Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

Hester ran down the beach, firing her gun at the limpet until its black hull was lost in a boiling of white water. Then there was nothing to do but shout Wren’s name over and over, hoarse, useless, her lonely voice the only sound remaining as the lap and wash of the Autolycus’s wake faded into silence.

No, not quite silence. Slowly Hester became aware of other sounds: dogs barking, shouts. Lanterns and flashlights bobbed on the hillside. Mr. Smew came charging through the gorse, waving an antique wolf rifle twice as tall as him and shouting, “Where are they, the subaquatic fiends? Let me at them!”

More people followed him. Hester went to meet them, shrugging aside the hands that reached for her, the questions. “Are you all right, Mrs. Natsworthy?”

“We heard shooting!”

“Was it the Lost Boys?”

The bodies in the shallows stirred gently as the waves broke round them, dragging long smears of red away into the lake. Caul knelt beside one of them and said in a soft, puzzled voice, “Gargle.” The air stank of gun smoke and exhaust fumes.

Tom ran up, looking stupidly about and seeing only his daughter’s going-away bag lying forlorn upon the shingle. “Where’s Wren?” he asked. “Hester, what happened?”

Hester turned away and would not answer. It was Freya Rasmussen, in the end, who came to him and took his hands in hers and said, “Oh, Tom, they’ve gone, and I think Wren is with them; I think they’ve taken Wren.”

“Daddy, Mummy’s face is all funny.”

“I know.”

“But why is it all funny?”

“Because a bad man cut her when she was just a little girl.”

“Did it hurt?”

“I think so. I think it hurt a lot, and for a long time. But it’s all right now.”

“Will the bad man come back?”

“No, Wren, he’s dead. He’s been dead a long time. There are* no bad men in Anchorage-in-Vineland. That’s why we live here. We’re safe here; nobody knows about us, and nobody will try to hurt us, and no hungry cities will come to gobble us up. It’s just us, quite safe: Mummy, and Daddy, and Wren.”

The voices of her childhood whispered in Wren’s memory as she slowly returned to her senses. She was lying on the floor of a tiny cabin that held a metal washbasin and a metal toilet. The toilet smelled of chemicals. A dim blue bulb glowed in a cage on the roof. The walls vibrated slightly. She could hear the threshing, churning sound of the Autolycus motors, and another sound, a creaking and whispering, which she guessed was water pressing against the hull.

Well, bad men have come to Anchorage-in-Vineland now, she thought, and they’ve escaped with what they wanted, and I’ve helped them. Only question left is, What are they going to do with me?

Dad had been taken by the Lost Boys once, yet he’d survived all right, and returned to Anchorage to marry Mum. So that must mean that there was hope for Wren, mustn’t it? But thinking of Dad made her think of Mum, and that made her remember what Mum had done, and the memory filled her with a sick horror. Inside her head, like an echo that would not fade, she could hear the crack and spatter of the bullet hitting Gargle.

She was not sure how long she lay there, shivering, whimpering, too shocked and miserable to move. At last the hard floor grew so uncomfortable that she forced herself to stand up. Get a grip, Wren, she told herself crossly.

The stuff on her clothes had dried brown and crusty, like spilled goulash. She ran some water into the metal handbasin and tried to sponge it off, then washed her face and hair as well as she could.

After a long time, a key grated in the lock and the door opened. Fishcake came and looked in at her. The gun was still in his hand. His face looked hard and white in the blue light, as if he’d been carved out of ivory. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Shut up,” said Fishcake. His voice sounded hard too. “I ought to kill you.”

“Me?” Wren wriggled, trying to burrow into the deck. “But I haven’t done anything! I got you the Tin Book like Gargle asked…”

“And your witch of a mother killed him!” Fishcake shouted. The gun in his hand wobbled as big sobs shook his body. Wren wondered if he was going to shoot her, but he didn’t. She felt scared of him and angry at him and somehow responsible for him, all at the same time.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “About Remora too.”

Fishcake sniffed loudly. “Mora was Gargle’s girl,” he said. “Everybody said he was in love with her. He was never really going to take you with him. I heard him and Mora talking about you, saying how stupid you were…” He started to cry again. “What are the Lost Boys going to do without Gargle?” he asked. “It’s all right for him; him and Mora are down in the Sunless Country together. What about the rest of us? What about me?”

He looked at Wren again. In this underworld light his eyes looked black: two holes opening onto empty space. “I ought to kill you, just so your Mum would know how it feels to have someone you love took away. But that would make me as bad as her, wouldn’t it?”

He stepped back, the door slammed shut, and the key grated in the lock.

“I’m going after her,” said Tom.

Everyone politely ignored him. They thought that going after Wren would be impossible, but they were all too kind to say so. They thought that the shock of what had happened was making him talk wildly. And he had been shocked, quite numb with it when they first told him she was gone. He had run up and down the beach, shouting her name at the waves as if the Lost Boys who had taken her might hear him and relent, until his heart had twisted and kicked so painfully inside him that he thought he was going to die right then and there upon the shingle, without ever seeing Wren again.

But he hadn’t died. Kind hands had led him to a boat and rowed him back to Anchorage, where now he sat with Hester and Freya and a dozen other Vinelanders in one of the smaller rooms of the Winter Palace.

“It’s my fault, you see,” he explained. “She was asking about the Lost Boys only this morning. I should have guessed something was going on.”

“No fault of yours, Tom,” said Smew, glaring at Hester, who sat silent and scowling beside her husband. “If certain people hadn’t gone racing off ahead of the rest of us and started shooting…”

Several other Vinelanders muttered in agreement. They had always respected Hester for saving them from the Huntsmen of Arkangel, but they had never liked her. They all remembered the way she had killed Piotr Masgard, killed him when there had been no more need for killing, and hacked and hacked at his body long after he was dead. Small wonder that the gods would send bad luck to a woman who could do such things. It was just a shame they’d waited sixteen years to send it, and that it had fallen on her nice husband and her lovely daughter too.

Hester knew what they were thinking. “I was only defending myself,” she said. “I was defending all of us. I promised Freya once I’d look after this dump and guard it from harm, and that’s what I was doing. You want somebody to blame, blame him.”

She pointed at Caul, who sat awkwardly in a far corner. But nobody seemed to think badly of what Caul had done. His former friends had come asking for his help, and he had refused. You couldn’t expect him to betray them. They were his people.

“What were the Lost Boys here for, anyway?” asked Mr. Aakiuq.

“Lost Girls too,” said Smew, still glowering at Hester. “One of those kids she shot was just a girl.”