by Jane Higgins
When the procession reached the Southside gateway it stopped. The crowd parted and a woman came forward. She was tall and dark – black skin, black tunic, and baggy trousers. She stood in front of the ones carrying the body and everyone seemed to hold their breath. Then she sang. Just her, alone, calling out to the night, calling home the dead. And, I swear, the Mol sang back, because I was standing close and I heard the ironwork ring. When she stopped there was deep silence. Then the whole mass of them sang back. It just about knocked me off my feet.
The bearers of the body stepped off the Mol; that’s when I saw there wasn’t one body, there were five. We turned to follow them, me and Fyffe and Jeitan and about ten thousand other people. I held Fyffe’s hand and stood still, letting an old man and woman go ahead of us, and a guy with a toddler on his shoulders, and a woman with a small girl. By then I couldn’t see Jeitan anymore. We’d worked our way to the edge of the procession and now it flowed on without us, carrying its song and its dead away to whatever end they made for militants killed in war. I nudged Fyffe, and we slipped into a narrow space between two shacks and wound our way upriver.
After about half an hour of threading through crooked alleys that had no pattern to them we’d traveled beyond the shantytown into a more ordered set-up of streets. The houses were two- or three-storey terrace blocks, like haunted versions of houses over the river: walls were cracked and growing moss and ivy; windows were shattered and boarded up; balconies were rotted through, trailing greenery, and clotted with rubbish.
We tried listening at doorways and peering in windows but everything was dark and quiet. After about an hour flitting from house to house like a couple of ghosts, we sat down in a doorway. ‘How will we find him in this?’ said Fyffe.
There was silence all around us as though the whole of Southside had clamped its mouth shut on the secret of where Sol was. As we sat there, I got to thinking the place really was haunted, that everyone had gone over the bridge and into the city and left us behind with the dead. The dead were here because they’d been brought over in a Crossing, so here is where they had to stay. And as we walked we’d meet them round a corner or see them opening a door or watching from a broken window. And maybe we’d see our own dead too: Lou with his face half burned away and Bella, pale and bloody, wandering the streets.
I woke up with a jolt. The streets were still dark and empty; I was still sitting in a doorway. Fyffe was asleep on my arm. We were still famished. Still beat. And now I was seriously spooked as well; the cold crept like a spider between my shoulder blades. When raised voices came from somewhere nearby, it was almost a relief. I woke Fyffe. ‘Stay here. I’m going to check it out.’
‘No – but—’
‘I’ll be back in two minutes, promise. Don’t move.’
CHAPTER 15
I edged down an alley between two houses and came out into a lamplit patch of broken, weedy pavement – and a fight. A guy and a girl, both about my age, were swinging at each other, feet and hands flying. My fault, then, that when I stumbled in he took his eye off the ball – off her foot, in fact. It swung through the air and smashed into his temple. He grunted and folded onto the ground. She spun around with the momentum of her kick and landed in a crouch.
She was black, like the singer at the bridge. Her hair was wound in a million braids and her clothes were the same as the singer’s – black tunic, baggy trousers. She flicked out a knife and glared at me. ‘I didn’t need your help.’
I backed away. She stood up, swayed, and waved the knife at me. She had a cut lip and a bruise rising on her cheekbone. The hand that wasn’t holding the knife was dripping blood. She said, ‘I am Lanya. I am a Pathmaker.’
I dredged my memory for Breken: Law and Lore – Dr Mercer (RIP, probably) – and found something about a pan-religious ritual for the dead. She stepped closer and I was about to turn and bolt when I spotted a board on the ground behind her with food on it: two strips of what looked like fish, flatbread, and a jug of something. A feast, in other words. The girl saw where I was looking and jerked her head at the boy. ‘Coly brought it. He wanted me to eat and dishonor the fast. But I am a Maker. He will not stop me. You will not either.’ She pointed the knife at me and came a step closer.
I held up both hands and said, ‘You’re bleeding.’ Which worked, because bleeding clearly wasn’t in her plan. She looked at her arm and swore. She swore the way Bella used to swear, in a sing-song voice that was as much for her audience as for herself.
