by Kate Elliott
“We’d better go in,” said Maretha. “People are staring.”
A few villagers had, indeed, gathered near the inn to look. But Chryse, touched by an instinct she could not name, looked only briefly at them. Instead she turned toward the wood that separated the village from the hulks of the factories. A path emptied onto the far side of the green between two cottages. A small figure stood there, poised on the edge of the trees.
“I would swear,” said Chryse slowly, “that I recognize that—” She began to walk away from the other two.
“Chryse!” Maretha called after her.
By its stature, it was a child, clothed in tatters, a little cap askew on its dark-curled head. Chryse went across the green as if drawn, vaguely aware of Maretha and Kate following in her wake. She knew she would see the pointed face and bright eyes before she was close enough to recognize them.
“Penny for a poor child,” it squeaked as she neared, then backed away as if it feared her presence.
“You recognize me, don’t you?” said Chryse.
The child retreated. “Just a penny,” it repeated. Its dark eyes glittered like glass catching the light of the sun.
“Chryse.” Kate’s voice, behind her. “I’m sopping wet. If you stop to interview every beggar child between here and our destination, I’ll never get changed.”
The child retreated up the path into the wood. Chryse followed.
“How on earth did you follow us here?” Chryse was walking faster now but coming no closer to the child. “I don’t believe this is chance.”
The child turned and ran. Chryse hiked up her skirts, gripping them tightly in one hand, and pursued.
“Chryse!” Maretha cried from behind, but Chryse was intent on her quarry.
She lost sight of the urchin once in a dim patch in the middle of the wood, but a glimpse of cloth, a quick movement, caught her attention and she ran again. By the time she came out of the wood she was out of breath and had to stop.
The child, halfway down a long slope, paused to look back up at her. But Chryse’s attention had gone past the urchin, focussing on the ugliest building she had ever seen.
It was a huge, hulking block. Tiny windows pierced dark walls in layers, demarcating three stories. Smokestacks jutted upward at all corners, spouting fumes and dark smoke into an already overcast sky. A high, grim fence encircled the vast structure. A single gate, one carriage wide, allowed access. In bold, iron letters over the archway, she read: Crudebelch’s Mattress Works.
The child ran down to the fence, slipped through a gap in the metal railings, and disappeared through a tiny door into the interior.
“What in bloody hell!” Kate startled Chryse as she came up beside her. “What was that all about?”
“I’m going after that child.” Chryse started down the slope. “I saw that child twice in Heffield. It can’t be coincidence to see it here, too.”
“Good Lady,” swore Kate, squelching along behind her. “You’re not going in there, are you? I hope Maretha finds the men soon. I think you’ve gone off your head.”
“I think,” Chryse muttered as they came down to the gap in the fence, “that I’ve been dreaming a very long and complicated dream for the last four months. Can you squeeze through here?”
“Why should I want to? Chryse, respectable gentlewomen do not traipse unescorted through factories.”
“Kate, I only see you and me here. Come on.”
Much struck by this point, Kate followed without a word.
The ground surrounding the factory was red clay, packed down by much traffic, though now they saw no one at all. Behind the building, winding away into a hazy distance of fields and woods, lay a small river. A constant racket swelled from the factory in counterpoint to the fumes spewing out above.
“I’ll never get clean,” said Kate cheerfully as dust dulled the black sheen of her bootleather. “And my skin’s beginning to chafe.”
“You can go back.” Chryse stopped in front of the door through which the child had disappeared. Heavy iron bands ribbed the stained and cracked wood; the door hung slightly ajar.
“And miss an adventure? Oh, no.”
Chryse, with her hand on the door, paused. “Are there trespassing laws here?”
Kate regarded Chryse for a moment with a puzzled look. “Some upstart mushroom of a factory owner wouldn’t dare charge you or me with any crime. And if they did dare, the appearance on the scene of a peer of the realm would—” She moved her hand across her throat in a cutting, final gesture.
