The Hush Read online

  And suddenly, a shout.

  Chester stiffened. It wasn’t a distant yell, from some far-flung corner of the maze. It was barely a hundred yards behind them.

  ‘I found ’em! Get the sheriff!’

  ‘Oi, over here!’

  Chester whipped his neck around. He couldn’t see the speakers. But when he thought of all the stalks they’d broken, brushing the sides of the path, he felt sick.

  ‘Come on,’ Sam whispered. ‘This way.’

  Chester fought to keep his footsteps light, but it was hopeless; every strand of dried grass or broken stalk crunched like a firecracker. And Sam, despite his speed and strength, wasn’t built for sneaking. He blundered along with all the noise of a wild griffin, sparking cracks and huffs and snaps into the silence.

  ‘The Hush!’ Chester said. ‘We can go back into the Hush, can’t we? Just long enough to get away from –’

  Sam shook his head. ‘Can’t do it out here, even if we wanted to. You need some Musical residue in the air, for breaking into the Hush.’

  ‘There’s none here?’

  ‘Nope. It’s not like in the middle of town, near that Songshaper’s house.’

  Chester felt a weight settle in his stomach. Without even realising it, he had been relying on the hope of the Hush. The knowledge that if worst came to worst, they could slip back into unreality, safe from the sheriff and his bullets.

  But they were trapped, with no way into the Hush and no way out of the cornfields. Their pursuers probably included the farmers who owned this field. They would know every twist and every turn. Chester, on the other hand, was lost. Ahead, nothing but endless green and tan. Above, just empty blue. There were no landmarks to judge by, no way to keep track of the town or the horizon. He couldn’t see over the tops of the corn stalks, which loomed like soldiers over his head. He tried to steady his breathing, to hide the terror that wrenched at his belly. You show folks you’re weak, and they’ll use it to break you …

  They swerved around a corner. Chester skidded on a few dried corn husks in a mad attempt to avoid crashing into Sam. The larger boy had jerked to a halt, one hand slapped upwards to keep his cowboy hat from flying off his head.

  ‘What …?’

  And then he saw a man, ten yards ahead.

  Nathaniel Glaucon.

  Chester’s throat closed. For a long moment, he didn’t breathe. He stared down the path at the Songshaper, at the sweep of his olive-green coat, framed by walls of corn stalks. At the chestnut pegasus by his side.

  At the pistol in his hands.

  Sam whipped his own gun from its holster so fast that Chester barely heard the click. There was a blast of gunfire and a bullet smashed into Nathaniel’s chest.

  Chester jumped, shocked by the roar of the gun. His ears rang, warping sound in and out like the chokes of a dying man. Nathaniel jerked back and Chester stared, waiting for the Songshaper to topple.

  He didn’t. Blood poured from his chest, spreading a stain across his olive coat. His breath was ragged, as though the bullet had pierced one of his lungs. But there was no cry of pain and no falling body. Instead, a flittering tune escaped his lips: a hum of notes, pouring Music into the air. A wisp of dark smoke curled up from his chest, as though his humming had scorched a melody into the wound itself …

  Healing, Chester realised. Nathaniel was using a melody to heal himself. Chester knew that a trained Songshaper could be powerful, but he had always pictured wild, brutal blasts of power. He had never realised that such finesse was possible: the skill to stitch your own flesh together with a song …

  Nathaniel fell silent. He stood there, a gun in one hand and reins in the other. His pendant – the silver nautilus shell – glinted at his throat.

  The pegasus, which had let out a terrified whinny at the gunshot, was straining and rearing now, fighting to break away. Its wings flapped and its nostrils snorted, panicked by the roar of the bullet.

  Nathaniel fixed his gaze on it. He hummed a slow, quiet tune under his breath. A tune of control, perhaps, to tranquilise the beast.

  The creature’s wings sucked downwards and vanished into its spine with a slow, crumpled slurp. Its legs stopped straining; its nostrils ceased flaring. The magic fizzled into its veins, its hooves, its bones, its withers. And slowly, inch by inch, the beast calmed. It stood silent and still, just an ordinary chestnut stallion, its mind drugged into a doze.

  Silence.

