The Hush Read online

  ‘Would’ve happened eventually, anyway,’ Sam said with a shrug. ‘You was teetering on the brink of it as soon as you started playing. Lucky for you, it happened when I was there to save you.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean –’

  Sam cut him off. ‘Want to know about the Hush or not?’

  Chester shut up. He realised with a surreal detachment that he was on the brink of losing it. After the horrors of his prison cell, the near execution, the dark of the Hush and the chase through the cornfields, he felt oddly fragile, like a shard of pottery on the brink of shattering. But then he thought of his father and pushed his own pain out of his mind. This oversized boy in front of him – with his cowboy hat and pale blue eyes – might hold the answers.

  ‘All right,’ Chester said. ‘I’m sorry. Just … tell me what to do.’

  Sam took a moment to process his apology, then nodded. ‘Get behind the trees. Train’ll be here in less than a minute, I’m guessing.’

  The trees – a tangle of trunks and lines of shadow – would hide them from the tracks. Chester led the horse gently by the reins to the shelter of a nearby clump of foliage, thankful that it didn’t pull too hard when he had only one arm’s strength to rely on. Unlike Nathaniel, Chester didn’t need Music to calm the beast down – the exhaustion of the ride had done that for him.

  A roar bellowed down the track.

  Chester peered through a cluster of branches. A train thundered down the line towards them, black and crimson, blasting clouds of smoke into the sky. It chugged, it roared, it rattled. Its wheels played a clackety racket of drumbeats – and amid the smoke and chaos, it piped a whirl of music into the sky.

  No, not just music, but Music.

  It was a rolling tune, a rollicking rhythm. It was churning wheels and grunting brass, the charge of a horse, the screech of a griffin. It pumped through the engine of the train, up into smoke and sky and sunlight. But the Music would only be there for a moment – at the exact moment the train passed by. Would they be close enough to harness its power?

  ‘Ditch the horse,’ Sam said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just do it.’

  Chester released the reins. The horse stumbled backwards, a little skittish, away from the roar of the train.

  ‘Right,’ Sam said. ‘Now, you gotta trust me. No matter what I do, no matter how mad it seems. I ain’t about to let you die, all right? Not after all the blasted trouble you’ve put me through.’

  Chester nodded.

  ‘Swear it,’ Sam said. ‘No matter how mad it seems, you do exactly what I do.’

  ‘I swear it,’ Chester said.

  Sam stared at him, as though trying to decide whether he was trustworthy. Then he nodded. ‘All right. Let’s go.’

  Sam dashed out from behind the trees. Chester followed, his heart shuddering like a loose fiddle string. They hurtled forwards – and with a terrible lurch, he realised where Sam was heading.

  The track.

  The railway track, right in front of the train.

  The train blazed towards them, gushing and roaring and pouring smoke into the air. Music pumped up through its smoke, and Chester fought down an insane urge to laugh. It sounded almost like a folk song, distorted with fire and power and engine grease.

  This is mad, Chester thought. This is mad!

  His entire body was trembling. He shouldn’t be here. He should be fleeing towards another town, searching for clues about his father’s disappearance. Perhaps he could slip away from Sam, escape the townsfolk on his own and make his way alone …

  But he felt faint from the blood loss and he had given his word and he had no idea what else to do. He had no money and without his fiddle he couldn’t earn a living. Nor could he charm people into spilling their secrets. Besides, at the moment, Sam was his only real lead to finding his father.

  Chester took a deep breath. He tensed his muscles and hurled himself onto the track.

  When he touched the metal, Chester let out a cry. Lit by the morning sun, it burned hot on his flesh. Sam grabbed his shoulder and began to whistle. Chester could barely hear over the roar of the train but he caught a few notes and realised it was a reversal of the Sundown Recital.

  The train was almost upon them. Its brakes screeched: the driver must have spotted them on the tracks, but it was too late. The train’s forward shadow fell across their bodies and Chester felt the world grow cooler, until all was smoke and screeching and metal and shadow and –

  It was gone. A churn in the air and a yank behind his gut. The world turned dark, rain exploded in blackened twists around his face, and dark fog rippled out from their position on the track.

