Labyrinth Gate (17 page)

“I don’t think,” said Chryse in the barest whisper, “that the marriage has been consummated.”

Kate raised one eyebrow, disbelieving. “I thought he wanted an heir,” she replied in an equally quiet voice.

Chryse shrugged.

“Well.” Kate swept the deck into one pile and turned up three cards one by the next. “I can’t believe he has any scruples about her maidenly modesty. Now this pattern is called the Hinge. It can read the immediate future, or the central hinge of a life or work, or, if you know how to channel magic, work a spell. For instance, I could move you from one side of a room to the other. See, here it shows the Town Square and—” she paused, “well, this is a wasteland, but on the other side, the SACU side, it would be the Garden, hinged by the figure of the Beggar.”

“Move
you?” Chryse examined the three cards with immediate interest. “What do you mean?”

“Transportation,” replied Kate. “I’ve seen it done. But short moves, like from one end of a room to the other, nothing like the distance you and Sanjay must have covered to get here from Vesputia. It depends on how much skill you have at channeling the power of the cards, and how much power your deck itself has.” She looked up suddenly, examining Chryse’s face. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

Chryse looked a trifle sheepish. “No.”

“How can you
not
believe me?” Kate set the main stack of cards aside and pushed the tea things to the far end of the table. “I don’t have much skill, but these Gates are powerful. Now, let me see if I remember this.” She placed her hand, palm down, over the Beggar, and shut her eyes.

“Can you only work magic through the cards?” asked Chryse.

Kate opened her eyes and frowned. “True mages, who have studied, can use their arts in ways I can’t even comprehend. The Gates act as channelers, augmentation, and also help the unskilled tap into the source of power.
But,”
and she shut her eyes again, “one needs to concentrate.”

“Oh,” Chryse grinned. “I beg your pardon.” She folded her hands on her lap and waited.

Kate sat very still. Nothing happened. By the window, Maretha turned suddenly and walked back across the parlor to stand by Chryse.

“Do you see the runes on the cards?” she said in a low voice. Chryse bent forward to look. “There, in the Town Square, you can see what we would call the consonant ‘F’, hidden in the panelling in that doorway.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I believe,” continued Maretha, “that those runes, our letters now, are direct descendents of the writing of the Pariamne culture, although they would have had different values, different connotations, then. Unless my personal theory that the Gates themselves are also a relic from that time proves true. There is one tale in the Sais legends that explains how she bound power into the cards in an effort to save the city, which corroborates my idea, although one can’t take old myths as an accurate guide. But I’m doing some work to correlate the runes and the symbology embodied in each card as a way of translating the written language fragments that we have recovered.”

“Between the two of you,” said Kate, opening her eyes, “it is impossible to focus my mind at all.”

“Here.” Chryse leaned forward. “Let me try.” She placed her hand over The Town Square. “Now what am I supposed to do?”

Kate removed her hand from the central card. “Concentrate on the essence of the card. That’s why those who study magic are much more successful.”

“Well,” said Chryse, “since I have no expectation of success, I won’t be disappointed.”

Kate rolled her eyes, but said nothing.

Chryse lifted her hand to look at the card once again: a few buildings, a common green, a pond—the medieval version of the village they were in at this moment. Embedded in the fine tracery of the inn door’s panelling she made out a letter-like figure ‘F’.

Shutting her eyes, she tried to concentrate on the inn itself, the room they were in now, but her thoughts kept wandering back to that rune. She thought of faces in the windows of the buildings, of flowers growing up on the grass of the common, of the fluidity of the water in the pond.

That image stuck with her, the gentle lap of water on a gradual shore, the heavy lulling swell of deeper water, the smoothness of the water itself—She began to feel as if she could not catch her breath, as if she were running up a steep hillside or swimming many strokes.

A sudden gasp from Maretha startled her out of her concentration, and she opened her eyes.

Kate was gone.

Chryse looked up at Maretha. Maretha ran to the window and, with no warning, began to laugh. Chryse followed her.

There, in the middle of the village pond, sat Kate, immersed up to her shoulders. As they watched, she stood up. The water came over her knees.

By the time Chryse and Maretha arrived on the green, Kate had slogged her way out of the water and stood dripping and bedraggled on the grass that edged the pond. Her sodden clothes clung to her body. Chryse and Maretha, coming up to her, could not stop laughing, although they tried.

