‘Don’t be stupid, Nort,’ says Radnor. ‘We’ve already got a good plan, and we’re not screwing it up at the last minute for the sake of some random scruffer girl.’ He glares at me, then points down the tunnel. ‘Get out of here, and don’t even think about following us.’
I want to argue with him but it’s pointless now, because Radnor has decided he doesn’t want me. Even if I manage to bargain my way onto the crew, I doubt we’d make it out of Rourton alive, let alone all the way to the Valley. Crew members have to respect each other, without any backstabbing or distrust, if they want to survive.
‘All right,’ I say, in the poshest richie accent I can muster. ‘Send me a wire if you change your mind. My address is in the golden directory.’
It’s a stupid jab at Clementine, of course, because only the wealthiest richies can send or receive telegraphs – and I don’t have any address, let alone one in the golden directory. I know I’m being immature, even as I say it. But it’s enough to make Teddy Nort grin, just for a minute. I can’t help feeling pleased that at least one of them seems to want me on the crew.
Then I head off down the tunnel, sloshing muck up my legs with every step. There’s no point making friends with Teddy Nort – not when he’s about to flee the city. I keep remembering Radnor’s comment: ‘We’re not screwing it up at the last minute.’ It sounds like the crew is leaving soon, maybe even tonight.
And if that’s true, it’s a solid bet they’ll be dead by morning.
Back up on the streets, I follow a shadowed alleyway. There’s no point thinking about the refugee crew. They don’t want my help, and they don’t want me. Full stop. End of story. Like everything else about life in Rourton, it’s better to make myself forget.
The bombing’s over now. I hear voices in the distance, and the crash and crumble of damaged walls collapsing into dust. Smoke pours up into the night, bathing Rourton in a sea of starlit grey. It stinks of ash and scorched debris.
The smell of fire brings back too many memories. Another night. Another bombing. My feet like lead upon another street.
When I was little, my mother told me stories of the Magnetic Valley. It’s forbidden to speak of it, but everyone knows – everyone whispers its name in hope. That’s what Walter’s folk song was about, his drunken ramblings in the Alehouse as the bombs began to fall. Now, the words come back to me: a taunt of dreams that can never come true.
Oh mighty yo,
How the star-shine must go
Chasing those distant deserts of green . . .
The Magnetic Valley is where refugee crews run to, where our dreams carry us on the darkest nights, in the coldest alleyways. It’s a boundary of green meadows, a doorway into another nation that lies beyond Taladia. In the Valley, the king’s magically powered planes and war machines are as useless as toys. Its hillsides are lined with magnetic rocks, which interfere with magic.
And according to our legends, the nation beyond is a paradise. It’s one of Taladia’s only neighbouring lands where our king has not waged a war. I don’t even know the name of the country, but if even half the stories are true, I’d give my right arm to live there. Supposedly there’s enough food and warmth and shelter for us all. The people’s leaders don’t bomb them, don’t send hunters to pursue them through the wild. Beyond the Valley, I could be safe. Safe, for the first time in my life.
But for now, I’m just a scruffer in a city of flames.
As the smoke thickens, my eyes start to water. I reach into my pocket for my handkerchief – a shred of stolen fabric from a clothing factory’s scrapheap – but it’s disappeared. I must have dropped it in the sewer somewhere. I wipe my eyes on a sleeve, but the grit feels like sandpaper. I haven’t had a chance to wash my clothes for ages. So I pick up the pace and try to ignore the dribbles running down my cheeks.
At one point, there’s a scream. It’s a few blocks away, so I can’t see the source, but it sounds husky: an old woman, perhaps. Has she returned home to find her house gone, her family lost amid the blood-streaked rubble? Maybe an alchemy bomb has replaced her home with wild flowers or a lake of rippling silver. There’s wailing now, a chorus of grief as her neighbours take up the call. I grit my teeth, grind each foot into the cobblestones and try to ignore them. There’s nothing I can do to help.
