by Joel Ross
“How about you?”
“A jibbering weirdo dragged me through a window.”
Sally clasped Ji’s hand and helped him stand. “You dragged yourself through a window?”
“Ha ha,” he said. “I met a—”
“Did you find Chibo?”
“No, I—”
“Oh!” Roz pointed to the wall. “Oh! Oh-oh! Oh!”
When Ji turned his head, his breath caught. A tapestry stretched across the wall. A true tapestry. A magic tapestry of brilliant reds and rich greens, sweeping silvers and obsidian blacks. For a moment, that was all that Ji saw: pure beauty, gorgeous colors.
Then the image snapped into focus, and he gasped. “Oh!”
“Oh!” Sally echoed. “Oh. My.”
“Whoa,” he breathed.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
“I mean,” he explained, “whoa.”
“Totally,” she confirmed.
“Indeed,” Roz summed up.
The tapestry showed the whole Summer Valley and bits of the lands beyond. The Coral Islands dotted a blue-green sea to the west of a rocky coast that rose into rolling farmland—except for one spot where the palace-topped mountain loomed, covered in buildings. The river flowed across the tapestry, branching eastward past Mirror Lake toward the ogre mountains. To the south, the salt flats stretched to the goblin mounds, and to the north, the cloud forest touched the bright snowlands.
“The known world,” Roz whispered, and spun a bronze cylinder attached to the edge of the tapestry.
“It’s amazing,” Ji said, his voice reverent. “It’s beautiful.”
“Imagine conquering all that,” Sally said.
As the cylinder whirled, the picture shifted until the coast was in the center. With every spin of the cylinder, the image changed: the palace-topped mountain shrank and the city faded into meadows and farms. Finally, all that remained was a village with thatched roofs and muddy streets, huddled behind a palisade of sharpened logs.
“This is history,” Roz said. “The tapestry is showing us the distant past. Now if I spin the cylinder in the other direction, time will move forward. . . .”
The image rippled until hundreds of tents covered the fields outside the palisade. Families in tattered clothes squatted around cook fires. Half of them wore ragged armor, and most wore slings and bandages.
“It’s showing us what it must’ve been like hundreds of years ago,” Roz said, her eyes shining. “Before the Summer Crown protected humanity from the rampaging hordes. This is what they faced. . . .”
The next time she spun the cylinder, the back of Ji’s neck prickled. Because dark shapes swarmed at the humans from the edges of the tapestry: creatures out of a nightmare, with claws and hooves and fangs.
The beasts struck the human defenders like an iron boot strikes a fat bullfrog. With a splat. The images on the tapestry were so detailed, so lifelike, that Roz turned away, while Ji peeked between his fingers.
Sally flinched but didn’t cover her eyes. “Spin it again, Roz! The knights will save them. They’ll cut through those monsters like war-wolves through a pumpkin pie.”
Ji’s disgust faded slightly at Sally’s words. War-wolves through a pumpkin pie?
“The knights didn’t save us,” Roz said, whirling the cylinder again. “Not that time. The Summer Queen saved us.”
“She was alive back then?”
“Not our queen. The first Summer Queen.”
In the center of the village, a lean woman with bronze skin and black hair stood on a platform beside a stone well. She was dressed like a forester, in leather leggings and a tightly wrapped tunic. An empty baby sling lay across her back.
Ji looked closer, but the tapestry didn’t show her boots.
“What happened to her baby?” Sally asked.
“Ogres,” Roz told her. “Or trolls.”
“She doesn’t look like a queen.”
“Not yet,” Roz said. “This shows her becoming the queen. She’s gathering magic from every single human. She’s absorbing enough power to defeat the beasts and save humanity.”
In the tapestry, dozens of people surrounded the woman. Soldiers held swords and spears while robed servants knelt before her, empty-handed. Roz spun the bronze cylinder, and time scrolled forward. The woman lifted her arms and—
Water rose from the well.
A river flowed upward into the air, then spread like a parasol over the woman. Her skin turned white, her hair turned silver. Then the water sprouted into a liquid tree, with a thick shimmering trunk splitting into branches.
