North! Or Be Eaten

by Andrew Peterson

  Janner looked back to see the Overseer pull himself to his feet and limp to where his whip lay.

  “Sara!” he screamed again.

  The portcullis wasn’t moving. What if Sara wasn’t on this shift or couldn’t get the other child to help her?

  “Sara, please!” he wheezed, almost to himself. His burst of strength was ebbing. He had spent three days in a box with nothing but an apple to eat, and he was beginning to feel it.

  “TOOL!” the Overseer raged again. “There’s no escaping the factory!”

  Then Janner saw a crack between the cobbled street and the teeth of the portcullis. It was rising.

  As he passed the horse and carriage, an idea struck. He bounded from the front wheel of the carriage to the driver’s seat, grabbed the reins, and snapped them.

  “Up! Up, boy!” he cried, and the sad horse lowered its head and heaved. Janner looked back to see the Overseer lurching nearer, cracking the whip wildly. But he was hurt. His back was hunched, and one leg dragged behind him.

  The Overseer screamed again and again, but Janner had stopped listening. If Sara opened the door in time—it was most of the way open already—he would reach down and take her hand. He would swing her up to the carriage seat, and they would gallop through the empty streets of Dugtown until they were sure they had outrun their pursuers.

  The horse moved at a trot. Janner ducked his head as the carriage passed into the entryway. Through the open portcullis, he could see the dark streets of Dugtown.

  He stopped the horse at the gate and peered into the darkness where Sara stood. She and a young boy held the chain that kept the portcullis open. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  “Sara, come on. There’s no time.”

  She shook her head.

  “Sara! The Overseer’s coming. We need to go.” Janner reached for her, just as he had planned.

  But Sara shook her head again. “There’s nowhere for me to go, Janner. I’ll die out there.”

  “No you won’t! I’ll take you to your parents. Don’t you want to see your parents again?”

  “The Fangs will find us. They’ll put me in the Black Carriage again. I can’t bear it. I can’t. At least here, there’s food and water and a bed to sleep in.”

  “Sara, please. You have to come with me. The Overseer—he knows you helped me. He heard me call your name.”

  The Overseer’s enraged voice echoed from behind them. The boy beside Sara started to cry.

  “Hush,” she said. “It’ll be all right. Janner, go.”

  Janner was determined not to leave her. He didn’t want to leave any of the children in the factory. He wanted to tie the Overseer’s arms, lock him in his office, and swing wide the doors of the factory and set the children free. But where would they go? Maybe Sara was right. They would pour into the dark streets of Dugtown and try to find their parents, but many of these children weren’t from Dugtown at all. Like Sara, they had been snatched by the Black Carriage and taken here instead of Dang. There seemed to be no safe place in all the world for children—no safe place but the Ice Prairies.

  “Sara, listen,” Janner pleaded. “If you stay, the Overseer will throw you in the box again. He might send you off in the Black Carriage anyway. At least with me you have a chance. Please.”

  Sara took a deep breath. Janner held out his hand again. She nodded and with a trembling hand, reached for the mechanism that secured the portcullis.

  “Tools,” came the Overseer’s wicked voice. He stood at the rear of the carriage, leaning against the wheel for support. He cracked his whip and sneered at Janner.

  Sara screamed, and the boy with her let go of the chain and clamped his hands over his eyes. He pushed himself into the corner and curled into a ball. The portcullis lurched down a notch.

  “Janner, go! I can’t hold it!” Sara shrieked, not looking at Janner but at the Overseer, inching his way between the carriage and the brick wall.

  Janner could stop him. He had done it once, and now the crazed man was hurt. He would have to be quick, but he could do it.

  Just before he sprang to the ground to confront the Overseer, Mobrik appeared. He moved in a blur, past the carriage and into the cleft where Sara stood. The ridgerunner pulled her hair and clawed at her hands, trying to force her to release the chain that held the portcullis. The gate lurched down another notch. Any more and the carriage wouldn’t fit.

  “Go!” Sara screamed again.

