Cuckoo Song (46 page)

The sounds woke her. A roar of engines, juddering and thundering. The hiss of sand. Shouts and orders. Gear clashes, the grinding and shrieks of metal defying its limits.

Trista opened her eyes, and found still she had eyes to open. There was a watch in her hand, and there was still a hand to hold it. She sat up with difficulty, clutching at a rent in her flank.
She was weak and in pain, but there was still a Trista to
be
weak and in pain. There was a strange numb lightness in her head that wanted to become joy, but was not yet sure how to go
about it.

It took her a moment to realize what the noises must mean. Those were not Besider noises. Those were the sounds of a construction site. Somewhere out there, ordinary hard-working people were
preparing to place the cap on the pyramid of the station. She was still running out of time.

She clambered unsteadily to her feet, tucking the precious watch into a pocket, and staggered to the doorway, stooping now and then to scoop up precious fragments from her innards. Beyond it lay
the Architect’s stone-walled labyrinth.

By all means try to find your way out
, the Architect had told her.
You will fail.

But the Architect had not reckoned on the trail that Trista had left, all too unwillingly, as he dragged her down corridor after corridor. Her wake had been scattered with scraps and stray
leaves. Now, leaning against the walls for support, Trista followed them back.

She would not be fast enough. Outside she could hear megaphone speeches, and applause from a crowd. Then a deep, juddering thrum that had to be the engine of the great crane . . .

. . . which cut out again. There was silence, and then a discontented, puzzled hum of voices that went on and on. New speeches followed, apologetic in tone.

They’ve stopped. They’ve stopped!

Pen, wonderful Pen! You did it! You made them stop.

At long last, she found the little door through which the Architect had dragged her. With a painful, incredulous surge of hope she pushed it open, and then stopped dead.

The room beyond was filled with figures. A montage of Besider faces glared at her, stripped of all disguise, their features twisted by anger and grief. At their head stood the Shrike, his eyes
burning under his bowler hat.

‘The Architect!’ was the whisper that ran through the crowd. ‘The Architect! The Architect!’

Trista remembered the long, resonating scream, and her heart plummeted. They had all heard it. They knew what had happened. No tears or pleas would placate them for the loss of their hero, their
saviour. And so she did not weep, and did not plead. Instead, she looked straight into the eyes of the Shrike.

‘They’ve stopped work out there – have you noticed that, Shrike? Piers Crescent won’t let them put the cap on the pyramid until he knows I’m safe. And if he
doesn’t, this building will be unfinished. Unsafe for all the people who want to live here.’

A tremor of uncertainty passed through the crowd, and all faces turned to look at the Shrike. As Trista had guessed, in the absence of the Architect, the Shrike was the obvious leader.

His bulldog features twitched with suppressed feeling. Again she thought she sensed behind them a curved beak, this time itching to snap her in two, or crack her like a nut. All that he needed
to do was give the word, and his fellows would rip her to shreds. But, she realized, that was the last thing he could do. He was bound by a magic promise not to harm her, either directly or
indirectly.

‘If you don’t make peace with Piers Crescent,’ Trista went on, as calmly as she could, given that she was using one hand to stop her insides falling out, ‘it will mean
disaster for everybody sooner or later. For him, and for you and your people. Will you let me talk to him for you? Or will you make the same mistake as the Architect, and tear apart everything for
revenge?’

The Shrike bristled for a few more seconds, then made a curt, angry gesture to the others, who reluctantly fell back towards the banqueting hall. It was not simply wrath that was brightening the
Shrike’s button eyes, however, as he scrutinized Trista’s living, breathing form like someone analysing a conjuror’s trick.

‘
How
did you . . . ?’ His grey gaze flickered with something that might have been respect.

‘Maybe you made me better than you thought,’ answered Trista.

He glared at her, then shook his head.

‘Somebody get the lady a ladder,’ he barked, his tone heavy with reluctance. His gaze passed over her rents and tears, and he winced fastidiously, conflict visible in his face. In
the end, impulse triumphed over restraint. ‘And . . . And while we’re waiting, my needle and thread!’ He gave Trista the angriest smile in the world.

