Together they walked briskly across the commons, littered with the tired and the destitute all segregated into their own camps—complete with a paranoid band of greenskins who had taken to aggressively marking their ground with spears and animal bones—as Penelope and the chaplain headed between a small shack where a merchant exchange had sprung up and a camp of faithful Rauschite foreigners attempting to soothe the ills of the border dispute. Above the din, a Rauschite clergyman announced, “Woe unto those who trust the selfish rumors of others! Heed them not!” Bigby, albeit intrigued by the whole scene, held focus and followed his targets. Though he might have lost her across the rambling outpost if not for the chaplain, Bigby remained undetected as Penelope and her escort gradually made it to the outskirts. Bigby reached the corner of a lean-to that overlooked the slight slope that led to the creek and then the woods.
Bigby stood motionless watching Penelope. Before the muddy, wheel-tracked road that ran along the outer rim of the outpost—as innocuous a demarcation of the border between two states as could be determined—she stood with the chaplain as an animated discussion ensued between him and a man in a fine suit. Bigby felt like he should recognize the man, but he looked like any other government agent.
He felt his heart race. She had told him to meet her here. Had she planned for him to see all this? Had she wanted him to be privy to her secret? Bigby knew he was early, though; knew he was meant to come after this meeting. Penelope had known it would not take long at the chaplain’s place.
Bigby had suspected there was something more to her—had even suspected that she might be driving him to some unforeseen end—but this was more than Bigby would have surmised.
Unwilling to be seen, he ducked behind a tree trunk and waited for a few minutes. On the wind, he could hear a few clip phrases from them but nothing worthy of determining a conversation. Bigby felt the fool; having trusted her, as he had trusted no other—save, perhaps, for Edgar, and Alec before him—he knew that he had taken an unlikely path and ended up too far from home for him to be able to fend for himself. Sighing, he leaned hard against the tree’s bark and rested his head on a woody knob, looking up at the night sky.
There was a shuffling of skirts close enough to rouse Bigby. He turned his attention to the edge of the road as Penelope crossed in front of his field of view carrying the leather satchel he had spied before. The chaplain and the other man were oddly no where to be found. He knew chaplains were no mean conjurers of strange phenomena—which is why he never did business with them—and refused to give it another thought. Bigby remained silent and, when he heard no other noise but Penelope’s fading movements, ducked out from behind the tree and followed behind her, careful to keep a safe distance.
The gnome kept pace with Penelope as she made her way leisurely back to the commons. Bigby watched her pause at the scent of cinnamon bread and begin to browse, then he crossed behind a row of chairs next to the countertop bakery built into the side of large covered wagon. It was early yet, and he was able to buy a few fresh sweet rolls and risk recognition by the baker, in case Penelope had covertly shared anything, before emerging out of the commons again.
Penelope exited the commons just as he was in line to intercept her.
“Bigby!”
He stopped and looked at her, chewing a mouthful of bread and waving. She hurried over to him, the satchel in hand, and stopped when she reached him. He handed her a roll as he swallowed, and she graciously accepted it.
“I was getting hungry,” he said.
She smiled. “I thought you had tried to slip across the border already.”
Bigby smiled. “I trust you at least a little more than that.”
Penelope had a moment when her face became blank, frozen, as though scared, and Bigby was pleased that perhaps she was feeling the pangs of guilt from her little secrets. It passed quickly, though, and Bigby continued to eat his roll.
“You wanted to meet?”
“Yes,” she said. “Shall we walk?”
* * *
Bigby stared at Penelope with awe. Not half an hour beforehand, she had been standing in nearly this exact spot, carrying on with that chaplain and the man in the suit. Now, here Bigby was being told that she had acquired all the necessary papers to get them both to the Great River.
“How did you get them?”
“That's my little secret, Bigby,” she replied. “Give me that pleasantry, at least.”
Bigby merely grunted. He did not like relying on her this much with such a large secret. He would have to begin devising a plan to get away, or at least protect himself should she turn on him. Or perhaps he could get word to Edgar: if there was one person that would be able to help—even from as far away as he was—it was Edgar.
