“Yes,” Barlo admitted, his fear softening somewhat at Tarn’s words. “There are many Welkin here. Everyone knows that. But who are you and why did you knock down the sunder and his men? They’ll light me on fire when they come to. Probably throw me off the outer wall and watch me burn to death in the sand.”
Adan stared at the incapacitated Waymen. The beginnings of a hurried and desperate plan began forming in his mind. “Barlo, we don’t have much time. We need your help.”
“Help? From me?” Barlo stared back at him in confusion.
Adan wavered. He was tempted to tell this man about their intentions to free the Welkin. He was clearly no friend of the Waymen, and yet Adan decided he should hold off until he found out more about him.
“We’re looking for someone. The last time I saw her they were here. There was a big tent around this area then.”
“The feeding grounds?” Barlo cocked an eyebrow.
“Yes, do you know what happened to it? Or, more importantly, where the women are who served the food?”
Barlo’s jaw worked back and forth like he was chewing on a mouthful of ideas. “And why should I tell you?” he spit out the question suspiciously.
“Because one of them is a friend of mine. And I really need to find her. She may be in danger.”
“Humph, we’re all in danger,” Barlo scoffed, but then he tugged at his chin in a thoughtful way. His eyes sparkled suddenly. “So what if I do know her? What’s in it for me?”
Adan suppressed a sigh. Apparently saving this man had done little to influence his opinion of them. He was either highly distrustful of strangers or exceptionally opportunistic. Either way, it meant that dealing with him would be less than ideal, but given the swiftly encroaching daylight and unfortunate circumstances Adan’s rash decision had put them in, he didn’t think they had much choice.
“We can protect you,” Adan declared. “If you take us to my friend, I promise to take you to a place where the Waymen won’t ever be able to hurt you again.”
Barlo eyed the fallen Waymen, a conspiratorial look on his face. “Hmm…what’s your friend’s name?” he asked in a low voice, as if he didn’t want the unconscious men to hear.
“Her name is Senya. Do you know her?”
Barlo’s face brightened at the mention of Senya’s name and, for the first time since they’d met him, all traces of fear faded from his countenance. With a surprising amount of tenderness in his voice, he answered, “Know her? She’s the only spark in all this sprawling pit of darkness.”
“Could you take us to her?” Adan asked, his hopes reviving.
Barlo’s lips twitched excitedly. “It would be my singular and sincerest pleasure. Any compa of Senya’s is a compa of Barlo. Come, follow me.” He turned to leave, but Tarn grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Wait, we need to tie up these shivs, don’t we?” he said, indicating Rak and his men.
“They should be out for a while, but perhaps you’re right,” Adan said.
“No good.” Barlo shook his head. “Othan, the new foreman, will be here shortly after dawn anyway. You’d only be wasting your time. Hurry now, we’re wasting time.” He hobbled off through the scrapyard at a surprisingly rapid pace for someone who had just endured such a severe beating.
“I don't like this,” Sierra's thought came into Adan's mind. He agreed, but there was nothing to do about it now except hurry after Barlo.
They fled the shack, leaving Rak and his unconscious henchmen lying in the middle of the heaps of debris. Hopefully it had been dark enough that when they woke up they wouldn’t be able to identify who had jumped them outside of Barlo’s shack, but somehow Adan doubted that would be the case.
Ten
Twists and Turns
Their newfound ally Barlo led them off the main path and through the maze of refuse. They wound their way through the morass until they arrived at the fence surrounding the scrapyard. Their guide leaned forward and latched on to the wire barrier with both hands.
“He’s not going to climb it, is he?” Tarn mumbled under his breath.
Barlo motioned for them to keep quiet and began twisting part of the fence with his fingers. At first Adan thought he was trying to pull apart a section of wire. He soon saw that what he had taken for a deformity in the metal was in fact a small tumbler lock attached to one of the chain links. Barlo flicked the tiny dials with practiced ease and a rectangular shaped opening in the fence popped free and swung open.
Though Barlo walked with a pronounced limp, they struggled to keep up with him as he ambled through the streets of Hull. They traveled always on the narrowest, most twisted pathways imaginable, never staying on a single one for very long, though generally heading towards the northwest section of the city.
The pathetic dawn of the Vast had mounted over the walls of Hull by the time they arrived at their destination: a massive, one-story structure made from patchwork metal paneling that looked like a much larger version of Barlo’s shack. It showed the signs of a hasty, temporary construction. Most of the metal panels were flimsier than those in the piles in the scrapyard. In fact, if someone had told Adan that this scrap had blown itself together into this corner of the city and formed itself into this structure he would have almost believed them.
Two weary-looking Waymen sat near the door, but they quickly jumped to their feet when Barlo and the others appeared. They were armed with shivs and pinions and physically imposing despite their unenthusiastic expressions.
Barlo walked straight up to them. At a word from the Welkin, they grumblingly pulled open the sliding panel behind them which served as an entrance to the catastrophe behind them disguised as a building. The whole thing shook a little when the panel stopped moving. Adan flinched, expecting the structure to fall on top of them, but it settled back into the same sorry state it had been in before. With great misgivings, Adan followed Barlo inside.