“Bloody hell,” swore Kate. Her coat, perfectly tailored, now stuck to her in creases. “I’ve never been so surprised in my life.”

“Oh, dear.” Chryse wiped a tear from her cheek. “I’m terribly sorry. I had no idea it would work. Oh, Kate, you do look funny.”

“Thank you,” replied Kate with a grand bow. Water dripped into puddles around her boots. She laughed. “Now I understand why I was the kind of child who was always getting broken bones and burns and bruises. However did you do it, Chryse?”

Chryse could only shrug, helpless. “I don’t know. I’m still not sure I believe it. Are you sure you didn’t just run out here while my eyes were shut and throw yourself in?”

Kate shook her head. “It isn’t a matter of belief,” she said, serious now. “It just is.”

“We’d better go in,” said Maretha. “People are staring.”

A few villagers had, indeed, gathered near the inn to look. But Chryse, touched by an instinct she could not name, looked only briefly at them. Instead she turned toward the wood that separated the village from the hulks of the factories. A path emptied onto the far side of the green between two cottages. A small figure stood there, poised on the edge of the trees.

“I would swear,” said Chryse slowly, “that I recognize that—” She began to walk away from the other two.

“Chryse!” Maretha called after her.

By its stature, it was a child, clothed in tatters, a little cap askew on its dark-curled head. Chryse went across the green as if drawn, vaguely aware of Maretha and Kate following in her wake. She knew she would see the pointed face and bright eyes before she was close enough to recognize them.

“Penny for a poor child,” it squeaked as she neared, then backed away as if it feared her presence.

“You recognize me, don’t you?” said Chryse.

The child retreated. “Just a penny,” it repeated. Its dark eyes glittered like glass catching the light of the sun.

“Chryse.” Kate’s voice, behind her. “I’m sopping wet. If you stop to interview every beggar child between here and our destination, I’ll never get changed.”

The child retreated up the path into the wood. Chryse followed.

“How on earth did you follow us here?” Chryse was walking faster now but coming no closer to the child. “I don’t believe this is chance.”

The child turned and ran. Chryse hiked up her skirts, gripping them tightly in one hand, and pursued.

“Chryse!” Maretha cried from behind, but Chryse was intent on her quarry.

She lost sight of the urchin once in a dim patch in the middle of the wood, but a glimpse of cloth, a quick movement, caught her attention and she ran again. By the time she came out of the wood she was out of breath and had to stop.

The child, halfway down a long slope, paused to look back up at her. But Chryse’s attention had gone past the urchin, focussing on the ugliest building she had ever seen.

It was a huge, hulking block. Tiny windows pierced dark walls in layers, demarcating three stories. Smokestacks jutted upward at all corners, spouting fumes and dark smoke into an already overcast sky. A high, grim fence encircled the vast structure. A single gate, one carriage wide, allowed access. In bold, iron letters over the archway, she read:
Crudebelch’s Mattress Works.

The child ran down to the fence, slipped through a gap in the metal railings, and disappeared through a tiny door into the interior.

“What in bloody hell!” Kate startled Chryse as she came up beside her. “What was that all about?”

“I’m going after that child.” Chryse started down the slope. “I saw that child twice in Heffield. It can’t be coincidence to see it here, too.”

“Good Lady,” swore Kate, squelching along behind her. “You’re not going in
there,
are you? I hope Maretha finds the men soon. I think you’ve gone off your head.”

“I think,” Chryse muttered as they came down to the gap in the fence, “that I’ve been dreaming a very long and complicated dream for the last four months. Can you squeeze through here?”

“Why should I want to? Chryse, respectable gentlewomen do not traipse unescorted through factories.”

“Kate, I only see you and me here. Come on.”

Much struck by this point, Kate followed without a word.

The ground surrounding the factory was red clay, packed down by much traffic, though now they saw no one at all. Behind the building, winding away into a hazy distance of fields and woods, lay a small river. A constant racket swelled from the factory in counterpoint to the fumes spewing out above.

“I’ll never get clean,” said Kate cheerfully as dust dulled the black sheen of her bootleather. “And my skin’s beginning to chafe.”

