Cold Magic (54 page)

Chartji turned to me a final time. “You’ll find the Adurnam offices of Godwik and Clutch in Fox Close.” She added, in the language of the Kena’ani, gesturing to include Bee, “Peace upon you and in all your undertakings.”

Then they were gone. Bee and I were left staring at each other in the shadow of the shattered airship’s ribs.

“I’ve never before exchanged words with a troll,” she said in a choked voice. “Yet the creature seemed quite unexceptionable.”

“No doubt because she is a personage of sensibility and intellect. About you, I admit, I retain a great deal of doubt. Don’t you think we’d best
get moving
, before we’re discovered by whatever that whistle warned against?”

We hurried down the alley, pausing to overlook the gate with its loosely wrapped chain. I caught a glimpse of our companions crossing the rail lines before they cut behind a distant brick warehouse. Where was the nephew? Just how far had the whistle carried?

Bee used her shoulder to shift the gates. She squeezed through the gap and under the loose chains. I heard a steady thunder of hooves, and I grasped Bee’s wrist and pulled her to the right along the high wall.

“We can’t go back the way we came,” I said. “If I do not mistake my ears, a host of mounted troops approaches.”

She shook her arm out of my grasp, but only so she could trot alongside me more easily. “Do you think it’s really possible we can find a place to hide overnight in one of the mills?”

“In that racket? I should be surprised if we could not. Who, after all, is likely to be sneaking
into
the factories?”

“Radicals meaning to inflame the workers.”

That her lips were set grimly did not surprise me; we were, after all, in a desperate situation. “Is there something wrong with radicals?”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Considering the Hassi Barahals have been accused of spying for Camjiata—”

“Really, Cat. Who supposes Camjiata to be a radical? He was a general!”

We fled around a corner just as the first rank of a troop of horsemen arrayed in the splendid turbans and knee-length jackets of a mage House appeared before the Rail Yard. I doubted they had seen us, but fear lent wings to our feet. We held our skirts away from our legs and ran into an overgrown field of dead grass and abandoned waste. Where a few scrawny trees gave shelter, folk had used the cover for their commode, so besides the cinders and smoke and clatter and hum, there was also a stink rising so strong it seemed we plunged straight into Sheol, if Sheol looked like a factory district whose chimneys thrust as spears into a cloudy sky smeared with cinders and ash. A rickety wood bridge crossed a stream whose water oozed sludge. A dead rat was caught in the weeds, rigid with indignation, no doubt, at having drowned. Since rats could swim as easily as they could scuttle, I wondered if it was the poisonous water that had killed it. Its corpse made me think of Rory, and my steps faltered.

“Hurry!” Bee picked her way across the bridge. A horn cried behind us. Farther off, a series of shrill whistles chased into the distance, but as we hurried up a stony path between heaps of discarded brick and wood so in pieces it wasn’t even worth scavenging, the troll signals became drowned beneath the pulsing hum of the three mills.

“Should we keep running?” Bee shouted. “Up into the hills?”

“No! We’ll be easier to catch in the countryside. I think Andevai is right. We’ll be hardest to track in the machinery.”

“Then where?” Soot streaked her face; she had lost her bonnet, and her hair spilled over her shoulders in an unruly mass of black curls.

Blessed Tanit! I could not help myself. I began to laugh.

“What?” she cried.

“I suppose I’ll be the one who has to spend tedious hours combing out those knots and tangles!”

“Oh, Cat!” She embraced me so tightly I grunted in pain. “How I missed you!”

I sniffed hard and pushed her away. “Of course you did! Who else has the patience to comb out your hair?”

Dressed as we were, we did not look so strange walking along the dingy row of houses, each with a door closed to the world and a pair of steps leading up to it. A woman with two very young children at her skirts slouched past us with a basket weighing heavily on her arm; once, perhaps, you could have seen its straw weave, but now it was blackened by coal dust. The children were very thin, and all were shod in crudely carved wooden shoes. Yet she in her shabby clothes was as neatly made up as she could make herself, and she took a moment from her weary errand to nod in a friendly way.

“Chance you be Missy Baker’s cousins?” she asked. “Down in Wellspring Terrace? She’s expecting a pair of lasses from the country, up for the work.”