  Already burning with guilt, already aching from the sadness he knew he would feel, Janner snapped the reins. The carriage pulled forward, bouncing as it rolled over the Overseer’s foot and dragged him to the ground. Mobrik finally overcame Sara Cobbler, and the portcullis came down. The rear of the carriage cleared the falling gate by inches.

  Janner turned, tears stinging his eyes, and caught a final glimpse of the FORK! FACTORY! sign. Below it, through the bars of the gate, he saw the Overseer rolling on the ground, screaming. He saw Mobrik’s face, his lip curled with hatred as he watched Janner escape.

  And he heard Sara Cobbler crying.

  For several minutes, Janner knew nothing but that sound. It filled his head and became not just Sara’s voice, but the voices of all the children in Skree, all the parents in Skree whose lives were torn and trashed like old paper.

  46

  The Strander Burrow

  The carriage careened through the streets of Dugtown, and soon Janner realized he was crying and so tired that he felt he could fall asleep on the bouncing, swaying bench of the driver’s seat. He closed his eyes and let the horse run.

  He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when the horse finally stopped. Janner opened his eyes to find that the carriage had stopped in the middle of an intersection of two streets: Green Blossom Avenue and Vineyard Avenue. It looked much the same as the other streets he had seen—tall buildings with dark windows slept in the glare of the torch towers, and trash littered the gutters. Nothing moved.

  “Oy there! Overseer!” came a voice from above.

  Janner froze. He squinted up at the torch tower nearest him. A Fang crouched at the edge of the platform, silhouetted by the fire. Janner’s mind went blank with terror.

  “Where are ye off to tonight, eh?” the Fang called.

  The top hat. It sat on the seat beside Janner. As casually as he could, he placed it on his head.

  “Er, Tilling Court, sir,” he said gruffly.

  “More children to exchange, then. Good. The boss will be glad about that.”

  “Yes. Er, yes, he will.”

  “Well, then,” the Fang said, “get on with it.”

  Janner nodded and pulled away as quickly as he dared. He turned the carriage onto Green Blossom Avenue. If he remembered correctly, Green Blossom intersected with Riverside Road, and then he just had to turn left and follow it out of Dugtown.

  A few minutes after he turned onto the wide road, a regiment of Fangs marched by. Janner fought every urge in his body to leap from the carriage and flee. Instead he lowered the hat and drove on without looking at the Fangs. They marched by without a glance.

  Several minutes later, Janner reached the corner where the Florid Sword had dealt with the Fangs. Two doors down hung the shingle of the Roundish Widow. Janner gulped as he drove the carriage past, hoping Ronchy McHiggins was safe and sound, fast asleep in his lonesome bedroom. He looked sadly down the alleyway beyond the tavern. It was there that he had last been with his family and Oskar. It was there that things had gone so horribly wrong, thanks to Migg Landers.

  Then he remembered with a start that the Overseer and Mobrik would surely raise an alarm. They would get word to the Fangs that he had escaped—and Mobrik would tell them who he was. They wouldn’t just be looking for some boy but for one of the Jewels of Anniera.

  The carriage rolled past boathouses, past the place where he had last seen Tink, past Crempshaw, the shortcut that had sent Janner to Tilling Court. As he rolled by, the torch towers hissed and crackled above, but none of the Fangs
on watch said a word, though Janner sensed their eyes on him. To his right, blacker than the night sky, lay the Mighty Blapp. Janner was aware of it only as a stretch of darkness with a fishy odor, and now and then he heard a splash of water or the thunk of a boat against a dock.

  At the edge of Dugtown, the buildings grew sparser and the roads rougher. Missing cobbles jarred the carriage again and again, until Janner found himself bouncing down a muddy road pocked with potholes.

  He reined up the horse and looked back at the town. He had been traveling gradually uphill for some time, and the river now lapped at the bottom of a steep bank that dropped away to the right. He had passed the last of the torch towers and felt much safer in the darkness on the edge of town.

