The Black Rose

by James Bartholomeusz

  “What a charming woman,” Bál remarked as the candlelight receded down the stairs.

  They deposited all their soaking bags and stripped off a few outer layers of wet clothing. True to her words, the landlady returned a few minutes later with several tin basins of warm, slightly murky water. She lit the fireplace in each of the rooms.

  Jack and Ruth ended up in the same room. They slung the wet clothes and sacks over the mantelpiece to dry out and went into Sardâr and Bál’s room, where they were doing the same.

  “So,” Sardâr began, when they were all squashed onto the bed, “not exactly what we’d hoped for, but it will do for now.”

  Bál looked like he thought this was a grievous understatement. Jack got the impression that he had been looking forward to a return to dry land whilst aboard The Golden Turtle but now was none too pleased to find that it was not dry and was more mud than land.

  “We’ll have to keep cover for a while whilst we find out what we need to. Working to fund our stay here will fit that quite well. Jack, Bál—there’s likely to be some industrial work not too far away. Ruth, we can probably find you work as a maid or cook.”

  “And why can’t I just get the same job as the other two?”

  “You can try, but I doubt you’d be taken on. From what we’ve just seen, I don’t think social equality figures particularly prominently here…”

  “What are you going to do, then?” Bál asked Sardâr, who was now pacing in front of the fireplace.

  “I’ll go undercover and try to dig up some leads,” Sardâr said. “If the Cult are here, which they almost certainly are, then their arrival won’t have gone unnoticed. There will be some new business or criminal presence they’ll be using as a front. Now, most importantly we need to work on disguises.” He pulled open his bag and, after rummaging a moment, retrieved the metallic egg he was looking for. He gestured for Bál to stand.

  Sardâr held the egg out before Bál and muttered a single syllable. It flashed bright green and floated out of his hand, spinning around the elf and the dwarf to create a matrix of emerald light that blurred their silhouettes. A moment later it returned to the elf’s hand, and the light faded.

  Jack stood and inspected the two of them. As when he had seen the effects on himself and Lucy, the two people before him were still recognizably Bál and Sardâr. It was just that Bál was significantly taller, almost as tall as Jack, and Sardâr’s frame had filled out and his ears rounded. It was less of a transformation than a reflection in a fairground house of mirrors.

  “We’re going to need some more appropriate clothing,” Sardâr continued, regarding his and Bál’s stretched garments. The dwarf’s had actually ripped up the seam on the side, giving him the appearance of a badly stuffed scarecrow. “I’m sure we can procure some from our delightful landlady tomorrow.”

  Jack and Ruth bid the other two good night and returned to their room. The pail of water had cooled somewhat now, but they still warmed their feet in it. By the time they were done, the water was distinctly murkier than it had been. With no plumbing in sight, they pushed the container outside the door and forgot about it.

  Jack didn’t feel much cleaner at all for that brief wash. Thorin Salr, supposedly correlating to a millennium earlier than this world, had provided cleaner facilities. Ruth, however, seemed to be dealing with it fine, so he didn’t say anything.

  Their clothes had warmed by now. They took turns leaving the room while each changed into dry garments and hung the wet ones on the rail. The choice was between the four-poster bed and a few blankets on the wooden floor. Jack grudgingly chose the latter.

  Ruth blew out the candle on the bedside table. There was silence for a few moments.

  “Are you missing Lucy?” Ruth asked.

  The question caught Jack a little off guard. “Well, yeah… I don’t think we’ve ever spent this much time apart before. I really hope she’s okay…”

  “So are you two… ?”

  It took Jack a moment to realize what she was talking about.

  “No! No, definitely not. It was never like that. Her and Alex maybe, but no—that would be weird.” He thought a moment, at a loss for anything to reciprocate with. “Do you miss anyone? Do you remember anyone from before… ?”

  “I guess I miss the crew a bit. And no, I don’t remember anyone. All I’ve got from before the amnesia is that tattoo and a dream I keep having.”

  “Dream?”

