Reclamation (21 page)

Ceramic pots stood in the ashes at the edge of the fires. Cor snagged a red clay bowl off a table she passed and dipped it into the nearest jar to shovel out a helping of porridge, mushrooms, and overcooked chicken meat. She glanced over the jar, looking hopefully for a flat dish of baking bread, but didn’t see any. She sighed at the porridge. It’d keep her from starving, but not do much more than that. Even the Nobility kept barely at a subsistence level in the time when there was more day than night.

She thought about Raking Coals, who brought his sledge in every tenth day and kept asking her what price she set her own hands at with a broad wink and a happy leer. And the Oilbrake sisters, who carried fifty-pound sacks of grain on their backs when their pair of oxen went lame and still whistled at the stable boys who crossed the courtyards. And the Notouch daughters who scrambled this way and that in the courtyard, grabbing up the feathers that came down like snow when the house’s Bonded sat on the roof and plucked chickens.

It was a filthy, hard, stupid life, and if the Vitae got hold of them, it would vanish.

And if the Family gets hold of them?
Cor dropped onto the bench and stuck her fingers into her bowl, shoving the food into her mouth before it went cold.

She’d been sent down with the team when the Unifiers still thought these people were Family. She’d hunkered down and learned the language and the customs and made friends as fast as she could. She learned to tell jokes and to laugh at them. She learned to pitch in with the work of the Bondless and to defer to the Teachers and the Nobility. She could recite the Words of the Nameless in the Temple on the tenth day and navigate using nothing but the walls around her. She’d deliberately set out to find anything and everything she could admire and respect about the culture. It was her job. She’d trained for it specially for years.

Then the word came down. These weren’t Family. These people were artificially created. Nothing like this had ever been found before. New policy would have to be formulated as soon as the extent of the engineering could be understood.

Policy? She scowled at her bowl and her porridge-spattered fingers. Jay’s voice had been flat and unquestioning when he delivered the message. As if there could be any policy for this world except getting them some decent food and a way to keep warm and dry through a twenty-year winter. These people who worked and starved and slaved and still sang and loved and told really, really obscene jokes.

Behold the noble savage,
she thought grimly.
Cor, Cor, Cor. They’re dirty and ignorant and so enslaved to their superstition that they don’t even know what they’re standing on top of. Come out of it, woman. It’s a raw deal, of course, but the worst the Family does’ll be better than the best the Vitae’ll do.

Cor scooped up another mouthful of porridge.

Of course it will.

A sharp ringing in her ear made her jerk and Cor nearly sent her bowl crashing to the floor. After a moment she realized it was her translation disk. She balanced her bowl in her dirty hand and tapped the disk twice.

“Cor, Jay,” said Lu’s voice. “Get yourself back here and move it like you mean it.”

Cor shot up straight and shoved the heel of her hand against the torque. “What is it?” she demanded, forgetting to whisper like they usually did over the e-comm links.

“We hit diamond. I think. I … look, just get back here.”

“On our way,” came Jay’s voice.

Cor sucked the last of the porridge off her fingers and deposited her bowl on the table for the Bonded to find later. She hurried through the halls and across the walks of the High House, shouldering past anyone who didn’t get out of the way fast enough, barely pausing to raise her hands to them. Something could have happened down in the smooth shadowy tunnels under the shelter. Maybe something finally switched on or came alive. Something real and comprehensible. That idea shone like a freshly lit lantern.

“Jay.” Cor slapped his threshold and pulled the door-curtain back at the same time. He was sitting on his bed, shoving his right foot into his boot.

“Where’s your gear?” he demanded. “Come on, we’ve got to get moving. We’ve only got a couple of hours until nightfall.”

“Have you got us leave from the King?”

A spasm of distaste crossed Jay’s features. “I’ll get it, I’ll get it. You get the sledge ready. We need to move it!”

“All right, all right. I’ll bring everything round to the main courtyard.” She let the curtain drop. She was halfway down the corridor before she was able to put a name to the strained, stark expression on Jay’s face. He was scared. No, he wasn’t just scared, he was so panicked that he didn’t care what she saw.

What in any hell could panic a Vitae? Even an ex-Vitae?

