“What’s going on here?” Elke said after a while. “All these people running around, that hole in the wall back there...”
“This place is under attack of some kind,” said Kiran. “Check out all the gas masks.” She tapped her throat.
It took a moment before Elke realised what Kiran was referring to, but once she saw, it was hard to believe she’d not noticed before. Nearly every person had a narrow band of cloth around their neck, fastened into a sort of rolled knot in the hollow of their throat.
“Those are gas masks?”
Kiran shot her an amused glance. “Strangeside version, yeah. They stretch up.” She tugged the collar of her shirt up over her mouth and nose to demonstrate. “Pretty effective, even against spores.”
Now that she thought back, Elke realised that many of the people in the city outside had worn similar neckwrappings, although those had been bulkier and more colourful.
“I wonder if they plan to give us some,” she said uneasily, but before Kiran could answer, a disturbance drew their attention.
“Trench! Trench!” The call came from the far side of the hallway, and soon the chant was taken up throughout. “Trench! Trench!”
The energy of it touched even the prisoners, who sat up and tried to see what was going on.
A knot of people milled about a doorway, then broke apart, revealing an exceptionally large man, a glim, from his proportions. He looked rather like Mack Jack, with the same dark skin and broad shoulders, but there the resemblance ended.
This man walked as if he owned the place, acknowledging the shouts with a raised hand and a nod. His out-sized moustache and close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair seemed somehow familiar.
“Hey,” said Kiran. “Isn’t that the guy on the gate? Remember? The mosaic? They were hoisting his portrait up when we were going through...”
“That’s right.” Elke looked at him with interest. “But—he’s a glim, isn’t he? I thought, I mean—”
“It is odd, you’re right,” said Kiran. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a glim in authority over higher castes. But that guy’s clearly in charge here.”
The man had moved out of sight towards one of the tables, but his presence could still be felt. Everywhere, backs were straighter, and people looked more hopeful.
“He must be quite a character,” said Kiran. “I wonder who he is.”
A man at a nearby desk glanced over, shaking out fingers cramped by writing. “That’s Boqor Trench,” he said eagerly. “You’re right. Not many glims could do what he’s done. He’s one of a kind. Used to be a pugio can you imagine, a common pugio. Rose in the ranks. Brilliant man. Just brilliant.”
He caught the disapproving eye of a fellow worker at a nearby desk and shot a wry smile at Elke and Kiran before turning back to his work.
“Mell. And Javiero.” Esseret Sadh was back with his list, and Mell and Javiero rose to follow him.
“I wish they’d just get it over with,” said Kiran, and Elke had to agree. The waiting was starting to wear on her.
She closed her eyes, trying to convince herself that she could catch some sleep.
A shout rang out. Elke sat up again, trying to see the source of the disturbance. People had turned towards a screened-off area not too far away. Another shout, and a screen fell clattering, revealing Javiero, face flushed, eyes wide, hands gesturing at the woman who faced him over her desk. Before Elke could draw a breath, several guards materialised around Javiero and hauled him back.
One of the guards had something in his hand, something like a giant stapler. He grabbed Javiero around the neck and brought the thing up, apparently trying to press it to his shoulder. Javiero struggled, shouting, kicking, spit flying from his open mouth. The guard lost his balance. The stapler-thing connected to Javiero’s head. It clacked, and his entire body stiffened before he slumped in his captors’ grasp.
The guards, after an angry exchange, hauled away the limp body. People were talking again, and in a moment, everything was as it was before.
Elke sat staring, feeling sick. What had just happened? It seemed impossible that she’d just watched a man being— Being killed, surely? They’d dragged him away like a side of meat.
The woman Javiero had been yelling at straightened her papers and smoothed back her hair.
“Did they just—” Elke swallowed dryly. “Did he— What the hell!”
Kiran squeezed her knee wordlessly, then looked up as Esseret Sadh came towards them again.
“You,” Sadh said, nodding at Elke.
“What just happened?” Elke rose to her feet.
