Cuckoo Song (27 page)

Not-Triss remembered his promise not to act against her and warily drew her stool closer to him. As she did so, the nearest dolls shifted as well. Some flinched away from her. Some reached out
slender jointed hands of wood.

‘Stop that!’ squeaked Pen, glaring at the Shrike. ‘Stop making them do that!’

‘I’m not.’ The Shrike’s eyes gleamed like stars in mist, as he threaded his needle. ‘
She’s
doing it.’ He nodded towards Not-Triss, to her alarm
and confusion. ‘But we’ll come to that.

‘I told you before, that my people have found it harder and harder to live in the places that were once our homes—’

‘Why?’ Pen’s question broke through his words like a bullet through a windowpane. The Shrike’s gaze flickered, and Not-Triss suspected that she had just seen a veiled
wince. Certainly, when he started speaking again there was a good deal of reluctance in his voice. The point of his needle stung slightly as he set about darning her flanks.

‘Maps.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Mostly maps. We . . . used to live in the wilds, the deep forests, the bleak mountains, the unused places. Because they were unknown.
Mysterious. Lost. Uncharted. And . . . we need that. We can’t survive anywhere that is governed by certainty, where everything is known and mapped and written about and divided into columns.
Certainty poisons us, slowly.’

The Shrike gave Pen a small cool glance in which there was a good deal of dislike, and Not-Triss felt certain that her question was one he had hoped not to answer.

‘Or sometimes quickly,’ he added, and darted Not-Triss a questioning look. ‘I dare say you’ve noticed by now that there’s a certain human tool that has a quarrel
with us?’ With his second and third fingers he mimed scissorish snipping motions. Not-Triss flinched, and the Shrike nodded. She noticed that he was trimming his sewing thread with a tiny
serrated bone knife, rather than scissors.

‘A knife is made with a hundred tasks in mind,’ he continued, threading his bone needle. ‘Stab. Slice. Flay. Carve. But scissors are really intended for one job alone –
snipping things in two. Dividing by force. Everything on one side or the other, and nothing in between. Certainty. We’re in-between folk, so scissors hate us. They want to snip us through and
make sense of us, and there’s no sense to be made without killing us. Watch out for old pairs of scissors in particular, or scissors made in old ways.’

‘Yes,’ Not-Triss admitted reluctantly. ‘They do seem to hate me . . . and I think it’s been getting worse.’

‘The more you act and think like one of us, the more they’ll see you as one of us.’ The Shrike was feeding the stolen vine back in through her torn side, and she could feel it
moving amid her vitals like a dry snake.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘we ran into the same sort of fix when your people started making better maps. Planes flew over and could see everything, and the railways went everywhere
and ramblers started wanting charts so they could follow the paths into the remote places. We withdrew and withdrew, until there was nowhere left
to
withdraw.

‘Some tried to defend their territory from the certainty, some tore each other apart fighting over the last scraps of land . . .’ The Shrike gave a dismissive wave of his hand, idly
brushing away decades of bloody history. ‘We were losing. We were dying. And then one of us – the man you call the Architect – came to the rest of us with a plan.

‘He had noticed something that the rest of us had missed, because we had been skulking further and further away from the villages and towns. He dared to walk right past them and into the
fringes of the nearest
city.
And one Sunday he discovered something.
The church bells there no longer hurt him.
’

‘Church bells?’ asked Not-Triss.

The Shrike nodded. ‘We have always avoided them. They sicken us, make our heads ring—’

‘It’s because you’re
evil
,’ Pen suggested promptly.

‘It’s the
certainty
,’ the Shrike contradicted her. ‘Every Sunday, people have always trooped to that cold crypt of a building to share their faith, their
certainty –
God’s in his heaven, the vicar is His postman and all’s right with the world.’ There was a glint of mirth in his eye that was not pleasant.

‘But everybody
does
still believe that!’ Not-Triss exclaimed.

‘Do they? Oh, they still troop in, good as gold, and listen to the vicar’s sermon. But they remember that same vicar telling them that the War was
God’s
war, that all
pious young men should be dropping their hoes and grabbing a gun. And they wonder,
Was it? That hell-beast that ate our sons whole, was that really God’s war?
’

The Shrike grinned, and Not-Triss found that she did not like him after all.

