Читать книгу The Last Reckoning - Paul Durham, Paul Durham - Страница 15

A CHILL BREEZE rattled the swamp maples and sent a storm of crimson leaves fluttering down past Rye’s shoulders like hundreds of tiny kites against a grey sky. The leaves joined their fallen companions around Rye’s boots, covering every inch of turf in the tiny graveyard. A dozen or so worn and broken headstones peeked out from the rustling red piles.

Villagers who knew of this place called it Miser’s End Cemetery. But most had long since forgotten it altogether, and didn’t call it anything at all.

Rye examined the thick bouquet of clover in her hand, the long stems tied with simple twine. She trudged through the leaves to the centre of the graveyard, where three irregularly shaped stones jutted from the overgrown weeds, their faces covered with ivy that had turned burnt orange with the season. She crouched and pulled aside the leaves from the first. The single carved name was faded but legible, and was unaccompanied by date or detail.

GRIMSHAW

It was a name she’d only recently come to know. Grimshaw the Black. Her grandfather … and former High Chieftain of the Luck Uglies. The second headstone was just as unremarkable, the ivy less dense as she tore it away.

LOTHAIRE

That was the name of Harmless’s younger brother. Lothaire the Loathsome was an uncle she’d once heard mentioned, but had never actually met. Rye swallowed hard and moved to the last of the three irregular stones. Here she didn’t need to clear any ivy. The markings on this headstone were still crisp, its face unadorned by weeds or growth.

GREY

Rye breathed deeply and looked around at Miser’s End. She had first met Harmless in this very same burial ground. They’d shared breakfast and stories sitting among these headstones. She’d played here with her friends even before that, and yet she’d never known her very own ancestors had come home to this small, unremarkable place.

There was a metallic creak behind her and she glanced quickly over her shoulder. It was just the iron gate swinging gently in the breeze as another round of crimson leaves danced past her boots. She cast her eyes to the path up Troller’s Hill, where its solitary old tree cast a skeletal shadow in the afternoon light. She thought she saw another shadow flicker on the hillside, but in an instant it was gone.

Rye turned back to the ground in front of her and resolved herself to the task at hand. She stared at the bouquet of clover one last time, pinched her eyes tight, then set it at the base of the headstone etched with her father’s name.

Rye hurried out of the cemetery and up the path to Troller’s Hill. She was just outside the northernmost fringe of Drowning, and as she climbed the gentle peak, she could see the roof of her cottage and Mud Puddle Lane not far away. She squinted, in hopes of catching a glimpse of Quinn, or the Pendergills, or even crotchety Old Lady Crabtree. But the dirt road seemed strangely deserted for midday. It would have been easy to hurry down and rap on Quinn’s door, to greet her old friend for the briefest of moments, but her instructions had been quite clear. She was to stay out of Drowning and return without delay. Abby would be waiting.

So instead Rye stopped on top of Troller’s Hill, where Mr Nettle waited, leaning against the base of the tree.

“Did you do what you needed to?” he asked solemnly.

Rye nodded.

“Good,” he said with relief. “Let’s be going then.”

Mr Nettle’s uneasy eyes were on Mud Puddle Lane, and the shadows of Village Drowning’s rooftops looming beyond it. He chewed his beard.

“All of those buildings,” he said with a mixture of awe and apprehension. “What are they?”

“Home,” Rye said with a tight smile. “Maybe I’ll get back there one of these days.”

Rye and Mr Nettle arrived at a small sod house built right in the side of a hillock, on terrain that was neither bog nor forest. Thick marsh grass grew from its turf roof, camouflaging the dwelling into its surroundings. It sat near the southernmost end of the Wend, and was the place Abby had led a shocked and desperate Rye to after finding her huddled in the bogs, still clutching Harmless’s body in her arms. The dilapidated hovel was an abandoned bog hopper’s shack – an artefact from a time when labourers would harvest the bogs for red marshberries and ship them by the cartful to Drowning. That was before the swamps crawled with Bog Noblins again.

