A Solitary Journey (46 page)

‘Had it done two days ago. Thought you’d be here then.’

‘You know what it’s like. Bosses think they own the place.’

‘They do, Curtin, they do.’

Meg sank against a pile of cured planks and listened as the men chuckled and talked business, but they walked through the room into another part of the building without coming near her. Whisper appeared at her feet.
Come.

The rat led her through another room, this one with benches and cutting implements, one strange machine hissing steam in the corner, and into a hallway, stopping at a ladder that rose to an opening in the ceiling.
Up,
the rat informed her and scaled the ladder frame. Meg glanced along the hall, listening, before she followed Whisper. The next level was in the roof of the coopery, but Whisper was running towards another opening that led outside judging by the daylight streaming in. On the roof was yet another ladder up a wall to the adjoining building roof which was two arm-spans higher, and eventually Whisper led her to the window on the paper factory roof.

She saw the foreman walking along the rows of children who were busy at a variety of roles—pulping, stirring, extracting, pressing—and the three guards had returned to lounging against the wall as if that was all they did each day. The angle and height from the roof made viewing the children difficult and the factory light was dull, but she observed them carefully, one by one, searching desperately for two faces—Emma and Treasure—faces she hadn’t seen for almost two years.

S
he watched him pack his small leather bag and wished there was something she could say to convince him to stay, but that conversation was already finished. He had returned from his exploration of the city in a foul mood, telling her that there was nothing for him in Lightsword. ‘I’m going north,’ he said. ‘There’s one place where I can still find what I need.’ He didn’t even ask about the outcome of her search for her children, as if now that they were in his homeland he was obsessed by his need only.

‘How many days?’ she asked, as he buckled the bag. ‘Three there and three back. Add at least one for the time I need there. And if there are any weather problems it will take longer. I’ll be back in less than ten days if it goes according to plan. That should have given you time to search the other factories.’ He hoisted the bag and headed for the door. ‘Are you coming downstairs?’

She followed him along the hall and down to the foyer where Shar greeted them from her desk. Luca waited at the entrance. ‘I’ve organised a conveyer to take us to the park. The dragon egg is ready,’ he said as he opened the door for A Ahmud Ki. ‘I’m sorry about
your children,’ he said to Meg as she followed A Ahmud Ki through the door.

‘I’ve only just started,’ she told him as they reached the conveyer. ‘There are a lot of factories.’

Luca smiled and took her hand. ‘Be careful. It’s a big city and there are people who can’t be trusted, especially around beautiful women.’ He kissed the back of her hand, which made her blush.

She looked up at A Ahmud Ki who was already seated in the conveyer. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mouthed, but aloud he said, ‘I’ll see you in a few days.’

Luca climbed in beside A Ahmud Ki. ‘We’re ready!’ he called to the driver and the carriage pulled away. Meg watched until the conveyer was lost in the traffic before she returned to her room, scooped up Whisper, sat at the window and stared across the cityscape, wondering where her children could be.

‘I’m from the government,’ she brusquely informed the short, squat woman at the desk of the cotton factory, eyeballing her with her green eyes. ‘I need to see that your papers are all in order under the new laws.’

‘We don’t have any slave kids,’ the woman replied, although the trepidation in her voice suggested to Meg that she was lying.

‘Then you won’t mind taking me on a tour of the factory,’ Meg said. ‘Let’s go.’

The woman went red in the face as she said, ‘Look. We don’t want any trouble with the government, lady. All right? We had slave kids, but we sold them on.’

‘When?’

The woman shuffled and looked askance at a pile of paper on her desk. ‘Maybe six months ago.’

‘Who to?’ Meg demanded, moving deliberately towards the paper pile.

The woman stepped sideways and put a hand on the papers. ‘Lady, you know how things are. I can’t just go telling you stuff that people don’t want the government to know about. You understand, don’t you?’

Meg’s spine tingled. The woman yelped and lifted her hand from the papers because they’d caught fire and she screamed as she pushed the pile off her desk onto the floor. ‘Fire! Help! Oh in all of the hells’ names, help!’

Meg ignored her pleas and pushed through the door into the factory, avoiding the men running to extinguish the fire. When a quick glance confirmed there were no children working on the factory floor, she returned to the smoke-filled office, again ignoring the people madly stamping on the paper embers and splashing water over the wooden floor, and left.

