The Gathering, page 12
part #1 of The Hundred Series
The alley led, at length, onto a small square surrounded by warehouses. She stopped in the shadows of one of the buildings, sending her senses out with a spell that all Hunar learned early in their training. A few watchers. The cluster of wagons in the square were empty, the oxen harnessed to them dozing.
Hunar also learned to work with shadow and she drew some of it around her, moving within the shelter of the buildings, following the trail to one of the warehouses. The sides of the warehouses were high enough that not much sunlight was getting into the square, leaving it gloomy even in the bright afternoon light.
Sending her senses out into the warehouse, she recoiled against it, hitting her head with a thump that rattled her teeth. It was full of misery. Too many different personalities for her to count, and almost all of them hopeless and lost. A few, dotted around, with a quite different outlook. Angry, bored, with violence held back by a hair’s breadth.
The pulse was beating hard and fast in her neck, throat tight and mouth dry. She knew what this was. It was one of the many reasons why she hated the city. Slavery. And the boy’s trail led to the warehouse. She could feel him, among the other souls. He was as lost and bewildered as all the other ones.
And then she found something else. Another familiar trail. Ubel. Guise’s associate had been here, too. Before he had been in Silverton. The trail was faint. But she had stood over the man’s corpse and had enough to identify him. Ubel had been here. Where slaves were kept.
Before she quite knew what she was doing, she was striding back along the alley, uncaring of who might see her or what they might think.
She made it back to the hotel in about a quarter of the time it had taken her to find the warehouse, careless of watchers. Far from the fear she had felt earlier, she was now angry.
Guise was sitting, apparently at his ease, at a table on his own. He had bundles of letters in front of him and was sorting through each, making notes in a ledger of his own. He looked up as she came into the room. It was the hotel’s main dining room, and empty at the moment apart from him. He took one look at her face and gathered all his papers up, shoving them in the satchel, and rising to meet her.
“You seem angry, mristrian. What’s wrong?”
“I need an advance on my wages,” she told them, words clipped off, fury still riding her.
“As you wish. May I ask why?”
“Your dead friend was trading in flesh. A lot of it,” she told him. “I found a warehouse full, including one of the children I was looking for.”
He went very still. She had never seen a living being go that still before. Not even wulfkin on a hunt. Only his eyes moved, their normal green darkening, tinges of red appearing. Normally it was a warning sign that any healthy person should be backing away, very slowly, and making soothing noises, hoping that the goblin’s rage would not come out.
She stayed her ground. She was still furious, her heart was still thumping in her throat, and there was a tight knot of fear inside her. There would have been watchers around the warehouse. Her presence would have been noted. The slavers would not know who she had been there to look for, but they would know that somebody had been there and, if they’d followed her, they would have seen the Hunar’s symbol on her shoulder.
“Modig.” The word was soft, spoken with the quiet calm before the storm.
She was not sure how he had heard it, but the hotel’s owner appeared at once. And, with the odd given name, she realised that, like Guise and like his hotel, the owner was not quite what he appeared to be. He looked human. The slight glimmer in his eyes suggested another heritage.
“My lord?”
“I need your funds. All of them. Now.”
“Of course, my lord.”
It said something for Guise’s authority that a hotel owner in Three Falls emptied his safe out for him, without question and without hesitation. Several purses, clinking merrily with coins, were brought to him in moments. Moments that Guise used to tidy his satchel, sealing it with a word and spark of magic that hurt Yvonne’s senses. Goblin magic and Hunar magic did not get on well together. He was already armed. Goblins did not go anywhere without being armed. Rumour was that they even slept with their weapons. They were not the only ones.
Guise took the pouches of coins as though they weighed nothing, and meant less. He tucked them into various pockets around his person, and it said something for his tailor’s skill that his coat did not look the least bit burdened.
“Look after this until I return,” he said to Modig, handing across the satchel. “Do not open it, and guard it with your life.”
“Always, my lord.” Modig made another low bow and, when he straightened, Yvonne realised that the not-human part of his heritage was almost certainly goblin. A human-goblin pairing was unusual, to say the least. “Good hunting, my lord.”
“Show me,” Guise said to Yvonne.
He had surprised her again. She should be getting used to it by now, the fact that she never really understood his motivation or why he did things. But for now, with the possibility of losing the child’s trail, she did not question it and did not speak, simply striding out of the hotel and back to the streets of the city. He kept pace with her, shoulder to shoulder, seemingly careless of the fortune he was carrying about his person. No one approached him. In fact, Yvonne saw one of the pickpockets she had spied earlier glance in their direction, turn pale, and then run away. Actually run. She looked across at Guise and saw why. His eyes were still tinged red, and there were hints of fang at his mouth.
“You’re scaring everyone,” she commented in a mild voice, turning down another street. They were getting close.
“Good. They should be scared,” he said. “Are we there yet?”
“Along the end of this alley, there is a square. There are warehouses around the square and it is the warehouse on the right-hand side of the square,” she told him. “There are guards.”
