Cuckoo Song

Chapter 15. AMBUSH

Outside Triss’s room, the evening came to an end. There was movement on the landing, muffled voices, door percussion. The faint rustles and ticks of the sleep-time rituals. And then, over the next two hours, quiet settled upon the house by infinitesimal degrees, like dust.

And this fine dust of silence lay undisturbed, even as Not-Triss opened her bedroom door and glided out on to the landing. She might have been a figure floating across a cinema screen.

Over one arm hung a woollen shawl, which she hoped might serve as a net to throw over her winged quarry. In her hands she carried her sewing box, a gift from her mother. It was made of wood, painted with forest scenes. The inside was lined with silk, the sewing tools housed in sheathes in the underside of the lid. Not-Triss had emptied out the box’s store of cotton reels and wool balls, and could only hope that it would be large and sturdy enough to act as an improvised cage. The night was thistle-sharp, spider-web tense. Not-Triss was part of its secrecy and danger now, but she sensed that she was not the most secretive or dangerous thing abroad. The night had no favourites. She could almost sense it curled around the world, dispassionate as a dragon, the stars mere glints in its black scales.

Not-Triss slipped into the forbidden room and found it much as she had last seen it. Once again, she slid under Sebastian’s bed to hide and wait.

Whatever that bird-thing is, it comes at midnight. If I can catch it, and if it’s able to talk, perhaps I can force it to tell me what’s going on. Maybe it knows what happened to the real Triss, and to Sebastian.

The little mantel clock downstairs could just be heard chiming twelve.

After the lost chimes had hung in the air for a few seconds, the sound Not-Triss was waiting to hear reached her ears. It was the same dry, wispy flutter-tap as before. It was out in the corridor. It was growing nearer. And then, with a whirr like the wind through dry wheat husks, it was in the bedroom.

The room was too dark to see it clearly, but now and then she could just make out the small airborne shape careering hither and thither. A dark shuttlecock in an invisible game, each wing-brush like a rasped breath, the motions unnerving in their unpredictability. Not-Triss could predict it though. That was her one advantage. She knew that it had come to deliver a letter, and that sooner or later it would have to perch on the drawer handle in order to do so.

Flutter-tap, flutter-rasp-bangitty-flap, flappety-flap. Flap. And perch.

There it was, a tiny shape perched on the drawer handle, so small that she would not have seen it if she had not been looking for it. Even now it melted into shadow before her direct gaze, and only kept its outline when she looked slightly away. It was distracted for the moment, sliding an envelope in through the narrow gap above the drawer.

Her instincts prickled in her veins like a thousand tiny thorns, causing her muscles to tense and coil.

Now.

Not-Triss sprang from cover, the motion as easy as falling. The only sound she made was a faint flap from the counterpane, stirred by her passing. Nonetheless the perching thing heard it, and looked around in time to see her landing neatly on her bare feet. Its shocked cry sounded the way a scar looks. The thing spread its wings, but Not-Triss was already hurling the shawl.

The fabric swamped the creature, but even the heavy wool was not enough to keep it down. A moment later there was a shawl-smothered shape crashing blindly around the room, bouncing off walls. All the while it hissed and screamed, in a voice like hot embers dropped down a well. Not-Triss could just make out gabbled curses and muffled abuse.

Not-Triss made a few jumps in an attempt to catch it, only to have the trailing fronds tease through her fingertips. She bounded on to the desk, landing so lightly that it did not even shudder, and leaped out into the centre of the room, seizing the loose ends of the shawl with both hands. She landed with a triumphant huff of breath, but the next moment her feet were dragged from the floor again as the thing fought its way back into the air and Not-Triss clung on to the shawl like grim death as she was lifted from the ground, swung against shelves and then dropped floorward by sudden cruel swoops so that she landed awkwardly.

‘Twig-minx!’ it screamed. ‘Scrap-brat!’

It tired in time, though its torrent of shrieked abuse continued. When Not-Triss found her feet on the ground, she threw herself on top of the struggling mass of increasingly ragged shawl, and then forced the bundle into her sewing box. Before it could burst out of her grip again, she slammed the lid and sat on it.

There was a wail of utter horror, like a wind-change before a storm.

