The Book of Storms (17 page)

Shimny careered over a small stream, but Danny's hands were tangled in her mane and his legs gripped her sides so tightly that he didn't fall. Feeling firmer ground beneath her feet, she tried for one last effort. I must lose them now, or I never will.

And with her last ragged scraps of energy, she held off the advance of the dogs for vital seconds until the edge of a wood was approaching so quickly that she barely had time to see the trees before dodging between them. Sunlight streamed through the forest canopy, lighting a path that pulled them toward a fast-flowing river.

The horse did not hesitate to throw herself in.

*   *   *

Danny fell sideways, slipping off Shimny's back. For a second his legs tangled with her kicking hooves; only his hands stayed attached to her, still knotted in her mane. The horse fought to pull her neck away from his weight, and his head went under the water, bubbles pouring into his nostrils.

He choked and coughed and lashed out with his feet, trying to find the bottom, but it was deeper than he could reach.

“Stop!” he tried to shout, but when he opened his mouth, it filled with water.

He tried to breathe one more time, before the flood drained down to his lungs. He spat and yanked hard at his hands, using his whole strength to try and get them away. All that happened was that he pulled Shimny's head down, and then somehow they were writhing together and his leg was over her back again and she was floating level in the water, her neck held high.

Danny's hands were white from the tourniquet of mane hairs. Clumsy and stiff, his hands refused to move. He gnawed at the hair with his teeth until at last it broke, and the panic of being tied to another living creature began to subside, leaving a slow fizz in his bloodstream.

Looking around, he couldn't see the dogs, whose baying still floated on the wind toward them. What would they do when they reached the bank? Dogs could definitely swim, although perhaps once they were in water it would be more difficult for them to bite. Even then …

Just as Danny reached into his right pocket to check that the stick was still there, he heard the pony speak his name.

“Yeah?” he answered. The dogs' barks were getting louder as they neared the riverbank.

“Ask the river to slow a bit. We're near a corner, and I'll be beached or drowned at the rate we're going.”

Danny didn't want to slow down. They ought to put as much distance as possible between themselves and those howling, yowling dogs. But back on land, without the pony, he'd have no chance at all. He turned his attention to the river. “Sorry, river,” he asked, “can you slow down a bit? The old mare can't swim.”

“Yes, yes, of course!” the river said, dragging its heels along the stones of its bed so that the flow of water calmed. “Hello! Hello! The stream said you were coming! Pack of dogs just behind you, I see!”

Danny lurched round to look at the bank they had jumped off, nearly pushing Shimny over sideways. Were the dogs following them along the river?

It appeared not.

“I did a bit of, ah, hydraulic engineering back there. Shallowed out so's it'd look like you'd gone across. And they just ran straight over, away to the other side! They're, um, not the brainiest creatures in existence and they won't stop to ask anybeast where you've gone until they're well and truly confused.”

Danny's hands trembled in a strange spasm. He closed his eyes and opened them again, to clear his vision.

“Thanks,” he said to the river. “We had no chance.… They just came out of nowhere.… Tom…” But he couldn't think about Tom, not just yet.

“Well, shall I put you on the bank, then? I think your horse is about to have a heart attack. Don't worry, I'll put you back on the side you came from. Those dogs are still haring after you way out west somewhere! The other side of the bank! Hah!”

Before Danny had a chance to answer, the river drew back and flung itself in a huge arc over the bank. Boy, horse, and cat were swept into the air in a rushing swell that slapped them down onto the earth and pounded them with an afterthought of water, pressing their limbs into the mud. It was like lying under a waterfall.

As the river drained away, Danny lay on the riverbank, coughing. Every time he coughed, water rattled in his lungs, but he couldn't seem to get it up to his mouth, no matter how hard he hawked. He needed to climb into a tree and hang upside down by his feet from a branch to drain it out, but he was too exhausted to do anything except let his arms sprawl out and press his cheek against the smooth earth. His legs didn't feel like they'd ever hold him upright again.

