Heart of Gold

by Sharon Shinn

  “Fine,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m going to Ariana Bayless. And Jex Zanlan will be dead by morning.”

  “No, wait!” she cried, before she had even thought about it, before she had reminded herself that he was crazy. He stopped. “How can I possibly believe you?” she demanded.

  “I don’t care if you believe me,” he said, and now he sounded weary beyond imagining, as exhausted as an old man who had viewed the random cruelties of the world for a century or more. “All I want from you is passage into Geldricht and an entree into the presence of Chay Zanlan. I won’t harm you. I won’t harm him. But I can promise you, on my life, on your life, on any talisman you care to name, that if I don’t get to Chay Zanlan, he will die.”

  Another squeeze of acid into her veins. “Chay will die? I thought you said Jex would.”

  “Both of them.”

  “You don’t have that kind of power,” she whispered. “No one does.”

  “I do,” he said, and he sounded so certain that, against her will and her rational judgment, she believed him. He could have them killed, one or both of them, and then what would the world hold for her? Her foot throbbed with a stabbing, insistent ache; her head was beginning its own rhythmic pounding; and she was afraid that, if she moved her hand away from the wall, she would lose her balance and tumble to the ground. But those were minor annoyances, nothing to be concerned about. Fear had ignited the rich oil of her blood so that every estuary of her body was on fire. She felt flames sparkle up through her pores. Not Jex, not now, now that she was sure he loved her again.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Take me to Gold Mountain. Leaving tonight.”

  “I have to get—clothes and money.”

  “I’ll have money.”

  “And I’ll have to write a note to someone and say I’m leaving. Otherwise—people will worry. I don’t think you want that.”

  “I’ll have to read the note.”

  “All right.”

  “Where are your clothes?” he asked.

  “At my cousin’s house. In the indigo residential district off of South One.”

  He shook his head. “No good. Too far away and too many people might see us. We’ll buy you some clothes here in the city.”

  “How long will we be gone?”

  “How long does it take to get to Gold Mountain?”

  Kit spread her hands. “It depends on the rains. If the weather’s been dry, the train will go straight through, but it will still take nearly two days. If there’s been flooding and the tracks are washed out, it could be days longer.”

  “And that’s the most direct way? The train?”

  “It’s the only way. Haven’t you ever been out of the city?”

  “Not in that direction.”

  “This will be quite a journey for you then,” she said, and despite everything, she could not keep the edge from her voice.

  He responded with a hollow laugh. “The journey of a lifetime,” he replied.

  * * *

  * * *

  They spent the next two hours shopping. Everything about this encounter was so strange that Kit knew she should not be unnerved by the peculiarity of this, but she was. Such a friendly, casual, intimate activity—shopping for clothes with a friend—and here she was with a madman, picking out shirts and comfortable trousers and undergarments while he stood grimly by. She only had a bare minimum of cash on her, which she had told him, but he had waved that concern aside so she assumed he planned to pay for everything. Which made the whole event even more bizarre.

  He had his own purchases to make, which included a couple of inexpensive suitcases so that they didn’t have to carry their new clothes in paper bags. He also surprised her by stopping at a nondescript little drug store and buying a handful of medical supplies.

  “You’re limping,” he said gruffly once they were back on the street. He led her to a bench on the sidewalk, and they both sat down. “You can wrap your ankle with that. And here’s a couple of pain pills. I think you should take them.”

  Kit was not one to dose herself with remedies, and this was not a compound she was familiar with. “I’m—I don’t like to take drugs. And I’ve never heard of this. What if it makes me loopy?”

  He gave her a wintry smile. “This will make you feel a lot better. Trust me.” He reached into one of his other bags and pulled out a big plastic bottle, rattling with capsules. “And here. Have one of these while you’re at it.”

  He shook a pill into her hand, and she eyed it dubiously. “And what is this supposed to do for me?”

  “Kind of like a vaccine. It’ll protect you against any infectious gulden diseases that the indigo body isn’t used to fighting off.”

  She tried to hand it back to him. “My body knows all about gulden diseases,” she said. “I’ve lived in Geldricht half my life.”

  He closed her fingers around the pill. “Take it. You’ve been in the city how long now? A few months?”

  “Six or seven months,” she admitted.

  “Long enough for you to lose your immunity. Take it. I don’t want you getting sick on me just when I need you most.”

  She gazed at him resentfully. “Then why don’t you take one?”

  “I’ve already had mine. I’m protected.”

  She made him buy her a can of juice from a street vendor because the “vaccine” pill was too big to swallow unaided, and then she downed both tablets. What could she do? Maybe he was trying to poison her; maybe she would end up just as insane and hallucinatory as he was. But she felt she had no choice. She had committed herself to his fantasy. She had to exist by his rules.

  “What’s your name?” she said, when she had swallowed the second one.

  “Nolan.”

  And she thought it sounded familiar, but she could not for the life of her decide why.

  “Well, Nolan,” she said, “I’m ready when you are.”