Sadh avoided her gaze. “Unfortunate,” he said. “Please come with me, and we’ll get this part over with.”
Elke suppressed an urge to grab the man and shake him. She followed him to the same desk that Javiero had just disrupted, her heart still beating a little too fast.
“Veraart,” Sadh said, handing a bundle of papers to the woman. She was middle-aged, with a round, jowly face and severe black hair. Nothing about her suggested that she’d just seen a man killed within reach of her chair.
“Veraart,” she repeated, thumbing through a pile of papers. “Ah. Da.” She looked up at Elke with keen blue eyes. She rattled off several sentences, which Esseret Sadh translated.
“This is Sebet Donnely,” said Sadh. “She is in charge of making sure that we capture all the necessary information about you, and ensure you are correctly sorted.”
Donnely looked down at the form as she asked a question. “You are from Serrago?” Sadh translated.
Elke had a blank moment, then remembered Jinan saying that this was the strangeside name for the Real.
“Yes.”
Donnelly made a mark with her pen and asked another question. Elke recognised one word—Kaapstadt.
She’s asking where I’m from. “Don’t you already know all this stuff?” The words were out before she could bite them back.
Donnely looked up from the form, her eyes cold. Esseret Sadh shot Elke a warning glance.
“We already got processed.” Elke gestured at her chin tattoo. “Don’t you already know all this information?”
Donnelly snapped a sentence at Sadh, and Elke could guess what it was. “What is she saying?”
Sadh reluctantly translated Elke’s words, and Donnelly spat out several more phrases.
“All our systems are designed with multiple redundancy to avoid error,” translated Sadh as Donnely complacently patted the forms. “That means that they ask you questions more than once. And really,” he added in an undertone, “I know it’s aggravating, but it’s best not to pull any kind of attitude with these people. They’ll truly give you hell.”
Donnely repeated her Kaapstadt question, unruffled.
“You are from Kaapstadt,” translated Sadh. “Is that correct?
“Yes. I am from Kaapstadt.” Elke bit off the answer. She knew that Sadh was right, but she was tired, angry, and frightened, and never coped well with being pushed around. She found herself missing Meisje painfully, yearning for the comforting pressure of the gardag’s flank against her leg, or the way she used to nudge her nose into Elke’s hand when she sensed that her mistress was upset.
“What work did you do there?”
Bit by bit, Donnely worked her way through Elke’s life, noting down her level of education, the languages she could speak, the list of jobs she’d done throughout her life. Elke’s remembered Sadh’s earlier warning and answered as completely as she could. It went against the grain, but she had to use whatever advantages she had.
Donnely was particularly interested in Elke’s experience as a mechanic, specialising in small engines. And when Elke mentioned her work as a gardag handler, she looked up at her, blue eyes unblinking. “Gardags. Bio-engineered dogs? You worked with those?” Sadh translated.
“That’s my job.”
“Was your job,” Sadh translated. Donnelly’s tone was flat but not unkind. She made another note. “You’ve had you
r medical examinations,” translated Sadh, “so we won’t waste time on that. You’ve had the jab, so that should take care of most problems.”
“The jab?” Elke asked Sadh while Donnely was distracted making rapid notes and straightening the pages. Elke couldn’t help noticing the quality of the paper—thick, smooth, crisp-looking pages, nothing like the matted grey of the recycled stuff that passed for paper in the Real.
“They gave you an injection, didn’t they? Just when you arrived?” Sadh touched his wrist.
Elke remembered the biosuit, somebody pressing something against her wrist, the stab of pain, and the way it had made her arm throb and itch. She nodded.
“Show me your wrist.”
Elke extended her hand, noticing for the first time a small, perfectly circular scab on the inside of her wrist.
“That’s it,” said Sadh. “The jab stops all the worst infections and diseases, but we’ll be keeping an eye on you for the next two weeks. There’s sometimes a delayed reaction. You must report any symptoms. Swelling at the jab site, headaches, that kind of thing.”
