Gregory Grey and the Fugitive in Helika

by Stanzin

CHAPTER 6.3

  Lesley's Diary - Odd Jobs - July 16, 1909

  Something strange happened today. A detail of healers and spooks went around camp fixing this stupid device onto everyone’s arms. It’s white, and woody and ugly, and it itches. They said it was for some blood census health project, whatever that means. The really unnerving bit was when they brought out this ugly, shrivelled, dead looking leaf, slapped it onto my other arm, and it started drinking my blood! It actually curled around my arm like some kind of wormy leech, stabbed a barb into my vein, and went from dead and grey-looking to blooming bright red in a minute.

  It’s the wrongest thing that’s ever happened to me (setting aside pre-school guest lectures on royal duties to a bunch of snot nosed brats. I like to think some of the kids still haven’t stopped crying.)

  In other news, I need someone to congratulate me! I have a job! I am (as the camp brochure puts it) gainfully employed. My first job ever! The pay is lousy, the hours are ridiculous, my boss is a fat and smelly letch, my colleague is a fluffy headed idiot, and my clients can’t spell their own names.

  I am… the Listmaker.

  It’s amazing the kind of cushy jobs you can find for just being able to read and write.

  People pour into camp everyday (new clusters of shacks come up every day), and their details: name, age, faith, family, possessions, previous addresses and so on and so forth must be neatly drawn up and registered and filed with the Camp Registrar. They’ve put at the Incoming Desk, at the camp’s West Gate, which Angie the ex-forest-belle to my right, Riordan the current-Imperial-White, and Borix, the supervisor with his own smelly office share with me.

  Angie helps me inventory the incoming’s stuff, and labels them. Riordan screams at the incoming and me that we’re not here to chit-chat. And Boris comes out once in a while to creep Angie and I out.

  I supposed I ought to write down exactly how I got here.

  Winnie says she found me stumbling around in the forest, disoriented, hairless, and extremely feverish just before she had to pack up and move to camp. She had to pack up and move to camp because the farm she and Emil ran had become too vulnerable to bandit attacks. Since I’ve recovered, people keep looking at me as if I was some kind of animal out of a zoo, thanks to my hairless state (even my eyebrows and lashes are gone). Thankfully, there’s a wigmaker, of all things, in the camp, and she’s kindly loaned me a sassy, red affair.

  How did I end up stumbling around in the forest? Ask the bloody demon.

  I’m bored right now though, so I think I’ll tell you about the people in camp.

  Winnie and Emil:

  It’s hard not to like someone who wakes you out of delirium with a bowl of chicken soup. Winnie looks lost and talks sad. She’s kind and small and smells like barley. She smiles a lot, though I think that’s more out of habit than actual feeling. She dotes on Emil, who dotes on her. Together, they used to manage the Greene farms as its Elders. They say that the whole farm was in one way or the other related to them. The farm’s gone now, but some people from there survived the Voidmark and the bandits and made it to camp. They’ve been put in charge as civilian administrators of the West Gate. Emil has a stave; Winnie, of all things, has a nose brooch. I think Winnie wants to adopt me. It could even be nice.

  Charlie:

  Emil’s great nephew is abnormally tall, abnormally thin, abnormally pimpled, and quite normally infatuated with me. He can’t stop looking at my head. To be fair, I couldn’t either when I first saw what my skull really looked, and I have to admit, I have a fetching skull. That he doesn’t mind that I don’t have eyebrows is at once sweet and unsettling. He keeps bringing the cutest little gifts. I accept them because its polite, but I’ve danced this dance before, and though it would be really fun, I won’t lead him on. Once was quite enough, and that didn’t turn out well at all.

  Cassius:

  Charlie’s half brother is everything Charlie wants to be. Dashing, persuasive with his words, strong, and aggressive, though he’s very short. It makes me want to do mean things to him. He has that special dirty kind of smile that you want to feed to piranhas. He’s managed to work himself into an unusual, novel position – the Falstead Reflective Workers Representative to Helika. I wouldn’t be surprised if he came up with the title himself. Theoretically, he could halt all work in the camp, which is a power more symbolic than realistic. If the Spooks start setting people’s behinds on fire, they’ll all work, union or no union. I suspect the Spooks are letting him get away with it because so long the refugees can pretend they have a voice, they may feel less inclined to use it. I don’t like the man, but I respect opportunists.

  Walder:

  The walking, talking cliché that represents every reason we call the Helika’s armed lackey’s Spooks, instead of Imperial Whites. He’s massive, his head is massive, pale, speaks in a high pitched voice (much like a baby’s), ruthless, sadistic, intimidating, and unfair. I was introduced to his fist before I was introduced to him, when, while still in delirium, I stumbled out of the Winnie’s tent and into him and he was kind enough to rearrange my nose, and put some vivid color into my skin, which, I admit, might have been peaky at the time. I, of course, don’t remember any of this, but was told it happened once I came back to my senses. Somehow, I must return his cosmetic favour.

  Linus, Taco, Felina, Bouche: The camp needs to be kept running; there’s a lot of little jobs that have been filled up by people with loud voices (I was once told that people talk in loud voices so they wouldn’t hear themselves think, because thoughts are scary – it was never truer than in this Camp). Linus washes clothes and other linen; Taco hands out the food stamps every day in the Mess Area; Felina leads an army of cleaners who keep the camp from getting too filthy, and Bouche cooks our food.

  And now for the camp:

  We are in the meeting of some valleys. It looks like a really nice sort of place. Beyond the stockade, I can see several ranges of green and grey mountains branching off away from us. We must be near some sort of lake or river, because I can hear the sound of water washing up on shore beyond the southern end of camp. I asked Emil, and he showed me a map of the area – we are about a sixty-kilometre flight south of the Domremin border. Also, I was right about the lake.

  There are about sixteen thousand of us here. I (and others such as Cassius) have tried to figure out a way to leave the camp. There isn’t any easy way. A ward has been set up around the camp, with our thaumic signatures integrated into it. Even if we did make out way out of the stockade, there’s no way to break the ward. For one, most of us aren’t ward breakers. More importantly, I don’t have an instrument, and almost no one else does. Camp Administrators are allowed instruments, but they wouldn’t help us escape – if they did, everyone still inside would be penalised.

  Why Helika, demon? Why here? What was the point of taking me hundreds of kilometres away and still dumping me somewhere entirely pointless?

  What do you want?