“I do not work well with secrets,” Bigby said.
“I promise it's for the best.”
“So when do we leave?”
“Whenever we want. I bartered for passage aboard a supply steam wagon to smuggle us to Riverpoint. We stay there a day or two—at the most—just to gather supplies and prepare for the final leg west.”
Bigby had never liked staying in unfamiliar territory too long. Suspicions arose amongst the locals. It made Bigby nervous. He shifted on his feet and looked squarely at Penelope.
“Fine. No longer than we need to, though.”
“Of course.”
* * *
Bigby sat patiently in the wire house—little more than a shack with equipment enough to send Ditdah messages and a network of webbed wires rising out of the shack, tacked to trees along to where they met the main telegraph lines north—waiting for the old lady with a letter to her son up in Lushbarrow to finish telling him about her eldest daughter—his sister—and her new baby. Part of him envied such mundane things, such trivial matters that made up the average life. When the lady, leaning heavily on a cane, finally hobbled out of the small, one-room office, Bigby rose and approached the little desk.
“May I close the door?”
The Tenderfoot Halfling looked at him, peering over his thin-framed spectacles. “Private matter?”
“Yes,” Bigby replied. “Very much so.”
The halfling waved at Bigby to do as he pleased. Bigby walked to the door and closed it, turning the key that had been left in the lock. The halfling did not seem too terribly surprised by it. No doubt there were many times when customers came to him to send private or personal messages.
“I need to send a message to Montrose,” Bigby said.
“Priority, sir?”
“Very urgent,” Bigby replied.
“Message?”
“Edgar STOP I am at Tinsdelve Outpost heading west STOP I am with a friend STOP Need help with the connections STOP Quicker the better END.”
The Tenderfoot read it back to Bigby, who nodded.
“Wait,” he said. “Add this: ‘blow out the candles.’”
Without hesitation the wire operator wrote the addition down. He read it back to Bigby again.
“Yes. That's fine. Thank you.”
“Very good, sir,” the halfling said. “Three dollars fifty cents, please.”
Bigby nearly burst out laughing at the Tenderfoot. Three-and-a-half bucks? That seemed ridiculous. The last thing he wanted to do now, though, was cause a ruckus and bring down the wrong kind of attention on him and Poppy. He fished out the bills from his wallet and handed them over to the halfling, a little reluctantly. The halfling quickly folded and stuffed the money into the front pocket of his vest, and returned to Bigby his change.
“Thank you, sir.”
Bigby nodded. He unlocked the door and left it open as he left, slipping out into the warm air of the commons.
* * *
Even in the best of times, the road heading west out of Montrose had been little more than a broad cart path, winding its way through the woods and up and down the rolling hills of the Ulleran Uplands. Now, as the motorcade barreled along the dirt and grass path, it was turning into a churning,
rutted mess unsuited for much travel at all.
Kard Val Daart sat in the back of the steam wagon, holding onto a railing with one hand, the other flipping through a file folder. The black-and-white daguerreotype at the top of the page showed a gnome in his early 50s—young for such a race—his face stoic and resolute. It had been taken by a border guard about fifteen years before as Bigby Dolan had crossed into the Federated States seeking refuge as a runaway slave. It hadn't been until a few years later that they had begun keeping an eye on him, rumors of his activities having surfaced through the district agency networks in Keystone, from Heavenswake and down along townships into Gardenia and from there into Pennoncelle.
Kard witnessed an akin likeness in the eyes of Bigby Dolan. There was pain captured in the picture there, even if others wouldn’t notice it.
Dolan's talent, however, had been immediately noticeable. While the government outwardly condemned the creation and distribution of such alchemies, there was an underlying desire to make them their own, legalize them, so they could profit from their sale. But the world would be chaotic, it seemed—at least to Kard's superiors—with the average man in possession of a wide range of alchemical concoctions. They had tasked Val Daart with finding and bringing in Dolan to force him into government work creating alchemical compounds for their use, mostly in warfare.
