‘Crows said there’s a chance of getting stuck. Is that right?’
She looked equivocal. ‘It’s been known.’
Mary wondered what it would be like, to forget everything, to give it all up and live each day, free of consequence from yesterday and free of thought of tomorrow, her whole world just flight and wind and feathers. That wouldn’t be too bad, would it? Except she had responsibilities now, to protect this ragged band of survivors. Her crew: her gang, in other words.
Not that she’d done a good job so far, but she was going to change that, and their fortunes.
‘Okay. In the morning, I’ll go out and look for Crows. In fact, what I’ll do is look for crows. If I find some, he might be nearby. What we need to do is make sure that dragon-lady here doesn’t try anything before then. Any suggestions?’
No one, apparently, wanted to kill her. At least, they weren’t saying it out loud.
‘Tie her up and lock her in a room?’ said Luiza. ‘A small room so if she changes, she hurts herself and not us.’
‘Is she that dangerous,’ asked Mama, ‘that we have to tie her up?’
‘I don’t want her coming for me in the night,’ said Mary. ‘And it’s going to be me, isn’t it? I’m the threat to her, no matter how brave Dalip is or how mad Stanislav is.’
‘We should watch her,’ said Dalip. ‘Take turns. But that means one of us is alone with her. Two of us?’
‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’
‘Stanislav will have,’ said Elena.
‘We’re not going to ask him for advice,’ said Dalip. ‘Why don’t I check the rooms and see if there’s anything without a window? Or ask someone who knows, which’ll probably be quicker.’
He wasn’t gone for long, when he came running back.
‘Stanislav’s gone.’ He paused. ‘He’s also killed the steward.’ He paused again. ‘It’s… not good.’
Mary caught his meaning better than the others. She looked at Bell’s reaction. She’d just lost her… what? Servant? Slave? Friend? Lover? And there was nothing except barely contained glee that their plans were going awry.
She knew people like that, back in London. They were the ones to avoid, the strange, dangerous ones who ended up getting locked away for the rest of their lives.
‘Then we’d better go and find him.’
28
The steward was over by the door to the bridge. And under the table. And halfway up the wall where something, some part of him, had been thrown with great force and stuck.
‘It looks like a fucking abattoir,’ said Mary, and retreated quickly, intercepting Luiza with a muttered, ‘You don’t want to go in there.’
Dalip had been to an abattoir, where they killed animals to eat according to Sikh rules. Quick, clean, one cut. The room◦– the killing floor, because that’s what it was called◦– had been almost spotless. The store room was far from that.
He stepped across the threshold and looked around. Stanislav could now be anywhere, either in the castle or even outside it. But he could still be here, hiding behind the barrels and the shelves, and he needed to check. The far door was still barred, but he peered into the shadows made barely lighter by the meagre lantern.
The steward had been decapitated, his head torn off with a force that was beyond human capacity. Hopefully, he’d been dead before that, because the thing that was glued to the wall was the sticky remains of his burst heart.
Dalip walked the room as if he was in a dream, the knife not even in his hand. What could he possibly do in the face of such primal forces except succumb? But Stanislav wasn’t there, and he stepped outside and back on to the staircase to report.
‘If he didn’t come up, he had to go down.’ He tugged at the hair on his chin. ‘We need to stay together. I think… I think he’s having some kind of psychotic episode. He was in a war where he came from, and he’s pretty much reliving it now. The very worst parts of it.’
‘Was that the guy’s head?’
Dalip nodded. ‘I don’t think Stanislav used anything but his hands to do that.’
Mary grimaced. ‘Seriously, he should be easy to find. He’ll be covered in blood, everything. Just, where the fuck are his footprints? Hand-prints? I’ve seen places where some kid got stabbed, and it’s everywhere: floors, walls, ceiling, and there’s always footprints and smears and marks on the walls where you brush against them. I mean, just look.’
Dalip did. His bare feet were leaving almost perfect dark impressions on the stonework, like a child’s printing set.
They searched the stairs, inspected the stonework, went down to the kitchen at the bottom of the tower, where their barricade was still mostly intact.
‘He can’t have come this way,’ said Dalip, rattling a big chair hard enough to make the table resting on it fall to one side. Once it had all finished moving, he added: ‘See?’
‘You climbed in the window,’ said Luiza. ‘He must have climbed out.’
‘I don’t know if he could. He doesn’t seem the climbing sort.’
‘He doesn’t seem the kind of bloke who’d rip someone’s head off, either,’ said Mary. ‘But here we are.’
Dalip leaned back against the wall. Stanislav had saved his life, more than once. And now this. He’d been brought up to be loyal, and deferential to his elders. This… this was difficult for him.
‘Luiza. The two women we found in the room above. Where did they go?’
She blinked. ‘They came upstairs with us.’
‘But they’re not there now.’
‘No.’ She tutted. ‘I suppose we must look for them too.’
‘This is getting stupid, right?’ Mary stared into the darkness up the stairs, and Dalip couldn’t help but see how her scars shifted.
‘We should go back to the top floor,’ said Luiza, ‘and wait until morning. We cannot see what we are doing.’
‘At this rate, there may be no one left by morning.’ Dalip pulled out the knife. ‘We brought him here. We have to deal with this. One way or another.’
‘Well, he’s your mate,’ said Mary.
‘In which case, I might get a chance where no one else will. I’m not saying we have to do anything, you know, permanent, but who else is going to stop him? There’s no one but us.’
‘Every room, then. Every door. If he’s not in the tower, then that’s something.’
When they got back to the store room, Dalip made to go in again. Mary was about to stop him, and tell him they’d already looked there. Then she caught his expression and said nothing.
He opened the door, pushing it with his foot. It was exactly as he’d left it, except that the bars that should have been sealing the way to the bridge were lying on the floor, and the door chattering and rattling in the rising wind. The draught stole around his ankles on its way through the tower.
Luiza, in charge of the lantern, held it high over Dalip’s head. ‘He was in there all the time,’ she said.
Dalip moved back on to the stairs and pulled the door firmly closed behind him.
‘Mary, when you turn into a bird, how do you do it?’
‘How? I just… I don’t know. I just can. I want to be it, and there I am. Some big-arse bird.’
‘And the first time, what happened?’
‘I grew wings. Bell’s dragon cut me open, and when I got the boilersuit off, I had wings. I really don’t know how this works.’ She stopped, and asked: ‘Why?’
‘So you can turn into a hawk, she can turn into a dragon, this man Crows turns into a sea serpent. I think Stanislav can turn into something, too. Something not good. Very strong.’ He struggled with the whole idea, even though he himself may have been changed, and was in the process of changing. ‘Do you get a choice?’
‘Of what you change into?’ Mary shrugged. ‘Maybe, but I think you just become whatever it is that suits you best. Have you got any idea of what he’s going to be?’