  Nathaniel raised an eyebrow at Sam, and kept his own pistol trained towards them. ‘Now, now,’ he said. His voice was hoarse, but with every word it sounded stronger. ‘You can’t have expected that to kill me, boy. I am protected by the glory of the Song.’

  Sam scoffed. ‘You ain’t protected by nothing but your own damn spellwork, you filthy –’

  Nathaniel Glaucon cut him off with a laugh. ‘Oh, very good.’ He took a step closer. ‘Very good, boy.’

  He dropped the reins. Behind him, the horse just stood there, silent and numb as stone. Nathaniel’s gaze wandered to Chester now, and he adjusted the angle of his pistol. It pointed directly at Chester’s face.

  Chester froze. He stared down the barrel of the pistol, at the hole where the bullet would emerge. Beside him, he felt Sam’s muscles tense. The silence stretched. No one moved.

  ‘Now,’ Nathaniel said, ‘this is interesting.’ His eyes flicked back to Sam, but his pistol stayed trained on Chester. ‘For someone who knows so much, you took a great risk coming here. All to save this brat from his rightful execution. Why might that be, I wonder?’

  Sam didn’t respond.

  ‘I know what you are, boy,’ said Nathaniel Glaucon to Chester. ‘But this is my town and we play by my rules. I won’t let an unlicensed Songshaper run out of here alive.’

  He pulled the trigger.

  The next few seconds were a blur. Sam crashed into Chester’s side and he was falling, stumbling, smashing down into a wall of stalks and leaves. Chester’s ears were ringing again, but this time pain accompanied the roar. His left arm burned hot, slick with blood.

  Sam lay half on top of him, heavy and gasping. But a moment later he was up, firing wildly at the Songshaper. Five sharp cracks smashed down the path. Every bullet shrieked, and Chester felt as though his ears might blast right off his head.

  Nathaniel staggered and dropped his weapon.

  Sam fired again and again. But he wasn’t firing at the Songshaper’s chest. With a jolt, Chester realised that the older boy was firing at Nathaniel’s ankles. The man toppled with a cry. His own pistol slipped from his fingers as he struggled to catch himself. He collapsed, flailing, into the tangle of his own coat.

  ‘You might be hard to kill,’ Sam said, ‘but good luck standing with your ankles in shreds.’

  Nathaniel fished something from his pocket – another gun, Chester thought in a panic – but no, it was a miniature flute. The man pressed the instrument to his lips and began to conjure a huffing, panicked melody. As the notes poured out, smoke spiralled up from the end of his flute. The path began to tingle, alive with Music, and the dirt beneath Chester began to dissolve. With a gasp, he felt himself sinking, as though the dirt was sucking him down into his grave …

  ‘Oh no you don’t!’

  Sam charged. He forced the Songshaper’s head down onto the path, and eddies of dust rose to mingle with the smoke. The flute skittered away and Sam swiped it up, along with the man’s lost pistol. Chester scrambled for a patch of solid earth just as the entire path snapped back into rigidity beneath him. On the ground fumbling in pain, he fought to rip his sunken knees and ankles free from the dirt.

  Nathaniel snarled up at Sam. ‘That’s mine!’

  Sam clutched the flute tighter, holding it beyond Nathaniel’s grasp. The Songshaper began to hum, pushing furious Music through his lips and teeth. Sam blasted a bullet into the man’s throat, just above his silver pendant. Blood and chokes poured from Nathaniel’s flesh as he writhed in the dust. But his fingers pummelled the dirt beside him, w
ith a certain regularity to their beat. He was tapping out a rhythm, Chester realised: a weak, halting beat to slow the bleeding in his wounds.

  A curl of dark, unnatural smoke rose from Nathaniel’s throat, and the skin began to slowly blister. But this time, the healing was sluggish. A rhythm, it seemed, was less effective than a melody. For a while, at least, Nathaniel would be in no fit state to attack them.

  And behind him, the chestnut horse just stood there. It remained numb and silent, drugged by sorcery, its wits as lost as its vanished wings. The sight was unsettling: an unmoving statue in rising clouds of dust and smoke.

