Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
The clouds had been building all day, and the rain started as Carmen walked home from Flag Wood. By the time she reached her house she was drenched. She towelled herself down and put on dry clothes as she listened to the steady drum of the rain on the roof. It ended up raining all night.
Joe Carmichael had come down for dinner earlier, then gone straight back upstairs after a quick kiss and apology to Carmen's mere. Carmen watched him like a hawk.
Now, as she mounted the steps to the attic shortly before her bedtime, a steaming cup of blackleaf in one hand, Carmen was still of two minds about what she was going to do. The ruse was good enough. She usually took a cup of blackleaf up to her pere before she turned in.
"Hello honey," he said, without removing the chisel from the lump of wood he was fashioning into what looked like a head – Carmen thought she could see a nose taking shape. "Oh, thanks."
Carmen put the blackleaf on his workbench, towards the back so he wouldn't accidentally knock it over. She went to a chair and sat on it and tucked her bare feet under herself, pulling her old pilled nightie down over her legs so that only her toes poked out the bottom. She was not cold – it was always warm up here – but she felt just then that she wanted to be small and compact, like a snokey in its hole.
Thump went the mallet, chock went the chisel, and a shaving curled over the back of the chisel like a big comber on a surf beach. It drifted to the floor. The chisels had belonged to Joe Carmichael's own pere, a man of whom Carmen knew little, for he had died when Joe was small. He had been a carpenter too – she knew that much at least.
Joe Carmichael examined the grain of the wood. He seemed to see something there that Carmen couldn't, setting the chisel carefully in a spot that looked to her like any other. His movements were slow, economical, inexorable. When he brought the old battered mallet down on the chisel butt it was as if he was opening an existing seam in the timber – as if the statue already lay inside the dumb lump of wood, and all he had to do was knock the shell off, like peeling a hard-boiled egg.
"It's simple," he'd told her once. "You just remove the bits that aren't necessary."
Carmen knew from her own unsuccessful attempts with the chisels that it was far from simple.
The larger hunks cleaved away, he picked up a smaller chisel and leaned in for the fine work. When he spoke he didn't look up or stop working. He could carry on a conversation as he worked, provided it wasn't too mentally taxing.
"How was school? Learn anything?"
Carmen shrugged. "I guess."
Thump-chock.
Carmen looked up at the shelf that had once held the dice. She remembered that they had been sitting, side-by-side, on top of the leather pouch. She figured she must have examined them closely once or twice, because she remembered some of the pictures on them – the mermaid, the turtle, the bear. The fact of their existence in her pere's workshop was not remarkable in and of itself. There had been many oddities in the Carmichael house back in those days. Some had gone to the Sloopers. Others had been hidden as the State's laws around the possession of arcana had tightened. Her parents had likely sold some items to Sam Sung's, who could be relied upon never to ask questions. So the presence of the dice had not struck her as unusual at the time. She had certainly never experienced the weird effect Ward had described.
"Where're the Sloopers?" she said. "Slops wasn't at school, and I went there after but they weren't home."
"I think they said something about a meeting. All very mysterious." He smiled at the chisel, then put it and the mallet down and picked up his cup of blackleaf. He turned and leaned back against the workbench, speaking to her over the top of the cup, as if he was, in his economical way, repurposing his words to blow the steam off it. "Hanging out with Slops is all good and well Carmen. But don't you want to spend time with other girls sometimes?"
It occurred to her then, perhaps for the first time, that she had no friends who were girls – not real friends anyway. Well, there was Mildew, but she could hardly tell her pere about her.
"Girls are boring," she said.
This was true enough. The girls at her school seemed to spend all their time talking about boys. It was nearly always gossip and secondhand knowledge, and hanging out with real boys made Carmen realise how ridiculous the talk was. The boys Carmen knew – like Ward – were more interesting than the boys her classmates swooned over anyway. But she could hardly tell her pere about Ward either. She smiled to herself as she wondered what her parents would say if they knew of her association with Wrinkler – a Reverser.
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Writing is simple, you just remove the bits that aren't necessary.