They entered a long metal hallway with unsightly gaps in the floor every few paces. Stepping carefully across the jigsaw floor, they emerged into a wide, oblong room with more than a dozen chairs and a few small tables. The furniture was worn, but appeared to be slightly better made than the building surrounding it. A few lumins dangled from cords in the ceiling, giving the room just enough light to avoid seeing the full extent of the negligence on the part of its builders. Another pair of Waymen, outfitted as if they were meant to be on guard as well, were passed out in opposite corners in two of the chairs, their heads lolling back against the wall.
“This way,” Barlo whispered, taking one of the two passages which led out of the room.
They went down several more topsy-turvy hallways, every one of them a mess of angles and an assault on the laws of geometry. They passed several doors along the way, but Barlo showed no interest in them. They paused at one of the open rooms where a woman sat by herself at a table. Her eyes were closed and her head was bowed, but she was clearly not asleep. Her arms were lifted above her head, her palms facing upwards.
She is praying, Adan realized. He had seen Senya in that posture when he visited her home. He hadn’t understood what it meant then, but now he recognized it for what it was.
Barlo hurried through the room without giving the woman so much as a glance and led them down several more nightmarish passages. At last he stopped at one of the gray metal doors in the middle of what passed for one of the walls of a hallway.
“I think this is the one,” he muttered to himself before giving the door a few soft raps with his knuckles. He waited for a response, his legs jittering impatiently. Then he knocked on the door again, louder this time. He repeated this process of knocking and waiting three more times, the volume of his knocks increasing each time until at last the door shuddered and swung open.
A woman with disheveled hair and tired eyes squinted at him from within a cave-like darkness.
“What is it?” she asked in a groggy voice.
“We need to talk to Senya,” Barlo said, stepping towards her.
“She’s not here,” the woman answered hastily, now very much awake. She eyed Barlo with visible fear now that she recognized him.
“Bah!” Barlo dismissed her with a wave of his hands and attempted to push his way past. “Don’t play games with me. This is important.”
Barlo had no room to get by so he simply bowled her over, shoving her into the room along with him.
“Wait—” Adan said, attempting to stop Barlo by placing a hand on his shoulder. But Barlo either didn’t notice or didn’t care and kept going.
“Barlo, you can’t do this—” the woman protested, but to no avail.
“Senya,” he said in a boisterous whisper. “Senya, it’s Barlo. I’ve got some friends of yours here to see you.” The room was dark, but enough light trickled in from the hall to see two sets of cots strung from poles on either side of the room. Mounds of hair, blankets, and clothing showed that two of them were occupied, but Adan could see little more.
“Barlo, I told you, she’s not here,” the woman insisted, tagging helplessly along behind him.
Sierra gave Adan a worried look. He wasn’t sure whether to try and rein Barlo in or stay out in the hall so as to not further invade this woman and her companions’ privacy. The cramped space favored the latter option so he called out to Barlo as loudly as he dared.
“Barlo, please come back out—I think you might have the wrong room.”
“Nah, this is hers, all right,” he shot back, leaning over one of the beds. After scrutinizing the face of whoever was beneath the hair and sheets, he let out a grunt and went to the other bed, all the while fending off the protests and pleas of the poor woman whose quarters he had invaded. “Shh! You’re liable to wake the guards,” he snapped, raising his hand as if he would strike her if she didn’t keep quiet.
She backed off and lowered her voice, allowing Barlo to examine the second bunk in relative peace.
“Not here, either,” he growled at the woman in the second bunk. She stirred and woke, letting out a frightened gasp and ducking back under her covers. “Where is she?” Barlo demanded of the poor woman who had first opened the door.
Adan had seen enough. He started to move into the room when Sierra stepped in front of him.
“Barlo, stop. You can’t do this,” she insisted.
“What?” Barlo exclaimed, making a surprised noise that was something between a wheeze and a growl.
“I apologize for disturbing you,” Sierra said, addressing the woman. “We’re looking for someone named Senya. Do you know where she is?”
“My guess would be the infirmary,” the woman said. “She usually goes there in the mornings early.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” Barlo huffed.
“I tried telling you she wasn’t here, but you wouldn’t listen,” the woman said meekly.
Barlo tromped sourly past both women and out of the room. Sierra followed, apologizing once again for the disturbance.
“Thanks for nothing, Maira. See if your rations aren’t a little tighter for a ten span,” Barlo threatened over his shoulder. Then he motioned for Adan and the others to follow him. “Sorry about that,” he muttered, resuming his former, less belligerent demeanor and flashing a look of regret. Then he limped off down the hall without waiting for a response.
Adan, Sierra, and Tarn had little choice but to follow him down the pock-marked passage, but Adan was wishing he had chosen to rescue someone of less questionable character.
The passage twisted capriciously as their journey through the haphazard building resumed. They traveled along three more passages like it before coming to another empty room with tables and chairs. As they made their way through yet another hallway, the immensity of the building impressed itself upon Adan. The sheer amount of scrap required was staggering. It may have been horribly put together, but a tremendous amount of work had gone into gathering the materials for its construction.