  Chester struggled to his feet. He had to help. He had to do something, he couldn’t just lie here. But as soon as he rose, his head swam with dizziness. Pain shot down his upper arm, where the bullet had struck. He clutched the wound, fingers tightening, and fought to stem the sticky flow of blood.

  A moment later, Sam was by his side. ‘All right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Chester gritted his teeth, and tried to look braver than he felt. ‘I’m fine. Better keep moving.’

  Sam grabbed his arm and examined the wound. He swore under his breath then stumbled back across to where Nathaniel writhed on the ground. The Songshaper struggled to rise but his bullet-ridden ankles made it impossible.

  Sam ripped off the man’s coat and tore a strip of fabric from the vest he wore beneath. Then he was back with Chester, tying the fabric tightly around his injured arm. Chester cried out when Sam gave one final yank to tighten the bandage. It felt like a whole new bullet through his flesh: a sharp shock of pain, followed by the burn of heat and seepage of blood. Chester clenched his eyes and let a hiss escape his teeth.

  ‘Will he be all right?’ he whispered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Songshaper.’

  Sam glanced back towards Nathaniel. ‘Yeah, he’ll be fine. Might take a few hours of healing, but a man like that don’t die easy.’ He looked at Chester. ‘You, on the other hand …’

  Chester swayed a little, trying to fight back the dizziness.

  Sam grabbed his face. ‘Look at me.’

  Chester blinked and tried to focus.

  Sam stared into his pupils for a moment then nodded. ‘All right, we gotta move. You feel yourself getting too dizzy, you let me know. Don’t wait until you’re falling off the damn horse, all right?’

  Chester gritted his teeth. ‘Yeah. All right.’

  They staggered across to the chestnut horse. Sam vaulted onto its back and gestured for Chester to get up, too. Chester winced at the stab in his arm, but stuck a foot in the stirrup and launched himself up in front of Sam. With a gasp of pain, he found his balance.

  The horse remained utterly still. Apart from the inflation of its chest when it breathed, they might as well have been sitting on a statue. The Music used to numb the creature had certainly worked.

  ‘Here.’ Sam reached forwards to pass Chester the miniature flute. ‘Can’t bring its wings back without the right training, but at least you can wake it up.’

  ‘You do it, I don’t know how –’

  ‘Gotta be you,’ Sam said. ‘I can’t play Music. Just play something cheerful. Something alive. And do it fast.’

  There were other footsteps now. Other shouts and cries in the fields around them. Suddenly Chester remembered the farmers, the townspeople, the sheriff. They would have heard the gunshots. They would have heard the shouts, the cries, the shrieks of the panicking pegasus …

  Any moment, they would be here.

  Chester raised the flute to his lips. He took a deep breath, struggled to tune out the agony of his arm, and blew a few test notes to get a feel for the instrument.

  Finally, he launched into the music.

  For the first few bars, there was nothing but the rollick of melody. The shouts behind them grew louder and there was the sound of running footsteps. Figures burst out onto the path behind them, and Chester heard the angry clicks of cocking pistols while the horse remained still and silent.

  Chester played harder. He built up the pace, the lilt, the thrum of the music. He scarcely dared to take a breath, except to suck back a note along the curve of his tongue. There was another tune now, echoing at the back of his head, that took the rhythm of his heartbeat. He stuttered, panicking slightly, as he recognised the Song.

  No! He couldn’t afford to connect to the Song. He had to focus on his own tune, his own Music. He clenched his eyes shut and blew the flute harder, focusing every last skerrick of concentration onto the melody. The tune rose higher and higher, louder and louder. The horse jerked. It shook its head and a whinny escaped its lips. Its nostrils flared and it stumbled backwards, tripping away from Nathaniel’s bloody body on the ground.

  ‘That’s more like it!’ Sam reached around Chester’s sides to grab the reins, and gave the horse a kick. ‘Let’s get of here.’

  The horse bolted.

  There was a frenzy of bangs and shouts. Hamelin locals poured down the trail and started firing in their direction. Sam kicked again and Chester clutched at the horse’s mane, his heart thumping and his arm throbbing. The world was a clatter of hooves and the shriek of bullets.

