She would not let it happen. Tomorrow, she thought. Somehow she would find the way tomorrow. She slipped her hand inside her doublet and felt her knife in its sheath. The guards had not searched her. They had not thought a girl would carry a weapon. But the answer would not be found in weapons, not in knives. When she got the chance she would give hers to Tarl so he could defend himself. The answer lay elsewhere, perhaps inside her, in all the things she had learned from Pearl and Hari and Tealeaf and the twins.
She felt for Duro and Danatok. They had retreated to the bell tower. The dogs were hidden in the alley across the street.
Under the canopy the Clerk slept. He snored. The woman wet his lips with water. The guards, except for the two watching her, had gone back to their dice.
Keep hidden, keep silent, she whispered to Duro. Tomorrow, she whispered.
Yes, tomorrow, he whispered back. I’m here. Don’t be afraid.
Xantee smiled. Oddly enough she was not concerned for herself, only for Hari, and for the world the gool and these agents of hers, Keech and the Clerk, were slowly turning inside out.
She lay down on the cage floor and rested.
The day was clear and sunny but the presence of the gool was in the air. She had no smell, unlike her children, but thickened every indrawn breath so that it slid into the lungs like an eel. The men carrying the cage, eight of them, coughed and spat and Xantee, in the cage, felt as if she had swallowed water from a drain. Tarl held the bars and spat too, aiming at the bowmen on either side. He was not afraid of them shooting him, nor afraid of the Clerk’s torture. Somehow he meant to escape. And now he had a chance for, in the night, while the bowmen slept and the guards nodded beside the brazier that made the only light in the trading hall, Xantee had given him her knife. He had weighed the short slim-bladed thing in his hand and grunted with contempt, but slipped it into his sheath, where it sat hidden, blade and handle.
The Clerk rode in a chair carried by four sweating men. He went ahead of the cage up the zigzag path and Xantee felt him probing for ambushes Keech might set. She could have told him there were none. Only mice and lizards lived in the bushes on either side. She felt them draw deep into themselves as the Clerk went by. The cage had a roof of bars bent to meet in the centre, but the floor was timber and the shafts the men lifted with were made from gas-lamp poles torn down in the streets. The structure tipped on every corner and Xantee and Tarl held the bars to keep from sliding. The carriers stumbled and cursed. Duro and Danatok and the dogs climbed three turns below, keeping their minds veiled from the Clerk, keeping out of sight.
The Clerk had not spoken to her this morning. He had eaten soup the woman fed him in a spoon, and peed into a pot she held for him, and swallowed his potion, and fallen back into his drugged sleep. Xantee pitied him for the pain that stabbed his withered arm when he was awake. It almost made her understand his cruelty. But drugged or not he had the ability to spring into consciousness and be alert. Now, finding no ambush on the path, he slipped into a doze. His head lolled, the clawed hand clung like a bird to his cheek. Poor Clerk, she thought. Poor little man. It was not a thought she would allow herself when he was awake.
The path levelled out and joined a wide street. The bowmen scouted left and right. The heaviness in the air increased, which puzzled Xantee – shouldn’t the breeze from the sea make things fresher? Then she understood – it was like a blow, knocking her thoughts askew and making her dizzy.
The gool was here. The gool lived on this hill.
She should have worked it out sooner. The mother gool would have her den, her hole, her hiding place, close to the clearing where Keech and the Clerk held their meetings, where the air about them, poisoned by their cruelty and greed, gave her the nourishment she needed.
Xantee gripped the bars and tried to hunt the creature down – was she in the tangle of trees on the other side of the street; was she in a hollow in the cliffs, or in the blackened ruins of one of the great houses? Wherever Xantee sent her mind she found emptiness. The gool must have defences. She must have ways of concealment, some barrier she raised. Perhaps with Duro’s and Danatok’s help . . .
‘Girl,’ cried the Clerk. She had forgotten him and some edge of her thoughts had brushed his mind, jerking him awake. She felt his attempt to burn her as he had burned Tarl, and she played her part, falling, screaming, and when he released her, lying curled on the floor, sobbing as though with pain and exhaustion.
I’m all right, she said urgently to Duro. He might come charging up the path.
The chair-carriers had turned the Clerk to face her. ‘Who were you talking to, girl? Was it Keech?’
She rose to her knees, miming pain, and whispered just loud enough for him to hear: ‘I was hunting the gool. She lives up here.’
‘Ah, so you’re back with your tale of monsters. You’re a fool, girl. You’re a child. You belong in the nursery.’ He waved at the chairmen to turn him round, called to the bowmen: ‘Watch her. Shoot if she tries any tricks.’
‘Are you all right, Xantee?’ Tarl said. She was pleased to hear him use her name. Usually it was ‘girl’, like the Clerk.
‘I’m all right,’ she said, and added in a whisper: ‘He can’t hurt me. I was pretending.’
