Skrimsli, page 28
‘Six?’ he spluttered. ‘Seven?’
‘How many cells?’ She pulled out the mask.
‘Ten cells, four or five in each.’
That was all they needed to know. Ekar struck him hard on the head and he lay still. She bound him up and shoved him back through the door.
Ekar whistled softly through her teeth. Fifty prisoners, she repeated.
Skrimsli could not see how many humans that would be, but he guessed a lot. How will we remove so many? he asked.
The same way we got in, Ekar replied. Unless you want to fight all the Automators round the front?
Skrimsli did not!
There was no time for further speculation. The guards beyond the door had noticed that the light in this part of the corridor had gone out. One of them was peering through. Ekar held up the keys she’d taken from the fallen guard.
I’ll open these cells; you take that next guard.
Skrimsli’s paws punched the door so violently that the peeking guard was smashed backwards with great force. He crashed into the other guard, and both fell in a tangle to the floor. They were dazed and slow, as most humans apart from Ekar seemed to be. He knew Ekar didn’t like killing so he lifted each of their heads in turn and smashed them against the ground. They lay still but, he thought, still breathed. They had however cried out loud enough to be heard. Another pair was now racing towards him, yelling loudly, probably alerting still more guards. Where was Ekar?
Right here, with help.
Ekar had opened the first four cells. Twenty ragged, weak, but very angry humans now came through the doorway. Many were young or sick but there were a number who looked as if they might be of some use. With Ekar and Skrimsli doing the hard work, they could simply overwhelm the guards.
It was clear that none of the guards had been prepared for an attack. Soon all the cells were open, and their guards were either dead or bound and placed inside the cells. The long corridor was full of people, all of them talking, crying, shouting all at once. Where in this crowd were Kal’s kin? Skrimsli didn’t know. He ducked behind Ekar to avoid any more people trying to pet him like one of Galu Mak’s dogs.
Ekar stood on a chair and spoke to the freed prisoners.
‘Quiet. Quiet! There are guards outside. We don’t want to alert them.’
‘Who are you; why are you letting us go?’ a woman at the back called out
‘That doesn’t matter for now. We just need to get you all out,’ Ekar replied.
‘Will that tiger eat us?’
‘No, he is helping to free you.’
They were very overexcited. Skrimsli could feel their desperation to break out. It threatened to boil over and sweep them all away.
If they burst from the building, we will all be killed, he told Ekar.
I know. Wait. I will try to calm them.
‘Quiet!’ Ekar barked. It was the voice Skrimsli had heard her use on Beart when she felt he wasn’t rowing hard enough. The crowd were instantly silent.
‘There is no time for talk,’ Ekar told them sternly. ‘We must leave quietly, secretly, before the rest of the guards here know you are free. We will go through a back door. It will take time. You must be patient.’
‘Why can’t we just take their guns and get out through the front?’ a young woman called out.
‘Look at the children and the sick here,’ Ekar replied. ‘They will die. Keep your fighting for another day.’ Nods of agreement spread, and the wave of panic died down.
Ekar explained their route out. It would be very hard, but it could be done if they kept calm, she told them.
Skrimsli looked around. Were Kal’s kin here? He couldn’t tell.
Ekar, ask for Kal’s kin, he told her.
I had almost forgotten, she said and asked for quiet again.
‘Does anyone know of a young woman called Havvity and her child, a boy, Roko?’
There were shaken heads all round, then a woman, very frail – probably, Skrimsli thought, about to die – came forward supported by two others.
‘She is my niece,’ the woman whispered. ‘They are keeping her in the basement.’
‘I thought this was the basement!’ Ekar said.
‘No, there is another floor,’ the old woman said quietly. ‘They are kept there.’
There was a dread in her voice that made Skrimsli shiver.
I will go there, he told Ekar. I will find them. Then, I will come after.
Ekar didn’t like this, Skrimsli could tell. But he could also tell she understood it was the only plan.
The old woman spoke again. ‘There is a lift … that way…’
But Skrimli didn’t listen; he’d already seen where it was in her mind.
The lift was a puzzle that it took him a few minutes to work out. It made a hideous clanking noise and as it went down deeper into the guts of this awful place, he was reminded of the barn with the skins stretched on the wall. But he pushed the fear down, and made the space in his mind clear, ready to think fast.
The lift stopped with a judder and a jolt. He pushed its door open. It folded like insect legs made of metal and he wished he had more time to examine it.
The space before him reeked of blood and fear. It contained just one guard, asleep on a chair, who jolted awake at the sound of the lift. He was slower than the others, but he had a gun. Skrimsli saw him grin and reach for this weapon. He saw the thought, too, of the tiger shot dead: a dumb beast, stupid and in the wrong place. Nothing could cure this man of his foolish belief that being a human with a gun made him better than any creature on the earth. Skrimsli felt the man’s utter bewilderment as he was knocked to the ground and quickly extinguished. He never had the chance to take his gun from its holder.
Skrimsli stood by the single cell door. He could not detect any sound from within it, although he smelled that there was someone inside. They were holding their breath! He reached out very cautiously with his mind and touched a wall of pain and terror, from which he recoiled. Then a voice came from the other side of the door, small and fearful, trembling.