I hesitate at the intersection. I don’t know which way to turn. It’s too late to find a bed in a hostel tonight; they all lock their doors at curfew. The thought of a night on the streets – now, when the world is a blur of death and flames and screams – is enough to turn my stomach. I can’t do it. I can’t stay here and listen to my family die over and over again.
There’s another scream, this one from the opposite direction, and I make up my mind. My encounter with Radnor’s refugee crew has cemented something in the back of my skull. A feeling I never knew was brewing there . . . not until now, on the intersection of Rourton’s alchemy-bombed roads. I can’t do this any more.
I refuse to do this any more.
I refuse to spend my life in this grimy city, scavenging for food and sleeping in doorways. I refuse to reach my eighteenth birthday here, to be conscripted into King Morrigan’s army and shunted off to fight on behalf of the monarch who killed my family.
I’m going to escape from Taladia. I’m going to find the Valley. And if Radnor’s refugee crew won’t take me, I’ll do it alone. Tonight. This is my chance. The city is in an uproar. People are battling fires, searching for their families, or – if they’re lucky – cowering in bunkers and waiting for dawn. Any obedience to the monarchy’s curfew has gone out the window and no one will notice a scrawny teenage girl. If there were ever a perfect night for escaping Rourton, this is it.
I have no real possessions, beyond what I’m wearing. The clothes on my back and my mother’s silver bracelet, which is secured up high above my elbow. It’s a liberating thought. It means that I’ve got nothing to worry about or protect, nothing to retrieve in the jumble of a post-bombing frenzy. No possessions, no friends, no family. I can head straight for the city walls and make a good start on my journey before the night ends.
I cross the intersection and start towards the edge of the city. There’s a thick plume of smoke and ash to my left, so I veer towards it. If anyone is looking out their window, hopefully they’ll assume I’m just a local girl running home to make sure her family survived. In all this haze, it would be hard to make out the ragged clothes and unwashed hair that mark me as a scruffer.
Closer to the city outskirts, I see more signs of the bombs’ destruction. There’s a huge crater in the middle of a road, where white snowflakes fall upwards and melt into the dark sky. A few streets later, I stumble across what used to be Rourton’s library. The building is gone, but broken books and papers flock like seagulls in the night. Thorny vines unfurl across the rubble so fast that I can actually watch them grow. I stumble forward, searching for signs of survivors, but of course there’s nothing. No one ever survives an alchemy bomb.
There’s nothing I can do.
The night my family died, the bombings were caused by a woman from Gimstead, a smaller city west of Rourton. She managed to whip a few dozen scruffers into an attack on their city’s hunter headquarters, trying to steal some food for the poorer children. Three guards were killed in the raid – alongside five or six scruffers. The whole block ended up on fire, and a lot of valuable paperwork was lost. Criminal records, court reports and the like.
The palace can’t let that sort of thing go unpunished. That’s the sort of thing that sparks more than fires. It sparks courage. Revolt. Maybe even revolutions. And so King Morrigan sent his bombs to punish every city north of the wastelands.
I understand why the woman in Gimstead did it. It was a cold winter and people were starving. It must have been hard to watch the king’s hunters on patrol, wolfing down bread and casserole. I might have done the same thing, if I were cold and
desperate and brave. But this doesn’t stop a part of me from hating that woman, whose lust for food got my family killed.
In the early days, when I was just adjusting to life on the streets, I used to lie awake behind a stack of rubbish bins and hope that the bombs got her too. Then I would hug my torso, hating myself for thinking it, and wait in silence for the night to end.
When I reach the wall, the sky’s still smoky. I keep my head bowed low, hoping to shield my face. The wall is imbued with picture spells: a magical surveillance system for the city’s edges. If you act too suspiciously, your picture can later be gleaned from the alchemical recording – and sooner or later, you’ll swap city walls for prison bars.
The easiest way to escape Rourton is to join a licensed trading crew. Then you can travel legally out the gates in a cart carrying pots or food on the way to another city. But a scruffer girl like me has better odds of flying to the moon than finding employment with traders. They’d think I was a crook: a pickpocket like Teddy Nort, hoping to steal their wares.