‘Then teach me to pretend.’
‘There’s no time.’
They crossed the wide street and the Clerk was alert again, searching for an ambush in the brushwood smothering the lawns. They went past a mound of charred timber and in a moment broke into an open space, behind a house leaning like a tree in a gale. Xantee knew, from Pearl’s stories, that it was the Ottmar mansion, the only house to survive the wars. The lower part of the back wall was torn off, exposing staircases and water-ruined walls once lined with tapestries or painted with murals. Yet there was enough grandeur left to make the two petty kings choose it as their meeting place. They must feel puffed up here – although the reminder of luxuries they could not have must also increase their savagery.
A space had been chopped in the scrub. The ornate rim of a fountain showed through tangled vines. Frogs croaked inside, but fell silent as the Clerk’s party approached. The bearers put down the chair and cage. They backed away round the side of the house, leaving the guards and prisoners and the Clerk, with his nurse crouched humbly at his side. He nudged her away with his toe.
‘See, girl, Ottmar’s house. See, dogman. Here is where your dogs killed Ottmar. And here is where you’ll die, when I’ve shown you to Keech. He’ll want you for himself, but you’re mine.’
Tarl shook his head and made no reply. A stillness had fallen on him. He was remembering Hari, who had jumped from the cliff beyond the trees, holding Pearl’s hand; who had died that day, and come back to life, and now lay dying again.
Xantee felt a whisper from Duro, circling clear of the Clerk: Are you all right?
He and Danatok had crept round the open space and hidden in trees by the cliff. When she had answered him – Yes, I’m all right – he sent her a picture of the marble hand that stood at the cliff-edge – shining white in Pearl’s and Hari’s tales, even when shattered by a cannon bolt, but now stained yellow and half-clothed in moss. She saw it was a place the gool might live, but hid the thought because she did not want Duro distracted. The Clerk and Keech must be dealt with first, then the gool.
The Clerk was alert. Xantee felt his distrust and his hatred of Keech. She felt schemes wriggling in his head, schemes for ambush, schemes for murder, but he could not make them settle and take shape. The Clerk was afraid of the burrows man and unsure that he could master him. It made him pucker his face and look at Tarl like a hungry child. Tarl he could master, he had no doubt of that.
‘Clerk,’ said the bowman leader, ‘Keech is coming.’
‘I can feel him. Who does he bring?’
Xantee felt Keech too and felt, like a punch, the prisoners he brought, and although sick with horror, was ready when he stepped from the scrub, behind his knife-guard. He led Sal and Mond on ropes tied around their necks. The cousins were bedraggled, beaten, bruised, but they still held hands.
Keech’s eye found Tarl with a click-beetle jump and his hand fell to his knife, but the Clerk cried, ‘No, Keech. He’s mine. I branded him. See the name on his forehead. I put that there in Blood Burrow, in Ottmar’s time, and it makes him mine. And see the girl. She runs with him. Runs with his dogs. I will punish Tarl but you can have the girl. She’s my gift, but watch her, Keech; she can sneak inside your mind if you let her. She’s a pretty thing, don’t you think?’
Keech still had his eyes fixed on Tarl. ‘I want no girl,’ he said. ‘Throw her off the cliff. But I’ll give you these two as slaves’ – jerking the ropes and making Sal and Mond stumble. ‘They came to spy on me. They have a voice, the same as the girl, but feeble, like new-littered rats. I took them, Clerk, no trouble, and I’ve brought them here to show you – and now you show me Tarl in a cage. He’s the one I want. Give him to me.’
They quarrelled like children, while the bowmen and knifemen eyed each other, ready to spring into action. Xantee was forgotten and she took the chance to speak with the cousins: Sal, Mond, listen. Duro and Danatok and the dogs are in the trees. Be ready when I call. Soon I’m going to talk with these men. You remember Barni’s tale? The Clerk and Keech are the red star and the white. And the gool lives here, on the hill. Can you feel her lapping at them? Lapping the poison? I’ll get them to help us and we’ll send her back –
You can’t, Sal and Mond said. They’re not men any more. They’re gools themselves. Kill them, Xantee. Kill them both. The gool will die.
No –
‘Girl,’ the Clerk cried, ‘who are you talking to?’
‘No one –’
Again he struck at her and again she writhed and howled. This time he kept on longer, to impress Keech. She knew that Duro, hidden in the trees, would hear her cries, and she risked sending a message: I’m all right. Stay hidden. Then she felt a burning behind her eyes, and realised that Keech had joined the Clerk. They were competing to see who could hurt her most and some of the pain was edging through her defences. She concentrated, pushing it out, keeping it out, but the effort was so great – the attack coming, red, white, red, white, and sharp one moment, blunt the next – that she had no energy to writhe and scream . . .