“You can go back.” Chryse stopped in front of the door through which the child had disappeared. Heavy iron bands ribbed the stained and cracked wood; the door hung slightly ajar.

“And miss an adventure? Oh, no.”

Chryse, with her hand on the door, paused. “Are there trespassing laws here?”

Kate regarded Chryse for a moment with a puzzled look. “Some upstart mushroom of a factory owner wouldn’t dare charge you or me with any crime. And if they did dare, the appearance on the scene of a peer of the realm would—” She moved her hand across her throat in a cutting, final gesture.

“Oh, yes.” Chryse pushed the door slowly open. “I’d forgotten about that.”

They stepped into a vast cavern of a room crowded with dozens of square machines twice human height. Chryse’s first sensation was of overwhelming heat. Her second, of an incessant racket of moving parts that in a strange juxtaposition of sense drowned out, obliterated, the human figures who worked beneath and around the machines. For a long moment she simply stared. Beside her, Kate swore, seemingly under her breath, though for all the noise she might well have been shouting.

“This way,” shouted Chryse, pulling Kate to the left.

They hurried down an aisle of machines. Men, women, and children stood hunched over clacking teeth and huge webs of tight fabric. Sweat shone on thin faces, trickled down bare arms, pooled in stains around bare feet. The din made by the machines made speech impossible.

At the end of the aisle a door shut slowly, as if someone had just gone through, leaving it to swing closed. Chryse tugged Kate to it.

They entered a second room, larger than the first. As the door shut behind them the noise level dropped, but it was also, as if to compensate, considerably hotter. Chryse felt sweat begin to permeate the back of her dress.

Huge structures, like looms, filled the room floor to ceiling. There were no windows, only flickering, sooty gaslight to illuminate the work. Women with drooping shoulders ran bolts of thick thread across the fronts of the machines. Higher up, hidden behind growing nets of fabric, smaller figures could be seen, like ghosts moving amongst the workings.

“This is awful,” said Chryse.

Not fifty feet from them, a slender girl swayed and fell in a faint at the base of her work station. The girls on either side of her looked hurriedly around and dragged her back up, shaking her until her eyes opened again. The loom clattered on, and thread began to tangle.

A shout, and a broad-shouldered, hairy man appeared at the end of the aisle.

“Come on,” Kate said.

“But that girl—”

“Come on.”

They hurried to the next aisle, and the next.

“There!” cried Chryse. A tiny figure in tattered clothes scurried away up one of the aisles. They followed, though there was scarcely enough room between the workers, the machines were crowded so closely together, to squeeze through.

The room seemed to stretch on forever, aisles branching into dimmer aisles of massive cacophonous machinery that dwarfed the fragile human figures tending it.

“I’m lost,” said Kate eventually.

Chryse stopped, panting. She was now as thoroughly soaked as Kate looked in those places where the cloth of her dress touched her body. Swatches of her skirt clung to her legs. “This is a maze. How do these people find where they work? There!”

And they were off again, coming at last to a far wall and a door, ajar.

“I hope you know where you’re going,” said Kate as Chryse laid a hand on the doorlatch.

“No,” admitted Chryse. “But I have a distinct feeling someone else does.”

They came into a hall. It was empty, narrow, and dark, seeming tomblike and cold in contrast to the room before. It led straight on into dimness. Torches hung at long intervals along the wall, but they gave off little light. There was no sign of the beggar child.

Chryse shrugged, starting forward. “There is only one way.”

The hall seemed to extend forever, as if it pierced a straight line into the heart of the factory. Their footsteps scarcely sounded on the hard floor.

At last the corridor branched to the right and ended in a small door. Chryse unlatched it and pushed it open.

They came into a small chamber, silent except for the labored breathing of four children chained to a block of metal embedded in the center of the room. Tubes led out from it in four directions, like the vessels of a mechanical heart.

Each child perched on a high stool on one side of the block, bent over a flat surface where they laid down and picked up in an unceasing circle the cards of a deck of Gates. With their cropped hair and emaciated faces, it was impossible to tell whether they were boys or girls. One was not even human: it had the pointed face of the Heffield urchin, but its eyes, like the other children’s, had the dull languor of terminal illness. The youngest of the children could not have been more than five. Each bore, on its right ankle, a manacle appended to a chain that fastened into the metal square.