This thought stole Kard’s attention, and he wondered again at his place in this whole affair.
The truck bounced over a bump in the road, and Kard cursed as he scrambled to pick up the scattered papers. His aching back nearly refused to cooperate as he straightened, and he was reminded again of the toll this journey would take on him. They moved quickly, though, and he hoped they would be able to find the fugitive gnome before he got too far outside the region.
His greatest worry was Penelope. She was a dangerous woman, an old tool of the powers-that-be, and she would have more information at her hands than Val Daart was aware of. Her network was extensive, and not always loyal to the government that they officially served.
* * *
The final leg of the journey west was to be by keelboat. The mighty Buckeye River. An east-west tributary of the Great River, its strong waters flowed over 450 miles from Riverpoint in Harmonia to the walled confines of Fort Kincaid in Sunderland. Though he was never without a lump in his throat where water was concerned, Bigby was secure in the thought that they’d bypass any fell creatures lying-in-wait buried in the crooked creeks and wooded hollows that abutted the river’s length. Bigby knew that the worst living nightmares on Ulleran soil had been pressed to northern climes by the encroachment of industrialization, places where only tamers and icetreaders dared to call home. Still, at night, unable to sleep as he watched the night sky roll passed him lying on the boat, even the overhanging tree limbs looked like they were clawing out at him.
The steam wagon to Riverpoint had taken eleven days. Not a comfortable ride. It had been a UMBO outfit destined to resupply the garrison at Fort KorLee. The Ulleran Military Barracks Outfitters was a lightly government affiliated army surplus retailer that did business across the Federation. Their business was profit, not policing the government’s wayward children. “They won’t bother to look where they think they’ve already checked,” Penelope had assured him. Bigby was through arguing. Once in Riverpoint, he had promised himself, he’d find a way to smuggle himself out from underneath this mess and break north or south, leaving this haphazard run to the frontier behind him.
“No, don’t go! Please! Our families were out of Metris,” a voice from his past whispered. “Please, take us with you!”
But that time had come and gone.
Metris—Bigby recalled—a doomed city: sacked and looted of most its wealth and inhabitants in the Great Hellfire, an attempt by Atanakan raiders to turn the tide during the last decade of the Abolition War in the north. Insane. Though he had helped the lost children of Metris escape, Bigby had never been able to escape their haunting words. Children. Of all races. Born into captivity. How could he have let them grow up in that world any longer? How could he let that be all they would ever know? How could he let Poppy go on into the unknown without him by her side? Too insane. There were times when he looked at her eyes that he knew. She was crying out to him, too. Only she was enslaved on the inside.
Two days from Riverpoint to Cinnabar, and now in the middle of a four-day drift from Cinnabar to Fort Kincaid, at least the amount of ground covered had picked up. At each prior stop, Bigby had been expecting the tension and pressure of being on the run to lessen, and it hadn’t. Now, finally, he began to breath easier. Maybe Penelope wasn’t trying to hornswoggle him.
She had finally opened up to him about other things, too. The leather satchel, for starters. The satchel’s contents certainly hadn’t been papers for bypassing the checkpoint at Tinsdelve Outpost; that she had proved to him beyond a doubt. Bigby had handled the documents himself, even spent hours making forgeries at Penelope’s request in case one of them was lost or stolen. Something called a “blueprint,” Penelope explained. And maps—to places Bigby had never been, and all in a foreign language he couldn’t read. The blueprint is what caught his attention, though. It strangely resembled a diagram, not unlike some of those he had seen in alchemists’ journals for transmuting substances, except it seemed to detail the interior of an intricate room, labeled solely in the foreign script. Whatever their purpose, Penelope had made it clear to Bigby that these documents intended nefarious ends—something the chaplain had told her, he concluded—anything like which would threaten every concerned citizen in Ullera if not dealt with.
In light of recent troubles, however, Bigby had a hard time seeing himself as a concerned citizen of anywhere.
