The five of them were led along one of the wooden walkways that encircled the cavern. Lynn saw Priestess Regina stop at a corridor cut into the rock. She let Mr. Stix, Mr. Stownes and Squid all shuffle past in their manacles and chains. As Lynn reached the corridor she stepped out in front of her.
“You will be coming this way, Lynnette,” Priestess Regina said.
“Why?” Lynn asked.
The clergyman who had been shoving her from behind grabbed her arm and pulled her in the direction of the corridor. Lynn pulled against him.
“No,” she said. “Wait! Why are you taking me away from the others?”
“Hey!” she heard Nim call from the walkway.
“What’s happening?” Squid said, trying to turn back to look at the commotion behind him. “What’s going on?”
“I’m afraid this is where you part ways from your friends, Lynnette,” Priestess Regina said.
“Lynn!” Squid yelled. “No!”
Another clergyman grabbed her other arm and they all but lifted her off her feet as they pulled her into the corridor. She didn’t know where they were taking her but she knew she might never see her companions again. She would never see Nim again but, almost to her surprise, it was Squid she called out to.
“Get out of here, Squid!” she yelled as they dragged her away. “Get out of here and don’t come after me. Find Big Smoke. Do what we came to do!”
“Lynn!” She could hear both Squid and Nim calling her name, though their voices faded as she was dragged away.
She felt dread in the pit of her stomach. It was like the pirates all over again. This time, though, she didn’t think they would be coming to rescue her and, just as she’d said to Squid, she didn’t want them to. She wanted Squid to save those people left in the Territory. He had to save them from the ghouls first and then, she thought, maybe then the Church would get its own Reckoning. She hoped Squid could do it without her.
Lynn was crying as they pulled her roughly through an open wooden door. In front of her was another large space, but this one was bright. There was an enormous hatch set horizontally in the roof, or really, she supposed, it was the ground. Before her, held in place by thick ropes under the open hatch, was a dirigible.
“Get her aboard,” Priestess Regina said.
Lynn struggled uselessly against her captors. “Where are you taking me?” She didn’t want to fly on a dirigible again, not after last time, not after being kept locked up and then dropped to the ground in that stupid cargo cage. She didn’t want to go back into the air.
“You’re going back to Alice,” Priestess Regina said. “The High Priestess herself has requested that you be brought before the Supreme Court. It seems she disagreed with the Administrator about letting you go. God demands that you are tried correctly.”
“But I’m already here,” Lynn said. “I’m already in your stupid prison.”
“It is not for me to question the High Priestess.”
“No,” Lynn said. “I guess you’re just another mindless drone of the Church.”
Lynn’s face stung hot as Priestess Regina slapped her. “If it were my choice I would have you in the colosseum tonight, you insolent child. God must truly despise you for your impurity and faithlessness.”
“If there really is a God,” Lynn said, her voice low and fierce, “I think it’s your church he’d despise.”
This time Priestess Regina didn’t slap Lynn, she punched her in the cheek with a closed fist. Lynn felt the brutal impact on her cheekbone and scrunched up her face against the pain. When she looked back she saw Priestess Regina holding her hand. Good, she thought, I hope you broke your fingers. That had hurt.
“Get her out of here,” the Black Priestess said through gritted teeth.
Lynn let her feet drag as the Holy Order pulled her up the wooden ramp into the dirigible’s hold. She had thought she’d escaped all this, but it seemed the High Priestess’s long bony fingers extended even out beyond the edges of their world. She had come all this way, and now they were taking her all the way back. Back to the city she had escaped. She knew Squid had been right – she was more terrified of the Sisters than of anything else. She knew Alice was where she might find the truth about what happened to her father, but the idea of returning to the cathedral was almost unbearable.
Lynn thought of the girl she had seen on that last walk she had taken with her father, an Outsider girl being dragged into the Supreme Court. Lynn had seemed so much like her, but at the same time so different. She had pitied that girl, and now she knew that soon enough that girl would be her, taken by red-cloaked soldiers through the doors of the Supreme Court, dirty and despairing, fighting against them, yelling about the injustice of it all. Maybe there would be another girl out walking with her father who would see her and think how unlucky she was, some Outsider caught by the Church for some crime. That girl would be thinking that she would never do anything to land herself in trouble with the Sisters – you’d have to be stupid to do that – it so obviously wasn’t worth it. And that girl would walk home with her father and eat ice-cream and live safe in the knowledge that the Church only did what was right to protect them all.
CHAPTER 27
Again. He had lost her again.
“Lynn!” Squid called, but there was no answer. She was gone.
“Keep moving,” the clergyman behind him said.
“Where are they taking her?”
The clergyman just looked at him and shrugged. “I said keep moving.”
The clergyman pushed him and Squid stumbled again, landing heavily on his knees. He grimaced against the pain, but it was nothing compared to the pain he felt inside. Somehow he knew there would be no going after Lynn this time. She was gone, and even if she hadn’t told him so herself, he knew he would have to go on without her. Right then, it seemed an impossible task.
