Watcher's Web

by Patty Jansen

  The only Pengali here were the turquoise-clad type, who moved like silent ghosts, bustling, carrying things, wheeling trolleys.

  Then houses made way for larger buildings, two or three storeys high, external stairs going up to higher levels, with galleries, and colourful displays in open façades. Shirts and dresses hanging on racks. Shawls or sarongs folded up on shelves. Cushions of all shapes and sizes, rolls of fabric stacked up to the ceiling.

  The smell of food drifted from a shop where people sat at tables and chairs. It could have been a café in an exotic place on Earth, until a Pengali wove between the tables carrying a basket-like tray crammed with bristly-skinned fruit that had been cut open, scooped out, and filled with red and green spotted leaves.

  Soldiers in twos or threes guarded every corner. They stood rigid at their posts; their eyes didn’t miss a single movement in the street. Most citizens ignored them, walking past stone-faced. A Pengali, carrying a sack on his shoulder, spat on the ground. Equally stone-faced, one of the soldiers unslung his crossbow and slipped it into the crook of his arm. His hand tensed and with a metallic click that caused some women to gasp, an arrow unfolded from the magazine. The soldier held the weapon aimed at the old man while he shuffled down the street, ignoring the weapon. When he had gone, the soldier made the arrow disappear into the magazine again.

  The street opened out into a large open square, a desolate and empty place with cracked and uneven pavement. Directly opposite, behind a line of bushes, the land fell away. Jessica spotted glimpses of marshland. To the right were huge trees with market stalls underneath their overhanging branches.

  Behind them, a two-storey building stood half-sheltered by giant pink-flowered trees. A wall surrounded the complex, crumbling where the roots of the trees had worked their way into the brickwork, bulging from cracks like varicose veins.

  An opening in the wall led to the entrance, where a glass dome, many of the panes missing, protruded above the building’s roof. On the first floor, to the left of the entrance, a large window looked out over the square.

  Iztho grumbled, “That’s the Barresh Exchange. See what a disgrace it is?”

  Yes, Jessica saw that. The centre section with its large window was the only part of the building that looked in any kind of habitable condition. In the wings to the left and right, windows glared like empty holes, the glass absent or broken. Walls were weather-eaten, pock-marked with what looked suspiciously like bullet-holes. Crowning the walls, exposed roof beams pointed up at the sky like dead fingers.

  “That place made the mistake that brought us here?”

  He nodded, his face grim. “We don’t want to go in there, or anywhere near the council until we’re convinced they are going to believe what we’re telling them you are. They’re going to deny everything about their mistake.”

  “But how does it work, if the building’s here and we crashed all the way in the forest?”

  “The craft are transferred to a point above the city, supposedly outside the atmosphere, but that clearly didn’t happen with us. The network requires a three-point check: one each from the on-ground nodes, like in this building; and one from the aircraft. If the Network doesn’t get a legitimate response from both the receiving node and the craft, it shouldn’t translocate. That’s the simple version of the story. The fact that this has happened is an outrage. I’ll make sure that the Barresh council won’t be allowed to cover it up, but only once we’re out of here, when you’re safe. I wonder how many other wrecks are in that forest.”

  They crossed the square to the line of bushes. There was a gate, where four soldiers stood guard. One soldier opened it to let Jessica and Iztho through.

  They came to a wide expanse of weed-dotted land on which stood a single aircraft, velvet black, like a crouching panther. Two red lights blinked on the wing tips, which nearly touched the ground. A line of oval portholes ran from the front wraparound window to the tail section, where broad flanges looked like exhaust outlets. The door was open.

  16

  JESSICA GULPED and stopped. “Where are we going? Where are you taking me?”

  If he thought she was coming in that thing, he would have to think again. She would agree to nothing unless she fully understood it.

  His blue eyes met hers. “Do you have a single trusting bone in your body? I told you we need to make you act the part of a lady.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Nowhere. Do you think I’d risk my licence by going off without a permit?”

  “I don’t know about permits. You don’t tell me anything.”

  “And you would do well to accept what you’re given once in a while.” There was that accusing finger again.

  She was going to say You don’t give me anything, but that wasn’t true at all. He wasn’t giving her some information she dearly wanted to know, but he had explained how he wasn’t free to share everything. He could just as easily have left her to fend for herself with the Pengali. He didn’t really need to take any risks for her. He was right. She wasn’t a lady; she was a mangy dog expecting a kick. Crawling under the table, but positioning her teeth so she could inflict the most painful bite possible when the foot came again.

  She’d built a shell for herself that looked like a tough cowgirl on the outside, but the armour was close to breaking and inside she was a mess. If she wasn’t human, then why did she feel so much pain?

  He stopped at the door of the craft. Sunlight made his hair glow like gold.

  “It is a truly poor place where you’ve grown up. I hope to show you that there are places where someone’s word is just that: his word. I promised I would help you, and no matter how stubbornly and stupidly you behave, I will do just that.”

  He opened a panel next to the open door. At the press of a button, plates of black metal unfolded from the recess and fashioned themselves into steps.

