The Red Queen (99 page)

There were so many people waiting for food, and ever more arriving, that I wondered if meals were all bought and eaten communally in Slavetown, as in Sador, rather than being cooked and eaten privately within dwellings. Certainly this infinity seemed as much a meeting place as anything else, for as well as the people eating and buying food and drawing water, there were others sitting against the walls of the surrounding buildings working at some small task such as sewing or whittling. There was even a boy playing a sort of pipe, his cap set before him in the manner of singers in the markets along the Westland.

Glancing back to the well, I noticed there was a dipper and I used it to draw some water then handed it to Swallow, telling him softly as I did so that I had learned from the woman who had handed me the dipper that the Ekoni always patrolled during the approach of dusk and they regularly took at least one person who would be sentenced to the ilthum mine. All understood this to be a random assertion of power rather than a deserved punishment.

Feeling myself watched, I turned to see three old women seated on the well ledge regarding us suspiciously. On impulse, I moved closer to Swallow and laid a hand on his bare arm, giving him a besotted look that did not match the sharp instructions I sent direct to his mind. Quick-witted as he was, he did not even look startled but set a hand on my waist and drew me close, a tender look on his own face, belying the concern in his eyes.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked softly.

I nodded and spoke again to his mind. ‘If we can do something about the blocking machine, it will enable me to act decisively. Remember, look for the Prime’s compound, since that is where Ariel stays when he is here, but be careful, for he may have come ashore. Don’t act unless it is entirely safe and you can be sure of succeeding. And if you can, find out exactly where the Ekoni keep prisoners. We will meet later at the back of the Slavetown wall to decide what to do next.’

‘You must make haste if you want to get out before they shut the gate,’ he murmured, and bent to brush my lips with his. Then he turned and gave the three old dames a wicked conspiratorial look that had them giggling and beaming sentimentally at us.

‘The cliff shadow makes it seem later than it is,’ I said, forcing myself to smile as he departed, conscious the women were watching, and then I turned and moved into the press of people about a food stall, knowing the crowd would enable me to make contact with people without it being obvious that this was my intent. From the mind of one young man, I took an impression of Slavetown, which added to what I had learned from the Redland slaves of Nareem’s household. I discovered it was constructed around seven infinities. The one we were in was called the Infinity of Tears, and there were altogether four infinities with wells that bore the same name.

I made contact with an older man who was pondering the wells, wondering at the tales told by Redlanders of abundant water in the time of the Red Queen. This piqued my curiosity, for he ought surely to remember that time quite clearly, given his age, but he moved away before I could delve more deeply. I made contact with a woman thinking about going to a market in the Infinity of Hope once she had eaten. Seeing it in her mind, it appeared to be a good deal larger than any of the other infinities in Slavetown. It was where Deenak, the nominal leader of the Landfolk, made his announcements, and where the slavemasters left instructions or summons for the people they thought of as their property. Ekoni also left messages summoning anyone they wanted to question, pointing out that all of the slaves in Slavetown were to check each day to see if there was anything for them. If there was no response to a summons from the Ekoni, a troop would be sent for them.

The woman I had touched wanted to check the board to see if her Chafiri mistress required her to collect some especially made jewels she had ordered for the masked ball, before coming to her compound the next morning.

I left the press of people and made my way back to the Knife and along it towards the Infinity of Hope. Passing the houses I was struck again by the age of the buildings. They seemed to me to be little different in age than the buildings outside Slavetown, and yet it was surely not possible for this dense and intricate labyrinth to have risen in a mere decade. It could only be that the area had existed when the Red Queen was alive, and the Gadfians had merely used it to corral a body of slaves they did not entirely trust. Certainly as far as I knew there had been no slavery in the time of the Red Queen.