“Good,” he said again. “Some exercise would be welcome,” he added, striding ahead.
Yvonne felt her mouth open, and shut it with a snap. That did not sound like the preparation for a business transaction, of buying the boy’s freedom, which is what she had intended. It sounded far more like the prelude to war.
She was nearly running to keep up with him as he used his slightly longer stride, and his superior strength, to draw ahead of her. He was not in the least out of breath, perfectly in command of himself, as he walked across the square, without hesitation, and kicked in the doors of the warehouse. The doors yielded to that single kick, breaking into pieces that flew into the darker interior.
Yvonne arrived on his heels to see that the inside of the warehouse had been fitted out with a series of cages. All of them were full.
The world spun for a moment, stomach twisting, not rising, as she remembered other cages, in other circumstances, and the feel of badly formed metal against her skin.
Then a shout of anger in the here and now snapped her back to the here and now, and a half-dozen armed guards surging towards the door, doubtless drawn by the sound of splintering wood.
“Ubel was inside. Before Silverton,” Yvonne told him.
“You neglected to mention that earlier,” he said, voice perfectly calm and controlled.
“I did tell you he was involved,” she pointed out, refusing to apologise. “I only mention it now because you may want to leave at one alive for questioning,” she said, and took a deliberate step back.
“You aren’t going to help?” he asked. He sounded more amused than anything else. The amusement, and possibly the red tinged eyes, made the guards pause in their tracks, only a few paces away.
“It’s barely a fair fight as it is,” she told him. And she did not like to fight if she did not have to. Whereas, for goblins, fighting was an art form. “I take it we’re not going to buy their freedom?”
“I despise slavery,” he said, calmness sliding away into icy fury. “People are not things to be bought and sold.”
He had surprised her again.
There was no time for more conversation, as the guards were on him, surging forward with their weapons already drawn, and ugly expressions on their faces. Perhaps thinking that a beautifully dressed goblin lord was no match for six of them.
But, as Yvonne had observed, it was barely a fair fight. He probably would not actually class this as a decent work out. Five of the guards were dead within as many heartbeats, and the sixth was pinned to the ground by one of the swords Guise had about his person, the tip of the other one resting just underneath the guard’s eye.
“I think he’s ready to talk,” Guise said. “Why don’t you free the children?”
It was only then that Yvonne realised what Guise must have seen as soon as he entered the warehouse. The cages were full, yes. But they were full of children. Some as young as ten, the oldest perhaps in their late teens. Children. She felt her hands shaking, and rage of her own rising up.
She remembered the narrow space left on Ubel’s barge, the small gap between the heavy crates and the side of the barge, where living things had been kept. Children. The half dozen horses that Ubel had so carefully recorded in his ledger had been children, sold to slavery.
For a moment she was frozen with rage, wanting to go back along the King’s Highway, dig up the corpse and kill him again. However irrational that was. A clean, quick death. One slice of a blade. It was far less than he had deserved.
“Hunar, help us,” someone said from the nearest cage, breaking into her fury.
The paralysis lifted at once, the Hunar’s magic kicking her in the stomach. She had a task to complete. She searched the guards’ bodies and found several sets of keys, going to the nearest cage.
“Tell them to wait for a little bit,” Guise said, not looking up from the guard. “I have something to give them.”
She gave murmured instructions to the children that she released to go and stand by one of the side doors, away from the sight of blood and whatever it was that Guise was doing to the remaining guard. In the middle of the second cage she found her quarry.
“Alexander,” she said. The boy looked at her. Freckles, standing out starkly on a white face that was far too thin, underneath hair that was longer than it should have been, if his mother had anything to say about it, and matted with dirt. “Your parents asked me to find you.”
He let out a single, heartfelt, sob, clapped his hands over his mouth to hold on any further sound, and tears rolled, in silence, down his face.
She stepped forward, put her hands gently on his wrists, and pulled his hands away from his mouth. “You don’t need to be quiet any more.” She looked around the listening children. They were all far too quiet, all wide-eyed, terrified, and too thin. And absolutely filthy. “None of you need to be quiet any more.”
Two of the older children stepped forward and held out their hands, asking for sets of keys. Between them they went to open the rest of the cages. Six cages in all, each holding perhaps a dozen children. Far too many. Far too many that nobody in the surrounding area had noticed. Even with children terrified into silence, there was the smell of so many bodies in such a small area with no bathing facilities. And the comings and goings of the guards had to have been noticed. And even though the children were thin, they had been fed, and given water.
She left the children huddled against the wall, all of them eyeing the door with longing, and told them, again, to wait.
“We are ready,” she told Guise, going back towards him.
The guard on the ground was dead. It had been a quick, easy kill and, from the expression on Guise’s face, nothing that he had learned had improved his mood.
“Good,” he said. “We need to arrange safe passage for them, and distribute this,” he said, digging into one of his pockets and producing one of the pouches of coins. “I didn’t realise there would be so many, but it’s the best I could do at short notice.”
