by Patty Jansen
Seriously, did everyone have to snap at him these days?
Sady walked to the table and looked over Viki’s shoulder. He was drawing an air pressure map, which displayed a large low pressure cell with closely-spaced pressure lines on its eastern side.
“Is that Fairlight?” Sady pointed at the end of a solid straight line, very close to the high-gradient area.
Viki nodded and kept drawing.
So that was where the telegraph poles had blown over.
The winds at the weather front would be south-east, bringing air from the slopes that led up to the platform. Agricultural areas and forest.
“Why the ghostcloud?”
“It’s not ghostcloud,” Viki said. “There are fires on the slopes to the southern platform. It’s smoke.”
“That many fires that the smoke travels all the way over here?”
Viki spread his hands and met Sady’s eyes with an expression of exasperation. “Why does everyone expect me to have the answers?”
Because you’re the meteorologist. Having answers is your job, even if you don’t. “What about sonorics?”
“Sixty in Ensar, forty-six in Solmeni, nineteen in Twin Bridges.”
“Twin Bridges?” That was halfway between the capital and Fairlight.
“That’s what I said.” He kept drawing.
* * *
Filled with worry, Sady went to his office, where he had to wrestle past a long line of people queuing up to see him.
All Chevakian citizens had the right to request an audience with the Proctor, and the queue was more or less a permanent fixture, so that there was even a food vendor allowed to come into the building to sell his wares to those waiting.
In the past, Sady had never taken much notice of those people and what their reasons and demands for speaking with the Proctor were. Back then, he’d known that it wasn’t his business and that someone would deal with it. Now that someone was him.
As soon as the people saw him coming, they started yelling.
“Please see me first. I’ve been waiting for a long time and have small children at home.”
“I was here first! The farmers of the city ring need your intervention.”
“Proctor, please—”
“But I’ve come all the way from Solmeni to ask for help with my children’s strange illness. Please, I don’t know where else to go.”
What? Solmeni was in a dead-end pocket of land to the east of Fairlight. Surrounded by the southern cliffs and forest. There was a railway track that went into the town, but the line stopped there.
Sady turned around and looked at the woman. She was thin, wore the long-sleeved garment and colourful head scarf of the type often worn by farming women, adorned with beads made from seeds. Her skin was tanned and wrinkled from having spent much time outside.
Everyone in the queue took the fact that he had stopped as a sign to start yelling more loudly.
“Please, Proctor, see me first.”
“No, me. I was here first.”
“I have nowhere to sleep. The landlord has kicked me out.”
Sady turned to the last speaker, a middle-aged man. “In that case, you’ll be better off going to see the housing office.” He gestured to the peasant woman. “If you could come with me, please.”
“But I was here first! Proctor . . .”
Sady strode into his office, avoiding the protester’s gaze, feeling awful and guilty.
A week ago, he would have promised to see all these people, and he would have questioned why Destran didn’t do so. Now he knew there wasn’t enough time in the day, and that the queue never stopped, no matter how many of them he saw. And that there would always be more people to go back home disappointed.
He shut the door after the woman had entered his office.
“Sit down.” He cringed at the mess: the financial books in big tottering piles. Pencils and pencil shavings everywhere.
The woman took the big leather seat opposite his, folding her hands between her knees. Eyes wide, she looked around the office.
“So you’ve come all the way from Solmeni.”
She nodded. “I got a lift with a travelling merchant to Twin Bridges and then got the train from there.”
“How long did that take you?”
“Three days.”
“Do you know anything about what’s going on in Fairlight?”
“Not Fairlight. That’s still a long way from us.”
Not that far, when seen from here, but never mind. “So tell me about your children?”
“Not jus’ mine, but a lot in the school as well. They have been sick to the stomach, sir. Especially the little ones, and all red around the eyes. I took a bundle of them the clinic in Twin Bridges—that’s why I rode with the merchant—but the medic wouldn’t see them and won’t come back with me. So I got angry and said as physic he has to see them, right?”
Sady nodded. That was part of the physic’s pledge, to see every person in need.
“I said they were the town’s children. Our future, you know. And he still wouldn’t see them. I asked him why and he used a lot of big words—like I never learned. We teach things the kids can use at school, not fillin’ the kids’ heads with big words, and I asked to 'splain but the physic couldn’ make any sense. So I said I’d go and complain. And he said feel free, but I don’t think he really believed I would do that. But I did and here I am.”
“I am glad that you did.”
She smiled a brown-toothed smile.
“Are there any other people in the area with the same illness? Adults?” Why hadn’t he heard about this before?
“Not that I’ve heard, Proctor, but then again, most are in the farms away from the town. Like ours. My man said he liked the hill so he built the house there. You should see the view—”
“Could any adults be sick at home?”
“Could be, why are you askin’? All I want ’s the physic seeing the little ones.”