  Judging from the view of the city below him, the house with the Strander burrow should be close. For the first time since his escape, Janner believed he might actually see his family again. He tried not to think about the image he had seen of Leeli in the snowy mountains. If it was true, it meant his family had left him behind. They had abandoned him. It had been days—he wasn’t sure how many—since their separation at the Roundish Widow, and the rational part of him knew they couldn’t wait forever. Podo had Leeli to think about, not to mention Nia and Oskar.

  But how could they just leave? No, they would still be there, waiting.

  He imagined his mother’s warm embrace and the look on Leeli’s face when he appeared in the burrow. Podo would clap him on the back and roar his approval that Janner had found a way back.

  But what about Tink?

  The image of Tink in the cage killed all thoughts of joy and happy reunion. If the vision of Tink in the cage was true, there would be no time to rejoice.

  Janner forced such thoughts away and dismounted the carriage. There was nothing to do but find the burrow and pray his family was still there.

  He unbuckled the horse’s harness, then swatted his rump and watched him gallop away.

  Then Janner ran too. He hopped over potholes as he trotted up the hill, keeping a close eye on the buildings to his left. He worried he wouldn’t remember what the old house looked like, but then he saw it.

  He stopped in front of the house, wondering where the old snoring man might be, and listened. He heard the great silence of the river behind him. Goats and chickens fussed in their sleep nearby. Frogs chirped. And a bell rang.

  Janner’s skin went cold. He looked down the slope at Dugtown and saw movement. The bell clanged and clanged, then more bells joined it. The sound rolled up the hill like an invisible wave. Suddenly the fires on the torch towers flared, first one, then another and another, until all of them burned twice as bright as before. Even from this distance, Janner felt exposed. Then, like a long, many-eyed serpent, a host of Fangs with torches moved through the streets and coalesced on Riverside Road.

  He had seen Fangs assembled in this way the night they coursed into Glipwood from Fort Lamendron. They were on the move and coming straight for him. Already he could hear the thud-thud-thud of the march.

  Janner ducked into the darkened house.

  The Fangs were already near enough that he could hear the pace-keepers bellowing a chant and beating a drum. It was hard to believe he was the cause of all this trouble. Do they really need a whole army of Fangs to find one boy? he thought.

  His foot bumped the iron ring of the trapdoor that led to the cellar. He flung it open, climbed down, and pulled the door shut. He groped his way in the darkness to the wall where Podo had triggered the mechanism that opened the secret door. He felt along the cracks in the wall just as Podo had, cringing at the thought of the insects he might disturb.

  Please, Janner prayed, let them still be here. If the Fangs were going to catch him at last, then he didn’t want to be alone. He grew more and more frantic as the mechanism eluded him, on the verge of tears, begging the Maker to let his loved ones be in the burrow. Finally, he felt a tiny metal wire with a loop in the end. He stuck his finger in the loop and tugged. He heard a click, then the creak of the trapdoor swinging open somewhere behind him.

  He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the hole in the floor. There was no glow of lamplight, no sound of breathing. A black, empty silence awaited him in the burrow. Janner’s heart sank. Maybe they just snuffed the candle, or maybe they’re hiding in the tunnel, he thought, knowing it was a fool’s hope.

  With a heavy sigh, Janner swung his feet into the hole and climbed down. He pulled the second trapdoor shut and descended into darkness as thick as that of the Overseer’s coffin. After a moment of searching, he found the lantern beside the ladder and the box of matches with it.

  When yellow light from the strike of the match filled the chamber, Janner was so shocked by what he saw that he wouldn’t have been surprised if his heart leapt up his throat, out of his mouth, and landed with a splat on the dirt floor.

  Someone sat against the opposite wall, staring at him.

  She was dressed in rags, her skin leathery and caked with grime, and her eyes were bottomless pits set in the wrinkled landscape of her face. She looked familiar, which told Janner she must be one of the hags of Tilling Court.

  He dropped the match and everything went black.

  She laughed. It was a dry, papery laugh, a dead crackle.

  “Child,” she whispered.

  Janner was too terrified to move. He imagined her crawling toward him in jerking movements, those wide, black, spidery eyes able to see him in the dark somehow. Fangs bumped and growled in the house above. He wondered which was worse: capture by the Fangs or the wet stink of the hag in the cellar.

