Cuckoo Song

Chapter 25. THE PACT

‘Then we are agreed?’ asked the Shrike, and received a nod from both girls. He took a deep breath and started to speak. It was a slippery, musical language which sounded like the bird-thing’s attempt to speak the Architect’s true name. The words were unknown to Not-Triss, but then she sensed that they were not directed at her. The Shrike was speaking to gain something else’s attention, and as he spoke the whole room developed a thickening storm-tingle, as if something enormous was turning its ancient, passionless stare upon them.

It waited for their promises. It heard them. Something indefinable in the world changed with a silent click, like a key turning in an imaginary lock. The tension receded, leaving Not-Triss feeling lighter but queasy. Pen sniffed and gripped Not-Triss’s sleeve. Even the Shrike paled, his face puckering for a few seconds as if he was struggling to hide his discomfort.

‘So,’ said the Shrike, once he had recovered his colour, his smile and his sangfroid. ‘Ask away.’ There was still something a little forced in his tone.

Not-Triss had to swallow before she could speak. There were too many questions in her head, trying to crowd out all at once.

‘What am I, really?’ she asked. ‘And… And why was I made? Why did the Architect take away the real me? And where did he take her? What’s he doing?’

‘And where’s Sebastian?’ demanded Pen. ‘And what are you all doing here under Father’s bridge? And why is everything upside down?’

‘Slow, slow!’ The Shrike held up a hand to halt their flow, then dropped his voice to a confidential murmur. ‘I had better start at the beginning, or we will be running in circles.’ The Shrike looked Not-Triss up and down, and again she was struck by the mixture of pride and cold appraisal. ‘And while we talk, I’ll stitch up those rips in your sides, if you’ll let me,’ he added. ‘It goes against the grain to leave those holes gaping.’

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.’

His manner was bright and approving, and an unacknowledged little flame went out in Not-Triss’s heart. He was her maker, but he was not her father. He had the pride of a chef who revels in seeing his masterpiece, but does not care what happens to the remains after the banquet. He would not help her.

‘Triss?’ Pen stared at her. ‘What does he mean, “It won’t make a difference in the end”?’

‘Oh.’ The Shrike looked from one face to the other. ‘How sweet. You haven’t told her, have you?’