‘She’s fainted,’ said the Clerk. ‘You thrash around like a beached whale, Keech. You hit with a club. The mind is a spear –’
‘You’ve got nothing to teach me, Clerk. Let me have Tarl. Then you’ll see how I make men howl.’
Again they argued.
Tarl was kneeling beside Xantee, brushing hair from her eyes. She felt for the first time that his mind was open to her, and she said silently: Tarl, I’m speaking to you. Say nothing. I’ll stay like this for a moment. You can talk to me. Think what you want to say. Talk into my head.
She heard a whisper, as faint as an insect’s wing brushing a curtain: Girl, Xantee, I can’t do this.
Yes you can. Don’t try, don’t think, just talk inside your own head and mine at the same time.
I can’t . . .
I can hear you. I’m going to wake up in a minute. I’m going to tell them about the gool. I can hear her feeding on them. If I can make them understand –
You can’t. They don’t care who dies, or if the world dies. They only care about themselves.
I’ll try anyway.
And after that I’ll kill them.
How, Tarl . . . ?
There was no more time. Keech and the Clerk had finished their snarling. Xantee let Tarl lift her to her feet.
‘So, the dogman helps his sick bitch,’ the Clerk said. ‘Pull her out, bowmen, so I can give her to Keech. I’ve no use for the other two. Keep them, Keech. But tell me, why do you want this meeting? To show me your prisoners? Mine are better, the dogman and this girl, who’s my gift to you. She looks like that Pearl who jumped with the dogman’s son off the cliff. Blue eyes, see. Your two are vermin. They’re slant-eyes. Use them to scrub your latrines.’
‘It was you who wanted a meeting, Fat One. And I want no gift from you. Keep her to rub ointment on that claw you call a hand –’
‘Stop,’ Xantee shouted. Two men had hauled her from the cage, while others aimed their bows to keep Tarl inside and clanged the door. She stood up from the chopped scrub-stumps where they had thrown her. ‘Stop,’ she said more softly, but threw a hard command, like a stone, at each of them: Stop your talking. Listen to me.
The Clerk leaned forward in his chair, fixing her with his gaze, his good hand gripping Tarl’s knife, which he had picked up to taunt Keech with; and Keech swivelled round on his bandy legs, like a wooden puppet, and clicked her into focus with his beetle eye.
‘No woman talks to Keech like that,’ he said, and slid his knife out of its ratskin sheath.
‘Wait, Keech,’ the Clerk said. ‘She has a story to tell. You believe in monsters from the other world. You can listen to her around your fires at night, you and your men who tremble at the dark –’
‘Clerk, I’ll kill you soon.’
‘Look at my men. Every bolt is aimed at you.’
‘And my knife men have their blades ready to throw –’
‘Stop,’ Xantee repeated. ‘You’re doing the gool’s work. Listen while I tell you Barni’s tale. You Clerk, and you Keech, you’re not monsters, you’re men. This is your world. But you’re letting this creature feed on you and make it hers. Her children are in the forests and the mountains. Every day they grow stronger. The forests fall before them, the mountains turn to dust, they drink the seas, they’ll kill every living thing – and it all starts here, on this hill, with Keech and the Clerk, with your hatred and cruelty and malice and greed. That’s the poison she feeds on. Can’t you feel her sucking it out of you? You’re the red star and the white. Barni’s tale –’
‘Enough,’ said the Clerk.
‘Shut the slut’s mouth,’ said Keech. ‘You, One-eye, use your knife on her.’
When she thought about what happened next, Xantee could never place things in a sequence. Often she thought, yes, Duro, then Tarl, then the dogs, and Sal and Mond, but she could never decide who acted first. Her own part was to try and stop the killing, but she managed to save only one life. She remembered plainly, and always with horror, the man, Richard One-eye, advancing towards her with his knife balanced in his hand, his eye-socket hollow, with eyelids stitched together, and his good eye slick with anticipation. For a moment her mind failed to work, and she felt Keech and the Clerk, both aware of her strength, working to hold her – but she managed a command: Stop. Then everything happened at once.
One-eye stopped. Perhaps it was Xantee’s command, perhaps Duro’s knife, thrown from the trees, thudding into his side, up to the hilt, below his raised elbow. That was what she remembered first: the thud, the red squirt of blood painting One-eye’s arm. But the dogs, Him and Her, materialised in the same moment, streaks of yellow and brown racing across the open space and leaping on the bowmen who kept Tarl covered. Too late. Both had released their cords. One bolt was deflected by a cage bar, but the other took Tarl – who had already jerked Xantee’s knife from his sheath and thrown underhand between the bars; and quick as light the blade sped across the open space, over the head of the nurse at the Clerk’s feet and struck the Clerk in the throat, high under his chin. The Clerk’s eyes sprang wide with astonishment and his glasses slid down his nose. He toppled – but Xantee did not see him fall, or Tarl fall, or see the dogs biting the bars of the cage. Sal and Mond . . .