Shar had convinced her to use the guise of a government official. ‘No one knows who works for the government these days—there’s so many of them. Just walk in all brassy and demand to see their papers, and most of them will go crazy trying to help you, especially over the slave law.’ She grinned. ‘It even goes crazy here when the inspector comes to check that we’re keeping a clean and orderly business. Bosses don’t like government inspectors. They can close down their business.’ Shar even told her what to buy to wear. ‘Government women wear the same dark green as the Peacekeepers. That’s the government colours. That and dark blue. Get a dark green dress, don’t put on any make-up, tie your hair back and you’ll get away with it. Believe me.’ So she believed Shar, bought what she needed, adopted the disguise and tried it on another paper factory in the north-eastern sector, and it worked. In three days she visited thirty-seven factories posing as a government official checking on the abolition of slaves and every factory let her check their credentials—until the
woman in the cotton factory acted as if she had something to hide.

Keen to avoid attention because people were already heading towards the building, having heard screams and seen smoke spilling from the office window, she strode briskly away from the factory, turned the first corner and walked on, glad to be among people who were oblivious to the unfolding events one street away. There were no clues to the whereabouts of her children at any factory. The first place she visited—H R Papergoods—was the only one in the city known to have used exotic child slaves in recent times. Several factories that bought slaves before the law change had already released them to freedom, although many former slaves now worked on the factory floor to earn an income. The remaining factories rumoured to still be using slaves turned out to be legitimately using prisoners from the ongoing Ranu war. The trail of her children had gone terribly cold. She couldn’t even conjure dreams to give her direction. Her heart was sinking like the late afternoon sun.

Birdcatcher savoured the texture of the cold metal in his broad hands as he sighted the red-haired woman along the barrel of the Andrak peacemaker. The street was crowded and a clear shot was going to be difficult, but he had tailed the woman all day to get this one opportunity and he wasn’t going to waste it.

The Port Authority of this strange land impounded his thundermaker upon his arrival the day before yesterday, leaving him contemplating how to assassinate the woman with the traditional methods which were much more risky. Luck played into his hands when a lone drunken soldier accosted him for sleeping in the park by the river the first night. Birdcatcher pretended to be helpless until the soldier was off his guard and then
he killed him. The booty was the soldier’s weapon. Although it was like a thundermaker, it was significantly refined, sleeker and lighter. He examined it to discover that it held five thin metal pieces in a package and did not use single heavy metal balls with the magic powder. It had a sighting system that allowed him to focus more accurately on a target. It didn’t sit on the shoulder easily, like a thundermaker did, so he took some time working out that he had to rest it along his arm. He nearly threw it away in the beginning, seeing it as too complex, but now he was glad that he’d been patient. Somehow, when he sailed back to Kerwyn to collect his bounty for killing the Abomination for the Seers, he had to take this weapon with him.

The woman stopped to stare into a window. He couldn’t read or speak Andrak, but the picture of a flute on the sign told him she was looking into a musical instrument shop. He aimed at her head and squeezed the trigger.

Meg screamed when the glass shop window shattered and a man collapsed at her feet, bleeding from the neck. As she crouched instinctively something whizzed by her shoulder and smacked into the wooden window frame, and people near her stampeded, screaming and waving their arms to warn others. She heard a popping sound and felt a sudden sting in her side that made her roll onto the cobblestones. As she was lying on her back, staring up at the sun-tinged clouds, she remembered pointing at a group of Kerwyn soldiers in Summerbrook and releasing a fireball of energy that enveloped them. They were strangers shooting her friends and she was stopping them. ‘Stay where you are,’ a man’s voice said. His elongated face, moustached and sweating, swayed at the corner of her vision. ‘Help is coming.’

‘I’m all right,’ she said calmly, but when she noticed that he was shocked by her simple assertion she tried to stand and couldn’t move. Her spine tingled with familiar energy, but it was making her feel enormously fatigued and she wanted to sleep.

‘Stay still,’ the man urged and his face was joined by others staring down at her.

Birdcatcher scrambled across the rooftop and clambered down a ladder into an alley. He heard the shouting and screams and assessed his options, but when men in green uniforms appeared he burst out of the alley, startling pedestrians, and dashed across the street, narrowly dodging a horse and carriage. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed that he was being pursued so he kept running, pushing people aside. He had a vague idea of the direction he was headed, based on tailing the Abomination, but the city’s minor streets and alleys were unknowns. He turned left along another street that rose to a crest and headed right along a narrow alley that opened into a broad avenue of tall, wide trees.