Then she breathed deep and said, ‘Have you been at the Crossing? Has it begun?’
‘Hours ago.’
She swore again.
I said, ‘I’ll fix your arm, for the food.’
‘Who are you?’
‘No one. Arm. Food. What d’you say?’
The boy moaned. She glanced back at him. ‘Yes. Hurry!’
‘Put the knife away first.’
She grinned. White teeth. Shrugged a where’s-your-sense-of-adventure? kind of shrug, but she folded the knife and pocketed it. She sat on the ground near the light and the food and held out her arm. ‘Hurry!’
I hefted the jug, sniffed at it – water with a splash of wine. I took hold of her wrist, lightly, watching her. She was trembling, adrenaline still running. I said, ‘Hold still,’ and poured the water over her arm. She hissed. On her forearm below the elbow was a cut as long as a finger, not deep – the blood was already thick and slowing.
‘Fight with knives often, do you?’ I said.
‘Never. It’s forbidden.’
‘Oh. Okay. And this is?’
‘A scratch. That no one will see.’
‘Does he still have a knife?’
‘No.’ She smiled and nodded towards a pile of rubble and rubbish at the back of one of the houses. A groan came from the boy. He was hauling himself to his knees, swearing. He stared in our direction and seemed to have trouble focusing. I hoped he could see four of us at least. He snarled something like ‘You shit,’ to me, and ‘Whore,’ to her, then staggered upright.
We were on our feet. She had her knife in hand and he was groping for his, but he couldn’t find it. He pointed a finger at her, then at me, but whatever he wanted to say was lost in a mixture of concussion and fury. He wandered a drunken path over to the rubbish pile, kicked through it for a few minutes muttering, but soon gave up and staggered away.
She sank down again and I went back to fixing her arm.
She watched me. ‘Are you an outcast?’
‘What?’
‘You said you were no one, so I thought you had been cast out.’
‘Oh. Uh… no.’ I filed that. Being ‘cast out’ must be some kind of official punishment. Outcasts became nobodies – forfeited their identity, maybe.
‘Where are you from?’ she said.
‘Gilgate.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘Looking for someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Do you have something I can bind this with?’
She untied the red bandana from her neck. ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘No one you know. Is that too tight?’
She shook her head. ‘You can know this – that I wouldn’t know this person?’
‘I have a pretty fair idea, yeah.’
‘If you’re not an outcast, what are you called?’
I ripped the end of the bandana in two with my teeth and tied it off. ‘Done,’ I said. ‘Someone should look at it though. It might need more than a bandage.’
She shook her head, braids flying. ‘You looked at it.’
‘Yeah, but I’m no one, remember.’ She smiled with more curiosity than was healthy. ‘Can I eat?’ I asked. She stood up, bowed, murmured something in Breken that I didn’t understand, and took off back down the alley. I don’t know if she noticed Fyffe peering round the corner.
We fell on the food: white, flaky fish and new-baked flatbread. It was gone pretty quick; I could have eaten the same again, twice. It was good to
have ballast again – feet on the ground and head connected to the rest of me. I grinned at Fyffe. ‘Better?’
She smiled back. ‘Much. But what now? This place is so big.’
‘What we need is some intel on local traffickers,’ I said. And our own private army would be handy.
‘What if they’ve sent him south already? Nik, what if they’ve…’
‘Stop. Listen – best case is they find out who he is. He’ll be worth a fortune to them to ransom. Once they know he’s a Hendry they’ll look after him better than their own kids. There’s no way they’ll send him south.’
‘You think?’
‘Sure. Of course.’ Maybe. Ransoms were bound to be risky. If traffickers could get the same money by selling him south, that’s probably what they’d do.
‘I know!’ She grasped my arm. ‘What if I tell them who I am? That I’m a Hendry and he is too and then they can ransom us both?’
‘Whoa! Fy! Are you crazy?’
‘No, it makes sense.’
‘No it doesn’t! They’re traffickers. You can’t know what they’ll do to you. Don’t even think that.’
‘We’d better find him quick then.’
‘Promise me, promise me, you won’t do anything crazy?’