“No way!” Ji felt himself smile. “Now that she’s got the magic, she’s going to make those creatures pay!”
“Holy guacamole.” Sally started to laugh—then gasped. “Wait! No! She’s too late!”
Monstrous faces and malformed figures appeared between the branches of the water tree. Shadows writhed, with clawed hands and horrible grimaces—and familiar robes.
“The servants!” Roz gasped. “They’re changing into beasts.”
“Must be ogre magic.” Sally tugged her bracelet. “The queen’s got to do something.”
And she did. She gestured again, and the entire village heaved upward, the earth stretching toward the clouds.
“She’s making the mountain,” Ji said, his voice soft. “She’s growing the mountain.”
“And she’s beating the beasts,” Sally said.
As the coastal village rose higher, branches of the water tree stabbed the half-human beasts, skewering first one, then two, then every single monster. Showing the moments when the first Summer Queen took all human magic into herself, then raised a mountain and destroyed the monsters. Protecting the humans, creating the realm.
When the bronze cylinder started whirling more slowly, the branches wove into a royal crown, which glinted with gold and gems. Then the tapestry stopped moving entirely, freezing on an image of the crown.
“Do it again!” Sally said, her eyes dancing. “Spin it again! Did you see the branches killing those beasts?”
Ji rubbed his shoulder. “I wonder what it’s worth.”
“It’s priceless! It’s awesome!”
“Tapestries are remarkable,” Roz said. “Although we must remember how they are woven.”
“By kids like Chibo,” Ji said, his excitement fading.
Sally frowned. “It’s woven with their blood. With their lives.”
“Right,” Ji said. “Let’s go.”
He led Sally and Roz down the hallway, following the moan of machinery. He pushed through a door and froze. Two women were strolling toward him, arguing about “threading heddles.” He panicked, his mind blank and his sandals rooted to the floor. Then he ducked his head, and the women walked past without looking at him: just another invisible servant.
A moment later, the women disappeared toward the tapestry room. Ji took a shuddering breath; then Roz and Sally slipped through the door to join him. Together, they headed into a hallway where a thum-thud-whack drummed and the floor trembled.
“The looms are close,” Ji said.
He opened the nearest door, and the stink of sheep smacked him in the face. Hundreds of bales of wool tightly packed a storeroom. He squeezed inside and peered down a narrow aisle toward the far wall.
“The noise is louder that way,” he said.
Sally climbed a few wool bales blocking the aisle. “C’mon.”
“I’ll wait here,” Roz said.
Ji followed Sally over the bales to three square iron doors at the other end of the room. When Sally tugged on one, it swung open on hinges at the bottom instead of the side. The thum-thud-whack burst into the room and a chute angled downward and—
Ji slammed the hatch closed, his heart pounding. “Loud.”
“Yeah,” Sally said.
“Sounds like the factory floor, though.”
He trotted back for Roz. “Climb over—there’s something on the other side.”
“So I heard.” Roz
started to follow—then paused. “A little privacy, if you please.”
“Oh! Right, sorry!”
He’d forgotten that Roz got shy about “improper behavior” that might get a governess fired—like climbing around in her dress. Ji didn’t really understand, but he didn’t need to understand. He looked away until Roz joined him. Then he led her to the hatches.
“I think the looms are at the other end of these,” he told her. “Through the chutes.”
Sally rubbed her face. “And so is Chibo.”
“Possibly,” Roz said.
Sally opened the hatch, and the thum-thud-whack thundered into the room again. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and started climbing into the chute. “No fear, no retreat.”
“Don’t be stupid!” Ji grabbed her arm. “There’s always fear—and we retreat if I say we retreat.”
“You—” Sally eyed him. “You’re coming?”
“Of course I am.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll chop your head off if I don’t,” Ji said, “and make me brush the stupid horses.”
“Just admit it,” she said. “You like my head.”
“Yeah, if only it didn’t have your mouth attached.”