A hundred paces on, the avenue bordered a park, so he ran for it his breath coming sharp as he reached his running limit. Hoping to have put distance between himself and his pursuers, he looked back to discover to his dismay that he was being chased by at least ten uniformed men. Ahead, the park of ornamental bushes and trees and statues was bordered by the river. He was trapped. He spent his last energy sprinting for a large fountain of a rising bird and slumped behind it, drawing stares of curiosity from the men, women and children who were walking and sitting around it—but when they saw the peacemaker and his wild eyes they screamed and ran as the Peacekeepers closed in, leaving Birdcatcher to fumble with the spare magazine taken from the soldier as he tried to reload his peacemaker.

The uniformed men yelled, but their words meant nothing. He saw their peacemakers and jammed the magazine into place. ‘I’ll kill you if you get closer!’ he yelled in Kerwyn. ‘Back off, all of you!’ He gritted his teeth. The Abomination was dead. He missed her with his first two shots, but he saw the third strike home with a spout of blood so he knew his job was done. The Seers offered him a lifetime’s fortune which was waiting for him now, in Port of Joy, and these idiots were all that stood in his way.
I can take down five of them,
he reasoned as he took aim on one.
They won’t stay if I get a couple even.

One yelled again. He pulled the trigger and the target jerked backwards. The others dropped onto one knee and raised their peacemakers. Birdcatcher fired again and a second victim cartwheeled backwards. A wall of smoke and fury erupted from the remaining eight peacemaker muzzles as he ducked behind the fountain. Particles of marble and drops of water showered him as the bullets smashed into the fountain. He rose again and took aim—and felt something smack into his right shoulder and his left hip like he’d been kicked. As he staggered backwards three more bullets punched into his chest and his stolen peacemaker dropped from his hands as he flopped onto the grass.

‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it,’ the man in the white coat with glass discs on his nose was saying. ‘Remarkable. Witnesses swear they saw the bullet hit her and that she was bleeding profusely, and there’s a bullet hole in her dress up beside her heart region, but there’s not a mark on her.’

‘She’s awake, doctor,’ an invisible woman said.

The man in the white coat gazed at Meg. ‘Well, you are a marvel. Welcome back to the world. I’m Doctor Harbin. And who are you?’ His face was round and
cheerful, and the strange glass discs made his blue eyes look larger than normal. His hair was hidden beneath a white cap.

‘Meg,’ she answered, conscious that under the white sheet she was naked. ‘Where are my clothes?’

The doctor smiled. ‘You can have them back, but the dress is bloody. When you were brought in we thought you had a wound, but somehow the bullet missed you. The blood on you must have come from the poor man the assassin shot.’

‘Is he—?’

‘Yes, unfortunately,’ he interrupted. ‘Did you know him?’

‘No,’ she replied.

‘Then you were a very unlucky bystander.’ The doctor slid off his white cap, revealing a full head of black hair with greying sides. ‘Although to escape unhurt is very lucky. Your papers say that you’re a foreigner?’

‘From Western Shess,’ she replied, but she was wary, wondering if the doctor knew what had happened in Port River.

‘Don’t know it,’ he said, taking her arm and encouraging her to sit up. ‘Is it far?’

‘Three cycles—months by dragon ship.’ There were two women in the white room and she was on a hard bed with wheels.

‘That is a long way,’ the doctor said. ‘What brought you here then?’ He signalled to a woman who nodded and left the room, but when he saw Meg’s concerned expression he said, ‘Rees is fetching your clothes and bag and a fresh outfit to see you home.’

‘I’m looking for my children,’ Meg explained. ‘I was told they were sold to a factory owner.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he started washing his hands in a bowl. ‘Have you learned anything since arriving?’

‘Only that I can’t find them,’ she confessed as tears coursed down her cheeks.

The doctor nodded to the second woman who slipped an arm over Meg’s shoulder. ‘There, there, it will turn out all right,’ she crooned. The first woman returned carrying a bundle of clothing.

‘I’ll leave you to dress,’ said the doctor. ‘Then you can go home.’ He smiled, adjusted the glass discs on his nose and left the room.

‘He’s a good man,’ said the woman named Rees. ‘You were lucky he attended to you.’

‘Rees?’ the second woman asked. ‘Do you know anything about slave children?’

‘Why?’

‘Because our friend here is looking for her children. They came from overseas. Didn’t your sister buy a girl to work around her house?’

‘Shh, Nell,’ Rees warned. ‘You know it’s against the law to have a slave.’ She glanced at the green dress in Meg’s clothing pile. ‘Government has people everywhere.’

‘I’m not from the government if that’s what you think,’ Meg assured her. ‘I’m from Western Shess. It’s a long way from here.’

‘Government people lie,’ Rees accused.