Inkdeath Read online

  Whatever the name of the wood, Mo was always captivated afresh by the peace and quiet under its trees. It reminded him that this, too, was a part of the Inkworld, as much a part of it as the Milksop’s soldiers. The first of the morning sun was filtering through the branches, dappling the trees with pale gold, and the fairies were dancing as if intoxicated in the cold autumn sunlight. They fluttered into the bear’s furry face until he hit out at them, and the Black Prince held one of the little creatures to his ear, smiling as if he could understand what its cross, shrill little voice was saying.

  Had the other world been like this? Why could he hardly remember? Had life there been the same beguiling mixture of darkness and light, cruelty and beauty … so much beauty that it sometimes almost made you drunk?

  The Black Prince had the farm guarded by his men day and night.

  Gecko was one of the guards today. As Mo and the Prince came through the trees he emerged from the ruined pigsty, a morose expression on his face. Gecko was always on the move. He was a small man whose slightly protuberant eyes had earned him his name. One of his tame crows was perched on his shoulder. The Prince used the crows as messengers, but most of the time they stole for Gecko from the markets; the amount they could carry away in their beaks always amazed Mo.

  When he saw the blood on their clothes Gecko turned pale. But the shadows of the Inkworld had obviously left the isolated farm untouched again last night.

  Mo almost fell over his own feet with weariness as he walked towards the well. The Prince reached for his arm, although he too was swaying with exhaustion.

  ‘It was a close shave this time,’ he said quietly, as if the peace were an illusion that could be shattered by his voice. ‘If we’re not more careful the soldiers will be waiting for us in the next village. The price the Adderhead has set on your head is high enough to buy all of Ombra. I can hardly trust my own men any more, and by this time even the children recognize you in the villages. Perhaps you ought to lie low here for a while.’

  Mo shooed away the fairies whirring in the air above the well, then let the wooden bucket down. ‘Nonsense. They recognize you too.’

  The water in the depths below shone as if the moon were hiding from morning there. Like the well outside Merlin’s cottage, thought Mo, as he cooled his face with the clear water and cleaned the cut that a soldier had given him on his forearm. All we need now is for Archimedes to fly up on my shoulder, while Wart comes stumbling out of the wood …

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ The Black Prince leant on the edge of the well beside Mo, while his bear lumbered around, snuffling, on ground that was wet with dew.

  ‘A story I once read.’ Mo put the bucket of water down for the bear. ‘I’ll tell it to you sometime. It’s a good story, even though it has a sad ending.’

  But the Prince shook his head, and passed his hand over his tired face. ‘If it ends sadly I don’t want to hear it.’

  Gecko wasn’t the only man who had been guarding the sleeping farm. Mo smiled when Battista stepped out of the tumbledown barn. Battista had no great opinion of fighting, but Mo liked him and the Strong Man best of all the robbers, and he found it easier to go out at night if one of them was watching over Resa and Meggie. Battista still did his clown act at fairs, even when his audience had hardly a penny to spare. ‘We don’t want them forgetting how to laugh altogether!’ he said when Snapper mocked him for it. He liked to hide his pockmarked face behind the masks he made for himself: laughing masks, weeping masks, whatever he felt like at the time. But when he joined Mo at the well he handed him not a mask, but a bundle of black clothes.

  ‘A very good morning to you, Bluejay,’ he said, with the same deep bow that he made to his audience. ‘Sorry I took rather a long time with your order, but I ran out of thread. Like everything else, it’s hard to get in Ombra. But luckily Gecko here,’ he added, bowing in the man’s direction, ‘sent one of his black-feathered friends off to steal me a few reels from one of the market traders. Thanks to our new governor, they’re still rich.’

  ‘Black clothes?’ The Prince looked enquiringly at Mo. ‘What for?’

  ‘A bookbinder’s garments. Binding books is still my trade, or have you forgotten? What’s more, black is good camouflage by night. As for this,’ said Mo, stripping off his bloodstained shirt, ‘I’d better dye it black too, or I can’t very well wear it again.’

  The Prince looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I’ll say it again, even though you don’t want to listen. Lie low here for a few days. Forget the outside world, just as the world has forgotten this farm.’

  The anxiety in his dark face touched Mo, and for a moment he was almost tempted to give the bundle back to Battista. But only almost.

  When the Prince had gone, Mo hid the shirt and his bloodstained trousers in the former bakehouse, now converted into his workshop, and put on the black clothes. They fitted perfectly, and he was wearing them as he slipped back into the house just as the morning made its way in through the unglazed windows.