  A gust of wind blew Iztho’s hair across his face. His rings glittered in the sunlight as he raked it back and gestured for her to go inside. Like a gentleman holding open the door to a lady. His expression, though, said otherwise; he hated her, with good reason. She’d behaved like a brat.

  Jessica felt dreadful.

  She climbed the steps and plunged into semidarkness of the aircraft’s cabin, a single space the size of a small room. When her eyes had adjusted, she saw control panels, blank screens, dials and other instruments on a panel that looked like the craft’s controls. A red light blinked every two seconds or so.

  A table surrounded by a semicircular bench and padded seats, bolted to the floor, was directly opposite the entrance. Cupboards, made of what looked like dark-coloured wood, lined the walls, their glass doors showing stacks of documents, small boxes and instruments, all individually strapped to the shelves with neat ties threaded through golden eyelets and secured with gold clasps.

  Iztho opened a door, slid the cloak from his shoulders and hung it on a hook inside.

  “Is this all yours?”

  “Yes.” He crossed to the table and set something down: a flat, tile-like object. “And before you accuse me of having known that we would end up here in advance: I had a member of my staff bring it here.”

  He slid in the seat opposite her.

  “Now, firstly, you’ll need to at least pretend you can speak to me in my own language. That is Mirani. I don’t suppose you have ever heard of it.”

  “No.”

  He slid the tile-like object towards him, pressed the corner and pushed it back to her.

  It was a screen of some sort, like a tablet, but much thinner and more flexible.

  Two black characters, if the assembly of circles, lines and triangles could be called that, occupied the centre of the light blue background. He shook his finger, the Pengali signal for no, and he said “Doi.” Then he touched the screen, where a single character appeared. He made the Pengali hand signal for yes, the downward movement of the hand, and said, “Eni.” A different character appeared on the screen.


  “Repeat this until you remember.”

  Geez, this guy didn’t muck around.

  Jessica had no idea how much time had passed when she stretched and looked up from the screen. The brightness of sunlight that fell in through the window and hit the craft’s instrument panel made her squint. On the other side of the window, the wind stirred clumps of weeds dotted over the expanse of barren land that was the airport. God, she had a headache.

  “Keep working.” He spoke Mirani. The screen translated, but she didn’t need the translation anymore. He had said it so often that the patterns in the text almost jumped at her.

  He sat on the opposite side of the table, keeping her company as she worked at his screen. A carpet of yellow cards spread out before him. He held a thin pen, with which he wrote out characters in immaculate precision. A jar with three more such pens stood on the table.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  He grumbled, “In Mirani.”

  Jessica clenched her teeth and repeated in Mirani. “I’m hungry.”

  “Have you finished?”

  Jessica glared at the rows of sentences, verbs, nouns and conjugations that filled the screen. Whenever she completed one exercise, the next one appeared. It was never-ending. “I think I’ve finished.”

  “I think you can do a few more pages. My younger brother did better than that in most of his language courses.”

  Jessica clamped her jaws. What did she care about his younger brother? The man was a slave-driver. In one morning, she had learned more Mirani than she had learned Japanese in four years of study. But all right, if he wanted to be stubborn, she could be stubborn, too. She returned to her work.

  Give ten examples: .

  Her fingers danced over the lower half of the screen, where she had long since become accustomed with the circles, angles, dots and lines that made up the Mirani alphabet, and the combinations of those that formed syllable-characters. There was an advantage to being naturally good at learning other languages. She squinted against the screen’s soft glow, letting lines flow through the text. The patterns weren’t quite as strong as they had been this morning—she was tired indeed—but still clear enough to be visible to her. In angry keystrokes, she typed out the sentences, murmuring them to herself. Gammari . . . jimara . . . talin. . . . Gammari . . . dolo . . . palin . . . Gammari . . . jimara—

  A clunk on the wooden tabletop made Jessica gasp. Iztho rose from his seat, his face set in a scowl. “Is there a less childish way to make your point?”

  “I tried. I think I learn enough today.”

  “Learned.”

  “Learned!”

  He dragged the screen across the table. With an experienced touch of this thumb, he flicked back through the pages Jessica had completed. His light blue eyes moved as he read each page, and although he said nothing, he gave a tiny nod each time he progressed to the next page, and the next one, and the next one. Finally he rose, flicked the curtain of hair back over his shoulder and retrieved his cloak.

  “In all honesty, I should tell you that my younger brother scored very rare perfect results in his Trader exams. And he already had a basic knowledge of the languages he learned.”

  Jessica balled her fist under the table. Ha—he was impressed; he was just too stubborn to admit it. And somehow the look on his face was worth more than all the praise she had ever received at school. Because no one at school had ever told her that her work wasn’t good enough. At primary school, she’d pretended to be working, while secretly sending out coils of mist trying to find out who had a crush on whom. Now, in the last years of high school, she was doing subjects not due until next year, but the teachers let her set her own pace. The teachers couldn’t keep up with her. They kept telling her they had no more study material for her, and she was bored.