  “It’s not much to go on. It doesn’t really make that much sense anyway…”

  They were both silent for quite a few minutes.

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  An indeterminate amount of time passed. Jack rolled over. He could hear Ruth breathing softly in her sleep a few feet away. The single-pane window projected the flickering orange light from the nearest lamppost directly onto his face. He clambered up off the floor and pulled the ragged curtains shut. But it still wasn’t dark. Another light shone behind him.

  “Inari!” he hissed, spinning around to see the white fox on top of his sheets, twin tails wavering hypnotically on either side of his triangular head. “We can’t talk now. Ruth’s in here!”

  The fox glanced around and caught sight of the figure in the bed. “Oh! So are you two… ?”

  “No! Well, maybe… but it’s complicated—”

  “Ah, ‘it’s complicated’… the eternal deferral of unrequited love…”

  Jack glared at the fox, now settling himself down on the floor. As before, he did not so much hear the fox’s voice as sense it reverberating inside his head. “I was wondering when you’d next turn up. Not much has happened since we left Thorin Salr.”

  “I know. I’ve been watching you.”

  “You can watch us?” Jack replied, slightly alarmed. “Where is it you live, exactly?”

  “Here and there. My essence is anchored in the Shard, but I can come and go in spirit form pretty much wherever I please.”

  “Does that mean you can go and check up on Alex?”

  The fox shook his head. “Alex is, I assume, in Nexus. I would rather not go there. There’s a powerful consciousness in that world from which I would do well to conceal my presence.”

  “What, the Emperor? Icarus?”

  “No. It’s the—” But the fox’s voice caught in his throat, making him gag. This had happened before when Inari had tried to tell Jack a little too much about his predicament. “Something else,” the fox finally managed, giving up.

  Jack sighed and sagged back a bit in his seated position. “Great. Just when I think I’ve got a grip on what’s going on, it all changes again.” He paused. “In that case, could you possibly go and keep an eye on Lucy?”

  The fox nodded. “In the Sveta Mountains? That shouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  Jack considered the fox for a moment. “Inari… the letter from Isaac which Sardâr read us… it said that you weren’t who you say you are…”

  The fox raised his head slightly, looking at him intently. “Did it, now? Yes, I met Isaac. The brother of Ruth’s adoptive father, wasn’t he?”

  “You don’t know what happened to him, then? Isaac, I mean.”

  “I’m afraid I do … but that would really be giving the game away…”

  Jack blinked, and the room was dark, devoid of the shimmering white light that seemed to accompany Inari whenever he appeared. The fox was gone.

  Chapter V

  the daily grind

  Dawn brought a weak light upon Albion. From the upstairs window, Jack could see that the city was feeling the labor pains of a new era. The spires of churches and cathedrals jostled with smog-belching funnels and rattling cranes. Fragile cobbled streets lined with gabled houses were now intersected by wide, mud-swept roads that acted like arteries for carriages and carts. In contrast to the old sculpted wood and stone, factories sat like blackened brick behemoths, engorging workers and spewing out mechanically produced goods. Yet beyond the haze encircling
the buildings, Jack could just about make out pale green hills on the horizon.

  It didn’t take long for Jack and Bál, having raided the storerooms of the inn for appropriate clothing, to find work. They walked a couple of streets up from The Kestrel’s Quill to discover a foreman’s assistant, who had set up a makeshift desk on the side of the road and was signing men up for factory work.

  Jack was unsurprised to see Bál unsure on his feet, having grown to human height overnight; his clumsiness drew a few odd looks from fellow applicants and a snide remark from the foreman’s assistant. Having had their names taken down—a necessity, it seemed, because many of the fellow men were illiterate—the two of them joined the lumbering march across the town to the factory building.

  Ruth, meanwhile, had found a job through the landlady, whose niece worked as a maid in an aristocrat’s city household only a few hundred feet from the inn. Apparently consulting a mental address book, the landlady had pointed Ruth in the direction of a woman she knew would hire “coloreds.”