This hurt all the more because once again they had parted on less than perfect terms. He loved her. That’s what he wished he’d told her. Not just the type of love that Nim would claim he had for her, the type of love that made you want to kiss and hold hands and act like morons. He loved her deeper than anyone else could. Maybe that was why he had reacted so badly to this thing between her and Nim. He just wanted Lynn to acknowledge that what they had was special, it was forged in spending long hours at the Academy with no one to rely on but each other, in the stinking heat of battle with ghouls, and in facing the ultimate powers of the land, together.
He wished he could go back and do things differently. He knew that he had overreacted, or at least reacted in a way that made it seem like he wanted all or nothing with Lynn, but that’s not how it was, that’s not how he wanted it to be. If he had known she would be taken away from him forever he wouldn’t have made such a big deal about her relationship with Nim. He would have made the most of the time they’d had left together.
Squid looked back to see Nim struggling against the Holy Order, trying to fight his way back to the corridor Lynn had been taken down, but the clergymen were overpowering him, pushing him forward.
“Not again!” he was saying savagely as he fought, almost howling. “No!”
In that moment Squid didn’t feel jealous of Nim, didn’t feel angry that Nim was angry. Instead, he felt proud that Lynn had someone else who would fight for her. She deserved that. She deserved to have people who would fight for her as she had fought for others, as she had fought for him time and time again.
Eventually, once Nim seemed to have realized the futility of his situation and ceased thrashing, they were led along the wooden walkway that spiralled down to the bottom of the prison. The crowd of prisoners in their blue uniforms parted as the Holy Order strode through, red cloaks flicking and floating around their legs, and Mr. Stix, Mr. Stownes, Squid and Nim between them.
Squid saw the prisoners watching them, following them across the floor as if sizing up the newcomers. The four remaining companions were led to a door in the far side of the space. As they approached
it a voice bellowed out from the top of the central tower.
“Exercise time is over. You have two minutes to return to your cells.”
The prisoners began to move to the wooden walkways and climb toward their cells. Squid saw that some wore chains and others did not.
The lead clergyman, a short man with brown hair cropped close around his large ears, unlocked the door in front of them and pushed it open.
“In there,” he said.
Passing through the door Squid found himself in a sort of storeroom. Shirts, pants, shoes, all parts of the identical blue prison uniform were stacked on shelves along the walls on either side of them. A Sister dressed in a black dress similar to that Priestess Regina had been wearing looked up from where she sat at a desk writing in a large leather-bound book with a pen and red ink.
Squid thought the Sister was in her late thirties or early forties, but it was difficult to tell because she showed little signs of age. The corners of her eyes were wrinkled and she wore circular wire-rimmed glasses which she removed as she looked at the group. Her hair, a mousy brown, was tied back in a bun. There was something about her that Squid felt relieved to see, a kind of welcoming in her eyes; maybe not all the Black Sisters would be as ruthless as Priestess Regina.
Five of the clergymen had entered the room with them. Four stood in pairs either side of the door in defensive stances, obviously there to guard them. The short clergyman who had been in front of the group stepped forward.
“Sister Constance,” he said. “Sorry to disturb you, but we have some new arrivals.”
“No problem, Clergy-Lieutenant …” The Sister let her words hang in the air.
“Werther, Sister,” the Clergyman said. “Lieutenant Werther.”
“Werther,” Sister Constance repeated, as if testing the name to see whether it fit the man. She pushed her wooden chair back and rose. “I wasn’t informed of a prison shipment today.”
“No, Sister,” Clergy-Lieutenant Werther said. “This is the group the High Priestess sent word about.”
With that Sister Constance quickly turned her attention to Squid, Nim, Mr. Stix and Mr. Stownes.
“The girl,” Werther said, “Lynnette Hermannsburg, is already on her way back to Alice. Priestess Regina saw to that herself.”
They were sending Lynn back to Alice. She would stand trial for treason and would certainly face death at the hands of the High Priestess. Squid’s blood ran cold in his veins. He felt suddenly disconnected from the world around him. Lynn was going to be killed.
How had they known they were coming here? Who had even known? Archibald, Squid thought, he must have been working for the High Priestess. He told us to come to Pitt. Lynn had been right all along. He shouldn’t have trusted anyone. He should have listened to her. Now he had got her killed.
Sister Constance nodded, but she did not look away from Squid. “This is the boy?” she asked.
“Yes, Sister.”
“And who are these others?” Sister Constance waved her hand at Mr. Stix, Mr. Stownes and Nim.
“Unsure as yet, Sister,” Clergy-Lieutenant Werther said. “They arrived with them, hired help perhaps?”
“Nobody hired me,” Nim said. “I’m here because I want to be. I’m a Nomad. I live free on this land. You can’t keep me here.”
Nim looked as though he was going to continue but Werther turned and struck him across the face with the back of a gloved fist.
“Silence,” he said. “No one is free but by the grace of Glorious God the Redeemer.”
“Praise be to the Pure,” Sister Constance said.
“Praise be to the Pure,” Clergy-Lieutenant Werther echoed, in unison with the four clergymen near the door.
Nim did not speak again.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Werther,” Sister Constance said. “You may leave us. I will have them dressed, allocated and issued their cells and work orders.”