  Silence.

  Chester was shaking. He raised his head, almost unable to breathe.

  Darkness stained the world around him. He still knelt on the railway line, but the metal beneath his knees and hands felt like ice. Rain swirled through the air, the sun replaced by dark grey sky. There was no train, just silent track. He was back in the Hush.

  Sam yanked him to his feet. ‘Come on, hurry. Gotta get the echoboat started before that train’s finished passing …’

  ‘Echoboat?’ Chester stumbled along after Sam. The rain parted as they crossed the track, throwing light onto a new patch of darkness.

  And suddenly he saw it. It sat on the railway track: a strange beast of sails and lumber, crouching on its nest. It was the size of a large wagon, built of wood and metallic cogs. A yacht’s mast rose from its top, sails fluttering in the dark. Its windows were made of glass, an expense almost unheard of except in Weser City.

  ‘What …?’

  ‘Echoboat.’ Sam clambered up a short rope ladder and onto the deck. He heaved open a trapdoor and began to descend into the boat. ‘Get moving, will you? Gotta use the train’s residual energy to jump-start the engine, or we’ll be stuck here until another damn train comes along.’

  Sam’s voice faded as he vanished inside, swallowed by clanking machinery. Chester scrambled after him, clambering down into the innards of the boat. He dropped down into a sort of driver’s cabin, a cubicle that brimmed with wheels and levers. The trapdoor slammed shut overhead, sealing them inside.

  ‘How can I help?’

  Sam yanked an enormous wooden lever. ‘Get out of my way!’

  There was a grumble around them and the cabin began to shake. The train’s Music played on, still leaking through from the real world. But it was fainter now; the whisper of a dying song. Sam swore then pulled another lever. He pressed a button and yanked a copper chain on the ceiling.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘This ain’t gonna be the smoothest ride.’

  The echoboat jolted and Chester slipped. He grabbed the wall with his good arm to steady himself. The vessel vibrated, shaking with magic and Music. The echoboat heaved itself up slowly, like an old man rising from his rocking chair. It groaned and grunted up into the air, until it hovered about a yard above the railway track.

  ‘Yes,’ Sam hissed, cranking another lever. ‘That’s my girl!’

  The echoboat lingered for a moment, motionless, then shot forwards with a whoosh. Sam grabbed the steering wheel and wrenched it sideways. The machinery groaned but the boat twisted around and jerked to the side. And suddenly they were flying, out into the dark expanse of rain-streaked fields.

  ‘Just like I told you,’ Sam said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Too dangerous to run around the Hush on foot. But when you got transport waiting …’ Sam twisted the wheel again and the echoboat turned a sharper left. ‘Well, you’ll see why this place is such a secret.’

  Sam waved a hand at the window, towards the swirling black ahead.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘to the Hush.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Inside the echoboat, all was still.

  The initial roar and rumble had died away, replaced by a serene kind of hum. Chester couldn’t decide whether the sound was an engine or the barest hint of Music in the machinery. He squeez
ed his eyes shut but couldn’t pick out a melody.

  ‘Why don’t you take a look in the back?’ Sam suggested. ‘I gotta focus on steering.’

  Chester’s mouth felt dry as corn meal. He wanted to ask a thousand questions, but he saw the look in Sam’s eyes now: the focus, the pressure. The older boy’s gaze fixed squarely on an illuminated map as he wrapped his hands around the steering wheel. His knuckles were white.

  Chester forced himself to be silent.

  In the back room, a chain of sorcery lamps hung from the ceiling, casting a shimmer of pale orange light through the air. Wooden cupboards filled the corners, a hammock slouched from one side of the room to another, stacks of books posed like makeshift furniture behind the door and a dog-eared sofa hogged an entire wall. The air smelt faintly of honey and ashes.

  Chester looked down at his hands. He was vaguely surprised to see that they were shaking, so jittery that they felt disconnected from the rest of him. Shock, he thought.

  As he stumbled forwards, a lamp glinted in the corner of his eye. Chester had a sudden flash of the axe crashing down. His entire body jerked, a marionette yanked sideways by the memory.