  Meggie and Resa were still asleep. A fairy had lost her way in the gloom of Meggie’s room. Mo lured her to his hand with a few quiet words. ‘Will you look at that?’ Snapper always used to say. ‘Even the damn fairies love his voice. Looks like I’m the only person not to fall under its spell.’

  Mo carried the fairy over to the window and let her flutter out. He pulled Meggie’s blanket up over her shoulders, the way he used to on all those nights when he and she had only each other, and he glanced at her face. How young she still looked when she was asleep. Awake, she seemed so much more grown-up. She whispered a name in her sleep. Farid. Was it when you fell in love for the first time that you grew up?

  ‘Where have you been?’

  Mo spun round. Resa was standing in the open doorway, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

  ‘Watching the fairies’ morning dance. The nights are getting colder now. Soon they’ll hardly leave their nests at all.’

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. And the sleeves of the black tunic were long enough to hide the cut on his forearm. ‘Come with me, or we’ll wake this big daughter of ours.’

  He drew her with him into the bedroom where they slept.

  ‘What kind of clothes are those?’

  ‘A bookbinder’s outfit. Battista made them for me. Black as ink. Suitable, don’t you think? I’ve asked him to make you and Meggie something too. You’ll be needing another dress soon.’

  He put his hand on her belly. You couldn’t see it yet. A new child brought with them from the old world, although they had found out only in this one. It was barely a week since Resa had told him. ‘Which would you like,’ she’d asked, ‘a daughter or a son?’

  ‘Can I choose?’ he had replied, trying to imagine what it would be like to hold tiny fingers in his hand again, so tiny that they could scarcely grasp his thumb. It was just the right time – before Meggie was so grown-up that he could hardly call her a child at all.

  ‘The sickness is getting worse. I’ll ride over to see Roxane tomorrow. She’s sure to know what to do for it.’

  ‘Yes, she’s sure to know.’ Mo took her in his arms.

  Peaceful days. Nights of blood.

  3

  Written Silver

  To what was sombre he was most disposed

  When, in his bare room with its shutters closed,

  High-ceilinged, blue, he read his story, thinking,

  And in his mind’s eye picturing forests sinking

  Under the water, seeing ochre skies,

  Fleshy flowers in woods of stars before his eyes …

  Arthur Rimbaud,

  The Poet at Seven Years Old

  Of course Orpheus did none of the digging himself. He stood there in his fine clothes watching Farid sweat. He had made him dig in two places already, and the hole Farid was excavating now was already deep enough to come up to his chest. The earth was moist and heavy. It had rained a great deal these last few days, and the spade was useless. In addition, there was a hanged man
dangling right above Farid’s head. The cold wind swung the body back and forth on its rotting rope. Suppose it fell, and buried him under its decaying bones?

  Three more sombre figures swung from the gallows on Farid’s right. Milksop, the new governor, liked hanging people. Folk said that he had his wigs made from the hair of executed men and women – and the widows in Ombra whispered that this was the reason why so many women had been condemned to hang.

  ‘How much longer are you going to take? It’s getting light! Go on, dig faster!’ Orpheus snapped, kicking a skull down into the pit. Skulls lay beneath the gallows like terrible fruits.

  It was true that day was beginning to dawn. Damn that Cheeseface! He’d had Farid digging almost all night long. If only he could wring the man’s pale neck!

  ‘Faster? Get your fine bodyguard to do some digging for a change!’ Farid shouted up to him. ‘Then his muscles would at least be some use!’

  The Chunk folded his bulky arms and smiled down with derision. Orpheus had found the giant working for a physician in the marketplace, holding down the man’s customers while he pulled out their rotten teeth. ‘What on earth are you going on about now?’ was all Orpheus had said, condescendingly, when Farid asked why he needed another servant. ‘Even the rag-and-bone men in Ombra have bodyguards to protect them from the riffraff roaming the streets. And I’m a good deal richer than they are!’ In this he was certainly right – and as Orpheus offered better pay than the physician, and the Chunk’s ears hurt from listening to all those screams of agony, he went with them without a word. He called himself Oss, a very short name for such a large fellow, but it suited a man who spoke so seldom that at first Farid could have sworn he had no tongue in his ugly mouth. However, that mouth worked overtime at eating, and more and more frequently the Chunk would devour what Orpheus’s maids put in front of Farid too. At first Farid had complained, but after Oss lay in wait for him on the cellar steps one night he preferred to sleep on an empty stomach, or steal something from the marketplace. The Chunk had made life in Orpheus’s service even worse. A handful of pieces of broken glass inside Farid’s straw mattress, a leg stuck out to trip him up at the bottom of a staircase, a sudden rough hand grasping his hair … he had to be on his guard against Oss all the time. There was no peace from him except at night, when the man slept outside Orpheus’s bedroom, docile as a dog.