  Upon her meek arrival at the servants’ entrance, Ruth discovered the lady of the house’s ward was herself not white. The so-called house was more of a manor: an impressive whitish-grey building with wide columns not unlike a temple’s. It clearly belonged to a wealthy district entirely apart from The Kestrel’s Quill quarter and the rest of the city.

  Sardâr had left before the others had awoken, leaving only a note in the most ambiguous terms explaining that he was going on a fact-finding mission and would see them that evening. Jack suspected he didn’t want the landlady, with her clientele apparently fervently committed to bigotry, to have too much of an idea what he was up to.

  At school, Jack had enjoyed learning about the industrial revolution, but nothing could have prepared him for this factory. The dark-bricked cuboid squatted by the riverside, encircled by a rusting cast-iron fence and a collection of ramshackle outhouses. Chimneys rose from its apex like dark spires, belching smoke into the air to be sifted over the rooftops by the wind. A thick crowd of men poured over the cobbles into the forecourt, foremen assigning them through various stable-like doors. Jack and Bál joined the mob, trying not to trip and be engulfed by the many boots marching relentlessly onwards as if belonging to some kind of gigantic millipede. They were swept beneath the sign on the gate—Goodwin Construction Ltd.—and, directed by a man on a soapbox, dragged off in a slipstream through one of the dim entrances.

  The first thing that hit them was the noise: the clanging and grinding of machinery refracting off the walls and floor. The room was cavernous, the upper half a matrix of leather pulleys and metal piping. Two of the chimneys extended through the chamber like trunks, their bases, if not the heat emanating from them, obscured by the aisles of interconnected devices. Jack breathed in and spluttered—the air was pummelled with gases and particles thicker than oxygen.

  He glanced at Bál. The dwarf’s eyes were wide in shock and possibly terror, much more so than they had been in the midst of battle. Jack had to remind himself that the dwarf could never have conceived anything like this, his own kingdom being almost a millennium away from this kind of economic progress.

  Though the crowd had slimmed, they were still carried with considerable force past the aisles. Perhaps hundreds of men were already here, operating the machinery, stoking the chimneys, and shifting a plethora of metal components about. They all, without exception, looked exhausted and ill. Their backs were hunched with strain, and grease and dirt matted their clothes, hair, and skin. Jack noticed many with missing limbs and some with open wounds that still seemed to be bleeding. Something knocked into his thigh, and he looked down to see a child, no older than seven or eight, bow his head in apology and scuttle away, hugging a hefty iron disc to his chest.

  Somehow, Jack and Bál found themselves in front of a line of consoles with a group of other men. Apparently aware of the next step, the others stepped up and began busying themselves with the operation. Jack and Bál hung back.

  “What do we do?” the dwarf roared at him over the din.

  “I don’t know,” Jack shouted back, shrugging. The contraption before them looked ancient and seeped oil.

  He watched the man next to him take a metal rod the length of a cricket bat from a bundle on the left and clamp it in place. With a switch, the man turned on a spinning blade, which made contact with the rod with a grinding shriek. Hot ribbons of metal and sparks cascaded off. After a couple of minutes, the blade was released and stopped spinning. The man dropped the rod, now thinner along one-third of its length, into a tin barrel to the right and took up the next one.

  Jack stepped up to his machine and, showing Bál how to do it, completed his first rod. It wasn’t particularly even, and he had to apply quite a lot of force to keep the blade in place for two minutes.

  Wiping the sweat from his brow, he dropped the rod into the barrel and turned to the man he’d watched. “What are we making?”

  The man looked up with red-rimmed eyes, shrugged, and returned to his task.

  The working day was much longer than either of them had thought possible. Once light began to fade from the massive grime-encrusted window above them, gas lamps were lit at every few workstations. The labor quickly became mind-numbingly dull and then actively painful. The workers could not sit down and so had to hunch over the consoles, shifting their weight to keep both feet working. The factory floor was stiflingly hot, and Jack suffered several coughing fits when the smoke-heavy air became too much. Oil quickly ingrained their clothes and arms, and their muscles ached from applying pressure to the spinning blade.