‘Who’s there? Who is it?’
There was a wail then, very faint and tiny, coming from the same cell.
‘Shh, shh, shh,’ said the first voice. ‘Sleep now, Roko, Mummy’s here. Shh.’
Roko. Skrimsli recognised these sounds. Yes, these were Kal’s kin! But he could not release them! He had forgotten that paws cannot use keys. The keys to the cell door lay right there, sticking out from the figure sprawled on the floor. But they were useless without a human hand to operate them.
Skrimsli growled in frustration. There was a small barred, window in the top of the door. He could pass the keys inside perhaps. He had to communicate with them in some way to work out together how to use the keys and get them both out of this place. But they were already very afraid. A tiger suddenly in their heads might be too much.
He would try the little one at first. As gently as he could, he reached out and found the child’s mind. It was bruised, afraid, confused. He slipped inside and began to purr.
‘Pussy cat,’ said the child out loud, with great pleasure. ‘Big pussy cat.’
‘What’s that, my love?’ the mother said. ‘Where’s the big pussy cat?’
Here said Skrimsli, inside her mind now. Do not be afraid. Kal sent me.
The woman panicked. Skrimsli heard her rush to the back of her cell.
How are you talking? I’m not a Listener? I am going mad.
No, no. You are not. Look through your door.
Wide terrified eyes showed through the little grill.
‘You’ve killed him!’ the woman who was Havvity said out loud. She gave a sobbing cry, ‘And there’s the keys!’
Skrimsli did not have to explain the problem with his paws. The woman, Havvity, saw it at once. Her fear subsided and was replaced by the purpose of the hunt.
I can break the grill. Give you the keys, he told her.
It won’t work. You can’t unlock this door from the inside.
She fell silent, thinking.
You can use the key, she said at last. I can tell you which one it is and then you can hold it in your teeth…
Skrimsli saw what she was thinking. Yes! he said. YES!
It was the biggest key. The feeling of its metal against his teeth was unpleasant and it took several tries to manipulate it correctly but at last it was in the hole. Skrimsli clamped his incisors round the head of the key, but they kept slipping off. Then he turned his head and slipped a canine into the hole in the centre of the top and twisted. There was a click. He unhooked his tooth and Havvity, with the child in her arms, pushed the door open.
She was very thin and small. Not so very much larger than the child she carried. She had many marks on her body – cuts, burns, scratches – but still she smiled. Skrimsli felt the joy of her release soaring through the awful darkness inside her mind. A word came to him: Brave. It was what Owl had been the day he had stood up to Kobret and his thugs.
The lift shuddered, taking them upwards, and the insect-leg doors clanked open. Skrimsli heard the shouts of more guards. They had discovered the escape, but they were still in the most distant cells. They were afraid and angry and, he guessed, now armed with guns. Automators seemed to like guns very much.
Fast, fast! Skrimsli told Havvity. This way, follow!
Skrimsli lead them back to the storeroom. There was no sign of the other prisoners apart from the path they had cleared through the piled-up furniture and the open door in the rear wall of the building. Ekar had managed to get all of the prisoners out. But they were not far away, just over the lip of the gully making their way in a line down the path. If they were discovered there, they would be easy targets.
Havvity’s fear was rising again. The child, Roko, grizzled. Behind them the guards were moving past the nearest group of cells and down the corridor. Closing in. Skrimsli peered through the door into the night. More black uniforms were coming, around the sides of the building. There was a way to give the other prisoners the best chance of escape and get Havvity and Roko away. It would seem very risky to these frightened humans, but Skrimsli was sure it would work.
Almost sure.
Once more he stole, purring, into Roko’s mind and showed him a picture of his own small self, riding on Skrimsli’s back. Instantly the grizzling ceased.
‘Ride on the pussy cat!’ the child cried.
Skrimsli went now into the mother’s mind. He used her naming word. That was a thing that humans liked very much, he had noticed.
Havvity, I am very strong and clever and fast. I can get you away from here, but you must do what I say.
He felt her hesitate but only for a moment.
Yes.
Get on my back, put the child in front. Hold my fur. Do not let go.
Havvity was heavier than she looked but not too heavy. The child clung on like a tick and his mother learned by looking and did the same.
Skrimsli stood half out of the door. Through the tangle of vegetation, he could see the guards. They were blundering about, blinding themselves with torch beams. Thank goodness for the incompetence of humans!
Ready? he asked.
Ready.
Hold on.
Skrimsli pushed the door open with a bang. The guards started as if they had been shot. Their torch beams skittered around wildly. By the time they had started towards the door, Skrimsli had cleared the clump of weeds and was heading past them down the side of the building. Another man stood in his way, screamed and dropped his torch; another two fired their guns into the space where Skrimsli had been two seconds earlier.
Skrimsli skirted the edge of the lamplit space around the front door. He showed himself just enough for more guards to shout, shoot wildly and then give chase. None of them would be looking in the gully behind the building now. In ten more paces he was down a dark alley, with the smell of the harbour up ahead and the sound of running boots fading behind.