Mr Nettle tended to their mare, and Rye opened the shack’s rounded door and stepped inside.

Her mother stooped over a cook fire, which warmed the earthen walls like a rabbit’s warren in winter. She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of the door, and offered Rye a smile. Lottie was too preoccupied to acknowledge her with more than a grunt. She was playing with a fuzzy caterpillar that she’d corralled within a tiny fence made from Rye’s hair clips.

Rye turned to the figure in the corner. He rested in a chair with a blanket over his legs, a steaming cup of pungent liquid sitting untouched by his side. The circles under his grey eyes were dark bruises, but the eyes themselves were keen and twinkled at the sight of her.

“Don’t just stand there. Come and give your dearly departed a hug,” Harmless said.

Rye hurried forward and threw her arms round him. He let out a little groan, but wrapped an enthusiastic arm round her in return.

Rye pulled away. “I’m sorry, too hard?”

Harmless waved away the notion. “Never,” he said.

“How are you feeling today?” she asked. “You sound stronger,” she added hopefully.

“Much better now that you’re back,” he said warmly.

Harmless carefully lifted his left arm and slowly clenched and unclenched his fist. From the short sleeve of his loose-fitting shirt, Rye could see that the muscles of this arm were noticeably smaller than his right one. It was still covered in a green mosaic of tattoos from shoulder to wrist, but where skin was visible it had taken on a greyish pallor. And his forearm was etched with an angry pink scar, raised and jagged, as if the victim of a sawblade. Rye knew that, in fact, it was the remnants of the near-fatal Bog Noblin bite he’d received last spring. The night he’d disappeared into Beyond the Shale, the Dreadwater clan close behind him.

“This old companion has seen better days,” Harmless said, running a finger over the damaged limb. “There’s still a tooth in there somewhere. Alas, extracting it is beyond my crude medical skills. I’ll get to Trowbridge to visit Blae the Bleeder soon enough. It’s been far too long and I’m afraid his business must be suffering from the extended absence of his best customer.”

Harmless gave Rye a wink.

“Your mother has helped me get most of the bog rot out of my lungs,” he added with a nod to the steaming cup on the table. “Although if I have to drink another cup of her foul herbs, I think I may jump right back into the muck.”

He shot Abby a playful look. She narrowed an eye in reply.

“If you don’t stop complaining and take your medicine, I’ll throw you back in myself,” she said.

“Riley,” Harmless said, becoming more serious, “how was your visit to Miser’s End?”

“I stayed there for a long while, just like you said. And left the clovers where you told me.”

Harmless nodded, satisfied.

“I don’t think anyone saw me, though,” Rye added, recalling the unusually quiet afternoon. “Troller’s Hill – and all of Mud Puddle Lane – seemed … deserted.”

“He will have seen you,” Harmless said, and Rye knew he meant Slinister. “With his own eyes or someone else’s. And that’s all that matters. Did you play it up?”

“I looked very sad. I almost shed a tear.”

“Excellent. If nothing else, you’ll have a future in the theatre.”

“I said ‘almost’,” Rye clarified.

“Close enough,” Harmless said. He picked up the cup with his good hand and sipped it. He grimaced and coughed. Leaning over to a wooden bucket, he expelled something black and thick from his throat, then wiped his mouth on his shoulder.

“What now?” Rye asked.

“Now we stay here,” Harmless said, “and rest. And catch up on better times.” He rubbed his chin and his weary eyes turned wolfish. “Then, in another day or two, when Slinister will have assumed the O’Chanters have left for good, you will return to Drowning.” Harmless’s jaw tightened. “And summon a Call.”

“A Call?” Rye asked.

Harmless nodded. “And not just any Call. It will be a Call of all Luck Uglies, near and far. And with it, we shall bring a Reckoning to Slinister and the Fork-Tongued Charmers.”