Her throat tightened but she didn’t let it slow her down. Jay needed to get back to the shelter. They needed to find out what was going on and get that information back home. That was her other job. She was to learn everything, immerse herself in everything, and at the very end, it was her absolute responsibility to get out with what she knew.

In the back of her mind a voice said Jay was not going to make that easy. She gave a mental shrug to silence it and concentrated on not skidding on the slick flagstones of the open walkway that led to the stables.

“Skater! Sight!” She shouted the stable keepers’ names imperiously and added a loud whistle. The pair of squat, Bonded men scrambled into view from between the oxen’s fat bodies. “I need the sledge. Let’s get it done.”

They passed their hands briefly in front of their eyes and sprang into action. With whistles and wordless shouts, they bullied a quartet of oxen into place and started strapping them to the yokes while Cor knotted and buckled the leather reins into place. She tried not to think about how the oxen’s eyes looked so much like Skater’s, or how once upon a time she never would have ordered another person around like that.

I am not here to judge. I’m here to learn and get the news out so they can all join the Family.

Except they’re not going to get to.

It’s still got to be better than this.
She caught up the driving stick and slapped the rump of the left, rear ox.

“Move, you lumps!” she hollered. The sledge scraped forward over straw and mud out onto rutted dirt and rock.

Jay jogged up to the sledge and swung himself clumsily up next to the driver’s stand before she could call the team to a halt.

“Keep going,” he said, clambering back to sit on the crates.

Cor managed to keep the reflexive jerk in her arms from tightening the reins. The oxen plodded forward toward the main gate.

“What’s with you, Jay?” She tried to catch sight of him out of the corner of her eye, and still keep her other eye on the approaching gate.

“I think I know where that missing hundred went.” He was looking past her shoulder, toward the heights. His face was still strained as he scanned the tops of the roofs and the distant walls.

“Are you going to tell me, or are you seeing scars on my hands?” The saying popped out before she could stop it. Her knuckles tightened on the reins and she had to just nod at the guards at the gates. Only one of them looked up. The other five had their eyes fixed on the commander coming down from the staircase alongside the wall.

The sledge jostled through the gate and Cor had to keep her eyes on the ruts in the half-dry road as well as the walls of the houses that defined the narrow streets. She pulled on the reins and whistled to the oxen to steer the sledge in something approaching the right direction.

“They’re here,” said Jay.

“What!” Cor glanced wildly from the street, to Jay and back again. She meant to tell him he had lost his mind, but her surroundings were beginning to penetrate through acclimatized eyes and her brain was starting to realize something was wrong.

Narroways was a noisy place, and this afternoon was no exception. There was noise and plenty of it. Shouting and hollering bounced off the close-packed buildings and cut through the steamy wind. Every blacksmith in the city seemed to be at his forge, hammering away. But there weren’t any children on the stairways, just the tops of heads and glimpses of faces bobbing to and fro on the roofs. No pedestrians crowded the streets. No soldiers on their oxen jostled them aside. There was just the shouting and the clattering and …

“Skyman!” shouted a voice.

A stone whizzed past and Cor ducked. The oxen halted in confusion. Jay hauled open the sledge’s canvas cover. The missing people spilled into the street like a flood down a canyon, driven by soldiers in the First City uniform. The noise hadn’t been blacksmiths, but swords. People ran into the houses, trying to get out of the way of the fray, but some were making a stand, with whatever they had at hand. Bodies draped in ponchos so she couldn’t tell if they were men or women surged around the soldier’s oxen waving sticks and hatchets. The soldiers flailed with swords and clubs. Stones from slings shot through the air indiscriminately.

The lead oxen bellowed and reared, giving Cor something she could concentrate on. She hauled hard on the reins and whacked their broad backs with her stick, poking and shouting, reminding the stupid beasts that they were more afraid of her than of anything in front of them. The sledge lurched forward.

But there’s a truce!
her mind cried.

First City is a bunch of sticklers for …

First City is losing. Badly. But they knew Narroways couldn’t afford to prolong the war. They were ready to risk two minor members of their Noble house in a gambit to knock what was left of Silver’s support out from under her.

And they wouldn’t feel it was much of a risk if they knew that Heart of the Seablade was a Heretic.