“Oh, yes.” Chryse pushed the door slowly open. “I’d forgotten about that.”
They stepped into a vast cavern of a room crowded with dozens of square machines twice human height. Chryse’s first sensation was of overwhelming heat. Her second, of an incessant racket of moving parts that in a strange juxtaposition of sense drowned out, obliterated, the human figures who worked beneath and around the machines. For a long moment she simply stared. Beside her, Kate swore, seemingly under her breath, though for all the noise she might well have been shouting.
“This way,” shouted Chryse, pulling Kate to the left.
They hurried down an aisle of machines. Men, women, and children stood hunched over clacking teeth and huge webs of tight fabric. Sweat shone on thin faces, trickled down bare arms, pooled in stains around bare feet. The din made by the machines made speech impossible.
At the end of the aisle a door shut slowly, as if someone had just gone through, leaving it to swing closed. Chryse tugged Kate to it.
They entered a second room, larger than the first. As the door shut behind them the noise level dropped, but it was also, as if to compensate, considerably hotter. Chryse felt sweat begin to permeate the back of her dress.
Huge structures, like looms, filled the room floor to ceiling. There were no windows, only flickering, sooty gaslight to illuminate the work. Women with drooping shoulders ran bolts of thick thread across the fronts of the machines. Higher up, hidden behind growing nets of fabric, smaller figures could be seen, like ghosts moving amongst the workings.
“This is awful,” said Chryse.
Not fifty feet from them, a slender girl swayed and fell in a faint at the base of her work station. The girls on either side of her looked hurriedly around and dragged her back up, shaking her until her eyes opened again. The loom clattered on, and thread began to tangle.
A shout, and a broad-shouldered, hairy man appeared at the end of the aisle.
“Come on,” Kate said.
“But that girl—”
“Come on.”
They hurried to the next aisle, and the next.
“There!” cried Chryse. A tiny figure in tattered clothes scurried away up one of the aisles. They followed, though there was scarcely enough room between the workers, the machines were crowded so closely together, to squeeze through.
The room seemed to stretch on forever, aisles branching into dimmer aisles of massive cacophonous machinery that dwarfed the fragile human figures tending it.
“I’m lost,” said Kate eventually.
Chryse stopped, panting. She was now as thoroughly soaked as Kate looked in those places where the cloth of her dress touched her body. Swatches of her skirt clung to her legs. “This is a maze. How do these people find where they work? There!”
And they were off again, coming at last to a far wall and a door, ajar.
“I hope you know where you’re going,” said Kate as Chryse laid a hand on the doorlatch.
“No,” admitted Chryse. “But I have a distinct feeling someone else does.”
They came into a hall. It was empty, narrow, and dark, seeming tomblike and cold in contrast to the room before. It led straight on into dimness. Torches hung at long intervals along the wall, but they gave off little light. There was no sign of the beggar child.
Chryse shrugged, starting forward. “There is only one way.”
The hall seemed to extend forever, as if it pierced a straight line into th
e heart of the factory. Their footsteps scarcely sounded on the hard floor.
At last the corridor branched to the right and ended in a small door. Chryse unlatched it and pushed it open.
They came into a small chamber, silent except for the labored breathing of four children chained to a block of metal embedded in the center of the room. Tubes led out from it in four directions, like the vessels of a mechanical heart.
Each child perched on a high stool on one side of the block, bent over a flat surface where they laid down and picked up in an unceasing circle the cards of a deck of Gates. With their cropped hair and emaciated faces, it was impossible to tell whether they were boys or girls. One was not even human: it had the pointed face of the Heffield urchin, but its eyes, like the other children’s, had the dull languor of terminal illness. The youngest of the children could not have been more than five. Each bore, on its right ankle, a manacle appended to a chain that fastened into the metal square.
“Bloody damned heaven and hell,” swore Kate in an undertone. In the hush of the room, the oath startled Chryse. She turned.
