Kal Moonheart Trilogy: Dragon Killer, Roll the Bones & Sirensbane (63 page)

She crawled up the beach on all fours. Her hand came down on a large bright red scallop shell. Lula recognised it from her childhood; it was an extremely rare dragon’s paw shell. Her father once had one hung above the door of his hut, until it was stolen one night. Lula stopped crawling and look around. There were
thousands
of the shells scattered all over the beach. I’m safe
and
rich, she thought.

And dead.
There would be no escape from this island.

The beach was a thin strip of shimmering silvery-white sand that stretched off to the left and right, and vanished around the curve of the headland. The sun was so hot, Lula was dry almost as soon as she stood up, but as she made her way to the shade of the jungle, a horrific screeching wail made her pause.
Insects? Just how big are they exactly?

Lula checked her gun and powder. The flint sparked when she pulled the trigger, and the powder was bone dry in its pouch, so she filled the pistol and rolled the shot down the barrel, jamming it home with a thin branch. One shot.
Make it count
, Azul had said, but Lula was sure he wasn’t thinking about using it on the wildlife.

She screwed her hat down tightly so that the brim was just above her eyes, and set off on a walk around the island. The creepy jungle could wait until later. And who knew—maybe there was a convenient boat moored on the opposite shore.

There wasn’t, of course. The far beach was just as empty and remote as the side she had washed up on. As she trudged through the sand, Lula cast her mind back over the sequence of events that had led her here. The seeds of her destruction were planted a decade ago, she ruminated, when she had left home and sailed the world. Lula had taken jobs where she could find them: in bars, on ships, in docks and on plantations. But the pattern was always the same—once she had worked hard enough to gain her employer’s trust, she disappeared in the dead of night with all the money she could lay her hands on. And who could blame her? There was no legitimate job in the world that wasn’t too much work for too little reward.

As she gained skill and experience, Lula turned to more dangerous pursuits. Her exploits could fill a hundred books, but she spent the money almost as fast as she made it. Unlike Kal, Lula wasn’t a disciplined gambler, and she was prey to most of the world’s vices. But still, she kept on reaching for bigger and bigger prizes.

The capture of Gaspar Azul almost cost Lula her life. Even when suddenly awakened from a drunken stupor, Gaspar had proved a fearsome swordsman. They had fought in a tent in the middle of the Nubaran desert (Lula had blagged her way into Gaspar’s company on a tomb-raiding expedition) and Gaspar had only fallen when he had accidently sliced through the tent’s guy ropes with his sword, and brought the canvas down upon his head. Gaspar’s bounty would make Lula rich, and allow her to finally stop moving and settle down somewhere.

Or so she had hoped. But the governor of Port Black had not been able to pay the ransom. And in the bleak dark emptiness of her disappointment, a new temptation had materialised to take advantage of her …

Sirensbane.

Lula had started working for the Magician, smuggling the drug into Amaranthium. It was a well-paid job, the best Lula had ever found, but Sirensbane was an expensive habit, and no amount of runs across the Silver Sea could ever free her from the Magician’s power. She would have to work years to drag herself out of debt.

At least money was now the least of her problems.

Lula found herself looking down at her own footprints in the sand. She had walked all around the island in a couple of hours, and now she was back where she had started. She sighed and collapsed down onto the beach. Maybe it was just as well Azul had caught up with her. What else would she have done? The zombie curse had swept through the Islands, and Lula had been stricken down like her friends and thousands of others. She had been getting increasingly desperate, and had pinned her hopes on the one person she trusted in the world: Kal Moonheart. Poor old Kal, who most likely had been ripped apart by zombies at the Blue Mahoe, had been Lula’s last chance. All Lula had done was bring Kal to her doom.

Tears came suddenly. Lula reached for her pistol. One shot. She raised the barrel and stared down it.

No
, she thought.

At least not while I’m sober.

She unwrapped the packet of Sirensbane. The drug had been crushed into tiny glossy black flakes. Lula picked one between her fingers and went to lay it on her tongue.

And then she noticed something out on the beach …

Two
sets of footprints emerged from the sea and up the sand. Lula stood and walked up to them: the second pair disappeared after hers around the island. That meant someone had been following her, and if so …

She whirled around, and came face-to-face with—

III.iii

Crocodile Tears

—‘Kal?’