Cor shouted at the oxen and smacked at them with the reins. The big, stupid beasts bellowed and stamped forward. Hands grabbed her arm and for a split second she saw an angry round face and felt herself dragged off-balance. Jay almost fell forward and smashed a heavy fist across the stranger’s mouth. The hands fell away and Cor regained her footing.

The oxen were panicking now, all of them fighting through the surging, clamoring mob to try to find enough room to run. Cor gave them all the rein she could. Animal instinct and a ton of mindless fear might just clear the way for them. Another pair of hands snatched at her. She smacked flesh with her driving stick and heard a voice howl. More hands. She struck out again. More screams, more white eyes, more confused colors on earth brown skin. She lashed out again and again, the noise of battle fading fast behind a ringing in her ears and a sick swirling in her head.

Jay loosened his jerkin and pulled out the gun.

He hunched beside Cor, drew a bead on the thickest ranks of the First City soldiers, and squeezed the trigger.

The soldiers of both sides exploded. Blood and flesh sprayed everywhere with the sound of the shots echoing between the houses. The fray turned into a stampede as they screamed and fled. Cor urged the oxen forward and they tried hard to break into a run to get away from the noise and the blood.

“Brilliant!” she shouted hysterically. “Now you’ll have half of Narroways convinced we’re the Aunorante Sangh!”

Jay didn’t answer. He just leveled the gun toward the fleeing backs and fired again.

“Over their heads, you animal!” Cor shrieked, but she didn’t have the luxury of turning to see if he’d done it. The oxen had spotted the gates and they were barreling forward. It was all she could do to keep a grip on the reins. The maddened beasts were about to yank her arms out of their sockets. She couldn’t slow them, couldn’t steer them. A river of would-be refugees clogged the gateway in front of the wagon, but the oxen were beyond caring.

“Outta the way!” she screamed. “Runaway! Runaway! Get outta the way!”

The walls closed in too tight and her voice rode too high and thin over the incoherent crowd. Backs fell into the mud and more screams rang through the air. All she could do was keep her numb fingers wrapped around the reins and pray they’d get out of the crush soon.

They made it through the gates in a blur of light and shadow and burst out onto the open road. The oxen stampeded down the flattest path through the crowd that was surging out in all directions. Sleighs and sledges rocked and swung to get out of their way, people scattered as if a wind blew them apart. Pain began to creep up from Cor’s clenched hands and down from her clenched jaw.

They were ahead of the crowd now, with the worst of the noise and riot pounding at their backs. Cor could separate out the bellows of the oxen from the screams of people. The sledge lurched and jumped badly as it hit the unyielding ruts in the road. She gathered nerve and muscle, braced her feet against the slats on the floor, and threw all her weight backward, dragging the reins up against her chest.

The oxen bawled and the left lead tossed his head hard. Cor gritted her teeth until she was sure they’d crack and hung on. The sledge skipped across another series of ruts, but the team slowed down and stopped.

“What’re you doing!” shouted Jay, dropping into Standard.

“Shut up!” Cor snapped back. “Just sit down and shut up!” She ran her hands across the oxen’s sides, feeling the way they trembled and how their lungs heaved. She jerked on the harness, checking the knots and straps to make sure everything was tight. She closed her mind against the sight of the rust brown blotches that soaked up the layers of dust on the team’s bald, pale legs.

When she was satisfied the tack wouldn’t come undone, she resumed the driver’s stand and slapped the reins. The oxen obeyed the gesture and lumbered forward. The countryside was deserted. In the brush and trees Jay saw knots of oxen and people, fleeing from the city. Word must have spread that there was fighting in Narroways and they were all clearing the road. Cor set her teeth gingerly to avoid reawakening the ache that ran all the way down to her shoulders and pressed the oxen’s pace up the rise toward where the world bent. She tried to forget that Jay was sitting at her back with the gun resting on his knees. She tried to tell herself that he had just done what he had to. They had to get clear of the crowd. If she’d been dragged down, she would have been killed and he would have been trapped. She had to get out. It was her job. She had to get away. And they weren’t Family anyway and they weren’t ever going to be and whatever they did now was better than what the Vitae would do later.