  ‘Bodyguards don’t dig!’ Orpheus explained in a weary tone, pacing impatiently up and down between the holes Farid had dug. ‘And if you go on dawdling like that we really will need a bodyguard. They’re bringing two poachers here to hang before noon!’

  ‘Well, there you are, then! I keep telling you: let’s just look for buried treasure behind your house!’ The hills where gallows stood, graveyards, burnt-out farms … Orpheus loved places that sent a shiver down Farid’s spine. Cheeseface certainly wasn’t afraid of ghosts, you had to give him that. Farid wiped the sweat out of his eyes. ‘You might at least write a more detailed description of which damn gallows the treasure’s under. And why does it have to be buried so deep, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Why buried so deep? Why not behind my house?’ Orpheus pursed his girlishly soft lips scornfully. ‘What an original idea! Does that sound as if it belongs in this story? Even Fenoglio wouldn’t fall for such nonsense. But why do I bother to keep explaining? You wouldn’t understand anyway.’

  ‘Oh no?’ Farid drove his spade so deep into the damp soil that it stuck. ‘Well, there’s one thing I understand very well. While you’re writing yourself treasure after treasure, acting the rich merchant and chasing every maid in Ombra, Dustfinger still lies among the dead!’

  Farid felt tears come to his eyes yet again. The pain was as fresh now as it had been on the night when Dustfinger died for him. If he could only forget that still face! If he could only remember Dustfinger as he was in life! But he kept seeing him lying in the disused mine, cold and silent, his heart frozen.

  ‘I’m sick and tired of being your servant!’ he shouted up at Orpheus. In his fury he even forgot the hanged men, whose ghosts certainly wouldn’t like so much shouting in the place where they had died. ‘You haven’t kept your side of the bargain! Instead of bringing him back, you’ve made yourself as comfortable in this world as a maggot in a side of bacon. You’ve buried him, like all the others! Fenoglio’s right, you’re about as much use as a perfumed pig’s bladder! I’m going to tell Meggie to send you back again. And she’ll do it, just you wait and see!’

  Oss looked enquiringly at Orpheus, his eyes asking permission to seize Farid and beat him black and blue, but Orpheus ignored him. ‘Ah, so we’re back to that subject!’ he said, barely able to control his voice. ‘The amazing, wonderful Meggie, daughter of an equally fabulous father who answers to the name of a bird these days, hiding out in the forest with a band of verminous robbers while ragged minstrels make up song after song about him.’

  Orpheus adjusted his glasses and looked up at the sky, as if complaining to the powers above of Mo’s unearned fame. He liked the nickname those glasses had earned him: Four-Eyes. It was whispered with fear and horror in Ombra, which pleased Orpheus even more. And the glasses were regarded as evidence that all the lies he told about his origins were the plain truth: he came from beyond the sea, he said, from a distant land ruled by princes who all had two sets of eyes, which allowed them to read their subjects’ thoughts. He claimed to be a son of the king of that country, born out of wedlock, and said he’d had to flee after his own brother’s wife had fallen madly in love with him. ‘By the god of books, what a wretched story!’ Fenoglio had cried, when Farid told Minerva’s children about it. ‘The slushy notions churning around in that fellow’s mind! He hasn’t a single fresh idea in his slimy brain – all he can do is mess about with other people’s stories!’

  But while Fenoglio was spending his days and nights feeling sorry for himself, Orpheus had leisure to put his own stamp on this story – and he seemed to know more about it than the man who had originally made it up.

  ‘When you love a book so much that you read it again and again, do you know what it makes you wish?’ Orpheus had asked Farid, as they had stood outside the city gate of Ombra for the first time. ‘No, of course you don’t. How could you? I’m sure a book only makes you think how well it would burn on a cold night. But I’ll tell you the answer all the same: you want to be in the book yourself. Although certainly not as a poor court poet. I’m happy to leave that role to Fenoglio – though even there he cuts a sorry figure!’

  Orpheus had set to work the third night after he arrived, in a dirty inn near the city walls. He had told Farid to steal him some wine and a candle, and had produced a grubby piece of paper and a pencil from under his cloak – and the book, the thrice-accursed book, Inkheart. His fingers had wandered over the pages collecting words, more and more words, like magpies in search of glittering baubles. And Farid had been fool enough to believe that the words Orpheus was so busily writing on his sheet of paper would heal the pain in his heart and bring Dustfinger back.