Then a bent, grey-haired man whose arm I brushed against was reflecting on the betrayal of the Red Queen as something he had been told about, and an older Landwoman was thinking about her mother, brought to Redport as a child. Of course there were many other inner cogitations I caught, but these and others like them implying Slavetown had been established for generations puzzled me more and more. If I had not seen Rushton, I might have wondered if we had slept aeons in Midland after all, but I
had
seen him, and though he had definitely looked older, he did not look years and years older. Thinking for a moment of his blank, hollow-eyed face, and his ragged clothing, my heart ached, for it could only mean that his master was miserly and a brute besides.

‘He lives,’ I said through clenched teeth, ‘and where there is life there is hope.’

I dragged my mind from him and the puzzling matter of time, telling myself that the only way to help him or myself was to help Dragon claim her kingdom.

The Knife brought me to the Infinity of Hope. It was not as large as the Infinity of Dragonstraat but it was three times the size of the Infinity of Tears. There was a cluster of stalls to one side, but few people stood about them and there was no sign of the Ekoni. They could not possibly have left the infinity along the Knife, else I would have passed them, so they must have gone back to the gate another way. Perhaps they used the Knife to cut to the heart of Slavetown, hence the relative emptiness of the Infinity of Hope, and then they had gone back to the gate in a spiralling motion, using the streets that led between the infinities. Picturing the route from what I had taken from the minds of people, it would take them through the whole of Slavetown, and they could vary the route each day by choosing a different order of infinities.

If I had wanted to patrol the walled area, that was how I would do it.

A woman near me stumbled and I jumped at the opportunity to help her up, brushing my fingers against her wrist to confirm my guess about the Ekoni patrols. Her mind told me that the Ekoni sometimes came in the opposite way, using the spiralling route between infinities, and then leaving Slavetown along the Knife; essentially, I was right. Her mind was unsettled by the patrol that had caught her in the street; if someone was named and did not present themselves at the gate to Slavetown by nightfall, children and old people would be taken randomly and put into stocks for the night as a way of forcing Slavetown to disgorge the wanted person. If the person did not present themselves by the following day, and could not be found, these people would be publically tortured, and ten men taken and sent to the ilthum mine. This would go on until the wanted person presented themselves. The woman’s mind told me that only twice had people failed to present themselves, and later, they had been found dead in the Infinity of Hope.

Chilled by her grim thoughts, I accepted the woman’s thanks and a thin grey metal square which she pressed into my hand with shaking fingers, her mind telling me that it was a small Redland barter coin used in Slavetown, stamped with the face of the Red Queen.

I studied it after she had gone, seeing Dragon’s face, and had to master a surge of fear and longing before I could go on. I moved around the outer curves of the infinity, seeing people were beginning to come into it from all directions, and thinking about the man Deenak. The slavewoman Cora had given me his name, saying he was the spokesman of the Landfolk, but there was something about his relationship to the Chafiri that troubled me, for if they trusted him, he must have proven worthy of their trust, and a man trusted by the Chafiri might be a man who would feel compelled either out of honour or for gain of some kind to give me up, and perhaps Dragon as well, given what her coming must mean for the slavemasters.

I came to the noticeboard, which was a great smoothed area of stone, and saw that messages were scribed on it using soft white stones set all about the rim, addressed to various slaves by name. I wondered who had scribed the summons, for surely slavemasters did not come to Slavetown to leave messages themselves.

A woman pushed past me to search the messages, and I saw in her mind that there was a system of flags that let slaves know when the Ekoni had entered Slavetown. The woman was thinking about these because she had been watching them to make sure she avoided the Ekoni patrol, her friend having been taken away the day before. Her mind was full of fearful speculations about her own punishment for some small indiscretion, which she feared her friend would reveal to the Ekoni under torture.

I moved towards the food stalls where a good many people were now shouting their requirements and pushed into their midst, determined to spend the little barter mark and see if I could find out from the people clustering about me who were the leaders of the Redlanders. That the Gadfians knew nothing of their existence inclined me to prefer them to a man who served the slavemasters.

