Blue Sea Burning (26 page)

The Mine

WE ALL FROZE
in place. Almost as soon as we heard them, the voices stopped. There was a rustle of branches, then nothing.

I heard the
click
of a pistol cocking. Guts.

Then there was a muffled whine that didn't sound quite human, followed by a short struggle that ended in the high-pitched yelp of a lapdog.

My shoulders sagged with relief. Ripper's men didn't have lapdogs.

“Who's there?” Millicent said in a loud whisper as she stepped through the gloom toward the sound. “Come out. We won't hurt you.”

“Is that Millicent?” It was a woman's voice, stuffy and rich. “Oh, my dear!”

“Mrs. Wallis?”

I knew the Wallises a little from the weeks I'd spent on Sunrise. They lived in the mansion down the hill from Cloud Manor and had three small children, all of them as yippy as Mrs. Wallis's lapdog.

The children were with her now, terror-struck into silence and each holding the hand of three equally terrified housemaids.

“Where you coming from, child?” Mrs. Wallis quailed.

“Edgartown,” said Millicent. “We only just landed.”

“Is the . . . landing near here?” She said
landing
in a hushed, embarrassed kind of way, like Pembroke's secret cove wasn't the sort of thing you mentioned in polite company. It made me wonder if all his slaving really was a secret to the people on Sunrise, or if it was just something they didn't talk about.

“It's right over there,” said Cyril.

“Why, Cyril Whitmore! Look at you! You're just landing now? Together? And these others . . . ?” She looked at Guts, Kira, and me like she didn't know whether to be glad or frightened of us.

“Never mind us,” said Guts. “Where's them Ripper men?”

Her eyelids fluttered at the name. “Everywhere! They went house to house—if the children and I hadn't been up the hill on a picnic, they would've rounded us up, too. My other servants couldn't escape, poor things.”

“What happened to them?”

“Taken to Blisstown with the others. Once they sacked Timberfield”—for reasons I'd never understood, people on Sunrise liked to give their houses names—“and all the other homes on the hillside, they marched everyone to town. The children and I hid in the woods until dark. Then set out to try to find the . . . other way out.”

“Have you seen my mother?” Millicent asked.

“No, dearie. But . . .”

“But what?”

Mrs. Wallis squeezed her lips together and fanned her face with her hand, even though it wasn't warm out.

“What happened?” Millicent said again.

One of the maids spoke up. “Cloud Manor got the sack, too, miss. We saw it.”

“Is my mother alive?”

The maid nodded. “Should be. They herded all the Cloud Manor folk into a cart, sent it to town.”

Mrs. Wallis put her stubby hand on Millicent's arm. “Don't you worry, dearie. If she cooperates, they'll leave her be.”

“That's what the pirates said,” a second maid added. “Yelled it out as they went. Said if we hid, they'd hunt us like dogs. But if we went along all nice-like, we'd be fine.”

“We thought about coming out of the woods. Going along with them. Do you think we made a mistake?” Mrs. Wallis asked.

“No,” said Millicent, shaking her head. “You didn't.”

“And we're going to get you off this island,” Cyril announced.

We all turned to stare at him. He nodded gravely.

“It's my duty as a gentleman,” he said. “Women and children have to be protected. And there's just room enough for all of us on the sloop.”

He'd suddenly found his courage. Funny how it involved turning around and leaving.

“Let's go,” he said, turning toward the stairs.

“They can find the boat themselves,” said Millicent.

He turned back toward her. “What?”

“We're going to the silver mine.”

Cyril stared at her in disbelief. “Millicent, we've got to take them back to Edgartown! We've got to protect these people!”

“They'll be safe as long as they stay hidden. It's everyone else who needs protecting.”

She and Cyril locked eyes for a long moment.

“I'm going to do my duty,” he said.

“So are we,” she replied. “Give us those slings.”

He handed her his rucksack. Then he turned his back on her, beckoning to Mrs. Wallis and the others.

“This way, please. I'll keep you safe.”

Mrs. Wallis stared at Millicent, bewildered. “Aren't you coming, dearie?”

“Don't worry, Mrs. Wallis,” Millicent said. “You won't be in danger as long as you're with Cyril.”

The way she said it, even dopey Mrs. Wallis must've known it wasn't a reassurance, but an insult.

Millicent started up the hill. Guts, Kira, and I followed her.

“Where are they going?” I heard Mrs. Wallis ask.

“It's no matter,” Cyril replied as his voice faded away. “Here, let me carry your dog . . .”

THERE WASN'T ENOUGH MOONLIGHT
to see properly in the woods, so we took to the road. We figured if anybody else was on it, they'd be carrying lanterns or torches, so we'd see them long before they'd see us.

After about a quarter mile, the road turned away from the coast, heading sharply uphill in a series of switchbacks. Millicent set the pace, moving fast enough that I quickly broke a sweat even in the cool night air.

Occasionally, we passed an overlook with a view all the way to Blisstown. There were a few lights twinkling there, and a fire still burned in one of the ruined fortresses. A couple of times, we heard what sounded like the distant echoes of gunshots.

Other than that, it was all too quiet.

None of us talked. Not so much because we were afraid to make noise, but because there wasn't anything left to talk about. We'd planned what we were going to do as best we could, but none of us, not even Millicent, had the slightest idea what to expect when we reached the mine.

