Piper at the gates of du.., p.1
Piper at the Gates of Dusk, page 1
PRAISE FOR
THE CHAOS WALKING TRILOGY
“With unflinching insight, Patrick Ness tackles the big questions – power, morality, loss, and hope – through
stories that are both thrilling and deeply human.
Few authors capture such honesty and grace.”
– Cassandra Clare, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“In a world full of Noise, the Chaos Walking
trilogy delivers a razor-sharp take on humanity
and morality even more relevant now than
when it was first published.”
– Neal Shusterman, New York Times
bestselling author of the Arc of a Scythe trilogy
“The Chaos Walking books are a touchstone for
powerful young adult literature. Inventive,
gut-wrenching, and all-consuming, this is an
unforgettable coming-of-age reading experience.”
– Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling
author of Coldwire
“An epic journey through both a sci-fi
world of extraordinary imagination and an
emotional landscape of gripping intensity.”
– Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Hugo
Award-winning Children of Time series
“Chaos Walking is one of the seminal young
adult series of this century. No one gets
you in the feels like Patrick Ness.”
– Juno Dawson, author of Her Majesty’s
Royal Coven
“My god, there is so much to love about the
remarkable Patrick Ness! Where to begin? His
beautiful prose? That electrifying originality?
Those multifaceted, real-to-the-bone characters?”
– Libba Bray, #1 New York Times
bestselling author
In loving memory of my father,
Stephen Ness
1939-2025
I miss him.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
BEN
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
MAX
BEN
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
The Tale of the Piper
10
11
12
MAX
BEN
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
MAX
BEN
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
MAX
BEN
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
MAX
BEN
1
2
3
4
MAX
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise for the chaos walking trilogy
Copyright
“Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music
I never dreamed of, and the call in it
is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.”
The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. “I hear nothing myself,” he said.
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”
The Noise doesn’t follow me into waking.
But the echoes of it do.
BEN
1
The god comes screaming through the trees, shoving them to each side like matchsticks, breaking and burning them as it thrashes its way out of the woods to come running, stumbling, screaming to the shore of the lake–
Where me and Max have nowhere to run.
It looks like a giant, skinless man, just muscles on bones, a jawful of teeth, and wild, staring eyeballs with no lids. Maybe it’s screaming because of the skinlessness or maybe because flames cover nearly all of it, like it’s coated in fuel. The burning is almost invisible except in a kind of rippling glow all around it with blue and yellow flames billowing from the top of its head. You can see its skinless body underneath, as it screams and screams–
Which is terrible, a sound so inhuman and despairing it actually hurts, actually makes your skin pull and pucker like it’s trying to get away, but the scream rose so fast all we really had time to do when we heard it was turn around, and there was a god–
“Ben, come on!” Max yells, grabbing my arm–
I must be going with him, but even now I know there’s no time, that a god is coming for us and no one can outrun a god and I can’t take my eyes off it or plug my ears from the scream–
The ground shakes as the god powers forward, the water in the lake actually splashing, as boom, boom, boom, the god stomps towards us like a charging bull, crushing bushes and stones, burning everything it touches. Like a mountain coming at you, like the whole landscape peeling up into the sky, as if someone’s grabbed the far corners of it like a blanket and pulled it into the air, and all you can do is watch your death come at you, because there’s nowhere to stand, nowhere to run–
Though we’re surrounded by animals who are trying to, breaking from the forest in front of the god, scrambling in all directions, tiny deer, forest squirrels, low-flying birds in wide-eyed terror, even the bared teeth of a rine, which up until this moment I would have called the scariest thing out here. Their Noise is a panic, no words, just the need to get away, the same need that’s made Max try to drag me along the lakeshore, not because it will help but because our bodies refuse to accept the obvious–
We’re going to die–
There is nothing, not one little thing, we can do to stop it. We will be killed by a burning, screaming god–
And it’s on us even though we’re running along the lakeshore–
It’s here–
We duck our heads, instinctively, stupidly, as the god stretches out its hand to us–
To me–
Oh, crap–
It’s reaching for me–
It’s going to grab me–
I push Max to get him out of the way if I can–
The god’s hand comes down–
I hunch my back, waiting for the crush of the fingers, the burn of the flames–
And–
The god misses me.
It steps over us both, its momentum carrying it on past us with a stride as long as a crop field, one burning, twitching foot above our heads just for a moment, its hand swinging past me, so close I feel the heat burn the hairs on the back of my neck, like I’ve only just slipped out of its grasp.