Kate was white, her expression appalled. “I heard rumors, but I never believed—”
She rushed forward suddenly and swept the cards out from in front of the nearest child. They rained in a spattering fall to the floor. The child shuddered and slumped forward into a faint. An ominous rumbling sounded, far away.
“Kate!”
“Don’t you see what they’re doing?” cried Kate, circling the block to the next child. “They’re using the Gates to suck the life from these children in order to power the factory!” She cleared the cards from in front of the child with a single, violent stroke of one arm. This child, too, fainted.
The third child, the youngest, faltered and paused, its eyes lifting to stare at Kate. The great block of metal, a deep, reddish-copper color, faded abruptly several shades darker, and an obvious pulse began to run through the tubes that lanced out from it. The fourth child labored on, oblivious. Chryse stared. The rumbling increased.
Kate went to the third child and pulled it from its stool. It grasped her tightly and began to whimper. She pulled a small knife from her pocket and hacked at the manacle.
“There are keys on the wall,” said Chryse abruptly, and she started forward.
“Stop the last one,” said Kate.
“Let’s undo the others first.” But she paused by the fourth child. It was working feverishly now, eyes sunk in, face far too pale, attention focussed utterly on the wheel of the cards: the slight tick of each card as it was placed corresponding exactly to the strained breathing.
And above it, almost inaudible, a whisper.
“Help me.”
Chryse looked around.
“Help me.”
She looked up.
Directly above the center of the block a grate had been set into the ceiling. Two slender hands gripped the metal lacing. A face, a youth, a boy with a visage that might have been that of an angel peering down from on high, stared down at her.
“Where are those keys?” demanded Kate from the floor.
The tubes pulsed more strongly now, in time to the fourth child’s gasping breath. The rumbling sounded louder. In the distance, muffled by doors and length of hallway, Chryse heard voices, shouting alarm.
“I’m being held prisoner,” whispered the boy. “Please help me.”
Chapter 11:
The Page
THE HEART OF THE factory shuddered and beat to the labored rhythm of a small child’s breathing as Chryse stared up at the face above her.
“The keys!” Kate’s hiss, full of an anger that was not directed at her, shocked Chryse into action.
She ran to the wall where the heavy ring of keys dangled from a hook, far out of the reach of the children bolted to the metal block in the center of the room. Grabbing them off their hook, she hurried back to Kate and knelt beside her.
“There’s so many.” Chryse chose one at random. It didn’t fit.
“By direction,” said the youth from behind the grate. “They’re each set to a compass point.”
“Kate?” asked Chryse.
“Of course!” said Kate. “Give me the keys. There are runes.” She took them, studied each one. The child still clung to her. “Do you remember the layout here?” she asked. “Ah, here’s one.”
“Haven’t a clue.” Chryse glanced at the four doors. “But they’ll be here any moment.”
“You’re east,” said the youth from above. “I remember that much.”
“Yes.” With a deft twist, Kate unlocked the manacle. It dropped away and struck the floor with a high, hollow sound. The child stopped weeping, and when Kate extricated herself from its grasp and stood, it simply sat and stared about with a bewildered expression.
Kate quickly unlocked the two children who had fainted. As soon as the manacles separated from their ankles, they began to stir weakly.
“Here.” Chryse reached for the keys. “I’m taller. I’ll unlock the grate.”
“Above,” said Kate. “Heaven’s rune.” She paused and stared up, getting her first good look at the youth. “Good Lady,” she swore. “A vision. Heaven, indeed. Here.”
Chryse climbed up on the block. Touching it, she felt a humming throb course through her, as though the metal were indeed alive. The fourth child labored on, but its breathing grew more ragged.
The grate unlocked at four spots, lowered off. Kate had climbed up beside Chryse, and together they helped the youth get down. He was slender, in their hands, but unlike the others’ it was a natural slimness, not emaciation. He stood just a hair shorter than Kate. His eyes, this close, had the brilliancy of the midday sky.