‘I do not pretend to know if there
is
a God,’ he went on, ‘or whether the cold stars go on forever. The War belonged to humanity, and nobody else. But for us it was a
godsend
, that much I can tell you. The War crushed
faith
. All kinds of faith. Before the War, everybody had their rung on the ladder, and they didn’t look much below or
above it. But now? Low and high died side by side in Flanders Fields, and looked much the same face down in the mud. And the heroes who came back from hell didn’t fancy tugging their
forelocks as they starved on the streets.

‘And the women! Once they kept to their pretty little path and didn’t step on the grass. But those that worked in the farms and factories during the War have a taste for running
their own lives now, haven’t they? So all their menfolk are panicking. Frightened.
Uncertain.
And all of this doubt, this shaking up of the foundations, there was more of it in the
cities.’

‘Why?’ asked Not-Triss, scarcely wanting to interrupt the Shrike’s flow.

‘Because cities are beautiful . . .
chaos
. They’re not like villages, where everybody knows each other and the ruts run deep. They mix hundreds of people and ideas like
chemicals in a flask, till things go
bang
! You can get
lost
in cities. The walls rise high and swallow all the landmarks, and you’re nearly always surrounded by strangers.
And there are
automobiles
. Everybody knows where they are with a horse, but motorcars? Nobody knows what they’re doing with them! And nobody driving them bothers with the rules! And
they churn up great dust clouds, so that
everything
is uncharted, and impossible to predict. It’s beautiful.’

‘So that’s why you’re here?’ Not-Triss tried to steer the Shrike back to the main topic. ‘It was the Architect’s idea?’

‘Yes.’ The Shrike grinned. ‘He
is
an architect of sorts, you see. A brilliant one. He can whisper bricks and mortar into shapes that twist your eye and your mind if
you stare at them. He can build a palace with a hundred rooms, and make its outer shell no bigger than an outhouse. He realised that the best way to find uncharted places for us in a city would be
to
build
the places, in ways that would show up on no maps.

‘But he knew that he could not do it alone. He needed an ally, a human architect – or better still a civil engineer – to pose as the creator of his designs, or they would never
be accepted.’

‘What does he mean?’ Pen was glaring at the Shrike accusingly. ‘He’s talking about Father, isn’t he?’

Not-Triss, however, could guess all too clearly what he meant, though she did not want to. She still felt the real Triss’s pride in her famous father, the Three Maidens bridges, all the
landmarks that had put Ellchester on the map . . .

‘All those buildings, the ones that made Fath— Mr Crescent famous.’ She took a deep breath. ‘He didn’t design any of them, did he?’

‘What?’ Pen stared, appalled as the Shrike shook his head.

‘No,’ confirmed the Shrike. ‘But he did rather well out of the deal.’

‘What was his side of the bargain?’ Not-Triss thought of poor, misled Triss, who worshipped her father, and felt an unexpected spark of anger on her behalf. ‘What did Mr
Crescent have to do in return?’

‘Oh, you don’t understand,’ answered the Shrike. ‘That
was
his side of the bargain. He was very reluctant actually. Thought the whole business very queer. It
took quite an offer to bring him round.’

‘What was . . . ?’ Not-Triss did not end the sentence, because already her mind was spiralling away from her towards the truth.

‘It was just after the end of the War,’ the Shrike explained. ‘Thousands of young men still stranded out in Europe, waiting to be brought home. Their families over here combing
through the bulletins, looking for news. But sometimes it was the
wrong
kind of news.

‘Your parents received a letter from your brother’s commanding officer. The usual kind of letter, along with your brother’s personal effects. But they did not want to believe
it. And then the Architect told your father that if he made a deal with him and gave him one of the items,
he would hear from his son again.
’

At last the terrible letters from Sebastian started to make sense.

‘But . . . where is he?’ exploded Pen. ‘Where’s Sebastian? Why didn’t he come home?’

‘Because he died,’ answered the Shrike, calmly and mercilessly. ‘He is not
gone
, but he is not alive either. Sorry. He is just . . . stopped.’

‘Stopped?’ Not-Triss’s mouth was dry.

‘How do we un-stop him?’ asked Pen.