But there’s no time to think about it, because the god crashes into the lake, its whole body falling forward, every towering, burning muscle of it, sending a huge wave of water over us, blasting away our little fishing spot, smashing us back up the bank in a drowning flood.
I reach out for Max, but my arm is knocked away by a log that’s been swept up. The water is murky and brown, the mud stirred up by the giant that’s fallen into it, and when it finally drops us and we cough all the water out of our lungs, we’re covered in a layer of dirt and silt.
And as sudden as that, it’s quiet.
2
“What just happened?” Max coughs out. “What the eff just happened?”
He doesn’t say eff, of course. Max swears a lot when Mom and Pop aren’t around. I try to stand, get myself ready to run again. Max tries to do the same, but his leg is pinned under a log, maybe even the one that hit us.
“Ben?” he says.
I clamber awkwardly over to him, feeling extremely wobbly on my legs, and I lift the log with one arm, just enough for him to scramble out from under.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
I shake my head. I start to sign that I feel weird, but then I realize my other arm, the one I didn’t use to lift the log, isn’t moving. Max stares at it, wide-eyed.
There’s a bone poking up through my wrist.
Okay.
So there’s that.
I don’t feel any pain yet, but the sight of it makes me sit right back down, hitting the ground hard with my tailbone. No wonder my legs are wobbly.
“Can you run?” Max asks.
I gesture with my non-broken arm, like obviously not, you idiot. I’m not even sure I can stand up again. I know what Max is thinking and that’s if he leaves me here, I’m not going to be able to get out of the way if the god comes back out of the lake. Or, for that matter, if any more gods come from the trees. What if there’s a whole herd of them back there?
I think what Max just said: What the eff just happened?
“I’ll go get Pop, okay?” he says. “I’ll go as fast as I can. ”
He grabs my shoulder and looks me in the eyes. He can be an absolute shit sometimes (most of the time), but he’s still my brother and is hardly going to let me die. He looks like he wants to say something, but I don’t know what I’d say in his position either. Don’t die? Don’t disappear but also don’t stay here? There’s nothing to say, so off he runs, dashing back through the non-burning part of the forest towards our farm.
3
It’s quiet with Max gone. I mean, it always is, he chatters like a territorial bird, but this is different. At first the only thing I hear is the water in the lake settling after the god fell into it, like it’s whispering to itself to calm down, calm down. I keep my eyes on it, waiting for the god to emerge, because gods like emerging from water, don’t they? They do it a lot in narrative vids. And ancient history. Though not so often in the sermons Margery Wingard likes to preach in town, now that I think of it. Her gods don’t do anything fun.
I hear the crackle of wood burning, the pop of sap as it boils, the crunch as a burning branch falls to the ground. I look back at the forest. There’s a hole where the god burst through, almost hilariously in the shape of a door that got knocked down. The trees there are broken and burning.
A forest fire started by a god.
And then, over the sound of the fire crackling and the lake settling–
I hear voices.
We only have a few neighbours, far enough away to keep out of our business, that’s the whole point of living out here, but suddenly what sounds like dozens or even hundreds of people are on their way here. What could they be doing? Chasing the god? Following it? I–
Except they’re not coming from the forest. They’re coming from the lake. The water doesn’t stir, any more than it was anyway, but there are voices rising from it. Not the screaming of the god. Actual voices. I can’t make out words, just different tones and pitches and emotions behind them, but they’re definitely human. Some are having arguments, some are laughing with each other, some are lonely, some are in crowds.
I can see it, too. Flashes of colour, images too blurry to make out completely, but impressions of sky and land and blood, even, and figures moving here and there. And I can sense almost every feeling you can think of hanging in the air in front of me, anger and love and laughter and fear and cowardice and triumph and despair.
It’s Noise. This is the Noise a bunch of men would make if they were in one place all together.
If none of them had taken the cure.
4
Our pop still has Noise, but that’s rare nowadays. It’s another reason we live out in the sticks. He can’t stand all the silence in the city. Which I guess is a different thing than the silence out here half a day’s walk downriver. When he goes to town – which he never does – he looks at the faces of all those silent men and women, and they look at his very much not silent face, and well, maybe you’d move, too.
But when the first settlers landed here and for many, many terrible years after, every man had Noise and no woman ever did. Nobody has ever said much about anyone who might have fallen betwixt those two; they were probably too busy trying not to die like everyone else. Just that, for a long time, every thought and feeling and memory of every human man on this planet was right there for all to see all the time, whether you wanted it to or not. There was no privacy, just your whole ugly self, on show, even the parts which needed to be secret.