“We’re not,” said Bee at her most confiding, with a smile that could melt suspicion into sweet candy. “Is there a hiring office here?”

“Toombs Mill is full up, as well I know,” said the woman. “That’s yon first mill, there. You may check at them others, Calders and Matarno. I don’t know aught of them, except it’s a fair long walk to get there.”

We thanked her and walked on, past men pushing wheelbarrows filled with rags and another leading a donkey pulling a covered cart whose concealed cargo stank so badly we had to cover our noses. Toombs Mill was a great beast of a building, fully four stories in height, with a dwelling house attached on one side like a small child to a stout parent, and at the far end a long low wing that I guessed housed the weaving shed. The din of its machines chased us along past a wharf where idle men watched us with the kind of stares that made us walk faster. These men with starving eyes had about them a sallow-cheeked desperation that made the villagers of Haranwy, despite the ties that chained them to Four Moons House, seem the more fortunate. Yet how could I judge? Why should laborers live in such deplorable conditions and entire villages be chained by custom and law to a master? Weren’t both terrible things?

On we walked past a dye works with its pungent odor and thence along a lane of dreary one-story brick warehouses. The steady roar of the mills serenaded us.

“This racket will drive me mad!” cried Bee.

“Aren’t you mad already?”

She essayed a punch to my shoulder, but her heart wasn’t in it. The day’s walk and last night’s escape were taking their toll even on her resilient frame, and the constant ringing, thrumming clatter was surely enough to unsettle the firmest resolve and drum into oblivion all coherent thought. We walked the length of Calders Mill and onward toward the twin stacks of Matarno Mill, at the end of the race.

Men winched bales out of a barge and loaded them onto a flatbed wagon. Bales of finished cloth had been stacked on another barge for the journey downstream. Dusk turned the water black; even the last glancing rays of the sun could wake no glistening shimmer on that foul liquid. A pack of scrawny boys fished from the bank, shivering without coats. Two braced themselves each on a crutch; one was missing his right leg below the knee, the trouser leg tied off with a bit of string.

A long, low howl scraped the air like a wolf marking its prey. A second, shorter blat replied, and a coughing
toot-toot-toot
roused briefly and wheezed to a halt.

All my life in Adurnam I had heard echoes of these calls from the comforts of the Barahal house. Only now did I see what they announced.

The rhythmic scratching brawl of the looms stepped down piece by piece. Within the queer alteration of sound formed by its cessation, the ringing clamor of the mules fell silent, and slowly the din settled and the ground ceased humming beneath my soles until all I heard was a buzzing in my ears. In the fury’s wake, an avalanche rumbled into life. A man unlocked a chained set of double doors on the ground floor of Matarno Mill, and workers spilled forth like stones and dirt racing down a cliff in an unstoppable tide. They wore wooden clogs rather than the leather shoes we could afford, and the noise made by feet striking stone, wood, and earth washed all before it. But most striking was their silence. You would think that after a day hammered by noise and unable to exchange a single civil word in a normal tone, folk would be ready to chatter about their thoughts and hopes and gossip. By the worn and exhausted faces flooding past us, I could see that no one had the strength to speak.

Just before the first wave reached us, I looked at Bee, and Bee looked at me. We needed no words to share what must have been obvious to both of us. It simply had not occurred to either of us that the mills would shut down for the night, because they relied on daylight for their workers to see. Then the wash hit us, men and women and children in faded and mended clothing, the women with their hair covered by scarves and faces pallid or ashen, depending on their complexion. So thin they were, faces pinched, hands trembling; one young woman was rubbing her right ear, and a man with stooped shoulders leaned heavily on a comrade, as though he were about to faint. A boy no older than Hanan passed, his gait made awkward by the evident pain caused him in his right leg, for he grimaced each time that limb pressed into the ground. A very small girl passed holding a bloody rag to the back of her head and crying, although not one soul paid the least attention to her.

