“Why?” said Silo suspiciously.
“I have bad dreams,” said Maximillian. “Sometimes I scream in the night. And sometimes I’m sick.”
“In that case I want the top bunk,” said Silo firmly.
Being Maximillian’s friend was evidently going to be something of a trial. He saw a battered sign in the corner—WASHROOM—and beneath it a door guarded by the hefty girl he had spoken to in the dining hall. He walked over and discovered, to his intense irritation, that when standing up she positively towered over him.
“I’ve come to see Ruby,” he said, and she shoved the door open a crack.
Ruby was awaiting him in the dim, candlelit interior. “This is Drusilla, my lieutenant,” she said, then added, in a lower voice, as she shut the door behind them: “She’s a bit thick, but she’s big.”
Silo scowled. As a small person he thoroughly disapproved of this method of recruitment. The room he found himself in was the merest box, about eight feet by eight. It contained a few buckets full of dirty water and its walls were chalked over with a sketch of what appeared to be a giant maze, but a maze with teeth, a striped tail, and claws.
“It’s a map of the building, to plan escape routes on,” Ruby explained. “I disguised it as a drawing of a tiger. It’s not complete yet, though. I only arrived here two days ago. Just as well really—they’re a bit wet, that lot.” She jerked her head in the direction of the dormitory. “Some of them have been here for ages, and they hadn’t even organized an escape committee. But things have moved on a lot since then.”
“Good,” said Silo. “What’s the plan?”
“The courtyard’s out,” said Ruby. “High walls and guards on the gate. Same with the dormitory—the skylights are barred, and we’re always locked in. I think we’re going to have to escape during working hours, and the drains are our best bet. I was living on the streets for almost a year before they arrested me, and I used the drains sometimes to hide from the SAD patrols—”
“The what?” said Silo.
“SAD. The State Archaeological Division. The idiots we’re working for. They go grubbing around in old rubbish dumps looking for Ancient artifacts. They have problems finding staff, though, so they send patrols out at night to round up homeless children. They say they take them to orphanages and look after them, but they don’t really. They put them to work in places like this.”
Silo thought of the buzzard burger boy—he and all the other ragged children who haunted the Capital. “Why are there so many homeless children here?”
“Because their parents have been shipped out,” said Ruby. “That’s what happened to mine, anyway.”
She looked so angry that Silo swiftly changed the subject. “About the drains…”
“Yeah. There’s a whole labyrinth of them under the city. We’re working underground, so hopefully we can dig our way in and find a way back to the streets. I noticed you and that little weird boy were digging by the north wall today. That’s good. The river Rampage runs to the north, and the drains must empty into it.”
“I’m on the case,” said Silo.
—
Thus began the most miserable period of Silo’s already rather miserable life. Their days at the Unicorn Tower began early. The bell rang when the light that filtered through the skylights was still pearly with the dawn, summoning them rudely from their bunks and dreams. Within ten minutes of waking they were expected to be seated in the dining room, where a mug of water and a slice of stale bread awaited them by way of breakfast, and then they were herded into the Unicorn Tower and their day’s work began. The twelve largest children worked the treadmill and the rest were lowered down to work in the chaos below, and Silo was always among this party. He found it filthy, backbreaking work, toiling in the gloomy half-light digging pit after pit after pit. Sometimes the sides caved in, half burying him in earth, and sometimes it rained and the pits flooded, leaving him toiling waist-deep in water. The excavated mud was loaded first into barrows and then into the great basket to be hauled up to ground level, and the route there was a perilous one, pushing heavy loads along paths that snaked around the crumbling edges of pits, where a single misstep meant a long fall. And Maximillian was an additional worry to Silo, for wherever he went Maximillian tracked him like a shadow. From the day of their first meeting he had attached himself, limpetlike, to his side, for Silo had told him he was his friend and Maximillian had taken his words to heart. Unfortunately he was a hopelessly impractical boy, much given to tripping over shovels and stumbling down holes, for he seemed to live in a strange twilight world of seeings where the present and the future mingled inextricably in his mind, and it made him dangerously absentminded. Often he froze where he stood and simply stared vacantly into space, prey to who knew what strange visions—at which point Superintendent Frisk would roar with rage and throw missiles at him.