  So—right. Bring it on. She would learn his language as quickly as she could. She would learn to be a lady, and whatever other challenges he dreamed up. Because she would not let herself be shown up by this arrogant arsehole.

  But the afternoon was long. She supposed it would be, if the day was twenty-eight hours, but it felt like time had crawled to a stop. Even though there was some sort of cooling system going, the door was open, and hot humid air wafted into the cabin.

  Jessica was tired, and when she rested her head in hands she must have dozed off.

  The sound of a door creaking. Soft footfalls on the floor.

  She hadn’t seen any threads, or mist, but somehow, she was in Daya’s mind again.

  He lay on a bed in a dark room. A thin strip of light fell in through a crack of a door which stood ajar. Something shuffled nearby.

  What the. . . ?

  He pushed himself up.

  Firelight edged the rug and the blankets on his bed in gold.

  No one.

  Daya jumped up, throwing off his blankets, and went into the hall.

  His footsteps echoed hollow in the staircase, the walls only lit by the glow of the fire above. The downstairs hall lay deserted; the large metalwork door was closed. Daya moved up the latch and pushed.

  He couldn’t move it.

  What was this nonsense? Wait—he’d get someone to unlock the door.

  Taking the steps two at a time, Daya ran back up the stairs, grabbed his bag off the table, took out his reader, turned it on . . .

  A soup of grey and blue dots sizzled over the screen. The only other place he had ever seen this happen was inside the refugee camps, where scramblers prevented unauthorised Exchange access by camp inmates.

  His heart thudding in his throat, he walked to the window. Drifting snow lashed against panes set in their metalwork frame. None could be opened; the window had no ledge on the outside, and below was a three-storey drop to the ground.

  He ran to the bedroom, but the situation was the same there. Trapped. He sank down on the bed. How could he have been so stupid?

  Just as he sensed a person moving in the room, the figure lunged at him from behind. A hand closed over his mouth.

  Jessica jerked up. The rich interior of the aircraft came slowly into focus. Iztho was still working with his cards.

  She stared at the screen, but turned her concentration inwards.

  Who are you? Where are you? What can I do to help?

  There was no reply.

  17

  IZTHO STOPPED in the street and gestured. “The dressmaker.”

  In a shop on the right side of the street, lengths of fabric hung from beams suspended from the ceiling, waving like flags in a gentle breeze. Orange, bright pink, yellow, blue, red, the colours of an African market blended into a tropical tapestry of colour.

  A man in a flapping orange robe squeezed himself from the narrow aisle. He squinted against the light, chest a-glitter with chains and bangles. “Trader Andrahar!”

  Iztho spoke to the man in the local keihu, waving a hand at Jessica. The dressmaker’s eyes widened, then beckoned for Jessica to come forward, staring up at her as if she were some weird creature.

  “You . . . like . . . colours . . .”

  Guess he wanted to know which material she liked. In the shop, the smell of food from the street stalls mingled with a musty, organic scent. It was cramped in here, and she had to bend her head to avoid colliding with beams displaying lengths of fabric. What did she like? She ran her hand over one gaudy-coloured bundle after the other. Certainly not orange, or hot pink, bright yellow or translucent white. Against her white skin, most colours simply looked dreadful. She was hot, wanted a bath more than anything else, and she had always hated shopping. Especially clothes shopping.

  Then her attention fell on a shimmer of blue against the side wall: a silky fabric in the clearest of cobalt blues. She squeezed herself between two piles of bundles, and touched it. The fabric ran through her hands like satin. Rich, smooth, soft. She looked over her shoulder, where the dressmaker waited in the aisle.

  “I like this one.”


  Iztho pushed himself forward. “Allow me.” He pulled the fabric down from the beam and draped it over Jessica’s shoulder. He nodded, stepped back and nodded again. “That will do just fine.” He handed the bundle to the dressmaker, whose face contorted with the effort of suppressing a smile. At this, Jessica was convinced she had chosen the most expensive fabric in the shop.

  Iztho dumped an armful of fabric bundles next to the blue one. A soft yellow, a light blue woolly fabric, a satin black, a peach orange with tiny glittering drops, and a shimmering deep magenta, each one more exquisite than the other. “Do you like those, too?”

  “Yes.” Jessica wondered how from her choice of just one fabric, he had determined her taste. Maybe that was part of his profession. This man had many strange qualities. Being a faded hippie wasn’t one of them.

  He pointed out the fabrics one by one. “I’ll ask him to make a second dress, a tunic, a nightshirt, a warm overdress, underclothes . . .”

  Jessica didn’t like it. All this was going to be expensive, and she had no money or whatever these people used to pay. He had to expect something in return.

  The dressmaker pressed a few sheets of cardboard-like material in Jessica’s hands. Photographs, or some such thing. “You stay . . . we make dress—”

  Vivid lively colours showed three women walking in a treeless meadow bursting with flowers. Sunlight played in the women’s silken hair. In the background, a landscape of rolling hills stretched away under a stark turquoise sky. “Where is this?” she asked Iztho, although the women’s light-coloured hair made her think she already knew the answer.