Page 72 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Angry about what?’

‘All this.’

‘No.’ He waited for me to catch up. ‘Just – glad of the company.’

I didn’t understand, and then I did. He didn’t mean for the walk. The worst anyone else in Bedlam had done probably involved a bit of unkindness or some stolen pineapples. It would have been lonely to be the only one who had done worse.

Off to our left, a markayuq watched us go. It was closer than the last ones. Raphael veered away from me to give it a prayer cord too and came back without saying anything.

TWENTY-FOUR

Crossing the forest floor was so slow we barely covered a mile an hour. I felt, in my foundations, which Clem said were magnetic ore, that we were curving. Twice we had to double back, and when we did I felt like we had cut too steeply into that curve. It was like tracing the outer edge of an hourglass. I wondered what we were avoiding, but I didn’t ask. All the while, I didn’t see anyone – not one solitary glimpse of an arrow fletching in the trees – but the sense of being watched never went away.

Despite the whitewood band, my leg started to feel sore after every mile or so and we paused often, never too close to a markayuq and always facing away from it, which felt itchy, but I was a lot better at this kind of thing than Orpheus and I never looked back. I started to enjoy the walk. The way tipped us gradually downhill and it was getting warmer – even the ground was starting to feel warm, which must have been something volcanic more than falling altitude, but either way it was lovely. The tree roots trapped the heat. There wasn’t much space to sit comfortably and Raphael bumped down with his shoulder against mine, which propped me up just at the angle that kept my back from aching. I shut my eyes, not asleep but not sure I could go on much further either. As he knotted another string I felt the tendons in his arm moving. After a while he stopped and I straightened up.

‘You’re very pale,’ he said. He was holding the cord wound over his hands like a garrotte, but slack.

‘Just tired.’

‘There are hot springs a bit further up, if you can make it. We can stop there overnight.’

‘Is it safe to?’

‘No one’s objected so far.’ He helped me up.

A gunshot went off somewhere behind us. Between the trees, a very straight, brilliant line of light arced out before the bullet thunked into a trunk. Other shots went off too.

‘That’s Martel,’ I said. ‘He’s got a revolver. I saw it at the church. They sound like that.’

He caught my arm. ‘Run. One wrong spark and everything in here will go up like a bomb, we need to be in the water if it does.’

‘I can’t—’

‘You’ll be surprised,’ he said, and shoved me.

The shock of having to run was like being dunked in cold water and all at once I was awake and not tired. The air to our south-west was shot through with bullet trails, but we were too far off to see if they had hit anything. Even with the whitewood, running hurt. Without it, though, I would have crumpled on the first step.

Something smelled sulphury, and then suddenly we were on the banks of a little lake. There was an island in the middle and a single sapling whitewood tree, only about three times the height of a person and bound by candle ivy flowering happily in a moonbeam haze of pollen that swum and glowed on the thermals above the hot water. The banks under the moss, the pebbles on the lake bed and the boulders round the island were all glass. Raphael went out as far as he could on the land, slung his bag and coat across then dived in to swim the last. I copied him. Shouts came from behind us, muffled in the trees. I didn’t notice until it seemed suddenly dimmer than before, but there was no pollen over the water; our trail stopped on the lake edge. The water was almost too hot. After the intense cold outside, my hands burned as the feeling came back into them. The pollen over the bank was a wall of diffuse light. Further up, some of the rocks had a yellow tinge where the sulphur in the water had crystallised.

Raphael motioned to say go round to the other side of the island. Once we were there, we held on to some smoothed-off glass. I half-curled up in the water, waiting for my leg to stop hurting.

‘How was he following us?’ I said.

‘The pollen trails hang in the air a long time on a still day. There’s a shimmer if you know how to look for it. Quispe knows; he’s from this side of the mountains though he pretends he’s not. He knows not to bloody shoot into it either.’

‘I can’t imagine Martel would listen to him.’

Raphael made a soft agreeing sound and then we both waited in silence, watching the warped view of the way we had come through a glass boulder and the fading light of the disturbed pollen. Small things were already zinging new trails through it, pulling the shapes to one side and the other. Something squirrelly traced a bouncing line of light halfway down a tree, then launched itself into the air and glided to the next. Its trail looked like a billowing flag. The ground sent up a high, sudden loop of brightness that must have been a jumping frog.

Slowly, my hands got used to the hot water and stopped hurting. Little aches washed up and down my spine. I felt like an old man and suddenly I missed how I’d used to be much more than I had for a long time. Three years ago I could have run for miles. Everybody says you don’t notice health until it’s gone, but I’d noticed, all the time, the same as I’d noticed warm sunbeams. It was probably just as well to have enjoyed it while it lasted, but I wished I could have been less fit then. It would have been less of a contrast.

There were no more shots. Gradually, I stopped expecting them.

The stream-bed was all glass pebbles, smoothed down until together they were like treasure. There were shells too, miniature, occupied by even tinier things stuck to the rocks. Nestled in the glass pebbles diagonally below me were a clutch of what looked like much more perfect pebbles, with yellow spheres suspended inside. Raphael saw too and dived for them. When he came back up with some, he set them gently on the rock in front of me for me to see. They were eggs.

‘Water’s not quite hot enough to cook them,’ he explained. ‘The ducks lay them underwater to incubate.’

I touched the curve of one, and it really was glass. Other things must have been mixed into it, because like ordinary duck eggs it was bluish close to. They were lovely things. He had left two in the nest; they had chicks in them.