  They rounded a bend in the path, building to a gallop, and the world flew by in a whirl of green stalks and blue sky. Dust roared up from the horse’s hooves, and Chester coughed and spluttered as it puffed into his mouth. But he kept his eyes open and his body tensed. Another bend, and another. The horse charged and panted, an engine of sweat and muscle. The cornfields fell away. With a final crash, they ploughed through a patch of young stalks.

  And then they were out, charging downhill with reckless speed into open fields and sunlight.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was almost noon when they hit the railway line, a gleaming trail of hot metal and wood. It ran into the distance, on and on, seeming to narrow as it trickled away. On the western horizon, it vanished into a shimmer of heat under midday sky.

  Sam reached out to help Chester dismount. For a moment Chester was insulted, but the burn in his arm won out over pride. He allowed Sam to grab him around the waist and lift him down.

  ‘All right?’ Sam asked.

  Chester nodded, although he still felt a little dizzy. Blood trickled out under the bandage Sam had made and he suspected the horse’s jolting had dislodged it from the proper pressure point. But he took the reins in his good hand and gave the firmest nod he could muster. ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’

  Sam bent to examine the railway track. His boots scuffed the dirt as he knelt, placing a cautious hand on the hot metal. He frowned then shuffled sideways. Little puffs of dust scraped up from the drag of his coat in the dirt. He pressed his fingers to the metal again. He bowed his head, cowboy hat tilting towards the tracks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Chester asked.

  ‘Concentrating.’

  Chester wasn’t sure whether that was an answer to his question or an order to shut up. He decided to go with the latter and took a few steps parallel to the track. He stared down the line. An endless line of wood and metal. Endless fields, endless sky.

  The Meloral railway line had only sprung up over the last decade or so. It began in Weser City, on the south-western coast, and stretched thousands of miles to the eastern port of Leucosia. In recent years, other tracks had begun to branch off from it, casting a spiderweb of lines across the country.

  Unfortunately, this progress had come with a cost. Hundreds of workers had died to lay the tracks, collapsing under the scorching sun in the remotest areas of Meloral. Only the most desperate of men would take a job on the railway. In many towns, going off to ‘work on the tracks’ was a euphemism for poverty or running from the past, and it meant dying young.

  Sam dusted off his hands. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Train’s coming soon.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Can feel it vibrating. The whole damn track starts to wake up when there’s a train coming.’

  Chester peered up and down the track. They we
re in the middle of nowhere – no station, no bridge, no fork in the line. Nothing that might slow a train long enough to jump aboard. Just flat, empty track. If a train came through here, it would come at full speed.

  ‘How are we supposed to jump on?’ he said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Onto the train, I mean. It’ll be going too fast to –’

  ‘We ain’t here to catch a train.’

  ‘Then where are we going?’

  ‘Back into the Hush,’ Sam said.

  Chester’s insides froze. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me,’ Sam said. ‘We’re going back into the Hush. We’ll need a hell of a Musical push to break back through. The trains’re powered in part by Music – normally they give enough of a push.’

  ‘You said I wasn’t trained to go there yet.’ Chester tried to hide the sudden twang of nerves in his voice. ‘You’ve changed your mind?’

  ‘Nope,’ Sam said. ‘It’s too dangerous for you to run around the Hush on foot. But lucky for you, I got transport waiting.’ He gave Chester a long look. ‘How’d you figure I got to Hamelin so quick yesterday?’

  ‘I thought you just happened to be in town …’

  ‘What, for a blasted harvest party?’ Sam snorted. ‘Yesterday morning, I was in Bremen. There was a Songshaper there, tracking you with a radar globe. If you keep joining up to the Song,’ he added, in response to Chester’s startled look, ‘sooner or later, you’re gonna get yourself noticed. The radar picks up interference in the Song, see, and it sends an alert if your Musical signature ain’t registered …’

  Chester swallowed.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sam said, ‘the radar said you was over in Hamelin, so the captain sent me to check if we’d found a real rogue Songshaper, or just a glitch in the radar.’

  Chester’s mouth tasted dry. ‘Last night in the bar … you told me to play “The Nightfall Duet” because it was a hard song. You were testing me. You wanted me to slip into the Song again, in front of all those people!’

  Sam didn’t deny it.

  ‘You could have gotten me killed!’