At last they reached a set of double doors. These were actually well made and they slid away when Barlo stood on a pressure plate in front of them. On the other side, two men sat behind a massive metal slab of a desk. The room was well lit and, though not the cleanest of places, had more or less straight walls and floors with no large holes or gaps in them. The ceiling was even partly tiled. It was a poor job, but at least an attempt had been made.
Two doors, separated by about three paces, stood facing them on the opposite wall. The men at the desks wore brown cloaks and were unarmed, but from the way they eyed Adan and his group, especially Barlo, it appeared that they functioned as guards of some sort, controlling access to the doors behind them.
“What do you want, Barlo?” asked the older looking of the two.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at the scrapyards?” added the other.
“There was a storm, in case you hadn’t heard,” Barlo quipped. “My shift got canceled.”
The first man regarded him with suspicion. “Okay, fine. Who are you here to see?”
“I need to speak with Senya. I was told she was working in the infirmary,” Barlo stated.
The man coughed. “She’s busy. Besides, we’re only allowed to let people visit the sick, not the healers.”
“But these people here need to see her. It’s urgent,” Barlo said, gesturing towards Adan. “Surely it’s not a serious infraction to bend the rules a bit. She could step out for a moment or two,” he suggested. Though his words came across smoothly, his anxious expression told a different story. Judging by the reactions on the faces of the men he was speaking to, they did not have a very high opinion of him.
“She’s treating Malloc’s leg injury,” the second man reported, glowering at Barlo.
Barlo’s expression darkened. “I know what you’re thinking. But you can’t blame his injury on me. It was an accident.”
Adan gave a start. “Malloc is here?”
The last time he had seen the Welkin leader he was lying unconscious in the Viscera after a fierce battle with several somatarchs.
“That’s not the first accident on your watch, Barlo,” said the first man, ignoring Adan’s interruption.
“If people would just follow orders, there would be a lot fewer accidents,” Barlo said defensively. “Malloc has been trouble from day one.”
Adan pressed up against the desk. “Please, I need to see him. It’s very important.”
The second man looked Adan up and down. He seemed skeptical, but the other man answered before he could reply.
“We can let this man and his friends in, can’t we Var?”
Var stifled a groan. “Fine, but Barlo has to stay here. Putting him and Malloc together would only cause trouble.”
Barlo threw up his hands in protest. “But he’s a patient. What could he do?”
“We’ll tell Senya you’re out here as well, okay?” Var responded curtly. “If she wants to come back out with these people to talk to you that will be her decision, but we’re not letting you in there.”
“This is an insult!” Barlo protested, shaking his fist at the man. “You’ll suffer for this, Var. Mark it in stone.”
“Like Malloc?” Var replied. “I guess that’s a chance I’ll have to take.”
“Don’t worry,” Adan said, laying a reassuring hand on Barlo’s shoulder and stepping between him and the attendants. “We’ll come back as soon as we can.”
Barlo’s face twisted into a vicious sneer, but he stifled whatever outburst he was tempted to make. “Just make sure and tell her that it was Barlo who brought you here. You can do that much at least, right?” His ingratiating expression made it very hard to sympathize with him.
“Yes,” Adan promised and then stepped towards the door.
Var manipulated something under the desk and a loud beep sounded. The left door slid open with a light scraping sound.
“You may pass through,” Var said, waving them in.
“Thank you,” Adan said as he, Sierra, and Tarn passed into the short hallway
beyond. Like the entrance room, some care had been taken in its construction. Dingy white tiles covered the floors and there were no holes to speak of. The hallway soon turned to the left and opened up into another small alcove. A woman sat behind a desk here as well.
“Who are you here to see?” she asked.
“Malloc,” Adan answered, remembering that it was the custom to visit sick people here and not those who were attending them.
“Eighth door on the left,” the woman said, pointing.
Adan walked down the hallway, his heart beating fast with the knowledge that Senya was near. Though he had only met her once, he had never forgotten her. He remembered the look of quiet resolve on her face when she had spoken to him of the pain of losing her husband, “All things in the end are passing, even death,” she’d told him, and that phrase had given him strength at his darkest moments.
Adan paused just before he reached the door and took a deep breath.
Then he touched a glass panel in front of the door. It slid open and he walked inside.
Eleven
Old Grudges
A single lumin embedded in the ceiling draped two figures in warm light. Below it, on a plain metal bed, lay a sleeping man with his right leg covered in yeso, a hard white material the Waymen used to set broken bones. The injured leg was propped up on the lip at the end of it and the other lay bent beneath a thick white sheet. This was supposed to be Malloc’s room, but at first Adan hardly recognized the Welkin leader. His hair had been cut short and his sunken face made him appear wasted and frail, a shadow of the imposing figure Adan had met in the Viscera.
Standing between the bed and a waist-high cabinet was Senya. Her hair was disheveled and her faded robe was more patches than actual garment. She had her sleeves rolled up and was in the middle of washing a rag in a basin of water on top of the cabinet. She too looked worse than Adan remembered, but she still had that same familiar blend of weariness and hope in her face. She stared at him for a moment, no recognition showing in her eyes.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 77