This caused conflict, to say the least. Different places handled it different ways, some good, most bad. The worst was Prentisstown, the cautionary tale we all get taught at school. They killed every woman there, because the men couldn’t stand being known that nakedly. It was a crime so awful they were cut off from the rest of the humans who’d settled here, not that there were all that many then. But those men didn’t rest. Their leader, Mayor David Prentiss, made an army and they marched and did terrible, terrible things. He eventually ruled every human settlement here.
They found a cure back then, too, made from plants and native chemicals, but how to make it got lost in the war that followed. The only big human city left, called Haven, was destroyed in a flood by the local species who everyone had treated pretty badly since we got here but who the Mayor’d managed to treat even worse in his short time as conquering leader.
That probably would have been it for the human race on New World if new settlers hadn’t shown up right about then in their thousands. That caused a whole new set of problems, but it all kind of settled down over the years into what it is now. They made a new cure, a genetic one way more effective than the first one. Once you took it, there was no going back, though there were side effects for some of us that…
Well, never mind that for now. Let’s just say the new cure helped, or so people say, and we’ve kind of had peace with the locals and with each other for at least my lifetime. Pop says most of the folks here now either don’t know the whole truth of what happened before or are pretending they don’t and that’s yet another reason we live out here in the sticks. My pop is from Prentisstown. He knows exactly how bad things can get.
So when I see the Noise above the lake, stirring there like a roiling cloud, I know what I’m talking about. It’s different from animal Noise. Animals aren’t stupid, they’re just direct and focused. Humans are a mess, and so is their Noise. Living in it must have been a nightmare. It’s hard enough with one person in your house having it. If this is what the world was like, no wonder people kept trying to burn it down before the cure came.
So why is human Noise rising from a lake where a god fell? Are they prayers? Are they what make a god? And if you’re asking why I keep calling it a god rather than anything else, all that shows is that you didn’t see it.
“Ben!” I hear in the distance behind me through the trees, my name over the hoofbeats of a horse.
Pop is coming.
5
“And everything he says is true?” Pop asks me, wrapping a bandage around my arm, saying it just quietly enough for Max not to hear. Pop’s having a hard time believing us, which is annoying, if understandable.
I nod. The injection from the medipak is re-knitting my broken arm, and the painkiller in it means I don’t feel anything except the weirdness of my bones moving on their own.
“Okay,” he says, and his Noise says, Okay. “I believe you. I believe you saw what you saw.” He glances back at the lake, completely still now, even where Max is finding places to look deeper and deeper into it.
“It’s not there, Pop!” Max hollers, and there’s a lot of fear in his voice. “I can see all the way to the bottom now, and it’s not there! Where did it go?”
Pop looks back at me. I shake my head. I don’t know either. Pop’s Noise is full of confusion, full of fear for his sons, all with a little undercurrent of wondering if his leg is being pulled. I do leave for upper school next week, after all. If we were going to pull a prank, now would be the time. Except we’ve never been pranksters, Max and me. Who’s got time for that on a farm?
Pop’s still questioning stuff in his Noise, so I gesture to the big, burning hole in the treeline.
“Yeah,” he says. “I reckon neither of you did that, did ya?”
Now that it seems to be all over – though who can be sure – I feel like, well … it’s not that I’m starting to doubt what we saw, because we absolutely saw it, of that I will be sure for the rest of my life. It’s more the opposite. I’m starting to feel the real danger of it. The sheer unexplainable impossibility of it. This terrible thing that happened right here, right in front of us. That could have killed us, killed me, was reaching for me–
Pop sees the wet in my eyes and he puts a gentle hand on the back of my neck. I shake him off, and his Noise gets a little hurt before he hides it.
“Look, we’ll get you home,” he says, “but I want to talk to the Land when they get here.”
“The Land are coming?” Max says, heading back over to us.
“They aren’t going to let that fire burn,” Pop says.
And he’s right. He hasn’t even repacked the medipak on Angharrad’s saddle before the Land start coming out of the woods. They carry those white saws they use which cut down trees better than any chainsaw.
A few of them wave to Pop. A greeting they learned from him, actually, since the language barrier is still pretty much a brick wall for most people. The biggest stupidity the makers of the cure didn’t properly think through before giving it to nearly everyone? The locals are a Noise-based society. If you don’t have Noise, talking to them is about ten thousand times harder.