  Foremen prowled between the aisles all day, batons in hand, clearly searching for anyone who appeared to be slacking. Just as at school, Jack could sense the others around him working particularly efficiently whenever they were being watched. But, at school, relaxing too long hadn’t earned anyone a beating. He witnessed an elderly man in the next aisle being dragged out under the arms, a bruise blossoming on his temple.

  Jack could feel Bál shifting next to him, instinctively reaching for the axe that was usually by his side. Jack placed a warning hand on the dwarf’s arm. He was as disgusted as Bál, but they were under strict instructions from Sardâr not to draw attention to themselves. He had to resist the urge to exact quick and undetectable alchemical revenge on the guilty foreman.

  Finally, once all sense of time had been drained from the two of them, Jack became aware that the mechanical noises were quieting. The men finished their tasks and stepped away from the machines, easing their muscles. Jack and Bál did the same and joined the slow trail of dirty bodies trudging out of the factory. Small pouches of coins, incredibly light, were handed to each upon their exit from the building.

  “Not great pay, is it?” a boy next to Jack commented, rattling the bag.

  “Nope,” Jack croaked, his voice hoarse from thirst.

  “Oh, well. I guess it’ll buy dinner.”

  Jack couldn’t even muster the energy to agree as the boy turned left out of the forecourt and disappeared into the crowd.

  Lucy could see them at least half an hour before they reached the camp: three insubstantial mounds, almost like dark igloos. She had first thought they had been small tents, until they drew close enough for her to make out the shuffling movements and the glint of reptilian eyes reflecting the snow.

  Their journey across the plain was arduous, and it took much longer than they’d expected. The snow was piled thicker on the flatlands, and in places they found themselves trudging through freezing powder. The wind cut harder the farther they ventured into the open, sheets of daggers sliding into any exposed flesh and pounding it deep crimson. Lucy’s gut, already uncomfortable, was wrenched with hunger when they halted, shivering, several feet before the goblin trio.

  “Welcome,” the central goblin called in a Slavic-like accent, her hoarse voice barely audible over the wind. “We do not receive many visitors here.” She was immensely old, her greyish-green scaly skin cracked into wr
inkles around her eyes and mouth. What Lucy had taken to be obesity at a distance was actually a cocoon of matted furs and hides wrapped around her so as to only leave her face and gloved hands visible. The two either side, both male, were taller but more lightly wrapped, and both carried spears from which shreds of cloth fluttered.

  “We mean you no harm.” Hakim laid down his staff. “We have come in search of an alchemical artifact and to deliver a message to you. Perhaps there is somewhere we can talk?”

  The goblin matriarch nodded and turned, shuffling through the snow into the midst of the campsite. Lucy, Vince, Adâ, and Hakim followed, the two goblin guards closing ranks behind them.

  The campsite seemed to have been constructed to provide maximum wind resistance for those moving about within: tents assembled in concentric circles with minimal gaps between them. As they passed through the aisle between two banks of canvases, the resident goblins clambered out onto thresholds to watch them intently.

  Lucy felt slightly uneasy. The goblins she had met before had been quite happy to mix with elves. They had even recognized her and Jack as humans through their alchemical disguises, but to expect the same of these would be like assuming there were no racist humans. If this community was as segregated from the outer world as it seemed, they might not react well to alien visitors.

  At the center of the campsite stood the tallest tent, a domed structure decorated with tribal patterns and weighted with snow. The goblin matriarch disappeared beneath the awning, and the travelers followed her.

  The interior was significantly warmer. It was lit by a circle of candles set in the center of the floor, a few flickering out from their movement as they stooped to maneuver into seated positions. Some sort of stylized map was cut into the material of the floor between the candles, depicting mountains, rivers, and several other locales. What appeared to be the matriarch’s living space was on the opposite side of the entrance: a nest of furs, thick hides, and rugs, into which she now settled herself.