“Esseret.” Donnely raised her voice, and Esseret Sadh stepped closer to the desk. Donnely pulled a piece of tape from a dispenser and fed it into a contraption clamped to the edge of the desk. She moved a lever, repositioned the tape, and moved the lever again. The tape emerged, printed in strangeside script. It was stiff and snapped back into a curve as Donnely handed it to Esseret Sadh.
“That’s your temporary number.” Sadh slid the tape around Elke’s upper arm, tugging it firmly into place. “You won’t get any food without a number, so better not lose it. Come.” He led Elke on, deeper into the hallway.
“This is good,” he muttered to her as they went along. “You’re going to the slave-court. If they were culling you it would be straight to medical. You’re okay for the moment, as long as you do what you’re told and don’t cause a ruckus like that young man did.”
He was a step ahead of her, so she couldn’t see his face, but there was something weary in his voice.
Not the first time he’s seen a killing, Elke decided. “What about my other friends?” she asked as urgently as she dared. “Where are they? What is going to happen to them? Noor—the girl—”
“We do what we can.” Sadh didn’t look at her as he spoke. “But we have to work between the cracks.”
Before Elke could respond, he was talking to another guard, handing him a slip of paper and indicating Elke. The guard took Elke by the arm, and before she could say anything else, she was being hurried away down yet another corridor.
¤¤¤
The guard led Elke up some steps, then down again, along an increasingly narrow passage that turned and curved until she was quite confused as to what direction they were going. She tried accessing her internal map display but it was still completely blank. Whatever damage had been done to it seemed to be permanent.
The way became rougher, with stone floors, and walls covered in a thick, chalky substance very much like whitewash. They climbed again, a narrow staircase as steep as a ladder, and then a corridor that ran along a row of cells, each one screened in with metal mesh.
The opposite wall dropped away to become a low parapet, topped by metal bars through which Elke caught glimpses of yet another courtyard. This one was ringed around with walkways, each one caged in metal bars, floor by floor all the way from the paved ground level to the top of the encircling walls.
The air was musty with the scent of stewing offal, wood smoke, and the tang of unwashed bodies. A sea-breeze ruffled Elke’s hair, and she became aware of a rumbling, hushing rhythm that could only be the sound of breaking waves.
Voices rose from the courtyard, but before Elke could get a look at the crowd below, the guard steered her down another stairway, this one steep and slippery, so that she was rather glad of his grip on her arm.
The sound of the crowd grew as they descended. At the bottom of the stair the guard banged on a metal-reinforced door. A bolt rasped, and the door swung open. Two large men looked round as the guard pushed Elke through, and the door closed behind her.
Elke eyed the men warily. One of them gestured for her to raise her hands, and they patted her down. The search was cursory, and when it was over, they gestured for her to move on.
Down on ground level the courtyard felt much bigger and much more crowded than it had looked from the walkway. Out of habit, as she did whenever she was stepping into potential danger, Elke reached for her mindlink to Meisje and once again the she felt the gardag’s absence keenly.
The place was crowded with slaves. They milled around or sat on the sandy paving. Some were washing clothes in the water troughs, some crouched over dice games, and some just stared blankly ahead of them. Not far away, two men and a woman were going through the slow-motion steps of an elaborate, stylised fight-routine, surrounded by a loose crowd of appreciative onlookers who jeered and shouted suggestions.
Everyone had the slave-marks tattooed on their chins.
A few people turned to see Elke enter, but she avoided making eye contact. She didn’t want to provoke a challenge in this unfamiliar place.
“Hey!”
Somebody waved at her from beyond the crowd that circled the fighters. “Hey! Elke!” It was Mell, pushing her way through the onlookers, ignoring their disgruntled looks. “You made it. Great. You’re okay.”
Mell patted Elke on the shoulder and looked her over as if she expected to see visible damage. “Come. We’ve got ourselves a little spot over there.”
She led Elke to where Betina was sprawled in a patch of sunlight near one of the walls.
“Kiran not with you?” asked Betina.