The clergy-lieutenant nodded. “Very good, Sister,” he said as he turned and left the room.
Sister Constance looked at each of them appraisingly. “Unchain them,” she said.
The four remaining clergymen moved forward, three of them standing close by as the fourth used a key to remove the clasps around the prisoners’ arms and legs and left the heavy chains on the floor nearby.
“Do not get any ideas about trying something now that your chains are removed,” Sister Constance said. “You would find the result unpleasant.”
As the manacles dropped from Squid’s arms he rubbed at his wrists, which were red and chafed where the metal had been digging into his skin.
“Remove your clothes,” Sister Constance said when they had all been freed.
“What?” Nim said. “Here?”
Sister Constance almost seemed to sigh. “Yes, here,” she said. “Remove your clothes or the clergymen behind you will remove them for you. Just to your underwear will be sufficient.”
Sister Constance did not avert her eyes. Squid began undoing the buttons of his shirt. This didn’t seem right. He didn’t like getting undressed in front of anyone, but a Sister was even worse. He let his shirt drop to the ground behind him.
“Stop,” Sister Constance said, walking toward Squid. “What is that?”
Squid’s hand shot to his key. He realized he should have hidden it, but he was so used to the feeling of it against his skin that he’d forgotten it was even there.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a key.”
Sister Constance reached out and took Squid’s key in her fingers. Without thinking Squid grabbed her wrist.
“No!” he said.
Before he could react two Holy Order clergymen were upon him. One took hold of his arm, the other grabbed him from behind in a kind of choke hold. Squid felt the pressure of the man’s forearm against his throat. He gasped for breath but nothing but a raspy rattle came in. His lungs were already burning just at the thought of not getting the air they needed. He let go of Sister Constance’s arm, putting his hands up, submitting completely to the clergyman’s hold, but the man kept hold of him. Points of light began to burst all across the top of Squid’s vision. His face felt so full of pressure that it might explode. His lungs begged and screamed for air, his diaphragm working to no avail.
“Stop,” Sister Constance said. “That’s quite enough.”
Squid felt the pressure around his throat release. He dropped, landing on his already bruised kneecaps, but this time he ignored the pain. It was only air that mattered. He breathed deeply, sucking glorious oxygen into his lungs. They almost hurt as they expanded and contracted. Breathing was something you took for granted every moment of every day, until the few seconds when you think you’re never going to breathe again. His neck hurt, his Adam’s apple felt as though it had been crushed.
Sister Constance eyed the clergyman before turning her attention back to Squid. She moved to him, grabbing the top of his arm and lifting him to his feet. Squid, still breathing deeply, looked up at her. The Sister stared back at him, her face like carved stone, unmoving, showing no semblance of emotion. Squid had no idea what she was thinking. She reached out and took the key once again. With her other hand she took hold of the string behind his neck, lifting it over his head. Squid flinched again, wanting to grab it, wanting to stop her taking his key away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw flowing red cloaks move toward him again.
“It’s fine,” Sister Constance said. “He won’t try anything again, will you, Squid?”
“Please,” Squid said. “Please, it’s nothing.”
“You seem awfully concerned for something that means nothing,” Sister Constance said, examining the key as it rested on her palm. “Where did you get this?”
“My mother,” Squid said. “She gave it to me.”
“Who is your mother?” Sister Constance said, returning her evaluating gaze to Squid’s face. Like all Sisters, Squid felt as though she could see through him, or at least deep into the many layers of himself.
&nb
sp; “Nobody,” Squid said. “She was just a farmer’s wife. She’s dead now.”
Sister Constance stared at him for a moment longer before speaking to the clergymen in the room.
“I believe Priestess Regina needs to be made aware of this,” she said. “Hold them here. I will send Sister Galah to prepare them for their stay with us.”
Sister Constance looked from the key in her hand to Squid one last time before she made her way to the door, her black dress swishing from side to side, just brushing the floor as she moved. Squid felt as if he were now truly undressed. His key was gone. The only thing he had left of his parents, gone. That was that, then. The two things that had been constants in his life, the two things he needed in their own way were both gone: his best friend and his link to the past. Even with Mr. Stix, Mr. Stownes and Nim in the room with him, and in a prison surrounded by who knew how many people, Squid felt utterly and completely alone.
CHAPTER 28
There was no way Squid could sleep. He lay on the thin mattress on the bottom bunk of his cell. He’d never really been accustomed to comfortable bedding but this was worse than usual, a bed that was in parts lumpy, squishy and hard. It would have been better suited to serving as a torture device, though, he realized, this was a prison, so maybe that’s exactly what it was.
His chest almost burned with the absence of his key. He was amazed that not having it against his skin could produce what felt like physical pain. Nim was asleep in the bed above him. The two of them had been placed in the same cell. Mr. Stix and Mr. Stownes were in the cell next door.
After Sister Constance had left a new Sister had replaced her, a pale soft-spoken woman named Whitney who had issued them each with blue uniforms, written their information in the big leather book on the desk and had roughly sewn a numbered label to each of their shirts. Sister Constance had never returned, and Squid had no idea what had happened to his key.
A City Called Smoke: The Territory 2 Page 19