“Bloody hell.” Kate stared at him.
One of the doors opened. A man and a woman, burly, broad-faced people, stepped into the room.
“Back the way we came,” cried Kate, jumping down to face them.
“But which door—” Chryse shook her head and scrambled over to the last child. She kicked the cards into disarray as she climbed down beside it. “Damn! I don’t know which key—”
A hand touched hers. “Let me,” said the boy.
“—and I’ll have you know,” Kate was saying in a loud, bluff voice that echoed strong and ringing in the chamber. There was no other sound; the metal block had ceased to beat the instant the last cards were scattered, and a thick hush shuttered them. “—that we are protected by a peer of the realm. Lay hands on me, and you’ll hang for it.”
The man and woman hesitated, whispering, and the woman backed up and ran out the door they had entered.
A bell began to ring, a harsh, insistent clamor.
The fourth child, freed from the manacle by the youth, still sat on its stool, its hands, empty of cards, continuing to deal them out in a circle of air as though it were unable to stop. Chryse grasped it by the shoulders and jerked it to its feet. It stood, limp, blank-faced, hands still moving.
The youngest of the children was now standing and ran quickly to the snout-faced child.
“Come on, Pin,” its tiny voice cried. “Got to gets up.”
Kate was backing up slowly.
“Can you carry this one?” asked Chryse of the youth. The sound of shouting came suddenly nearer, too fast. She did not wait for the youth’s assent but hurried to the last child, picking it up. It was shockingly, horrifyingly light.
“Not that door,” said the youth from behind her as she gathered up the child called Pin as well. “Here, take my hand,” he added, a strange aside until she realized that he spoke to the smallest child. “This door.” Carrying her two burdens with precious little effort, Chryse followed him. “I think,” he finished, but they were at the door.
It opened easily and a long hallway, lit with torches, stretched out before them—empty, silent.
“Kate!” cried Chryse.
Kate turned and bolted for the door. The man dashed after her and, in the instant Kate passed through the opening and they thre
w the door shut, more people entered the room, an amorphous group surrounding a huge, broad-shouldered figure. His roar reverberated, shuddering through them, until the slam of the door cut its volume in half.
“It’s got a lock! Chryse, help me hold it shut.” Kate flung herself against the door, bracing. The youth let go of the child’s hand and fumbled at the keys. Chryse set down her two children and stationed herself next to Kate, gripping the door handle.
They felt the impact of many people. The handle clicked and began to turn. Chryse strained against it.
“Kate!” she gasped.
The youth fumbled with the keys, trying one after the next. Kate grasped the handle, but it continued to turn, inexorable.
“The one with the sign of the road,” said the smallest child, suddenly. “That’s what you wants.” A snuffling sounded on the floor. “Here, Pin,” the tiny voice continued, seemingly oblivious to Kate and Chryse struggling to keep the door closed and the youth examining each key with urgent keenness. “Don’t cry, mittens. We’ll be right fine now.”
“Got it!” The youth’s cry was triumphant. The key turned with a satisfying click in the lock, and with it a second roar shook the door.
“Lord.” Chryse gathered up Pin and another child. “What was that?”
“That’ll be Crudebelch,” piped the small child, trotting alongside the youth and Chryse. Kate brought up the rear, dislodging each torch as they passed so that the lights guttered out on the floor to leave the length of hall behind in darkness. Shouts and pounding faded as they moved forward.
“But what an awful sound,” said Chryse, puffing a little.
“Well, yes,” replied the child, quite matter-of-fact. “But he’s an ogre.”
“Clearly.” Chryse nodded. “Any man would be, imprisoning you here like that. Lord!”
“Now where?” The youth had reached the end of the hall. Three doors offered exit.
“Bloody hell.” Kate came up with the last two torches, one in each hand. The hall lay in blackness behind, the darkness like a cloak muffling sound.
“Where do you wants to go?” asked the child in its tiny voice.