“No,” said Elke. “You guys know what happened to Noor? Or Jinan? Any of the others?”
“Sorry, no. Sit.” Betina patted the ground next to her, but Elke remained standing. Tired as she was, she wanted to see as much as she could of this place.
“You found out anything yet?” she asked. “What they plan to do with us?”
“Not really.” Mell settled herself down next to Betina. “This place is hell of a cliquey, I’ll tell you that. We tried to get a drink from that trough over there but apparently we’re not high enough in the local pecking order.” She pulled a sour face. “Some of these guys are real sweethearts. Kill you as soon as look at you. That one over there, I mean, just look at him.”
She jerked her head to indicate a man who sat on the edge of the nearby water trough. He was sharpening a long, wicked-looking knife and was dressed, like his companions, in leather body-armour. They all had the relaxed but lazily alert attitude of professional fighters.
“Better stay away from that lot,” Elke said, and Betina grunted in agreement.
Elke leaned against the wall and tried to focus. It was time to take inventory of everything she knew about this place. Any plans they might make would succeed or fail, based on how accurately they observed their surroundings.
From what she’d seen so far, the Carsera had been dug out rather than built. Each of the courtyards seemed to have been carved out of the surrounding mountain. Corridors tunnelled between the courtyards, and many rooms and hallways had been hollowed out. As a result, the corridors and rooms were not laid out in any kind of grid but curled and curved and fit into one another unpredictably.
This organic layout would make any attempt to escape doubly difficult. And if they did manage to get out of the Carsera, there was the city outside, with all its unknown challenges. Beyond the city was the semi-desert they’d seen from the train, and from the sound of it, the other side was guarded by the sea.
The courtyard—Sadh had called it the slave-court—was taller, or deeper, than the one at the entrance of the Carsera. Here and there, thick vines crept up the walls. Up high, the vines interlaced the overhanging branches of trees and shrubs that grew on the top of the mountain. Elke eyed the vines thoughtfully. They looked more than strong enough to bear her weight. It would be quite a climb, all
the way up to the top, but not impossible.
If you’re desperate. But there must be a catch; it seemed too obvious an escape route.
What else had she learnt?
If Kiran was right then the city was under attack of some kind. Those ashy patches she’d spotted from the train, the gas masks, and the broken wall all pointed to that fact. There seemed to be many soldiers about as well, and then there was the way the people had behaved at the station—their hastily packed possessions, the fearful way they’d demanded to be let onto any train that might be leaving the city.
Even here, in the slave-court, things seemed unsettled. People milled about as if they didn’t know quite where they belonged, and there was an air of tension that sparked her nerves.
As she watched, a skinny young man stumbled as he walked past the leather-clad group at the water trough—had he been tripped? A woman with a leather skullcap grabbed him roughly, spun him about, and sent him stumbling into the dust with a well-aimed kick.
Nobody else so much as looked as the man picked himself up, dabbing at his bruised chin.
Elke continued her inventory. From what she’d seen, the cells that lined the walkways around the slave-court had the look of long, continual use and were still occupied, presumably by slaves. There were shelters in the slave-court too, but only temporary structures, shacks and tents that had clearly been put up in a hurry, and recently.
The only exception was a stack of cargo-cans like the ones in the Babylon Eye. They were piled high, and overgrown with vines, so must have been in place for years.
“Hey.” Betina sat up. “Isn’t that your friend?”
She was right. Kiran stood at the entrance to the slave-court, alert, and poised as a cat that had just dropped on all four feet.
“Here,” Elke called, waving.
“You guys all made it, huh,” Kiran said when she reached them. “You haven’t seen Noor?”
“No,” said Elke. “I tried to ask—”
“Gwaah!”
They all turned at the sound. A man was stalking up to them, a bald, round-headed man with eyes like raisins sunk in dough. He was flanked by two others, younger, but with the same solid look about them. He snarled out a sentence in some strangeside dialect but Elke didn’t need to understand the language to get the message.
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