  With a ragged breath, Chester reached up to touch the lamp, hoping that its tune might calm him. The glass was hot beneath his fingertips. Its Music rolled down his fingers like sweat: the tinkle of piano keys.

  Oddly, the tune was unfamiliar. The Songshaper who had enchanted this lamp hadn’t played the usual nursery rhymes that formed the magic of most ordinary lamps. They had created their own song, playing a little of their own Music into the glass. The tune was warm and sweet and unsettling all at once.

  Chester sank onto the sofa, fighting to calm the choke of emotions in his chest.

  All right, so what did he actually know?

  There was another version of the world, called the Hush. It looked like the real world. It had the same buildings, the same fields, the same railway lines. But it was dark, filled with fog and rain. Unnatural rain. Rain that fell in swirls and sheaves, yet left those it touched as dry as bone …

  And not everything that existed in the real world existed here. The train, for instance. It had existed in the real world, but not in the Hush. Here, its only remnant was its Music, the sorcery that powered it. Nothing else had leaked through.

  He also knew that there were dangers in the Hush that he hadn’t seen yet, dangers that frightened even gruff, burly Sam. And strange magic existed here, like the echoboat. An unnatural hybrid of sails and machinery, designed to sail through the Hush like it was a sea of shadows …

  Chester closed his eyes. Of course, there was one more thing he knew about this place. Hush, hush, hush … His father’s final words before –

  The door banged open. Chester opened his eyes.

  ‘On a straight course for now,’ Sam announced. ‘Nothing to crash into out here, just a bunch of fields, for miles and miles. Should be right without a driver for a while.’

  ‘What …?’ Chester tried to speak, but his mouth felt too dry to let the words slip through. ‘What is this thing?’

  ‘Echoboat,’ Sam said. ‘I already told you. Just a small one, though. It joins onto our gang’s main echoship, the Cavatina. That’s where I’m taking you, to meet the captain.’

  ‘Echoship?’

  ‘Floating ships, I guess you’d call ’em,’ Sam said. ‘They only exist in the Hush – I ain’t never seen one in the real world. But here, with all this residue of magic and sorcery sloshing about …’ He shrugged. ‘Don’t really matter how it works. It’s Dot who knows all that stuff, not me.’

  ‘She’s in your gang?’

  Sam nodded, then crouched beside him. ‘Gotta look at your arm. Captain won’t be happy if I bring back damaged goods.’

  ‘Might mess up your hopes of a pay rise?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Sam pulled Chester’s arm into the light. Chester sucked his teeth, clenched his fists, and tried not to show how much it stung. Just another performance, he told himself. He had to prove his strength to these people, to earn his place in their gang – ultimately, to earn the truth about his father.

  Sam unwrapped the makeshift bandage and tossed it aside. A hiss of disapproval escaped his teeth. ‘I ain’t been trained to deal with this, you know.’

  He sounded irritated, almost angry. Chester felt as though he was expected to apologise – as though it had been his fault that he had been shot, and left the older boy with damaged goods on his hands.

  ‘If you hadn’t told me to play “The Nightfall Duet”,’ Chester said, ‘I wouldn’t have gotten shot in the first place.’

  ‘You’re the one who chose to play it, not me,’ Sam said. ‘Back on the ranch, my pa used to say “It takes a fool to squat with his spurs on”. You make a mistake, you can holler all you like, but don’t go blaming the world for your own damn recklessness.’

  ‘But you –’

  ‘Besides,’ Sam added, ‘if you had more control over your own powers, you could’ve played your merry way through “The Nightfall Duet” without getting caught.’

  ‘But I don’t have any powers! I’m just a fiddler, I swear.’

  ‘Then how did you connect to the Song?’

  ‘That was an accident; it happens sometimes when I play something tricky … I don’t know why it –’

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ Sam said, pointing a finger. ‘Because you’re one of them.’

  ‘One of what?’

  ‘One of them blasted Songshapers,’ Sam said. ‘And don’t try denying it,’ he added, when Chester opened his mouth to protest. ‘You did it again before, up in the cornfields. Played a tune on the flute and woke that horse up from a calming spell. That was Music with a capital “M”.’