‘We are not friends, Cuckoo, but if I
am
letting you out, you will not emerge looking like some seamstress-in-training patched you together with her eyes closed. I am a craftsman,
and I have my pride.’

Chapter 43

For the next few days, the Crescent family was front-page news, but the stories about them were very confusing. It was public knowledge that both the kidnapped Crescent girls
were safe and well, but there were wild and varied reports of their rescue.

Most agreed that the youngest girl had been discovered wandering in the snow by a policeman on the beat. She had subjected him to a dazzling deluge of tall tales, the tallest being that she was
the missing Penelope Crescent. Fortunately the constable had been patient enough to check this story, which had turned out to be true.

The rescue of the older girl was a far more sensational matter. Those who gathered to witness the Capping Ceremony to mark the completion of the new railway station were forced to wait as the
proceedings stalled for inadequately explained reasons. It was later revealed that Piers Crescent, the civil engineer who had designed it, had suddenly demanded that everything halt, since the snow
would make the placing of the apex too dangerous.

While the crowd became restless, and the organizers tried to convince the increasingly irate civil engineer that his fears were groundless, a solitary figure had been noticed at the very top of
the pyramid, weakly waving its hand. Hundreds watched as several men, including Piers Crescent, clambered up the scaffolding and came down again carrying a frail-looking young girl. Those who saw
her recognized her from her photograph as the missing Theresa.

In spite of all this evidence, however, there were still some newspapers that insisted that Theresa had actually been rescued the night before, when she was discovered dripping and dishevelled
on a dockland jetty.

There was just as much confusion about the identity of the girls’ kidnappers. All the papers that evening had carried stories on the arrest of Violet Parish, with lurid details of her
rumoured criminal contacts. Having painted her scarlet as blood, the same papers’ accounts of her next day were short and rather furtive. The Crescent girls and their family were apparently
adamant that Violet was blameless, and that she had in fact been injured in her attempts to protect the children.

Indeed, it seemed the one person who had pointed the finger at Violet Parish was a tailor named Grace, and he was no longer to be found. As the days stretched with no further word, the papers
alternated between describing the kidnappers as ‘mysterious’ and hinting heavily that the missing tailor might have been one of them.

It was a week of wild stories, however. Everything, including the seasons, seemed to have gone mad for a time. Crazy reports of children seen on roofs, mysterious wild-fowl behaviour, ghost
barges and missing dressmakers seemed not out of keeping with the freak miniature winter that had descended on Ellchester within hours, and which yielded to an Indian summer within days. After a
while, ‘Wild White Week’, as it became locally known, was dismissed as a time that didn’t count, a period when the usual rules had temporarily stopped working.

The Crescents certainly had nothing to tell the newspapers. The reporters tried for a while to trace Violet Parish, but Piers had paid for her to be moved from the city hospital to a private
clinic outside town, and no details of her location were forthcoming. The Crescents, after all, could afford a high quality of discretion.

The clinic nestled in the lap of three hills, and had a peaceful, coddled feel. Its lawns were neat, but not severely so, and there were crazy-paving paths through its little
orchard. The apple trees had suffered during the freak blizzard, however, the weight of the snow ripping away many boughs. The grass was lush and green, but still had a saturated, sodden look. Like
the patients within, the grey-stone clinic was suffering its own share of recovery pangs as workmen struggled to mend a damaged roof, and pipes that had burst during the freeze.

To anybody who knew her, it was clear that Violet was suffering from impatience and boredom more than from the splint on her leg. The orderlies had quickly learned that her repeated demands for
news on ‘when it would be fixed’ were questions about her motorcycle, not her leg. Violet had been lucky, suffering only sprains and bruises rather than any fractures.

‘I bounce,’ she explained to anybody who asked, with a savage grin.