Kalina Moonheart was standing in front of the sun. Her whole body was lit from behind; the tangled reddish-brown hair that escaped her black hat was burning like fire, and her sunburned skin shone with an opalescent sheen like a marble statue. Kal’s red and white shirt was torn and tied up around her waist, revealing a wide, flat belly with abdominals jutting out like islands in a sea. Her feet were bare, and her velvet trousers were shredded almost up to the crotch. Lula could see Kal’s new tattoo for the first time: a black dragon that wound around and up her left thigh, it’s tail disappearing between her legs.

‘Kal,’ Lula repeated, sinking to her knees in the sand as if grovelling before a god. ‘How did you … how did you get here?’

‘Well, that’s a long story,’ Kal said. ‘But the gist of it is that I escaped Port Black, chased down Azul’s ship, sneaked aboard and then hid in the bilge compartment for three days. Let me tell you, I’d have swapped places with you in a heartbeat. Down there, underwater for hours, breathing through a bamboo shoot … I passed the time
dreaming
of being chained to a bed.’

The bilge compartment!
The lowest part of the ship, where there was only an inch of space between the the stagnant water and the deck above. Just the thought of it made Lula feel queasy. She stumbled forward and hugged Kal’s Legs.

Kal hoisted Lula to her feet. ‘You look terrible, Lu,’ she said. ‘You’ve got heat stroke, and you must be starving. Did they feed you?’

Lula couldn’t find her voice. She was delirious, alright: deliriously happy. She moved to kiss Kal on the mouth, but her rescuer pulled away.

‘I’m still mad at you,’ Kal said. ‘We could have been far away from here if we had just fled the mansion when we had the chance. But, oh no—you had to run back in to save your friends. Well, it’s a good job I reminded them of that fact, otherwise they wouldn’t have been so keen to help me find you now.’

A wave of despair passed over Lula. ‘It’s no good,’ she managed to say, after a few deep breaths. ‘You wasted your time coming after me, Kal. Only Azul knows where we are. No one’s ever going to come and rescue us now.’

But Kal only smiled: the genuine confident smile that had drawn Lula to her the day they met. It had been at a wrestling match of all places, held in a dockside warehouse in Amaranthium. Kal had been so sure that her guy was going to win, she had persuaded Lula to bet everything she had on him, too. But the match had been fixed, and they both lost a lot of money. Lula stayed over on the floor of Kal’s flat that night, and the next day Kal had taken her to the Snake Pit, where she had taught Lula how to play cards. Between them they won back more than double what they had lost.

‘… to have to trust me,’ Kal was saying.

Lula shook herself back to the present. ‘What?’

‘I said, you’re just going to have to trust me. Do you think I’d come all this way without a plan for getting us home again? Come on, let’s get into the shade, get some food down us, and I’ll tell you the whole story!’

Kal took Lula’s hand and led her up the beach to the shade of the jungle. Kal was talking as she went—‘find shelter soon. This place might look like paradise now, but come nightfall it’s going to be very cold and very wet’—but all Lula could think about was the fact that Kal’s big leather satchel was moving and bulging, as if something was inside it, trying to get out.

Was Lula losing the plot completely? ‘Kal.’ she said. ‘There’s something in your bag …’

‘Oh, that’s dinner,’ Kal said. ‘I picked it up while I was following you around the island. It’ll be fresher if we don’t kill it until just before we put it in on the fire. Speaking of which, start gathering dry twigs!’

Dinner!
While Lula had spent the first hours of her exile dwelling on the past and thinking about killing herself, Kal had been hunting and planning for their survival. Lula felt a hot rush of shame mixed with anger. She shook off Kal’s hand and plunged ahead into the trees. It was cool and moist under the giant ferns. The jungle was a riot of vines and strangling figs. Lula found she had to place her feet carefully with every step, lest the flora trip her up.

And then there it was again: that ear-shredding shriek from somewhere up ahead.

Lula cocked her pistol. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, as Kal came up behind her. ‘Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it.’

Kal tossed her bag down among the roots of a giant hollow banyan tree. ‘Vuda’s demon guardians,’ she said. ‘I heard they haunt many of the more remote islands. That’s why nobody ever comes here. They’ll ignore us, though, just so long as we stay on the edges of the jungle and don’t stray too far inland. A bullet won’t stop them, Lu, but thanks anyway for the offer of protection. We need to work together and help each other if we’re going to pull through this.’