She hesitated for too long, but she said, ‘I promise.’
I didn’t believe her. If I’d been scared before, I was plain terrified now. She said, ‘All right, then. What now?’
I stood up. ‘Now, I think, I look for a knife.’ I raked around in the rubbish where Coly had been searching and, being neither concussed nor in a fury, I found it straight away. It was a flick knife like the girl’s – small, for hiding, and sharp, for hurting. I’d never had a knife before and, to be honest, pocketing one now didn’t make me feel as safe as I’d hoped it would.
Fyffe stood up. ‘That boy might come back. Where shall we go?’
‘Their HQ. Let’s see what they know about traffickers there.’
So we headed back downriver, through the darkened streets, towards the bridge. Before long we heard the crowd, and then we found it, still carrying the chant but no more than a low rumble now. The people swayed as though they’d sung themselves into a trance. We made our way towards the space that seemed to be the focus of the Crossing. It might have been a park once but now it was bare ground edged with the skeletons of trees. Even the kids crowding the branches of those trees were quiet.
In the middle was a mound, with a raised platform where they’d laid the bodies. Seven people stood around it, facing out to the crowd. They held orb-lights high in cupped hands. The sun was long gone and the orbs glowed.
As we watched, an old man leaning on a walking stick lurched through the crowd and climbed the rise to the platform. He was flanked by two younger men – one was Commander Vega from Moldam Road. The old man turned to the crowd and held up a hand. The chant rolled down to a murmur.
‘My friends!’ Silence all round. ‘This is the first Crossing of the Great Uprising – the last Uprising!’ Ten thousand voices roared – the sound of it thundered off the clouds and leaped over the river and I wondered if Dash could hear it in the city.
The man went on. ‘There will be more Crossings. Perhaps there will be many more, before we taste freedom. But hear this! Reports are in from every district. We have taken every bridge!’ The roar crashed around us again and I felt cold to my bones. ‘Blackbyre has Watch Hill.’ Wild cheering. ‘Curswall has Central Communications.’ More cheering. ‘Gulls Fort has the flood gates.’ And more cheering. ‘Moldam has the Marsh!’ An almighty roar. Pitkerrin Marsh, they meant. The Mad Marsh we’d called it, back in school. It was a psychiatric hospital. I couldn’t think why the hostiles would want it.
‘We have been patient. We are patient no longer. We have been caged. We are caged no longer!‘ I felt sick and looked away, straight into the faces of two kids, little brown versions of Sol, with red bandanas round their heads and huge black eyes staring at us. I realized that Fyffe and I hadn’t yelled or punched the air with the rest of them. I started to move us sideways, but Fyffe saw the kids and stuck her tongue out. They did the same, then grinned and looked back to the old man.
He was going on about the glorious dead and freedom waiting on the other side of the river. Glory and freedom and death. Glory and freedom and death… It pounded in my head and if he said more, I didn’t hear it because all I could hear was glory and freedom and death beating like a drum, over and over. Then I realized there was, in fact, a drumbeat; the bearers of the orb-lights had marched back to the crowd, and out from the crowd came fire, leaping and spinning, flaming across the shadows, tossed high in the air, caught and tossed again. The crowd was silent and seven dancers, all arms and legs and sticks of flame, crept towards the platform like giant spiders weaving a fiery web across the dark. And yes, Lanya of the million braids was there. And no, you’d never guess the bandana on her arm hid the results of an illegal knife fight. She crept, spun and leaped, tossed flame and caught it with the rest of them.
They reached the platform and the drumbeat stopped. We held a collective breath. The dancers lifted their firesticks high and plunged them into the platform, then whirled cartwheeling away.
The pyre lit the night.
CHAPTER 16
I woke up on cold, clammy earth with a tree root sticking in my ribs and two boots in my face. One of them took a swing at me; I grabbed at it, missed, and it connected with my shoulder. But it only gave me a nudge. I pushed it away and scrambled up, trying to get my eyes open and my tongue round the right language. ‘I’m awake! I’m awake! What d’you want?’ The boots belonged to Jeitan, who looked like he’d slept all night in a warm bed, showered in hot water, and breakfasted on coffee and hot buttered toast and… that was a dangerous line of thought so I stopped it.