Bee pushed forward against the tide, and with an elbow here and a shoulder there, we pressed through the crush toward the mill’s doors, where a pair of foremen watched as the workers departed. In such a commotion, it was easy enough to be what I was not. I was not walking
into
the mill but rather was part of the outward flow; Bee was twisting her bracelet, as if anxious about a missed tryst, no one important. Hidden within the glamor of misdirection, we got inside the stairwell; very dim it was, with no windows and only one lamp burning midway between each floor. The clomping of many feet echoed in the stairwell as folk pushed down.

Shoved against the brick wall, we swam like birds against the current upward, for laborers from the upper floors were only now coming down. At the first landing, we slipped into a vast, low room with big windows where the encroaching dusk gave us little enough light to see by. Brushes were hung from a rack on the wall. Spinning mules stood in their ranks, fiber pulled in long threads but now still. Bee knocked her knee against a wheel, and I jammed my toe when I kicked a runner lying so low along the floor I had not expected it. White flickers of lint drifted and warmth lingered. Dust tickled in our nostrils. A bloody knot of human hair lay on the floor.

“Did you see how young those children were?” whispered Bee.

Footsteps clumped behind us. We turned.

A night watchman with a lantern and a knotted whip walked in. “Here, now, off you go, girls! I’ve no time for your malingering! We’re closing up!”

We hurried away down the long room to the opposite door, by now drowned in gloom, down the cold, silent stone steps, and again outdoors. Out back, connected to a one-storied annex, rose the engine house, where the engine still hissed and wheezed. A pair of watchmen stood by the door, talking and laughing. Bee grabbed my arm and tugged me with her as she marched to the door. As they looked up to see her, she bobbed her head and rubbed her hands as if nervous.

“Begging your pardon,” she said in a soft, un-Bee-like voice, “but we’re come up from the country for we were told we could get jobs here.”

“What kind of job were you thinking?” asked the younger man.

The elder gave a frown. Bee burst into tears.

I said, “Oh, please, we’re good girls. We were sent up to live with our cousin on Wellspring Terrace and take a job here, for there’s no husbands for us at home. But she died, and her husband said a terrible thing to my sister, like he meant to… to mistreat her. We’ve just enough coin to make the trip home, but nothing for a roof tonight, and it’s so cold, and we’re so frightened.”

Bee bleated out another anguished sob.

“All we ask is one night. In a safe, warm place, like you’d hope for your own sisters and daughters.”

“Probably that bastard Tom Carter,” said the elder. “For his wife died three months back. Some say he shoved her down the stairs, and her pregnant! The baby died, too.”

Bee wept noisily.

“All right, then,” continued the elder with a sigh, “and don’t you go being disrespectful,” he added, with a stern nod at the younger man. To us, he said, “I’ll tell them to let you lie on the floor just inside the door. But how much sleep you’ll get I could not say, for it’s a cursed din.”

“Do they keep the furnace lit all night?” I asked, hoping he would say yes.

“Yes. It’s easier that way than drawing it up each morning.” He opened the door.

And, indeed, inside the stone walls of the engine house it was smoky and noisy and hot, but it was combustion, and if anything would hide us from the mansa, it was combustion.

We curled up against a wall, out of the way, in our coats. The workers in charge of the furnace ignored us. It was smoky, and noisy, and hot, but we slept.

A horn blast woke us before dawn. The hard planks had bruised my right shoulder, and my neck ached from lying crooked all night. My stomach felt hollow, and worst of all, the smoke and heat had parched my lips until they were flaking. The older watchman appeared as, from far off, a roll like thunder rose.

“Best you get moving, then,” he said in a loud voice above the steadily increasing rumble. “May the gods watch over your travels.”

Bee got quickly to her feet. “My thanks to you,” she said with real gratitude, and she kissed him smartly on the lips, which made him flush and then smile. We hurried out into icy dawn, where the silence was shattered by the clatter of hundreds of workers surging along the streets, entering the factory doors, and clomping up the stairs in their wooden shoes.

We joined the stream, going up one floor to the long room with the spinning mules. I grabbed a pair of brushes from the bar, and Bee and I set to work brushing beneath the thread as more workers streamed into the spinning hall. They looked as weary in the gray pallor of morning as they had under dusk’s gentle glow.

“Here! You two!” A man with a weathered face and a scar across his nose called us out. “Who are you?”