For Frisk was an inescapable evil. The titanic statues of the Unicom couple soared high above the chaos of the diggings, and it was the superintendent’s habit to climb up to the plinth that supported them and pace around and around their gigantic feet, surveying his little empire of mud and misery. His beady eyes were everywhere and his bullying voice carried into even the most distant corners of the tower:
“Number Sixteen—move it with that barrow! Numbers Twenty-Nine and Thirteen—why so slow? Number Eight—stop picking your nose and start digging!”
Officer Feeton patrolled the paths that wound amid the heaps and holes, and nothing escaped his eyes as he urged the children to work harder, dig deeper, move faster. Frisk bellowed and bullied from his plinth, his keys clanking with his every movement, but it was Feeton whom Silo came to hate more, for he moved swiftly on silent feet, creeping up on weary children and hurling clods of earth at them if he found them snatching even a moment’s rest.
And so their days passed to the dull thud of picks and shovels, the shouts of the overseers, and the trundle of barrow wheels, but loud over all came the rumble of the treadmill that towered above them, its great wheel creaking and its chains rattling as the basket was lowered, loaded with earth, and raised up again; up and down, up and down, from dawn until dusk. It paused only once, at noon, when the children were hauled back into the daylight for lunch. The menu was unvarying—mudfish broth. Lunchtime lasted for forty minutes precisely, and then they descended back into the gloom. And their work seemed meaningless to Silo, for the Ancient artifacts they found seemed singularly useless: bits of rotted wood and rusty metal, fragments of pottery, lengths of cabling, and the mangled remains of mysterious objects shattered beyond all hope of repair or identification. But on this, as on so many things, he and the State Archaeological Division disagreed. These precious finds were loaded into a big wooden bucket and hauled up to the platform by means of a pulley. When they arrived at the surface they were packed carefully into straw-lined crates, for the Division wished to inspect each and every one of them.
At six in the evening work finished for the day. A meager ration of boiled turnips was served, and then finally they were allowed what was called “recreation”—though by that time most of the children were so weary they headed, zombielike, to their bunks. Silo yearned to do likewise, but instead he forced himself to join Ruby in the washroom to sit, dazed with exhaustion, as she pored over her ever-expanding map in the vain hope of finding an escape route. But as the long summer days crept past, even Ruby began to sound despondent. Silo was dismayed to learn that some of the children had been there for six months or more. The grinding labor and meager diet were taking their toll on him, and he found himself thinking less and less of escape and more and more about food; and the things that had preoccupied him when he was at liberty began to seem distant and strangely unimportant. But one question at least was answered for him, and in an unexpected way.
One morning the children were gathered beside the treadmill, about to begin their daily grind. Silo was glowering at the Unicom couple. Their gigantic heads were on a level with the platform and
so were the first thing that met his eye when he entered the tower each morning. Their toothy smiles seemed to mock the miserable children ranged before them, and Silo had grown to hate them with a passion. Frisk was strutting about in his usual self-important manner.
“New girl!” he cried. “We have no names here, only numbers. You are Number Thirty, and will answer to that number at all times. And you will join the party on the treadmill.”
Silo turned to see what new unfortunate had fallen victim to the Division, and was surprised to see it was someone he knew. “Hello, Daisy,” he said.
“That’s Number Thirty to you,” roared Frisk, poking him painfully in the back of the neck. “And you’re here to work, not chat. Into the basket immediately!”
Daisy was taking her place on the treadmill, her eyes red-rimmed with weeping. So now Silo knew where seers ended up—at least, those who pretended to be seers to get a government job. Poor Daisy was working for the Government now, but Silo doubted she would derive much joy from it.