A group of men suddenly emerged from a door and for a moment I was caught between the customers and the men, all jostling and reeking of ferment and sweat. There was some banter and cursing and as I struggled to get out of their midst, I was shocked to feel someone probe
my
mind, a swift dim groping that could not reach through my mind shield. But before I could identify which of the men had tried to get at my mind, they all moved away.

It confirmed that there were Misfits within Slavetown, even as the Redland slavewomen had intimated, and I was certain that any Misfit would know of Matthew, but I would have to make contact to find them. Rather than coercing thoughts, for a time I simply listened to the ebb and flow of conversation about me. There was talk about the Ekoni, of course, and a rumour that they had taken several people with them the night before for questioning, and speculation about who they were and why. There was talk of an informant and then one old woman spoke Deenak’s name in a querulous voice. She was swiftly hushed by those about her, but it was enough to turn me against the idea of seeking out the man. There was also talk of Salamander and the arrival that day of the
Black Ship
with a new load of slaves. He and his greatship were well known because many of the foreign slaves had come to Redport with him. Ariel’s name was mentioned, but the talk suggested he might not be aboard, since he had not come on the last trip.

The talk turned to the Chafiri and the lavish fire festival that had been held for the sake of the emissary from the land of the white-faced lords, and the ball that would be held in his honour. A few thought of his purple-sailed greatship as coming from Shambala, though from my understanding the name was that of a city in the land of the white-faced lords, and that, in any case, it was landlocked. I frowned, trying to remember where that bit of information had come from, but could not. The trouble with plundering so many unknown minds one after another was that you often absorbed information that you were not aware of taking in until some time later.

Some spoke more specifically of the masked ball and I remembered that Nareem had been busy preparing dresses for Chafiri women, and that the emissary would bring his women ashore for it. The fact that they had not so far set foot on land, had given rise to an immense curiosity about what they would look like.

I tried and failed to work out from the talk when it was meant to happen, for I had the feeling it was to be very soon – not this night, but perhaps the next or the one after that. According to the talk, it was to be an emulation of the ball at which the Red Queen had revealed herself to her people by removing a ceremonial mask, and had demonstrated her great powers. The fact that no one had seen her or her display of powers might have been understandable, given that slavery had not begun until the Gadfians had taken over the Land, but there were many Redlanders among the gathering crowd as well, and strangely not one of
them
had seen her. Moreover all still spoke as if her death was an ancient tragedy.

Most seemed to know that some accommodation had been reached with the emperor of the white-faced lords so that they had agreed not to visit their wrath upon Redport for the Gadfians’ failure to produce a vast slave army, and that the fire festival and the masked ball were sops. No one knew exactly what the accommodation had been, but other than talk of ceremonies and gifts, most believed that some priceless Beforetime treasure had been promised to the emperor. Some thought it would be presented at the conclusion of the masked ball, in the Infinity of Dragonstraat. Others spoke of an armada of empty ships that waited outside the Talons to take aboard all of the soldiers that had been amassed at Quarry. Some speculated that the ships were there to ensure the promised treasure was handed over.

There was a little talk about some female slaves being offered to the emissary as a gift for his emperor, or for the emperor’s brother, who had made the original bargain with the Gadfian Prime to supply a slave army to vanquish some ancient enemy; some thought they were for the emissary himself. It was clear that all of the slaves were well known in Slavetown, and one was the daughter of a well-loved and gifted healer. There was some fear as to what use would be made of the women. Some thought they would be sent to the pleasure gardens of the emperor; others had more grisly notions.

Curiously, I did not find anyone speculating that the treasure might be a weaponmachine.

I had been gradually moving out of the crowd about the stalls, which was growing thicker by the moment. Breaking free at last, I was startled to see I was looking at a line of black people, standing utterly still. It took me a moment to recognise that they were formed of stone and I realised that I had seen them in Cora’s mind without understanding what I was seeing.