He almost screwed up his nose at me, but that would have wrecked the effect he was trying for. ‘Thought you’d scarpered back to Gilgate.’
I rubbed the tree root bruise on my ribs, shivered, then remembered Fyffe and looked round in a panic. She was still there, uncurling and stretching. She started to say something, thought better of it and gave Jeitan a winning smile instead.
Over Jeitan’s shoulder, the pyre smoldered. Beside it, Commander Vega was talking to one of the dancers. As I watched, they bowed to each other, a short curt bow like the one Lanya, the Pathmaker, had given me the night before. The dancer turned away and Vega summoned us. He looked us over. ‘You watched the Crossing, then.’
‘Yeah.’ I said. ‘And learned, like you ordered.’
‘Sir,’ said Jeitan, glaring at me.
‘We watched and learned, sir,’ I said.
The commander’s eyes narrowed. ‘They teach you to read in Gilgate?’
‘Me, yes. Her, no.’
‘I see. And write?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Sort of will do. If you’re staying here, you’re going in a squad. Is that clear?’
I nodded.
‘Full of conversation, aren’t we? IS THAT CLEAR?’
‘Yes… sir.’
‘Better.’ He turned to Jeitan. ‘I’m assigning him to CommSec. Her to the infirmary.’
‘But, sir!’ said Jeitan. ‘Should you do that? I mean – is that…’
‘Is that wise? Are you asking?’
‘No, sir.’
‘We need someone non-aligned who can read. Someone from outside Moldam, even better.’
‘We don’t know he’s non-aligned, sir,’ said Jeitan.
‘Does he look like a Remnant devotee to you?’
‘No, sir,’ said Jeitan.
‘And he’s certainly not one of ours.’ Vega turned a cold stare on me. ‘You. Who do you pray to?’
Now that was a dangerous question. I tried, ‘Why?’
‘Never mind why.’
So I told the truth, as of last Wednesday. ‘No one.’
‘No one, sir,’ muttered Jeitan.
‘See?’ said Vega. ‘Gilga
te breeds heathens. He’ll do.’
‘He won’t stay non-aligned for long. Remnant will make him an offer.’
‘First offer he takes, he and his young lady are going back to Gilgate. And I don’t think they’re keen on that, or they would have gone last night when you lost them.’ Cue Jeitan looking crushed. ‘Besides,’ Vega went on, ‘he won’t understand what he’s reading, and you’ll be checking with CommSec on a daily basis to make sure he’s following orders. Clear?’
‘Sir.’ The smart shoulders slumped. Not the guns and glory he was hoping for.
But we got the breakfast we were hoping for. Or at least a breakfast. A sludge of porridge slapped in a bowl and a mug of black coffee. Not much, but it stuck to my ribs and was a whole lot better than the nothing we’d had the last couple of days.
We were back at HQ where Jeitan had taken us the day before. The big dining hall echoed with chatter and the scrape of chairs, its windows steamed up by a bitter brew of coffee. So, phase one of our plan – get back to HQ – turned out to be surprisingly easy. Phase two – actually finding useful intel – was quite likely impossible. I looked at my porridge and wondered what Sol was eating. If Sol was eating. That kid was skinny. I hoped they thought him prize enough to feed him.
At the back of the room, Commander Vega stood up and rapped on a table and everyone shut up. He waited for absolute hush, then said, ‘Thank you. As you heard at the Crossing last night, our first foray has gone to plan.’ He held up a hand to quiet the cheering. ‘It’s a beginning only. We hold strategic posts that we will use to bring the city to the negotiating table. However. The mutiny of their armed forces that has given us this chance poses problems for us. It will take time to organize talks with a credible city command. In the meantime, our plan must be to hold the posts we have taken. Do not assume this will be easy. City forces are fragmented but they still have more weapons, more ammunition, more fuel, and more vehicles than we do. At present, they appear to lack an organized command structure. That will not last. Overconfidence is an enemy – watch for it. Your squad leaders have your orders.’