  * * *

  * * *

  They boarded the night train from the city. Twice a day, big sleek engines departed from the transit station at the southwest edge of the city, just inside the loop of the Centrifuge. Nolan paid for two round trip tickets, business class. Kit wasn’t sure how he picked the fare—if he didn’t know about the semiprivate cars or couldn’t afford the rates, and if money was a problem, why he hadn’t elected to take them tourist class. When she asked him, he said merely, “We’re on business,” which left her no more certain than before.

  She had ridden this train more times than she could count, alone or with her father, so she knew all the tricks to making the journey bearable. “The back three cars are tourist-class,” she explained to Nolan as they passed through one slim lozenge-shaped car after another. Nearly every seat was filled with tired gulden women, restless children, white-haired old men who pretended to be anywhere else in the world. The noise level was remarkable, somewhat like a midsized auditorium with badly designed acoustics. “The next three cars are business class, and past them are the private cars. We want to get all the way to the sixth car.”

  “Why?” he asked. He was taking quick, surreptitious glances at the passengers all around them, as if dying of curiosity but afraid to appear too rude by staring. She wondered what seemed so odd to him about these accommodations. She had traveled in the tourist coaches a good half of the time she had made this trip.

  “Because most people are too lazy to walk through all the cars. They just take the first empty seats. So the cars farther up are emptier.”

  He nodded absently. “Good. Why do all these people have food?”

  She glanced back at him as she negotiated a narrow aisle partially blocked by a protruding foot. “Because the journey takes two days or more. As I told you.”

  “But aren’t there—I mean, I didn’t bring any food.”

  “Ther
e are food stalls in a car between business and private. But the food’s expensive. We’ll make a few long stops tomorrow at stations where there will be vendors. We can stock up then.”

  He nodded, but for the first time he looked a little nonplussed. Overwhelmed, actually, by the sheer volume of details he did not know. Kit felt a small smug burst of satisfaction. Good.

  The cars were linked by small, rubbery accordion-style chambers in which sound was peculiarly deadened and electrical smells had an alarming concentration. Kit always tried to pass through these as quickly as possible, particularly once the train was in motion. The next two cars had progressively fewer people in them, but the first car in business class was quite crowded. Here, most passengers were prosperous gulden men, business owners with operations in the city and homes fifty or sixty miles out in the one of the small towns that clustered around the train tracks. A handful of albino men were also traveling business class, and most of them sat bunched together in a few rows toward the middle of the car. A few of the gulden men were accompanied by their wives, well-dressed, well-groomed women who kept their eyes focused on their handiwork or novels. There were no children in business class; any rich man who chose to travel with his family booked one of the rooms in the semiprivate coaches.

  The next car was not quite as packed, and the third one was more than half empty. Kit led them to the very back of the car, to two sets of high-backed green velvet seats that faced each other and created a small, imperfect cubicle of privacy.

  “You sit here. I’ll sit across from you. Put your suitcase in the empty seats. Now no one else will sit with us unless every last seat is taken.”

  He did as she bid but gave her a faint smile. “I would have thought you might want a leaven for my presence,” he said.

  She flicked him a look of scorn, though inwardly, she was puzzled. “It’s not that I want to be alone with you,” she said. “I just don’t like to be thrown together with strangers.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Train leaves in about fifteen minutes. Stops about every hour for the first five hours. Then, it’s every couple of hours, as we pass through the rockland where towns are scarcer. Then, we’re in the valley, and towns are closer together again. Then, we go across the Katlin Divide, so it’s very slow, but the train never stops. Then, another twelve hours, and we’re at the foot of Gold Mountain.”

  “And how do you entertain yourself for a trip like this?”

  Kit couldn’t help a little smile. “Well, people who plan ahead bring books or work or perhaps some sewing project. Mothers with their children, of course, don’t have to worry about entertaining themselves. Every once in a while, especially if you’re back in tourist, you find some lonely soul who just wants to talk all night and all day. That’s one of the reasons I try to find an empty car and pile up my seat with my luggage. I don’t want to be stuck talking to a stranger for two days.”

  “I’ll try not to annoy you with too much conversation,” he said stiffly.

  Kit felt a small shock of surprise run through her. For an instant, she had forgotten he too was a stranger, and a hostile one at that. How could she possibly have slipped into such an error? Perhaps because, aside from hers, his was the only blue face she had seen on the train.

  Uncannily, he seemed to catch her thought. “I haven’t seen any other indigo,” he said. “Do they never go into Geldricht?”

  “Sometimes. Not often,” she said. “There are a few entrepreneurs who have business with the gulden, but they’re more likely to want their partners to come into the city. If there are any on board, they’re probably all in private rooms.”

  He nodded and looked out the window. They were still in the station, and there was little to see except a few passengers making the last-minute run for the train. But maybe this was an unfamiliar sight to him and therefore interesting. He was silent long enough that Kit finally asked a question.

  “Why didn’t you ask for a private room? Didn’t the clerk tell you they were available?”

  He nodded, still gazing out the window. “I thought you might be afraid,” he said, “cooped up for two days in a small room with a crazy man.”