  But Orpheus had very different ideas in mind. He sent Farid away before reading aloud what he had written, and before dawn the next morning ordered him to dig up his first treasure from the soil of Ombra, in the graveyard just beyond the infirmary. The sight of the coins had made Orpheus as happy as a child. But Farid had stared at the graves, tasting his own tears in his mouth.

  Orpheus had spent the silver on new clothes for himself, hired two maids and a cook, and bought a silk merchant’s magnificent house. Its previous owner had gone away in search of his son, who had ridden with Cosimo to Argenta and never came back.

  Orpheus made out that he himself was a merchant, one who sold the granting of unusual wishes – and soon it had reached the Milksop’s ears that this stranger with the thin fair hair and skin as pale as a prince’s could supply bizarre things: spotted brownies, fairies as brightly coloured as butterflies, jewellery made of fire-elves’ wings, belts set with the scales of river-nymphs, gold a
nd white piebald horses to draw princely coaches, and other creatures previously known in Ombra only from fairy tales. The right words for all sorts of things could be found in Fenoglio’s original book of Inkheart – Orpheus just had to fit them together in a slightly different way. Now and then one of his creations would die after taking only a few breaths, or would turn out vicious (the Chunk often had bandaged hands), but that didn’t bother Orpheus. Why would he mind if a few dozen fire-elves died of starvation in the forest because they had no wings, or a handful of river-nymphs drifted dead in the water without their scales? He pulled thread after thread out of the fine fabric that Fenoglio had spun and wove patterns of his own, adding them to the old man’s tapestry like brightly coloured patches, and growing rich on what his voice could entice out of another man’s words.

  Curses on him. A thousand and one curses. This was too much.

  ‘I won’t do anything for you any more! I won’t do anything at all!’ Farid wiped the moist earth from his hands and tried to climb out of the hole, but at a gesture from Orpheus Oss pushed him roughly back again.

  ‘Dig!’ he grunted.

  ‘Dig yourself!’ Farid was trembling in his sweaty tunic, though whether with cold or rage he couldn’t have said. ‘Your fine master is just a fraud! He’s already been in jail for his lies, and that’s where he’ll end up again!’

  Orpheus narrowed his eyes. He didn’t like to have that chapter in his life mentioned at all.

  ‘I bet you were the sort who cons money out of old ladies’ pockets. And here you are all puffed up like a bullfrog, just because your lies are suddenly coming true. You suck up to the Milksop, because he’s Adderhead’s brother-in-law, and think yourself cleverer than anyone else! But what can you really do? Write fairies here who look like they’ve fallen into a vat of dye, chests full of treasure, and jewellery made of elves’ wings for him. But you can’t do what we brought you here for, you can’t do that. Dustfinger is dead. He’s dead. He – is – still – dead!’

  And now here came those wretched tears again. Farid wiped them away with his dirty fingers, while the Chunk stared down at him as blankly as only someone can who doesn’t understand a word of what’s being said. And how could he? What did Oss know about the words Orpheus was collecting on the sly, what did he know about the book and Orpheus’s voice?

  ‘No one brought me here for anything!’ Orpheus leant over the edge of the pit as if to spit the words into Farid’s face. ‘And I certainly don’t have to listen to any lectures about Dustfinger from the boy who caused his death! Have you forgotten how he sacrificed himself for you? Why, I knew his name before you were even born, and I and no one else will bring him back, after you so drastically removed him from this story … but how and when I do it will be my own decision. Now dig. Or do you think, you brilliant example of the wisdom of Arabia –’ Farid thought he felt the words slicing through him – ‘do you think I’ll be more likely to write if I can’t pay my maids and I have to wash my own clothes?’

  Damn him. Damn him to hell. Farid bowed his head so that Orpheus wouldn’t see his tears. The boy who caused his death …

  ‘Tell me why I keep paying minstrels good silver for their pitiful songs. Because I’ve forgotten Dustfinger? No. It’s because you still haven’t managed to find out how and where in this world I can speak to the White Women who have him now! So I go on listening to bad songs, I stand beside dying beggars, I bribe the healers in the infirmaries to call me when a patient is at death’s door. Of course, it would be much easier if you could summon the White Women with fire, like your master, but we’ve tried that often enough and got nowhere, right? If at least they’d visit you, as it seems they like to visit those they’ve touched once with death already – but no! The fresh chicken blood I put outside the door was no use either, and nor were the children’s bones I bought from a gravedigger for a bag of silver after the guards at the gate told you that was sure to raise a dozen White Women at once!’

  Yes, yes! Farid wanted to put his hands over his ears. Orpheus was right. They’d tried everything, but the White Women simply didn’t appear to them, and who else was to tell Orpheus how to bring Dustfinger back