Lula took some deep breaths and lowered her gun.
Work together!
She could tell that Kal was throwing her a lifeline, to make her feel like she wasn’t completely useless. ‘Alright then,’ Lula said. ‘You start on the shelter then. I’ll collect wood for the fire.’

Kal grinned, and Lula actually laughed as she set off on her scavenger hunt. Despite their crazy predicament, despite the last hellish few days … so long as Kal was here—no, so long as they were both here, together—then there was hope.

* * *

Lula dumped her kindling in the stone-ringed pit that Kal had dug in the sandy dirt at the top of the beach. She lit it with the flint of her pistol, then Kal produced dinner from her bag: a wriggling two-foot-long juvenile crocodile, whose jaws were clamped shut by her leather belt.

‘I saw it snoozing in the mudflats by the stream on the other side of the island,’ Kal said. ‘I didn’t even stop to think about it, in case he caught wind of me; I just creeped up behind him and slipped my belt over his nose.’ She held the struggling animal up to her face. ‘I bet you didn’t expect to see me today,’ she said to it, almost tenderly. Tears were welling in the croc’s eyes. ‘Oh don’t cry,’ Kal said. ‘We both know that you’d eat me just as soon as I’d eat you.’

Then while Lula held it down, Kal drove her knife straight down between its eyes. The meat, once barbecued, was delicious: smoky, chewy and salty.

‘Tastes like chicken,’ Kal said. ‘Fishy chicken.’

It was sunset. Lula held another chunk of croc meat over the fire on the end of a stick, idly turning it as she gazed at Kal. ‘So …’ Lula said. ‘Tell me what happened back at the Blue Mahoe. Last thing I remember was killing a zombie that was attacking Azul. He looked at me, looked around—presumably to see if you were about—then knocked me out cold with the butt of his pistol.’

So Kal told her side of the story. Lula listened in horrified silence as she heard of the death toll at the mansion. Her horror turned to sudden intrigued interest when Kal revealed that she had confronted Che about the treasure, and found out that the cook had indeed stolen and hidden a fortune belonging to his father, once the governor of Port Black, but now the Magician.

‘Holy hell, Kal,’ Lula said. ‘So Gaspar Azul was telling the truth all along! When I hauled him in to collect the bounty, he kept rambling on about the albino. Said he’d split the treasure with me if we ever found it. I almost agreed, but then figured I could collect the bounty and go find the treasure myself.’

Lula washed her meat down with a skin of spring water. She was starting to feel more like herself, and was even having fun, sitting by the fire swapping tales with Kal. Her hunger and thirst had been sated, but she had other needs to take care of before she could completely relax. Her hands automatically went for her pouch of Sirensbane. ‘Please, please tell me, Kal, that you got a map off the damn albino. If we find the treasure, we can split—’

In less than a second, Lula found herself flat on her back in the sand with Kal on top of her. Kal’s hand gripped Lula’s wrist that was holding the pouch. ‘No more!’ Kal said. ‘You’re done with this stuff!’

Lula dropped the Sirensbane in the sand, rolled, and grabbed it with her free hand before Kal could react. She got to her feet and put the fire between herself and her friend. ‘Kal, I
need
it! I’ve not had a hit in three days.’

‘Look at your palm,’ Kal said.

‘What?’ Lula turned her hand over and spread her fingers. The white spot, which last time she had looked had spread to her fingers, was now just a coin-sized circle in her palm. ‘Kal,’ she breathed. ‘How …’

‘If you want to be free of the curse, then you have to free yourself of the drug,’ Kal said. ‘It’s how the Magician controls people. First your lose your will to him, then your body. I’ve seen it happen to Dead Leg.’

Lula felt the anger and anxiety rising again. She
needed
a hit, and who was Kal to deny her? It took all of her self-control to remain calm. A fight with Kal would get her nowhere. She tried a different tack, rubbing her arm across her eyes and letting loose a faint sob. ‘Don’t do this to me, Kal. I’ll just die if I go without for much longer. The Magician can’t control me here—let me take a little and come off it gently.’