  Which astonished her so much that she couldn’t think of another thing to say.

  A few minutes later, the train lurched into motion. Kit, who sat with her back to the wall, facing all the other riders, saw every head bob in unison, side to side and front to back. Some of the riders, as if stubbornly awaiting this signal, leaned their heads against the chair backs and drifted to sleep. Others appeared oblivious to their surroundings and kept their attention on their books and papers.

  “How long are we underground?” Nolan asked.

  “Not long. But it will be dark soon. You won’t be able to see much.”

  “What’s the countryside like, then?”

  “For the first hundred or so miles, rocky but you wouldn’t know it. I mean, there’s enough topsoil to grow houseplants and a few scrubby trees, but there’s solid stone not far under the surface, and you can’t really farm. Actually, nothing in Geldricht is really arable except the valley. They graze sheep in the mountains—and they also mine about a dozen products—and then once you get to the coast, it’s mostly fishing and harvesting sea kelp. If you were asking about major industries.”

  “Just—I don’t know much about Geldricht. Just asking questions. So that’s what they live on? Sheep and fish and a few grains from the valley?”

  “Well,” she said dryly, “there’s trade.”

  “With the blueskins?”

  “More than there used to be, but about three-quarters of the trade is foreign.”

  That jerked his head around so he was staring at her. “Geldricht trades with foreign nations? Trades what?”

  His surprise made her irritable. Hadn’t he ever read a history book? “Gold, silver, copper, diamonds, coal. Those are the big ones. In return, they buy spices, some foods, some textiles. Almost all the silk you’ll find in the city was imported by Geldricht. You didn’t know that?”

  “I never had a reason to ask about it.”

  “Well, what kind of industry did you think they had in Geldricht?”

  “I didn’t—I don’t know. I guess I assumed they were all farmers or something.”

  “They’re all farmers in Inrhio. That’s where the fertile land is,” Kit said tartly. “Remember? The indigo usurped the gulden cropland during their great march westward.”

  “That was hundreds of years ago.”

  “The races immigrated here hundreds of years ago,” she corrected. “In roughly equal numbers. And both races first settled on the eastern edge of the continent. But gradually the indigo appropriated more and more of the land, until the Kaelian War and the resulting treaty which split the continent—”

  “I’m familiar with the history,” he said.

  “Well, you don’t seem to know too much about anything else, so I wasn’t sure this was one of the things they taught you in your obviously inadequate school courses.”

  “We did focus more on indigo heritage,” he admitted, “and the glorious achievements of the First Mothers of the Higher Hundred.”

  She could not help it; he made her smile again. “So anyway. Pushed to the western coast, the gulden adapted. They found metal, so they began to experiment with electronics. They found an ocean, so they sailed it. They found friendly nations on the other side of the sea, so they began trading. Actually, these days they don’t trade in products so much as technology. Chay’s cousin has set up an overseas operation in the country of Dournier where he’s helping construct some incredibly complex transit system. It’s going to make him the head of one of the richest families in Geldricht.”

  “Really?” Nolan said, and he sounded as if he was working very hard to grasp a concept so alien to him that he almost couldn’t be sure it was possible. “I can’t
imagine that anyone would be that interested in new machinery. I can’t imagine that anyone would be proficient enough at technology to be able to export it.”

  “You mean, that a gulden would be smart enough to be proficient,” she said in a glacial voice.

  He seemed surprised at her tone. “No, I—” He tossed his hands in the air. “I’m the first one to admit I don’t know a thing about machines. Electronics. I couldn’t begin to tell you how the Centrifuge works. And my computer back at the lab. I can turn it on. I can use it. I have no idea what went into it.”

  She relaxed again. “Gulden technology, most of it,” she said. “But from what I hear, all computers are still pretty primitive. Compared to what the engineers hope to produce some day. But some of the existing technology truly is amazing. I mean, the Centrifuge. The cars are actually airborne. Do you think about that as you go diving through the lanes? How can you possibly be flying? But it’s not true flight, or so I’ve been told. There’s something about magnetic dissonance and an antigravity field that can only be used in a confined space. I’ve been told the real trick will be true flight in airborne vehicles that can cover hundreds of miles in a few hours.”

  Nolan nodded. “I’ve heard that, too. I used to work with a guldman who would go on and on about marvels like that. We all used to ignore him.” He paused and seemed to brood a moment—remembering, perhaps, past conversations with that mocked visionary, and wishing he had been more receptive. “Well, he doesn’t work there anymore, so I guess I can’t ask him about any of this stuff.”

  “Where do you work?” Kit asked curiously. “When it comes to that, who are you?”

  “I told you. My name is Nolan. Nolan Adelpho.”

  “Higher Hundred,” she said instantly. Which made this little kidnapping escapade all the more unbelievable.

  He nodded. “Spent my whole life in Inrhio till five years ago when I came to the city. I’ll spend the rest of my life in-country once I’m married. You’re making fun of me for what I don’t know but—I know everything I was taught. Everything I needed to know for the life I was supposed to live.”