He glanced over at her, seated on barrels around a crate and wearing a well-disguised cheater’s grin as she doled out cards to a pair of river pirates, one an avus half-orc, who had talked her into it. They had no idea what they were in for. Bigby marveled at how easily she seemed to mix with everyone wherever they went. The only reason the pirates—and Bigby knew that’s what they were—had agreed to take them on was on the basis that their cover was as guides who catered to wealthy couples on a romantic river tour. Bigby took it as no small consolation that he and Penelope had incentive finally to play it close.
Penelope chirped and the crew groaned as they lost another hand to her.
Bigby only hoped she wasn’t waiting for the perfect opportunity to cash in on her good fortune and leave him to the pirates.
Chapter 5, or, “Fort Kincaid: Firm and Friendly Arm of Outlet to the Frontier”
Penelope smiled serenely at the graying Ulleran military officer who accepted her gloved hand and laid his lips on the velvet. He smoothed his jacket, adorned with a row of gold and silver medals and pins, and seated himself opposite her at a small round table situated on the edge of an outdoor cafe that occupied the raised traffic circle in the middle of the station outside of Fort Kincaid. Bright morning sun lit the scene as carriages and steam wagons rolled around the circuit—depositing passengers and offloading goods—all under the stony gaze of the fortress’s moss-covered walls.
“Let me extend my thanks for agreeing to meet so soon after your arrival,” the officer said, running a thumb and index finger down opposing sides of his neatly combed handlebar mustache.
“On the contrary, Colonel Hargrove,” Penelope said. “Please accept my sincere thanks. Had you been unable to meet now, this meeting might never have taken place.”
“Well, I have to admit,” the colonel grunted, “after the wire message from your chaplain at Tinsdelve was brought to my attention, I almost disregarded it out of habit. Such claims as the one you were making have gone ignored before, you understand?”
“Rumors run deep where this topic is concerned, Colonel.” Penelope produced a single folded sheet of paper and laid it on the table.
Hargrove’s eyes hovered over the sheet of paper. “We’re always looking for that elusive piece of har
d evidence to substantiate those claims,” he said.
“You needn’t look any further, Colonel,” she offered, gesturing again at the paper.
Colonel Hargrove lifted the paper and unfolded it. His eyes consumed what was written there. He spoke without looking up. “And the smuggler? You can deliver him to us?”
Satisfied that the colonel had accepted the copy she had had Bigby forge during their river trip, Penelope’s features softened. “Yes,” she said. “Him and the remainder of the evidence you seek. He’s travel weary and resting off the journey at a dockside inn. I have the address. You shouldn’t have any trouble picking him up.”
* * *
Bigby sat huddled against the back of a rickety barracks. The wooden bench had long since begun to rot, and the people sleeping above or beneath it—some snoring, some silent, some screaming—were little different: all transients and gutter trash culled from around town or elsewhere, held here for processing. But Fort Kincaid was not a prison. The old barracks, upon which the newer fortification was built, had been converted into an underground brig. He had surmised all this early on, due to the lack of light and trapped echoes that filled the place, for his captors had verily carried him shackled and hooded.
Bigby had been out of contact with Penelope for nearly a week. He could feel the aching numbness on his extremities and wondered if he was losing feeling at all. He moved his fingers and toes despite the shackles; they wiggled as they ought, and he smiled for that small miracle. Where are you? the question echoed in his mind. Had they caught her, too? Taken her elsewhere?
His thoughts drifted back to the children of Metris: their escape from the slave camp. Whether it had been easy or hard—Bigby could scarcely remember which—inside connections might have made it even more so. The kids’ parents had sent them, Bigby recalled, to beg and plead for their lives. He might have been able to debate the parents on the merits of sending their own young flesh and blood into such a danger as escape; convince them of the risks involved—What do they know of the outside world? How can they survive on their own? They can’t even fight! Who’ll take them in once they cross the border?—but to the very children themselves? How could he have possibly said no to all those believing children? They had been taught to think it was their only chance. They had practically clawed all over him at the opportunity.
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