Underneath the silence, my brain was churning. I was pretty sure that what had just happened between Cyril and Millicent had busted up any chance of them ever being together, or even staying friends. But I didn't dwell on that for long. There were too many other things to worry about: the mine and the town and the pirates and the Natives and the guns and the keys—
Where are the skeleton keys? Still in the pack? Check to be sure
—and the ship and the oars and Birch's body on the steps and Mrs. Wallis with the dog and the children with the maids and Mrs. Pembroke with the pirates and my brother with the volcano and—
What about my sister? Haven't even thought about her since . . . What if the Moku sacrificed her? What if they're about to? Who's going to save her? I'm a terrible brother. Haven't even lifted a finger to try to . . . WHY AM I THINKING ABOUT THIS NOW? Check the keys again. What if they fell out of the pack? No, there they are—
and the explosions in the fortresses and the townspeople all doomed to die if we didn't do something and the pirates and their plunder and the silver . . .

The silver.

“The pirates are going to be angry,” I told the others.

“Why?”

“There's almost no silver on the island.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard the Governor-General tell Healy. Back in Edgartown. They were worried about Cartagers attacking Sunrise if the invasion of Pella failed, so they shipped all the silver out early. A couple of weeks ago.”

“Don't matter,” said Guts. “Silver or not, raid's gonna end the same way.”

“Shh,”
said Millicent, raising a hand in warning. Something was coming into view up ahead.

It was a guardhouse, standing in front of a tall, open gate. Nailed to the guardhouse wall was a large sign:

SUNRISE MINING COMPANY

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

TRESPASSERS WILL BE JAILED

There were no guards to stop us, so we continued up the steep road. We were close to the timberline now—the forest on either side of the road was growing thin, and the wind had picked up.

Then the road flattened out onto a wide plateau, and what looked like a whole town suddenly opened up in front of us. There were buildings of all sizes, from squat little huts to long barracks-type structures, to a few giant sheds so big they could've held Cartager men-of-war, masts and all. Great dark hulks of strange machinery were all over the place, hitched to wagons or hanging from scaffolds or just lying on the ground.

And looming behind everything were massive piles of gravel and broken rock that dwarfed even the biggest buildings.

A quarter mile ahead, the plateau ended in a wall of rock that shot up toward the summit of Mount Majestic. At the base of the rock was a gaping black hole thirty feet high and twice as wide.

The only thing missing was people. Other than the remains of a fire that smoldered beneath an iron vat the size of a house, there was no sign of life anywhere.

We walked the whole length of the place, almost as far as the mine entrance, before any of us got up the courage to call out.

“Hello?” Millicent's voice was tentative at first.

She tried again, loud enough to raise an echo. “Hello?”

“HELLO?”

The echoes faded into the night.

Then Kira tried.

“Se ka?”

No answer.

“SE KA?! MASULA TE SE KA?”

She yelled it twice more. The echo from the last one was dying when we heard a voice, thin and distant.

“Ka te?”

“MATA TANO!”
Kira yelled her reply as we looked around for the source of the voice.

“Ka te!”

It was somewhere behind us, back in the direction we'd come from. Kira began to run toward it, calling out in Okalu.

The voice kept answering her, growing louder as we approached.

Eventually, we found its source—one of the massive, warship-sized sheds near the front of the complex, where the road first emerged from the trees.

By the time we reached it, Kira was in a shouted conversation with the Okalu locked inside.

“They are all in here,” she said. “We just have to open the door.”

It was easier said than done. The only entrance was through a twenty-foot-tall double door that was barred shut by a crosspiece of wood as big as a tree. It must have taken a dozen men to lift it into place.

The four of us started trying to push it up and out of its runner. It was hopeless. Even with all of us pushing at once, it didn't budge an inch.

There was no skeleton key for this kind of thing.

Millicent ran around the entire length of the building, looking for another way in. She came back, panting, to tell us there wasn't one.

And the only windows were all the way up near the roof.

Kira was still calling back and forth in an ongoing conversation with one of the Okalu. I could hear the faint buzz of dozens of voices inside.

“Do they have any ideas?” I asked.

“They say there are explosives. In one of the buildings near the mine entrance.”

“Gonna blow the door?” Guts sounded dubious. I was, too.

“Not the door. The wall. The walls are thinner.” To prove her point, Kira knocked on one of the doors, then on the wall beside it. The sound from the knock on the wall was higher pitched and more hollow.

I didn't like the idea of messing with explosives that none of us knew how to use. But we didn't seem to have a choice. Once Kira got more specific directions from the Okalu, we ran back toward the mine entrance and started searching the buildings.

None of them were locked—I was starting to wonder why we'd bothered with the skeleton keys—but that didn't make them easy to search, because most didn't have any windows to let in the moonlight. Even in the ones that did, we could barely see anything. Millicent and Kira left Guts and me to do our best while they tried to cobble together torches from the smoldering embers under the giant iron vat.

That seemed particularly dangerous.

“Don't you think,” I called to Guts, who'd disappeared into one of the smaller buildings and was clomping around inside it, “that it's a bit stupid to go searching for explosives with a burning torch in your hand?”

“OW!” There was a loud banging noise.

“What are you doing in there?”

He emerged from the building, limping and rubbing his knee. “Nuts. Try another.”

I tried two more buildings on my own, blundering around them in the dark and feeling useless. We were looking for barrels of black powder, but I wasn't clear on what size the barrels were, let alone how to identify them by feel. I was walking out of the second building when I heard Guts's yell.

“GOT IT!”

I found him at the door of a small shed, holding an ax in his good hand.