“You’ll need this,” Roz yelled over the racket, pulling a length of twine from a wool bale. “To help you climb down. I’ll stand watch.”
Ji and Sally climbed into the hatch and slid down a chute that ended after five feet, at a panel made of stretched cloth, vibrating with the sound of the looms. Sally opened the panel, and the two of them tumbled down another five feet and smacked into an iron grate.
When Sally slid the grate aside, silence fell. Ji’s ears rang from the sudden lack of noise, which didn’t make any sense. How did the looms get quieter when he got closer?
He shrugged to himself, peered through the opening, and saw the factory.
A heap of wool bales rose on the floor ten feet below him—because the grate opened high in a wall. Across the room, massive wooden frames rose and fell, each stretched with brilliantly colored thread. A thousand shuttles zipped back and forth through sheets of half-woven fabric, and tree-trunk-sized posts turned huge wheels and an enormous fan.
Oh, and the air was filled with flecks of color. Floating, swirling color flakes like a blizzard of sunsets or a shredded rainbow.
Ji gaped at the churning colors. “Is that dye? Pigment?”
“I don’t know, but I think it’s soaking up the noise,” Sally said, because only a faint thrum sounded. “That’s why it’s quiet in here.”
“Magic,” Ji muttered. That explained how the looms were quieter when he got closer, and sounded loud again farther away.
The fan kept the colorful flecks blowing through the room, and an eddy of them drifted through the now-opened iron grate. Ji waved his hand in front of his face, and the pigments—if that was what they were—swirled and swooped.
“Ow!” Sally said, blinking.
“What?” Ji asked. Then his eyes starting burning. “Oh! It’s like getting soap in your eyes.”
“Ji!” She elbowed him. “Look!”
He followed her watery gaze beneath the looms. Threads plunged down from the frames, surrounding hundreds of kids working in rows beneath the tilting, clattering machines. With their heads shaved, and dressed in identical mud-brown tunics, the kids all looked the same. And they moved the same, too—with small, endlessly repeating motions as they tied knots, applied colors, and wrapped fabric around spindles.
Ji wiped tears from his eyes. The threads never stopped falling, the kids never stopped working, and two burly overseers patrolled the rows, wearing gauzy veils to protect their eyes from the swirling flecks of color.
“There,” Sally said, and pointed to a row of kids standing at spinning gears.
At first, Ji couldn’t tell which one was Chibo through the color-swirling air. Then an overseer strolled closer, and a little bald kid tilted his head. It was Chibo: braiding a thread onto his gear, then another, then another and another.
“We found him,” Ji said. “Now what do we do?”
“First I’m getting my brother,” Sally said, sticking her leg through the opening in the wall. “Then I’m getting a sword.”
22
JI PULLED HER back into the chute. “Wait!”
“No way,” Sally said. “I’m getting him right now.”
“You see those guards?”
“I’ll take care of them.”
“With what, Sal? They’re twice your size. And what about the threads?”
She wiped tears from her face. “What threads?”
“Those kids are woven in place,” he said. “Chibo is woven in place.”
“What are you talking about?” Sally looked closer . . . and her jaw tightened when she saw what he meant. “That’s evil.”
Threads were wrapped around the kids’ wrists and ankles in thick knots, roping them to the looms. Every time they moved, shuttles slid and gears turned and spindles bobbed. Ji felt a simmer of anger. A hundred kids, treated worse than servants—treated more like machines than people.
Sally took a shuddering breath. “I can’t leave him, Ji.”
“I know.”
“I’d rather be tied there beside him.”
Ji rubbed the sting from his eyes. “Yeah.”
“So what’re we doing to do?” she asked.
Ji frowned into the color-swirling air. “I don’t know. How about, um . . . okay. I’ll run and untie Chibo. I’m good with knots.”
“What about the guards?”
“They’ll leave when you and Roz make the distraction outside.”
“What distraction?”
“The big one,” he told her. “The huge one. The massive, earthshaking, tooth-quaking distraction that gets the guards called away.”
“Oh.” She peered at him. “Maybe I should untie Chibo, and you should think of a distraction. It’s dangerous down there.”