He ought to talk more to the river. If he was ever going to get anywhere, if he was ever going to find his parents, he had to keep asking for help. But he couldn't even move his hand to check whether the stick was still in his pocket.

The image of his older sister came to him. What would life have been like if Emma had been there, leading the way? She'd have been like Tom, confident and strong, sure of herself. She'd have shown Danny what to do.

Except that hardly mattered now. Emma didn't exist, and Tom was probably dead, lying ripped apart somewhere, his legs bleeding, his blond hair chewed off, like those pictures of mangled foxes on the animal-rights stall outside the library.

Danny shivered and forced himself to sit up. The horse was lying on her side, her legs straight and stiff. Her rib cage was mountainous, an upturned bathtub, but it rose and fell to the rhythm of her feeble breathing. He could talk to her, now Tom wasn't around. But she didn't look like she'd relish a conversation.

The stick was still in his pocket. He'd known that, really. He'd have felt its loss, like when he'd left Abel Korsakof's without it. It wasn't even damp: the outside world didn't seem to touch it much.

Mitz was a bedraggled ball of rage. She was shaking and licking, shaking and licking, in a furious attempt to dry herself. At least the river had washed off all the soot.

“Hey, Mitz,” Danny tried softly. “Are you okay?”

The cat gave him a filthy look. “Ask me that again,” she said, “and I'll scratch your eyes out. Do I look okay?”

“Better than you did. I'm sure you'll dry and look fine,” Danny said, coughing again. His lungs hurt, as though someone had first overinflated them and then punctured them with a knitting needle. Mitz arched her back and hissed at him. Without all the fluff, her body was skinny and sharp and her eyes looked too big for her face.

Another sound came up from the water. It was the river again, its thousand voices straining together.

“Are you recovered?” it asked.

“Yeah,” said Danny, although he wasn't really. His legs were made of string, and now he'd never find the Book of Storms, without Tom. He didn't know one end of a woodland path from another, and the map was still in his schoolbag, which he didn't dare take off his back. Once he knew that the map had become a fistful of soggy gloop, then he'd know for certain that all was lost.

“What were you doing, being chased by the Dogs of War?” the river asked.

“I don't know! I just looked around, and they were running up the hill. Who keeps that many dogs? They're killers! They should lock them up.”

“The Dogs of War? No one keeps them, not all together in a pack. They belong to the moon—just normal dogs, owned by people, living in houses all around the place, except when she calls them together. But she only sends them out on very special occasions. You must have done something pretty bad.”

Danny wanted to stick up for himself one last time, although he was sure he'd stop bothering soon.

“I haven't done anything,” he said. “I'm only looking for my parents. And Tom came with me, and then the dogs got him, and he's … he's … I dunno, and Sammael's after me. He wants something I've got—but he's never even asked me for it, just keeps trying to kill me. I guess next time he'll probably succeed. I must be running out of luck by now.”

“Sammael?” The river bubbled deep underneath, causing the surface to shiver. “Ah, then it must have been him who asked the moon to send the dogs. He's old friends with the moon, you know—she always owes him a favor or two. How did you come to be mixed up with him?”

“Not my fault,” said Danny. “I just found something. He wants it a lot, I guess.”

The river was silent for a moment. Danny couldn't hear its normal slippery streaming sound quite so well when he was listening out for its real words.

Eventually it said, “I did hear that he was plotting something. I mean, he's always plotting something, but this one's big. Something to do with humans—he wants to hurt them badly, to destroy them all, I think.”

Danny clutched at the stick. His other hand balled into a fist. What on earth
was
Sammael? How could this river speak so casually of him destroying people?

“All people?” he said. “But …
why
?”

“Oh, I assume it's because he's tired of endlessly doing his job with no recognition or reward. He's been doing it a long time, you know, and people have changed a lot. Perhaps he thinks they're not as interesting as they once were—perhaps he thinks they're not as imaginative. Whatever it is, he's certainly angry these days. Angry at the whole lot of you, I'm sorry to say.”