‘Let me out! Let me out or I’ll bonfire you! I’ll make nests of your bones!’

The box jumped under Not-Triss, and she could hear rending within. She could picture the wicked little beak tearing the shawl apart.

‘Not till you tell me what I want to know!’ she hissed back. ‘What are you?’

‘Just a messenger! Deliver letters!’

‘Where’s the man who wrote the letters? Where’s Sebastian?’

‘Don’t know! Don’t know any Sebastian! Don’t know what is in letters! Not my fault! Not my fault!’

‘Whose fault then? Who sent you?’

The response the creature gave might have been a name. It slithered over the eardrum the way moonlight slides over the surface of a rippling pool. It was unfamiliar, but Not-Triss already had an idea who might have sent the bird-thing.

‘Is that the same man they call the Architect?’

‘Yes! Brick-magic. Insidey-outsidey-hiding-magic. Let me out!’

‘Did he steal away the other me – the real Theresa?’

‘Yes! Needles and pins, they burn! Let me out!’

‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know – only a messenger. Architect would know. The Shrike might know.’

‘The Shrike?’ The box was rattling so badly that Not-Triss had to brace her feet against the floor to stop herself tumbling off.

‘The one who made you. Skraaark!’

The one who made me. It’s true then. It’s really true. An unacknowledged shoot of hope that Pen had been wrong withered and died.

‘What am I?’

‘Rag doll, thorn-doll, seven-day doll! Cruel doll! Killing doll!’

‘Stop it!’ snapped Not-Triss, bouncing hard on the box lid, her mind a simmering turbulence of rage and fear once more.

‘Killing me!’ insisted the voice again, now rising in what sounded like pain and panic. ‘Killing me! Let me out! Stop killing me!’

‘Well, stop flapping if you don’t want to hurt yourself!’ Not-Triss whispered back, but the sounds from the box were becoming troubling. The wingbeats were more frenzied and intermittent, and there was a rattle now and then as if something hard and heavy was lurching about inside.

‘Please!’ For all the voice’s strangeness, the panic sounded real. ‘Get it away from me! It’s killing me!’ There followed an incoherent susurration which sounded like sizzizzizzizzizz…

Scissors.

With a stone-cold jolt, Not-Triss remembered her mother’s scissors twisting antagonistically in her hand and the vast cast-iron shears falling down towards her head outside the dressmakers’ shop… and the sewing scissors sheathed in the silk-lined lid of the sewing box. Scissors had turned on Not-Triss, wanting to hurt her. If this creature was like her in some ways, perhaps she had just shut it in a box with a tool that wanted to kill it…

Her conscience smote her. Whatever this creature was, even if it was sent by her enemies, she had not seen it do anything that deserved death at her hands.

‘Promise you won’t attack me!’ she whispered.

‘I swear!’ came the shriek.

‘Promise you won’t lie to me!’

‘I swear!’

‘Promise me you’ll stay and answer my questions!’

‘Three questions, three answers – I swear!’

Not-Triss would have liked to insist on more promises, but there was a terrible breathy wailing and whimpering coming from within the box, and she was afraid if she waited a moment more the creature within might actually perish. She had no idea whether her captive would really consider promises binding, but she slid off the sewing box and flung open the lid.

No flutter of wings erupted into the room, and for a moment she feared that she might have been too slow. Peering into the box, however, she discovered a pitiable sight. Somehow the scissors had managed to fall from their sheath in such a way that the two points were embedded in the base, one on either side of the bird-thing’s throat. It appeared to be unhurt, but was clearly too terrified to move for fear of shredding itself on the hostile blades.

‘Help…’ it whispered. When she looked at it directly Not-Triss could see only a pattern of staining on the silk lining. When she peered intently at the scissors, however, the figure became visible, and she could see that it had the face of a lean old woman ashen with terror, brows threadbare and pimpled.

Not-Triss reached towards the handles, then hesitated. It occurred to her that pulling the scissors free might not be the best idea, in case they were waiting for a chance to close on the captive creature’s neck with a self-satisfied snip. Snatching a small award cup from one of the shelves, she popped it over the bird-thing’s head, to its evident confusion and outrage. When she tugged the blades free they did indeed close, but clinked harmlessly off the metal. They then settled for twisting in her grip, scraping the skin from her knuckles until she flung them away across the room.