One morning, in the third week of Silo’s captivity, something finally occurred to break the monotony of their days. The great treadmill juddered to a halt and Frisk’s cries of rage, loud in the sudden silence, told Silo that it was not a scheduled stop. A single ladder led from the diggings to the platform high above. He and Feeton went storming up it to see what was amiss, and the children gratefully dropped their tools and slumped down to rest. Lunchtime came and went, and finally Feeton’s face appeared, scowling down at them over the edge of the platform.
“On your feet, little vermin! Form a line by the bucket.”
They did so, and were hauled up one by one in the bucket used to transport artifacts. Silo was the last to arrive and his eyes were immediately drawn to a mangled metal object, an Ancient artifact no less, protruding from the workings of the treadmill. He realized, with a thrill of pleasure, that it was an act of deliberate sabotage, and he suspected Ruby was responsible.
“You the last one, Number Twenty-Nine? Right! The superintendent wants a word, so get along to his office, the whole pack of you.”
The children trooped out of the tower and into Frisk’s office, and instantly all eyes were fixed longingly on his desk, for sitting before him was a plump chicken roasted to golden perfection, garnished with crispy bacon, nestling amid a mound of vegetables and smelling mouthwateringly delicious.
“Well, you little maggots,” he said, dousing his plate in gravy, “don’t any of you be getting any bright ideas from Number Twenty-Eight.”
So it had been Ruby, thought Silo.
“Thought she’d disrupt work, she did, so she could have a rest and a sit-down maybe, but she got a beating instead. And she’ll be having no food for three days either”—he speared a roast potato and stuffed it into his mouth—“so let this be a warning to the rest of you.” He glowered at them, gravy dripping from his chin. “You two! Numbers Six and Seven!”
“Yes, sir!” Two brothers called Basil and Rodney Bolton sprang to attention.
“You’re to take her place on the treadmill tomorrow. Number Twenty-Eight won’t be given a chance to play her nasty tricks again. She’ll be working in the diggings from now on.”
Ruby had planned this, Silo realized. From now on she would be able to hunt for drains to her heart’s content; he was impressed by her fortitude.
“So no more monkey business,” Frisk continued. “We’re way behind schedule as it is. You need to work harder, the whole pack of you.”
He tore off a chicken leg and leveled it at them in a menacing manner. “What do you need to do?”
“Work harder, sir,” chorused the children, their ravenous eyes fixed on his plate.
“That’s right!” he cried. He took a bite of chicken, his words issuing forth amid a rotating mass of mangled meat. “Now get out of my sight, you shirking little scumbags.” He gave them an evil smile. “And enjoy your lunch.”
—
It was boiled buzzard. Silo stared at his plate for a moment, torn between hunger and revulsion, then drank the gravy and wrapped what remained in a rag and stuffed it into his pocket. He nodded to Daisy as he left the dining room. He had barely spoken to her since her arrival, for she had been a friend of Elgarth and that he found hard to forgive, but time had worked an unexpected change of heart.
Daisy had spent her first evening weeping quietly in a corner, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. The sound of sobbing was commonplace in the dormitory. But on her second day she seemed to pull herself together. She, Ruby, and Drusilla were the three oldest children in the group. Ruby was preoccupied with her escape plans and Drusilla was frankly scary, but there was a gentleness about Daisy that seemed to draw the youngest children to her. Some of them were very young indeed, no older than four or five, and perhaps she reminded them of big sisters from happier times. She dried her tears and took them in hand. She patched up their cuts and bruises, combed their matted hair, and encouraged them to brush their teeth. She taught them an annoying song about a puppy called Cuddles. Sometimes a little group, about a dozen in all, would cluster around her and she would tell stories. Silo found the stories repellent, for they invariably featured fairies and elves, but the little ones seemed to enjoy them and Silo discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that Daisy had risen in his estimation.
Now he made his way to the washroom with Maximillian padding at his heels. Ruby was perched on an upturned bucket. She had a split lip and the beginnings of a spectacular black eye, but even so there was an air of quiet satisfaction about her as she sat surveying her map.