“And he will.” Sady slid a sheet of official paper across the desk and wrote a note reminding the clinic of their obligation. As he signed his name, he figured that over there in Solmeni, many people wouldn’t even know that the leadership had changed.
He rolled the paper up and handed it to the woman. “I’m going to send someone back with you.”
She stared at him. “But that’s not necessary, Proctor, much as I appreciate it. Just signing an order for the physic to treat the little ones will be enough. I thank you for that. I know that you and your people are busy and all that—”
Sady rang a bell, and a moment later Orsan came in. In a few quick words, Sady explained that he wanted a small team to return with the woman.
“I want them to take sonorics measurements—and suits,” he whispered. “If there’s any spare carriages, make sure they get hooked up to the train.”
Orsan’s eyes widened; he understood.
He nodded and with a quick salute, he was out the door.
Mercy. Solmeni was well within the borders. First Fairlight and now this.
What if this evil came to Tiverius? What if the barriers failed? What were they facing?
Chapter 18
* * *
MILLEUS SLID the truck into neutral and let it coast to a stop until the tyres hit the kerb in front of the Town Hall. He glared at the building’s facade with its pompous columns. The gentle rolling hills of the town stretched out behind it, with their sprawling timber houses, but the main street was a neat row of solid stone buildings in a mockery of a streetscape in Tiverius. Somehow, it looked even less like anything in the capital. These monstrosities, built from funds squandered by Destran, were a
ll fake.
Mercy, he always grew cranky if he had to go shopping.
But with the youngsters on the farm, he needed decent food and this morning, his second pair of work trousers had come apart and he didn’t know how to fix them. He’d grown tired of asking Andreus’ grumpy wife and didn’t want to ask her after having rebuffed her husband the previous night—she didn’t do that good a job anyway—he didn’t want to ask Nila—she was doing so much already and he wasn’t sure if she did have sewing skills—so was going to ask the tailor in town. He was, after all, not a pauper.
And that meant shopping.
Despite the pompous facade of the Town Hall, council positions didn’t occupy officebearers full-time, so the tailor doubled as the town’s mayor, and a visit to have trousers fixed had a second purpose, as everything does in politics. Milleus wanted to know if the southerner the neighbour had mentioned had been elsewhere in town and what the local authorities were doing about it. There was a small army unit stationed at Ensar, and he’d like to know if they had been called or had asked for reinforcements.
Southern Eagle Knights on the loose in Chevakia. If that was true, it was a clear violation of the border agreement. Why wasn’t the district swarming with army units? Oh yeah, they were probably still waiting for their supplies.
Mercy, he had sworn never to look into politics again, leave the whole lot to stew in their own mess, but what if the doga just didn’t know, through collective bureaucracy and incompetence, that there were southern spies foraging around? In his day, they would call in the ambassador, but apparently no one had thought to re-appoint an ambassador after the anger over the kidnappings of girls by the Eagle Knights had abated.
Yet he knew there were several southerners in the city. They called themselves merchants, but everyone knew they were spies. If nothing else, he remembered that the lady Armaine had been a gathering point for southerners and their sympathisers in the city. They would certainly know what was going on in the City of Glass. Why didn’t the doga—
Pfa, he should stop worrying.
He opened the van’s door—it creaked—and slid out of the cabin. His trousers, a sorry bundle of cloth, lay on the bench next to him. He tucked it under his arm, shut the door and crossed the street to the tailor’s shop, opened the door, stepped inside . . .
A siren wailed. A high-pitched scream that made him want to clamp his hands over his ears. He stopped, as frozen, on the door mat, while the door blew shut after him.
The shop’s sonorics alarm.
Milleus just stood there, his heart thudding, like a little boy caught snooping in the pantry.
The alarm quietened. There were yells and shouts inside the shop. Shufflings and clangings. A few moments later, someone burst into the shop through a back door, wearing a full protective suit. Stopped.
“Milleus?”
The voice was that of the tailor, muffled inside the suit.
“Yes, I wanted to have a pair of trousers fixed, but . . .” Milleus stared at his own reflection in the suit’s helmet visor.
The tailor walked around Milleus, passing the sonorics meter over his farm clothes. The needle jumped on the dial. Not very high, but it definitely moved.
“Where have you been?” the tailor asked inside the suit.
“Just the farm.” Milleus’ heart was still thudding.
Andreus had said that something like this had happened to him, but he’d been visited by the mysterious Knights, and attacked. Wait—he had shown Milleus a burn. And where would a burn come from other than some sort of sonorics-based weapon? That wasn’t supposed to work this side of the barrier.
He asked, “When have you last checked the sonorics readouts?”
Every day, the meteorology officer drove up to the shack not far from the back of Milleus’ farm to read the sonorics levels, which he then telegraphed to Tiverius, and Sady.