That leaves two options. Under the wall, or over it.
Going underneath is impossible. The wall’s foundations were strengthened by people with Earth proclivities, who coaxed the ground to swallow a barrier as deep as it could go. The wall has stood for hundreds of years, and will doubtless last for hundreds more. I don’t have the magic to fight against that. I don’t even know what my own proclivity is yet, let alone how to counter someone else’s.
Lately, I’ve sensed an odd itching at the back of my neck and down my spine. It must be the start of my markings, as I move towards adulthood and my proclivity begins to emerge. But until it fully develops, I have about as much magic as a five-year-old. Nothing that could bust through a wall of magically enhanced stone.
So I can’t go through the gate and I can’t get under the wall. That leaves one option: going over the top. I know that it’s been done before, so there must be a way. Somehow, while the smoke’s still swirling, I’ve got to find it.
On this side of the wall, I can only hear shouts and wind and the crackle of flames. But on the far side, if I strain my ears, I can just make out a faint chirping. Crickets. I recognise the sound from the city market. Sometimes traders sell them, for the times when you’re starving enough to eat anything that might pass as meat. Now, though, their chirps don’t sound like food. They sound like freedom.
I begin to climb. There’s no time to worry about the wall’s picture spells. By the time they identify me, I’ll either be free or dead. The wall is made of huge stone bricks, each half a metre tall. They’re roughly hewn, split by trenches and valleys that must seem an entire continent to the ants upon their surface. The valleys are too shallow for my fingers to grip but there are gaps in the mortar, worn away by decades of neglect. The king prefers to fund guards and weapons, not bricks and mortar. On a normal night, this wall would be crawling with guards, infesting the turrets that punctuate the wall every hundred metres. They’d stare up and down with metal binoculars and carry rifles on their shoulders. On a normal night, I’d be shot from this wall in an instant.
But this is not a normal night. Half the turrets are deserted – even the king’s own guards are afraid of bombs. Perhaps they were given prior warning, or simply fled when they spotted the biplanes approaching. The guards who remain are too far away to make out a shadowy figure upon the bricks. Their spotlights are focused inward, highlighting the spectacle of Rourton’s burning streets.
About four metres up the wall, I stop to take a breath. It’s hard, sweaty work, even in the chill of a northern night. The smoke might be a good disguise, but it’s also hot and gritty. I continue climbing. One, two, one, two. My lungs throb in time with the upward swing of my limbs. Scruffer kids are good at climbing, since we often need to make quick getaways. It’s illegal to sleep in people’s doorways and the richies are allowed to get rid of us however they see fit. We’re just vermin to them. Scooting up the side of a building can be your only hope to escape a whack from someone’s fireplace poker – or worse, their proclivity.
The wall begins to shake. For a wild second I think it must be another bomb – that the planes have returned and our city is under attack again, just when survivors are gathered outside to assess our losses. Then I realise. This vibration isn’t the wild crash that comes from a bombing. It’s a mechanical rattle, like power travelling along a wire.
Someone is opening the city gate.
I whip my head around, staring along the wall. I’m high enough to see over the roofs of nearby buildings, and I can just make out the gate through the smoke. It’s a vast slab of iron about a hundred metres away. As I watch, squinting through the haze, it trundles out towards the world beyond. What are they doing? Why are they opening the gate at this time of night? I shift my weight, trying to fight the growing numbness in my fingertips. There’s a group of figures near the gate. The guards are easy to pick out, because their copper breastplates gleam beneath the streetlights. The others, I realise quickly, aren’t just normal traders. They’re foxary riders.
That explains why the guards are willing to let them out at this hour. Foxary riders mean trouble and I bet the guards will be glad to see the backs of them – especially with all the chaos caused by the bombs. Foxaries are great, coarse beasts that resemble massive foxes but are ridden like horses. They were created decades ago after someone with a Beast proclivity mated different creatures together. With breeding, magic and a bit of illegal experimentation, he created the first foxary. Originally they were used to pull wagons and carts, inspired by sled dogs in the far north. Then some crazy trader decided to mount them directly.
