Kate Elliott - Cold Magic

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 indigna-tion, 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 Tank! 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 strik-i ng 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