  “Child,” she whispered again, louder.

  Janner closed his eyes and tried to shut out the world. When he heard the woman grunt and drag herself across the floor toward him, his breaths came in short, desperate gasps. His head seemed to thicken; bright points of light danced across his eyelids.

  Her hand touched his foot, and Janner tried to scream, but his voice made no sound. The stars burst into fiery colors, and he had the sensation of falling slowly upward and into the dreadful, silent well of space.

  47

  A Change of Heart

  The next thing Janner knew, he was coughing. Dirt filled his mouth. He sputtered and spit, aching for a cup of water to wash the grainy sand from his teeth and tongue. When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to find there was light. Then he remembered the hag, the Fangs, the hand on his foot—

  He sat up.

  The woman sat against the wall, the lantern at her side.

  “Child, ye forgot to cover your tracks.” He didn’t know what she was talking about, so she pointed. “The string, child. Always pull the string.”

  Janner looked up at the ladder and saw a string dangling near the wall. He remembered Podo had pulled it to release dirt from the ceiling to hide the trapdoor.

  “Sorry, uh, I forgot. The Fangs,” he said, “they’re gone?”

  “Oh, they’re always nearby, slitherin’ about their murderous work.” She paused. “You don’t remember me, do ye?”

  He shook his head. Her face was familiar, but her accent was much thicker than Gorah the hag’s. She was so dirty she may as well have been wearing a mask.

  “I knew yer grandpa, remember?”

  “Nurgabog?”

  “Aye.” She sighed.

  “But—what are you doing here? What happened?”

  “Easy up on the questions, lad. First things first. Ye want to know where your family is, don’t ye?”

  “You know where they are?”

  Nurgabog shook her head. “First things first, lad.”

  She coughed, and Janner saw that her breathing was shallow and watery.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Claxton. He’s mad as a blat.” Her chin quivered. “Hurt his own mother, he did.” She waved her hand in the air. “No matter. Right now I need water, and I need ye to help me change the dressing on me wounds.”

  She held the lantern up so that he could
see her side. Blood soaked her ragged dress.

  “Claxton did this?” Janner asked quietly.

  “Aye. Now scurry up the ladder and find a cup or a bucket. Creep down to the river and bring back some water. All the supplies here are gone—gone with your family.”

  “Please, tell me where they are,” Janner said.

  “If ye don’t get me any water, I might faint and never wake up. It’s been days, lad. Go. Shouldn’t be hard to find a vessel in all that junk. And be mindful of the Fangs. I’ve heard naught of ‘em since you took yer little nap.” She laughed again, that weak, crackly laugh that set her coughing so badly she toppled over and lay on her side in the dirt.

  Janner didn’t wait to be told again. He scrambled up the ladder. At the top he listened for movement and heard none. When he pushed the trapdoor, it didn’t open. He pushed again but was afraid to break the latch.

  “Er, Nurgabog?”

  “It’s behind…the ladder,” she moaned.

  He found another looped wire behind the top rung of the ladder, tugged it, and the door clicked open, spilling dirt into the shaft.

  When he emerged from the house, Janner found dawn fast approaching. No Fangs marched past, and no old man snored on the stoop.

  In the rosy gold light of the sky just before the sunrise, Janner searched the debris around the house until he found a large clay pot. There was no sign of Fangs, so he sprinted across the road and skidded down the bank to the water’s edge. The surface was glassy, undisturbed except by occasional rings where water bugs alighted. Suddenly a fish broke the surface with a great splash and hung in the air for a moment before pointing its needle-sharp snout back into the water and sinking away.

  “A daggerfish!” Janner said with wonder. Then, more seriously, “A daggerfish.” He filled the pot and scrambled away from the water line.

  Nurgabog was unconscious when Janner returned. He nudged her and helped her to a sitting position. She smelled awful and looked even worse, but Janner felt a surprising affection for her. She had known and even loved Podo in his younger days, which made her less like a hag or a Strander and more like a long-lost grandmother.