Foxaries are tough: hard to kill and even harder to control. The beasts can run for days, carry huge weights and even live off tree-bark, if need be. If your proclivity isn’t Beast, there are only two ways to ride one: with its trust or with a knife bridle. Most riders rely on the latter, using metal blades and whips to keep their mounts under control.
Like I said, foxaries mean trouble.
King Morrigan could stamp out the riders if he wanted to, but he finds it more useful to turn a blind eye. Foxary riders are hired by wealthy traders as mercenaries, to guard the richies’ possessions while they’re on the move. If anyone threatens you on the road, a foxary’s jaws will do a lot more damage than horse teeth.
Someone shouts from the gate. The situation changes so fast that I hardly realise it’s happening until the fight has begun. Guards leap towards the foxary riders, raising pistols to fire, trying to stop them leaving . . . Someone is already manning the machinery, and the gate begins to close again with a mechanical groan . . .
A gust of wind blasts above the buildings. It clears the smoke for a moment and I steal a clearer glimpse of the figures by the gate. The foxary riders are smaller than I expected, and wearing neck-scarves to disguise any proclivity markings. Teenagers. And there are five of them . . .
A flash of gold curls reveals one of the twins: either Clementine herself, or her quieter sister. She tumbles backwards, falling from her foxary’s back to avoid the blast of a guard’s pistol. The riders are Radnor’s refugee crew, disguised as foxary mercenaries to sneak out of Rourton.
It’s a brilliant plan – no one would suspect that a bunch of refugees could afford such a disguise. But even brilliance isn’t enough to survive King Morrigan’s guards and somehow the plan’s gone wrong. If they’re captured, they will die. They’ll be hauled off to the guillotine and beheaded at dawn, in the same market square where traders sell tea-leaves and crickets sing their way into cooking pots.
I have to do something. I can’t just hang off a wall and watch the guards take them. The thought of Teddy’s grinning head beneath a guillotine, or that quiet twin sobbing as they lead her to the blade, makes me feel like vomiting. I’m a hundred metres from the gate; if I can just distract those guards, get them to chase me into the wilderness, maybe in the co
nfusion we can all get away . . .
There’s an empty turret above and to my left, with no signs of human life through the guardrail. I’ve been climbing at a diagonal without realising it, inching along the wall to find the safest handholds. I struggle up the rest of the wall and throw my body over the rail. There’s a rifle stand but no gun in sight. I guess the guard from this tower was clearheaded enough to take it, even while fleeing the bombs.
A wooden crate squats in the corner, half-concealed by shadows and smoke. I shove up the lid with a grunt and scan the contents through watery eyes. A hessian lunch bag. A box of matches. A pair of climbing picks: the portable handholds guards use to scale the city walls quickly.
And two emergency flares, ready to blast into the sky.
I stuff the lunch bag into my coat. The climbing picks go into my sleeves, ready for quick access. I hesitate for a moment, then thrust one of the flares down my trouser-leg. The cylinder is cold against my thigh and its fuse scratches my skin, but I’ve run out of pockets and it might be useful later.
The second flare won’t survive long enough to worry about ‘later’. I position it on the turret floor, pointing up into the sky. The fuse isn’t very long – a metre at most – and I tug on it uselessly, half-hoping it might extend like a coiled ball of wire. But it just flops to the side, frail and thin upon the stones.
‘All right,’ I whisper. ‘I can do this.’
I open the matchbox, trying to control the trembling of my fingers. There are only four matches inside. I strike my chosen match against the side of the box, fingers tensed. Nothing happens.
‘Come on,’ I mutter, and try again. Nothing. For a second I’m afraid the matches have been ruined by mildew or rain. I can hear screaming from the gate now and the faces of Radnor’s crew flash through my head. Even though they’re a hell of a long way from being my family, all I can think is: I can’t let them die. Not again.
Chasing the Valley Page 3
