Twelve-year-old Carmen has a secret: she can talk to her cat Grim. But the powerful Brotherhood has banned pets, and the penalty is death.
Ward is the most wanted boy in the world. The only thing standing between him and the hangman's noose is maste...
It was a Sinday, the Hattoist day of rest. Jaggles was not religious: he scorned the Hattoists like he scorned everything else in the world, but he was a creature of habit, and the fact that he, George Jaggles, had been resting on Sindays since time immemorial, was proof of the day's sanctity. Sinday was Ward's favourite day. Sinday meant no chores. It meant being set loose on Devil's Island, population two. Jaggles forbade him from leaving the cove; Ward naturally got as far from it as possible.
Sometimes he went to the lighthouse at the island's south-western tip. He had been inside it twice with Jaggles, who was the lighthouse keeper. At all other times it was locked. There was a spiralling staircase leading up to an octagonal room, containing an oil fire that was lit on stormy nights, and a reflector the size of a tabletop floating in a dish of poisonous quicksilver. The lighthouse fascinated him, and haunted the deep rare dreams of his childhood.
He would often climb down to the caves below the lighthouse, where the sea heaved and boomed and flung black mountains of kelp onto the shelves. He didn't fear the sea, but the caves were another matter. They were, according to Jaggles, home to Bucca, goblins that turn the winds about so that passing ships are drawn onto the rocks and smashed to flinders. Ward imagined the Bucca fishing sailors from the water and dragging them into the dark. What boy could stay away from such a place?
The rowboat pulled up to the jetty. There was a tiny old man inside it. He was alone but for a bird that perched on his shoulder. He climbed up onto the jetty with a nimbleness that would have been impressive had there been anyone around to impress. Jaggles was never impressed by anything. An explosion may have caught his attention, but only a very large one.
As the old man shuffled towards them Ward got a good look at him.
He seemed to have been placed inside an old-fashioned suit in some distant age, from which he had been unable to get out of again; the suit had become marvellously shabby, to the point where it was unclear what its original colour had been. His face was swarthy and clever, with a long nose, and dark eyes that flashed about, and eyebrows that almost joined in the middle of his forehead. The archon perched on a leather patch that appeared to have been sewn onto the shoulder of the old man's suit for the express purpose of accommodating birdlife. It was as glossy black as the old man was shabby. Its eyes were bright, and it took in its surroundings with darts of its head from side to side – this gave it a look of curiosity and intelligence.
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