He strode forward, towards the children, and a few of them gave muffled cries, backing against the wall.
“You may want to put your sword away,” Yvonne commented, going with him. “And calm down a bit.”
He sent her a sideways glance, his eyes still tinged with red, and lifted an eyebrow. “I am not calm,” he said, words very precise.
“Well, you’re scaring them. Could you pretend?”
“That, I can do.”
A moment later, the furious goblin was gone, replaced with the polite facade that she was familiar with. There was no red left in his eyes, no hint of fang at his mouth.
The children were still wary, of course. They had seen the red, and the white tips of his fangs.
The sight of coins drew many of them forward, listening intently as he gave them instructions. The older ones should pretend to be guards, with the younger ones hiding in the wagons outside. They would need to be very quiet through the streets. One last time being quiet. Merchant caravans left the city all the time, and at all hours. They could sneak out after dark.
Yvonne saw the determination setting on their faces. No one needed to spell out the dangers for them. Children were vulnerable in Three Falls in ways did not bear thinking about. And there might be others involved in this set up. The cages, and the guards, suggested a level of organisation. Best for the children if they could escape the city unnoticed.
It was a well-thought-through plan at short notice, Yvonne thought, eyes narrowing in suspicion, particularly when he gave them specific instructions on where to go. A place not that far from here, where friends of his would help them get back to their homes, if that’s what they wanted, or find somewhere else to go.
Then he divided the coins up, asking each one their name and where they were from as he gave them their share.
All over the lands. They were from all over. The rumours that she had heard, and shared with Grayling, had not covered the extent of it. So many taken.
And then one of the older ones offered more information. There had been a wagon full of older ones taken away the day before. The people who had collected them hadn’t been interested in what they looked like, one of the girls said, just that they stood up straight and seemed strong. Guise and Yvonne exchanged glances, making sure each other had noticed that information, before they sent the children on their way, packed into the wagons that had been waiting in the square, the oxen making no fuss at the change of drivers.
Yvonne watched them go with her jaw clamped shut. One child found. Alexander was tucked amongst the others, one his way back to his family. One other missing, the impression of Caroline bright inside her. And all those others. Far more than she had imagined possible. Gathered together like cattle for market. She wished for a moment that she had joined Guise in fighting the guards earlier, rage coursing through her.
Somewhere, there was a leader. Someone responsible for all of this. And she was going to find them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As they watched the wagons leave the square, Yvonne had the urge to follow them, make sure they were safe. She was too noticeable, though, even in this city.
She was relieved when Guise said he would follow them. The people of Three Falls were used to seeing goblins, and he had even brought a disguise of sorts, producing a hair tie and hat from his coat pockets. With his hair bound, and hat pulled low, he became just one more well-dressed goblin. He hesitated a moment, glancing at her.
“You don’t want me with you,” she guessed, mouth twitching into a smile at his expression. “I will be perfectly content to go back to the hotel.”
“Thank you,” he said gravely, as though she had done him a tremendous service.
“It would have been useful to look around here a bit more, though,” she said, walking with him to the side door.
“It will be taken care of,” he told her. She believed him.
So it was not really a surprise when, several hours later, Guise came back to the hotel, requested her presence in the hotel’s dining room, and put several ledgers out onto the table. He did not need to worry about them being overheard. She was not quite sure what he had done, or said, to Modig. She was sure that she had seen at least a few other guests in the hotel earlier in the day. The hotel was now empty apart from them.
She was freshly bathed with the faintest trace of the flowery perfume in the hotel’s soap teasing her nose, and the hair the nape of her neck still slightly damp from the bath, confined to its usual single braid straight down her back.
Looking across at Guise, as he settled into a chair, she knew that, outwardly, there was no reason for her to have bothered with her appearance. No matter how much soap she used, and how carefully she braided her hair, she would never match even his most casual appearance. He did not look like someone who had been creeping around the city streets, ensuring the safety of freed slaves. He was dressed with his usual understated elegance, the quality of his clothing evident even in the soft light of the dining room.
“You have not eaten,” he commented. “Aren’t you hungry?”
She was starving. Her stomach had been making gurgling noises for quite some time. Without even having to look at the menu, she knew that nothing in this restaurant was within her means. Guise had not given her an advance from her wages, and the few coins she had she needed to preserve. He often paid for meals when they travelled together, but she could not take that for granted.
She had been waiting to make sure he was back, and the children were safe, before venturing out again. This was Three Falls, and there were food stalls open virtually the night through in the market places. And she was hungry enough to risk going out again into the press of people.
“Modig,” Guise called. He barely raised his voice, but, as with earlier in the day, the owner was there in a moment with a shallow bow.
“The bank delivered the replacement funds as you requested, thank you, my lord,” Modig said. If he was surprised or relieved by the turn of events, he gave no sign of it. The thank you was sincere but matter-of-fact. “I have your papers safe, whenever you wish.”