  Chester stared at him, his mouth open. Sam rummaged through a nearby drawer and pulled out a small wooden box. He opened it to reveal a medical kit, with bandages, drugs and syringes.

  ‘I’m not a Songshaper,’ Chester said. ‘I’ve never gone to the Conservatorium. It takes years of training to –’

  ‘To get your official licence,’ Sam interrupted. ‘That don’t mean that other folks never learn on the sly. Black-market tutoring, illegal instruction books …’

  He filled a syringe with dark liquid. The needle glinted in the light of the sorcery lamps. ‘I’m not a fool, Hays. I know you learnt off someone, but you don’t gotta lie to me about it. In case you hadn’t noticed, I ain’t working on the side of the law.’

  ‘I didn’t learn illegally from anyone! It just happens, all right? I can’t control it. If I’d had proper lessons, do you think I would’ve connected to the Song right in the middle of a saloon? I’m not suicidal.’

  As the words tumbled out of him, Chester realised that what propelled his outburst wasn’t fury. It was fear. Even though sticking with Sam was the best way to get information that might lead to his father, every instinct screamed at him to flee, to return to the real world – a world of fresh air, of sunlight, of dangers that he could understand. Not this unnatural world of dry rain and cold and darkness …

  Sam grabbed his arm. ‘Hold still.’

  He jabbed the needle into Chester’s arm, right below the bullet wound. Chester gasped at the pain. ‘What …?’

  ‘Stops infections,’ Sam said. ‘Travis always makes us take a jab when we get cut up.’

  ‘Travis? Is he another member of your gang?’

  Sam scowled. ‘Captain hired him as our doctor, not that long back. Useless at fighting or thieving, but he knows his way around a medical kit.’ He yanked the needle out of Chester’s arm. ‘Most of the time.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like you like him much.’

  ‘I don’t like no one much,’ Sam said, ‘unless they’re handing me a bottle of whiskey.’

  He pulled out a flask of clear liquid. When he uncorked it, Chester caught a strong whiff of liquor. Sam sloshed it over a cloth and began to clean the wound.

  Chester closed his eyes.
The alcohol burned and he desperately wanted to yank his arm away. It took every inch of self-control to keep it in place and to allow Sam to keep wiping it with the cloth. After the initial sting, however, he was surprised to realise that Sam’s touch was almost … gentle. The boy cleaned the wound with soft dabs, not the violent scraping Chester had expected.

  ‘What’s your job in this … gang?’

  ‘I fight. I steal. I do the dirty work.’ Sam gave the wound a careful wipe. ‘I steer the ship. I pick up any scraps and junk we need for jobs.’

  ‘And me? Where do I fit in?’

  ‘Like I told you,’ Sam said, ‘scraps and junk.’

  Chester jerked his arm back. ‘I meant, why am I being recruited? What does your gang want me for?’

  Sam snorted. ‘Been on the lookout for an unlicensed Songshaper for a while. Captain wants you for a job in Weser.’

  Chester’s gut clenched. ‘Weser City? But I … I’ve never been to the city before.’

  ‘First time for everything.’

  ‘And it’s a criminal job?’ Chester said.

  ‘Well, it sure ain’t picking daisies in the sunshine.’ Sam began to bandage the wound. ‘Don’t you start acting all high and mighty, neither. We all gotta eat, and we only steal from rich folks. And in case you hadn’t noticed, you’re a criminal yourself now.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,’ Chester said. ‘But I’m not killing anyone, if that’s what you want.’

  Sam gave him a condescending snort. ‘As if a weakling like you could kill anyone. It’d have to be a little old lady in her rocking chair – and even then, I figure she’d knock you out with her walking stick.’

  ‘I’m not weak! I’ve survived on my own for months, and –’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Sam said, tight with sarcasm. ‘Did I jump to a conclusion about you without knowing all the facts?’ He gave a pointed look. ‘Since we’re on that topic, I’ll have you know we ain’t a gang of thugs. We don’t go round killing people.’

  There was a pause.

  Sam pulled the bandage tight and began to tie it. ‘We rob ’em blind,’ he said, ‘but we leave ’em breathing.’