“Sally, if someone whacks at us with a lance, I’m hiding behind you. If we have to arm-wrestle a goblin, you’ll go first. But he’s woven into place with knots. Those are my job.”
“That’s not a boot, Ji.”
“Everything’s a boot when you’re a boot boy.”
She bit her lip. “Just be careful.”
“Don’t you mean ‘just be honorable’?”
“Shut up.” Sally shoved him with her shoulder. “Jerk.” She grabbed the twine and started climbing up the chute. “I’ll see you outside.”
“No, head to the town house,” he told her bum as she scooted higher. “They probably won’t notice I’m missing, but if we’re all gone for too long . . .”
“Okay,” she said. “See you there.”
“And throw me more rope!” he called after her.
A minute later, another length of twine tumbled down the chute and draped around Ji’s head. He tied it to the first length, then wiped tears from his cheeks, watched the guards, and waited for the distraction.
Ten minutes.
Twenty minutes.
Thirty minutes . . . and a striped flag flashed across the factory floor. One guard jerked in surprise. He grabbed the other guard, and they jogged from the room. Ji grinned to himself. He didn’t know what Sally and Roz had done as a distraction, but it must’ve been pretty massive and earthshaking.
“Those two really know how to quake some teeth,” Ji said.
He unraveled his double length of twine onto the factory floor, then jumped from the grate. He aimed for the heap of wool bales, which he expected to be as fluffy as a bunny rabbit made of smiles.
It wasn’t.
He hit hard, then did a little groaning and rolled onto the floor.
The floor wasn’t exactly soft, either.
When he caught his breath, he pushed to his feet and headed to the work floor, his side aching and his nerves jangly. The looms slammed overhead, like a thousand bear traps. He kept his gaze low, jogging through the colorful, swirling f
lakes. He slunk into a forest of threads, then slipped into Chibo’s row.
Up close, the kids still looked almost interchangeable, with shorn scalps and skinny faces. Attached to the loom like puppets. Ji only recognized Chibo from his rosebud mouth and his dark skin, more like Ji’s than Sally’s.
He stepped beside Chibo and murmured, “Stay quiet. We have to get out of here before—”
“Jiyong!” Chibo yelled. “It’s you! It’s you!”
“Chibo,” he hissed. “Quiet!”
“Hey, everyone, it’s Ji!” Chibo announced, shouting to be heard through the color flakes. “He’s here!”
“Would you shut up?”
“I told you he’d come, I told you!” Chibo clung tightly to Ji. “I knew you’d come, you and Sally.”
“She wanted to burst in with her sword swinging,” Ji told him. “But what do you mean, you knew? We didn’t know!”
“’Cause I’m smarter’n you are,” Chibo said, raising his smiling face.
The pigment in the air brought tears to Ji’s eyes . . . but there weren’t any tears on Chibo’s cheeks. And his eyes weren’t focused on Ji’s, either. He was looking slightly to the side, like he saw the basic shape of Ji’s face, but not the details.
“You’re mixing up ‘smarter’ and ‘shorter’ again,” Ji told him. “Let’s get you out of here.”
“Get us all out of here!” Chibo said.
Ji knelt to unravel the threads around Chibo’s ankle—and jerked in surprise. “There’s someone under here!”
A girl was sleeping in a cubby beneath Chibo’s place at the loom, her arms and legs jerking gently as the threads around her wrists and ankles moved.
“That’s Ximena,” Chibo said. “She works this station when I sleep. Then I work when she sleeps and—”
“Done!” Ji said, unwinding the last tendril from Chibo’s ankles. “Give me your hands.”
“Um, if you untie me—” Loops of thread spewed crazily from the gear in front of him. “That! That happens.”
“Who cares?” Ji said, starting on Chibo’s wrists. “The guards are gone.”
A bell dinged, shrill despite the colorful flecks. “Not all of them! Oh, badness. The overseer . . . he’s coming!”
“The overseer?” Ji murmured, desperately unknotting the last snarl around Chibo’s wrist while threads unspooled past his face.