There was a lather of wings, and the bird-thing was not in the box any more. Not-Triss stared around the room in vain, fearing that it had fled in spite of its promises. Then she became aware that there was something bobbing in her peripheral vision. The creature was perched on the silver frame of Sebastian’s soldier photograph, gripping the metal with tiny pale hands.

They looked at each other for a long second, bird-thing and thorn-doll, and then the former flew sullenly down to perch on the desk with an air of concession.

‘Friends now,’ it whispered, its voice as soothing as a rattlesnake lullaby. ‘You won’t tell anybody about this? Not them?’ It jerked a head towards the door, the bedrooms beyond. ‘Not… him?’ A fearful glance towards the night-filled window, and Not-Triss thought of the Architect.

Not-Triss said nothing. Instinct told her there was danger in making promises, and she was suspicious of the creature’s sudden good humour.

‘I know what you’re thinking of asking,’ the bird-thing continued, edging closer to her along the desk in small, companionable sideways hops. ‘You want to know where you can find him. Do not ask that, for I cannot answer it. Our beaks are bound on that matter, and we could not say anything of it if we wished. And anyway, if you have wits you will not want to find him. Of all the Besiders in these parts, he is the most powerful and dangerous. He would tear you to pieces.’

Besiders? Not-Triss nearly asked the question aloud, but bit back the word at the last moment. She had almost used up one of her three precious questions.

‘He’s not the one you want to talk to,’ the bird-thing continued. ‘I will tell you that for free. You want to talk to the Shrike. The Shrike created you – he will know how he made you and why. He will know something of the Architect’s plans. And he doesn’t belong to the Architect, the way we do. He just works for him when the price is right. So he might not kill you. If you’re clever. And if you know where he can be found.’

Not-Triss closed her eyes and sighed. The hint was obvious. But was there anything more useful she should ask? The bird-thing had already told her that it had never heard of Sebastian, did not know where the real Triss could be found, could not reveal the location of the Architect and was ignorant concerning the letters it delivered.

‘All right,’ she muttered, ‘where can the Shrike be found?’

‘He lives in the Underbelly, beneath the Victory Bridge,’ the thing answered, in crisp, triumphant tones. ‘Of course,’ it continued, with a hint of mockery, ‘knowing where he is will not be enough to get you there.’

Not-Triss could have kicked herself. Now she had little choice but to ask the trailing second question. Without it, the first piece of information was useless.

‘How can I get into the Underbelly to find the Shrike?’ she asked, through clenched teeth.

‘Go down Meddlar’s Lane under the bridge’s end, turn your face to the bricks and start walking. Then keep walking until the sound of the traffic grows faint and you can understand the gulls. Of course –’ and now there was clearly a suppressed snigger in the voice – ‘knowing how to reach the Underbelly is not the same as knowing how to enter it and leave again safely.’

Not-Triss hesitated a long moment. Her brief advantage over the invisible sniggerer was slipping through her fingers. However, she had already committed herself with her first two questions, and there was no going back.

‘Tell me,’ she said at last, giving in, ‘how do I enter and leave the Underbelly safely?’

The creature leaned forward, and its grin of pleasure was diluted by a gleam of earnestness.

‘Find yourself a cockerel, and a dagger or knife. Before you enter the Underbelly, drive the blade into the ground by any means you can. That is the only way to keep the path open behind you for when you need to leave. Pay no heed to any music that you hear playing. And whatever happens, remember why you are there. If you have questions to ask, keep asking and make it plain that you will not be gone until they are answered. Keep the cockerel wrapped and dumb until you think you are in danger.’

It watched her face for a few seconds more, and the sparks in its eyes became gleams of malicious delight.

‘But hurry, scrap-brat! You have only three days left! Three days! Three days!’

And then it was gone, with only the briefest rasp of sound, like somebody running their thumbnail down a notepad.

Too late, Not-Triss realized that the dead of night was no longer as dead as it had been. From down in the street she could hear the sound of hushed and puzzled voices, and the barking of excitable dogs. Even so, she was slow to make sense of it, her mind still shaken by the bird-thing’s words.

Thus it was that she was quite unprepared when the door suddenly opened, and she found herself bathed in candlelight.