‘I have no idea. You would have to ask the Architect.’ The Shrike gave a smile that made it clear that he did not think she would do anything of the sort.

‘What was the thing the Architect asked for?’ asked Not-Triss.

‘Something belonging to your brother, and tied to his death, I believe.’ The Shrike shrugged. ‘The Architect never told me much more than that, but I would guess that it was
something he needed to fulfil his half of the deal.’

‘That’s . . .’ Not-Triss thought of the tormented tone of the letters. ‘That was a cruel, horrible trick! He must have known they thought Sebastian would come home! And
now he’s trapped somewhere . . .’ She thought of the way the Crescent family had ruptured and folded in on itself, like a paper hat in the rain. ‘Wasn’t that enough? Why did
the Architect kidnap Triss as well? Hadn’t he done enough harm?’

The Shrike looked genuinely surprised by her outburst.

‘The bargain you make is the bargain you make,’ he said with a shrug. ‘If Crescent didn’t heed the wording, more fool him. He wanted to believe a lie, so he did. And
maybe there were arguments when he didn’t get what he expected, but he had enough sense to keep his side of the bargain and build the Architect’s designs. Until a few months ago, that
is.’

A few more pieces slotted into place. The article in the newspaper. The mysterious conversations Not-Triss had overheard between Piers and Celeste.

‘He stopped building what the Architect wanted, didn’t he?’ she said slowly. ‘He started working on that Meadowsweet suburb instead . . .’

‘He
broke the bargain.
’ The Shrike’s voice was suddenly pure venom, as if he was naming a sin far beyond the pale. Not-Triss remembered the Architect’s reaction
when Pen suggesting ‘telling’, and going against the terms of her deal with him. She shuddered as she recalled his wild, child-like loss of control.

That would be breaking our bargain!

‘There’s nothing in this world more likely to drive the Architect insane than
that
,’ commented the Shrike. ‘And that’s what he is now, where it comes to
the Crescent family. Vengeance is on his mind, pure and simple. He has some plan for young Theresa – something that will see its end in a few days, if you ask me.

‘Because that’s where
you
come in. He needed
you
to stand in for little Theresa, just long enough for him to do whatever he plans to do. Now, usually when
there’s a switch of this sort, it’s enough to leave an ordinary doll cloaked with a simple glamour . . . that is to say, a touch of something to fool the eye. The doll doesn’t
need to think. If it’s a baby doll it just squalls and asks for food, then withers over the course of a week. If it’s older, it lies there as if it’s in an impenetrable sleep, and
wastes away until it dies. But Crescent knows about the Besiders, you see, so the Architect wanted you to be more convincing. Much more convincing.

‘
That
one,’ he nodded towards Pen, ‘brought us everything we needed. Diaries to supply memories. Things dear to her sweet sister, all with a power to them. And then I
pushed my craft to its limit . . . and I gave you the power to think. To remember. To believe you were Theresa. To act. To feel. And I cloaked your body of thorns and straw with the most powerful
spell I had to make you move and look human. That’s why my dolls here started to move when you drew close. They came within range of the spell. They don’t have a mind the way you do,
but they can mimic having one, just while the spell touches them.’

‘So all my memories come from Triss’s diary entries?’ Not-Triss tried not to wonder what would happen if those pages fell out through her sides. ‘But . . . then I would
just remember what was written down, wouldn’t I? I remember more than that – what things looked like and how it felt to be there. I remember . . . Sebastian.’

‘The diaries were invested with Triss’s memories,’ answered the Shrike. ‘They’re a link, if you like. You only remember events written down in her diaries, but you
remember them as
she
remembers them.

‘There.’ He broke the thread and examined his handiwork. ‘Those seams should hold.’ He gave Not-Triss another shrewd glance. ‘And . . . I cannot help noticing that
there’s matter in those innards that
I
never put there. Other things belonging to dear Theresa, are they?’

Not-Triss flushed. It had not occurred to her that the objects she had swallowed might be visible to the Shrike through the holes in her side.

‘So that’s how you did it! That’s why you’re still so spry. By now, I thought you’d be flat on your sickbed, barely able to raise your head or talk. Clever girl.
Won’t make a difference in the end, of course, but good for you.’