She refused to believe there was any good reason for the splint (‘They’re just afraid I’ll chase the male orderlies’) or for her to be denied cigarettes (‘I’m
choking without them’). The staff tolerated her jibes, but refused to yield to any of them. Violet was at least allowed visitors. She seemed happiest in the company of another patient, a
young girl who had been admitted at the same time with the conveniently vague complaint of ‘nerves’.

On the first morning in September, that same young girl could be found in Violet’s private room, leaning out of the window to hear the church bells chime.

Trista never tired of hearing them. Clocks fascinated her now, the way they ticked and told the hours without her dying. Suns that set and rose again, without a countdown. Mornings without the
whispers and snickers of mortality.

The last soft chime throbbed into silence, and Trista stepped back into the room with a slightly rueful smile.

‘Are you going to do that every hour for the rest of your life?’ asked Violet. She was dishevelled and shiny-faced without her make-up. The books and magazines which people had given
her to relieve the tedium had avalanched on to the floor and been left to sprawl there.

‘It still isn’t boring,’ Trista answered, slightly embarrassed. ‘I’m enjoying meals as well, now I can just eat a normal amount.’ Then, a little more boldly:
‘Are you going to keep moving around, now that it’s not chasing you?’

Violet puffed her cheeks thoughtfully, and wiggled the toes of her imprisoned leg.

‘Probably,’ she said at last. ‘Habits die hard. I
love
the fact that I
can
stay still if I want, and sleep a full eight hours in the same bed without causing
Ragnarök. But . . . it turns out I love speed, motion and change too, and without them I go stir crazy. At some point, that became part of me. However, now I’m the one who chooses. I can
move towards something, instead of just running from a past I can never escape.’

Violet peered at Trista through narrowed eyes.

‘I . . . saw him that night,’ she said carefully. ‘The night of the snows.’

Trista did not ask who ‘he’ was, nor did she exclaim or prompt. She came over and sat by Violet’s bed, giving her friend a silence to fill.

‘It was bitterly cold in the hospital, and the sisters had run out of blankets to pile on us. And then the windows all burst open, and the rooms filled with the blizzard. Not just gusts of
flakes, but a real snowstorm so thick it was as if we were all outside. I felt as if the world had melted away, and all that was left was Winter, with me and my bed in the middle of it.

‘Then I saw a figure walking towards me, through the snow. And it was . . .’ Violet trailed off, and laughed under her breath.

There was a long pause, and Trista realized that no more tale would be told. There was only a snow-blank page for her to fill in herself.

‘And . . . he seemed . . . happy?’ was all she could think of to ask.

Violet gave the slightest nod, and a very small smile that made her look younger and slightly shy.

‘He says he likes my hair short,’ she said, under her breath.

‘I’ve been thinking about the watch.’ Trista bit her lip, then made herself unbite it. The mannerism gave her a funny feeling now that she had seen Triss do the same thing.
‘It was mainly linked to . . . to him through his hair. But it was linked to you because it was
yours
, and because he wanted you to have it. That means it still
is
linked.
I’ve stopped time running out for me, but it’s possible I did the same for you. I . . . don’t know what that means.’

Violet pondered this, brow creased, hands behind her head, then finally gave a shrug.

‘Well, it isn’t stopping me healing. It sounds as if we’ll have time to think about that anyway.’ She grinned. ‘And potential immortality isn’t the worst
problem we’ve had to face recently, is it?’

There was a knock at the door.

‘Miss Parish?’ A nurse put her head around the door. ‘Those visitors you’re expecting – they’re here.’

Despite herself, Trista found herself straightening and readying her mental armour as the Crescent family entered the room. The armour was almost immediately dented as Pen pelted across the room
and flung her arms around her.

‘Trista!’

Trista picked her up and swung her to and fro so that her legs waggled in the air, then remembered that she was displaying strength unusual for a slight eleven-year-old girl. The other three
members of the Crescent family waited by the door, looking pale-faced and uncertain as if they thought there might be lava under the floor.

It was Piers, of course, who braved the lava first, finding a chair for his wife to sit down, then walking over to shake Violet’s hand and ask if she was being well looked after.