“Here.” Silo took the unsavory package from his pocket and handed it to her.
“Thanks!” Months of living on the streets had inured her to the taste of buzzard.
“Maybe now that I’m in the diggings we can move things on a little.” She spat out a stray talon. “But I was wondering—you two are seers. You haven’t seen anything useful, have you, about the future? Something that might help us?”
Silo shook his head. His own gift had lain dormant within him since his last terrible vision of the Island. When he first arrived he had hoped that Maximillian, as the greatest seer on all Mainland, might see a path through the troubles that beset them—though in this, as in so many things, he was doomed to disappointment. But Ruby could find out for herself.
“Tell her what you’ve seen today,” he said to Maximillian.
Maximillian thought for a moment, then stared into space with unseeing eyes. “Two bulls will fight on a hillside. The spotted one will win. A man will buy a horse called Clover, but Clover will tread on his foot and break his toe. The man will say a bad word. Pigtown will lead Killvale ten–nil at goatball, but then they’ll run out of goats and the Killvale fans will riot. A woman wants to surprise her husband for his birthday. She’ll make a pudding and pour booze on it, then set it on fire. But the pudding will set fire to the curtains. Her husband will be very surprised—”
“That’ll do,” said Ruby. She looked wearily at Silo. “Is he always like this?”
“Yeah,” said Silo.
Being the greatest seer on all Mainland was obviously not all it was cracked up to be.
—
The next afternoon he and Maximillian were set to work in the corner where the north and west walls met, toiling in the gloom with the usual layer of mud and junk underfoot. Silo had just dug up an old panel, cracked, chipped, and caked in dirt. It was one among dozens they had excavated to date—little boards made of a strange material, not wood or metal or stone but something smooth and light. On one side were written numbers, symbols, and mysterious words—CTRL, ALT, ESC, PGDN—and the whole alphabet in a strange, random order, not A to Z but Q to M. Silo was mystified as to their original use, but they had obviously been considered precious once, for they had lids that folded down to protect them.
“I wonder what these were for,” he said idly.
“They’re all dead now,” said Maximillian sadly, “but once they used to glow. T
he Ancients pressed the letters and the lids showed them pictures and writing. And sometimes they sang.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I’ve seen them doing it.”
Silo dropped his pick in amazement. “You mean seen as in seeing?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean that you have seeings of the past, from way back before the Newcount? From the time of the Ancients?”
“Sometimes,” said Maximillian.
Silo’s mind reeled. It was possible, then. Mrs. Morgan had been right. He suddenly realized, with a blinding flash of revelation, that the fragile form of Maximillian Crow embodied the wildest dreams of Mrs. Morgan and the entire State Archaeological Division: a seer who could unravel the mysteries of the Ancients and describe the workings of their strange artifacts, maybe even find the source of their mysterious power. He stared in wonder at him, a boy whose mind ranged freely through unimaginable realms of space and time but was incapable of finding a sensible place to be sick.
“What was it that Number Thirteen was just talking about?”
Silo turned, and to his horror he saw that Feeton had crept up, in his usual silent manner, and was standing right behind them. How much of their conversation had he heard?
“Number Thirteen was saying something about seeing into the past. Is he a seer like yourself, Number Twenty-Nine? The Division is interested in seers—leastways, those of them that behave themselves.”
“Number Thirteen gets confused, sir,” said Silo, appalled. “He…”
He what? Silo desperately racked his brains for a way out of his predicament; anything that would prevent the Division from getting their hands on Maximillian and forcing him, by who knew what horrible means, to divulge the secrets of the Ancients. He needed a miracle and—astonishingly—he got one.
There was a wild cry from overhead, a sudden shower of rubble, and Silo looked up just in time to see a figure plummeting through a window high above him. Its fall was arrested violently just six feet short of the ground, and the three of them stared in amazement at the sturdy dark boy who revolved slowly before their eyes, suspended upside down in a tangle of rope. It was Orlando.
Silo and the Rebel Raiders Page 11