Danny wrestled with the idea of all the humans on the planet in one single blob, all looking in the same direction at Sammael, and Sammael facing them back, hating every single one.

“But … there're, like, seven
billion
of us. There's no way anyone can destroy us all!”

“Oh, he's got a lot of time,” said the river. “And a lot of patience, I'd say. I'd heard he was working on something to do with storms.”

This was way too big. All humans? Everybody? But by the way the river was talking, it was something that would take ages. Maybe years. Maybe centuries, and then Danny wouldn't really have to worry about it at all.

“How much time?” he asked. “I mean, will it take him, like, years?”

“Oh, I should think so,” said the river cheerfully. “Maybe years. Maybe days. You can never be sure how fast Sammael is working. He just has to collect what he needs—he's found out that storm taros can give him the ability to gather and control storms. It's because of that coat, you know.”

“His coat?” Danny tried to picture what kind of coat Sammael would wear. For a moment he wished he could see him, there in front of his eyes. At least then he'd know what he was running from.

“Mmm. Long black thing,” said the river. “There're all sorts of stories about it—legends about how it came to be, what it was made from, all that sort of thing. No one knows whether any of them are true, but each set of creatures has its own. Some say the coat was made from the hide of the Great Ox Xur, who pulled the sun up into the sky on the first-ever morning. Some say the coat's made of deerskin, from one of the black stags that pull the moon across the sky. I know that its origins are shady and that it was bought at great cost. But whatever the truth, he discovered that when he put that coat on, it gave him the power to control the storms he gathered up. So that's what he's planning to do, I think. Collect enough taros to be able to call up a storm so vast, it can destroy a huge area, and then another, and so on.”

“But … he can't kill people, can he?” said Danny. “He has to get other creatures to do it for him, doesn't he? That's why he's never tried to, I dunno, strangle me or something. I didn't believe it at first, but those dogs … Why would you go to all the trouble of trying to get
dogs
to kill someone if you could just go and do it yourself?”

“Clever!” said the river. “Not lacking in brain, are you? You're right: Death's job is to go around collecting people's sand—or souls, if you like—and then to return that sand to the earth so it can become part of new lives. If Sammael tries to kill people, then Death won't take their sand away—she says his job is to create, not to destroy, so she brings them back to life. But if a storm killed them, too much of their sand would go straight into the earth with the lightning. It'd be impossible for Death to get it all back and make them alive, and whole, again. She wouldn't refuse to take the rest of them, then—she wouldn't leave people in limbo just to make a point to Sammael. So his plan will work fine, unless something stops him. Frankly, I'm not sure that anything can.”

Danny pulled the stick from his pocket and looked at it. It still just looked like a stick. But he was talking to a river, and the river had said Sammael's power to control storms lies in his
coat
.…

He slowly twisted the schoolbag off his back, plonked it on the ground between his knees, and opened it. Water had wriggled through the seams. Both notebooks were damp, their pages sticking together, but still readable. When he fished around for the map, though, all he found was a lump of wet mush that had bled blue ink all over itself. It was too wet to fold out.

So the map had gone. No Tom, no map, no Book of Storms. Would he ever find his parents again? Should he just give them up for lost?

“I've got to go back there.… I've got to find Tom. Is there even any point…” he said, not quite knowing what he was trying to say.

“Any point in what?” The river was still cheerful.

“Any point … keeping on trying,” he said, finding the thought. “I don't actually know if my parents are even still alive. I sort of think I'd know if they weren't, but maybe I wouldn't. Maybe they have just gone, forever, and I'll never see them again. And now Tom…” He didn't have to fight back tears; he was past crying.

The sun eased round in the sky, and a thin ray hit the side of his face. The river was silent for a moment and then said, “But you still need to find the answer, don't you? And there're always places you can find answers if you keep looking long enough. It's just that looking is sometimes harder than you want it to be, that's all.”