moved across the meadow towards the palace, Christopher sniffed. The air smelt of sea and flowers, but as they grew closer there was another note to it – a scent of rot.
‘Can you smell that?’ said Christopher.
Mal nodded. They approached the palace, slowly, their nerves on guard. ‘There’s something wrong here,’ she said.
‘What?’ said Nighthand. He stepped in front of her, one arm out to protect her. ‘Point me to it!’ He drew his knife.
‘The grass on the meadow should be longer,’ said Mal. Her face was tense.
Nighthand’s face fell. ‘Little Immortal, I cannot fight the grass.’
‘She’s right,’ said Christopher. ‘If the roses have gone so wild, why is the grass so trimmed?’
‘Someone’s been trimming it.’
‘Or something.’
They were almost at the palace now; Christopher could see the windows, clouded with dust and thick with bird droppings; someone had painstakingly painted miniature images along the windowpanes: lemon trees, flowers, tiny mermaids, a stern and lovely adult griffin. His heart tightened.
Some of the windows were cracked, and in others the roses had broken clean through the glass, pouring into the palace. ‘At least we won’t have to break a window to get in,’ said Christopher.
‘Wait here,’ said Nighthand. He clambered over the windowsill, looked left and right, and nodded, giving a hand to Mal and then to Christopher.
The window formed the end of a long, high-ceilinged corridor, marble floored, its ceiling studded with jewelled mosaics. The corridor was flanked on both sides by marble statues of creatures: nymphs and dryads, armed centaurs, a unicorn. In places, the statues were so over-twined with roses that only the heads or feet showed. Many of the faces were missing a nose or an ear, but the person who had carved them had cared about making something true and lasting. They seemed to breathe.
Their feet rang in the corridor. At the end, it formed a T, leading to left and right.
‘Which way,’ asked Christopher, ‘to the dining room?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mal.
‘No instinct?’ said Nighthand.
‘No! I told you.’ She looked side to side and bit her lip. ‘I don’t like it here. That smell’s stronger. We need to get out fast. Me and Christopher will go left,’ she said, ‘and Nighthand, you go right.’
Nighthand began to argue – but she turned, her chin high. ‘That’s an order,’ she said, and strode around the bend.
Christopher caught up with Mal; they pushed open the door, and found themselves in a ballroom. The greenery of outside had come cascading in over the last hundred years, and there was a piano, entwined in ivy, and a cello, and some wooden instruments Christopher had never seen, covered in vines.
‘Not here,’ said Mal. ‘Watch out! The sweet-suckle will give you a rash.’
It was then that they heard it. A ringing sound: of something hard and fast, clanging against the marble floor.
‘It’s up ahead!’ she said.
‘Quick! This way,’ said Christopher. But as they stepped out into the hallway, he let out a hiss and pulled Mal down to crouch behind a statue of a centaur.
‘Look,’ he breathed.
The thing that came around the corner of the curving corridor had hard intelligence in its eyes. It was, at first sight, a horned horse: larger than a cart horse, but thinner, gaunt: its ribs were visible, and its skull was vivid beneath its skin. Its coat was darkest purple, and its hooves were yellow, stained and callused and cracking. Its hide hung loose upon its body, like that of an old man. Its horn was black, and pointed at the tip like a rapier. It stank of blood and rot and ruin.
The creature sniffed. It let its tongue loll out, and its nostrils widen. It was insolent.