Milleus couldn’t see the tailor’s reaction in the suit, but the man opened a drawer behind the shop counter and drew out a set of hand-written measurements. There was also a sheet of graph paper. He’d seen Sady’s work often enough to know how to read it. The highest level of sonorics was sixty-nine motes per cube. Twenty was considered dangerous; fifty was the lowest all-clear level for the barrier. No one knew at what level it would break, but it would do so explosively.
“Look at this.” Milleus pointed at the end of the graph, where the squiggly line rose towards the top margin of the paper. The needle on the sonorics meter which lay on the bench jumped when his hand passed it. So much else made sense. The unseasonably cold wind, for one.
“You reported this?”
“All sent to Tiverius,” the tailor said.
“Has there been a reaction?” Mercy, why hadn’t there been any advice from the capital? “Why are there no warnings up in the street? Why is no one doing anything? Has the army post been notified? Where are the emergency suits?”
The man took a step back. “What do you mean? We were following our normal procedures . . .”
“Even with figures like this?” Milleus gestured at the paper. The needle on the dial jumped as his arm passed. “Someone needs to go and check the barrier. I don’t understand why that hasn’t already happened. Hasn’t the doga’s chief meteorologist been here to tell you that sonorics were rising without explanation? And you didn’t think to warn anyone to limit time spent outside? You should have rung the bell.”
“We discussed it in the council. Tiverius said not to worry, so we didn’t. We didn’t want panic—”
“No, instead you’ll have panic now. You could have started an evacuation before panic hit. Oh—wait—you have not enough passenger trains available, and the suits are still in storage in Ensar, waiting for authorities to approve their transfer. And half the local army unit is on leave to attend the northern ballooning competition.”
The man took a further step back. “Now, wait, Milleus, you can’t go accusing—”
“It’s true, though, isn’t it? You haven’t done anything, because the district hasn’t the resources and because the politicians are sitting on their comfortable arses pushing documents from one side of their desks to another. They’re passing the problem off to someone else, and meanwhile nothing happens. You value your political career over the safety of the people.”
“But Milleus, tell me what we could have—”
“What you could have done, with no money? Watch me.”
Milleus turned on his heel and strode back out the shop. The alarm started wailing again.
The tailor ran after him.
“Milleus, stop! You have to come inside and—”
Milleus wheeled at him. He felt oddly alive, perhaps more alive than he’d felt in years. “Have to scrub and decontaminate? Never mind that. If I’m contaminated, everyone in town is. I’m an old man, so whatever sonorics is going to do to me, I’ll take it. I’ll protect the young ones, though.”
Mercy, a whole crowd of people had gathered outside the shop, hurling questions at him as soon as he came into the street.
“What’s going on?”
“Milleus, I heard you are going back to Tiverius.”
“What is the doga doing about those southern spies?”
Milleus held up his hands. “Listen, everyone, listen.” And when relative calm returned, he continued, “Everyone please back away a few paces. It seems my farm is contaminated. I have just set off the sonorics alarm.”
People stumbled away from him, mothers dragging children. Whispers went around. Milleus picked up his name a few times. The feeling of satisfaction it raised in him was surprising. In his voice, he heard echoes of the past, of a hall full of senators, one by one raising their hands in favour of a general mobilisation of all Chevakian men. That
had been one month prior to the Aranian offensive. It had been the most important reason Chevakia had won the conflict. Preparation. His hand went to the pocket of his trousers, but he had left the letter with the fifty signatures on the table in the kitchen with the intention to burn it. He didn’t know, in fact, why he hadn’t already done so.
“The sonorics level has risen dramatically near the barrier. Before anyone asks—the barrier is holding for now—but I don’t think anyone can guarantee anything in the future. As a way of precaution, I want everyone here to go back home, warn you neighbours, collect your family and most important possessions, including any protective gear you may have, as well as provisions, tents, if you have them, take your trucks, carts and animals and go to Ensar. Make yourselves known to the local garrison and await instructions. By leaving now, rather than waiting for authorities to notify you, you will ensure that nobody needs to panic. But do make sure you tell any family and friends you may be in contact with. Make sure you look after people who are sick or the elderly. Don’t leave anyone behind.”
A wide-eyed woman at the front asked, “What if you don’t have protective clothes?”
Mercy, did they have nothing? The older farmers would have suits to deal with the occasional flare-up, but all these young families would have settled after the barriers were installed. “The suits are made of resin-coated fabric. Substitute anything that is thick, and finely-woven. Winter jackets, truck canopy covers, tents, that sort of material. If you have any, it helps to dip the fabric in paint or wax.” Of course they wouldn’t have the special resin used for the official suits. It contained metal-dust, which made the suits so heavy and hot.
“Will rain jackets do?” asked a man.
“It will be better than nothing. The important part is not to expose any part of your body unnecessarily.”
There were a few more questions, all asked in orderly fashion, and then, somewhat to his surprise, the first people started moving off. Mercy, people were actually doing what he said.
He watched the crowd disperse.