‘Fast, fast, pussy cat!’ Roko cried in delight.
32
The Palatine
The Last Assassin
Sayka was still not flying, so the Palatine had climbed into the rigging with him perched on her padded shoulder. It had been hard work and she had been glad that she was clipped onto the foremast with a rope that would save her life if she fell.
The Palatine looked down now at the performance on the deck and the crowd assembled on the quay. It was far from certain that the outcome of the night would be what they hoped. And if it wasn’t, it was up to her to protect the ship and the crew in Ekar’s absence.
‘My ship is my kingdom,’ Ekar had told her as she left with Skrimsli. ‘Guard her as you would guard your own land. Leave without us if you have to. Skrimsli and I are fighters; we can take care of ourselves.’
So the Palatine was watching everything very carefully. Especially the Automator commander, Lazit, in his seat on the front row. He had accompanied the Nordsky ambassador when the delegation had come to her with their lies about the railway. He had been a silent threatening presence there. He must have got back to Erem only a few days ago. She looked at him now, the dark glitter of his eyes betraying the wheels of his mind turning. Cunning, slippery and wicked.
As the crowd began to grow restless, he whispered something to a junior officer beside him, who got up at once and made her way to the back of the crowd. The Palatine tracked the progress of this figure through Ekar’s telescope: along the quay she ran then onto a shadowy network of old pontoons. There was little light at that end of the quay, but the Palatine could just make her out. She boarded an old fishing boat and vanished below deck.
What was on that boat that was so important? She needed to know. She had a feeling that all their fates might depend on knowing. She reached up to Sayka’s head and took off his hood.
My dear old friend, she told him. I need your eyes, your flight. That boat, lost in the dark there?
She directed him to where she needed him to look but he was reluctant, dull with inactivity. He hunched his shoulders and ruffled his feathers like an old man drawing a coat over his shoulders. There was only one way to do this.
I love you as my life, but if you do not fly you are not alive!
The Palatine pushed him off and into the air. For a split second he was like a stone then, like struck tinder, he sparked to life.
There, she told him. Over there, show me what you see. Tell me what that boat carries.
His wings spread, his mind flamed, and he was hers again! Sayka spoke into her mind as he never had before.
I fly! I see! he cried. I fly, I see for you, my heart, my heart!
The crowd was rumbling like a volcano, about to explode. Anger was building. People jeered and threw stones at the Automators. Herring folk and Horse folk united for a moment against this enemy. But the tide had not quite turned and Lazit was very far from beaten. He leapt up to the microphone to call their performance ‘lies and nonsense’.
‘My Automator forces are all that stand between the people of Erem and ruin!’ he cried.
It was strange how such nonsense would pass for truth in anyone’s ears, but she was sure her brother was selling the same deceptions in the same way in her own home city. Perhaps they would indeed have to run from the harbour without Ekar and Skrimsli aboard. Beart and his rowers were standing by at their oars, the fore and aft mooring lines attended to and ready to be released at once. She had only to give the signal and they could be heading from the quayside out of range of Lazit’s guns.
Any moment now. She held her breath … and then there was movement in the dark streets that led down to the quay. Ekar and a band of ragged citizens came running, with the noisy pursuit of more Automators close behind. They pushed through the bewildered shipwreck survivors and into the crowd of Horse and Herring. The crowd on the quay cried out as some of them recognised loved ones they’d thought lost to them. Ekar leapt onto a chair and shouted, her voice clear as a trumpet above the hubbub.
‘Here is the welfare of the Erem people!’ she cried. ‘Innocent citizens and children imprisoned.’
The Automators who had pursued the escapees through the town held back, as the Erem crowd enveloped the freed prisoners.
Lazit shouted something about dangerous escaped criminals, but no one was listening because now there was yet another wonder. A tiger came bounding from a side street with a woman and a child upon its back. The crowd parted in astonishment to let them through. The tiger walked slowly right up to the Automator commander whose face at last betrayed emotion; he looked terrified. But his orders to ‘shoot this monster’ were ignored.
The girl who must be Havvity slipped from Skimsli’s back. She staggered a little, but she steadied herself with a hand on the tiger’s back, then scooped her child into her arms and stood straight at Skrimsli’s side. Her voice was weak, but the crowd were now hungry to listen, and they were very, very quiet so as not to miss a word. Havvity looked straight at Lazit, a gaze as sharp and precise as a needle, pinning him to the spot.
‘I have been imprisoned, beaten and tortured by this man,’ she spoke slowly, making every word count. ‘Separated from my child, threatened with death. All because the witness to the lie that began this war is my friend, Kal Numiko!’
Her voice broke.
Lazit’s eyes darted. He could see things were not going in his favour. But he wasn’t quite done.
‘Where is this witness that you speak of? Or is this just another terrorist lie?’
Don’t take the bait, Kal, the Palatine thought. He just wants to get you in the open! But it was too late.
Kal appeared on the aft deck and pulled the green covers from Luja’s coat, revealing the dark stars on a milk white ground, the very image of the wanted poster Pale horse with distinctive spotted coat.
