The Vastness Page 4

  The bruises on her neck had gone all yellow and purple. What would she say if she knew I was the one who had done it? I could not look at her, and my face got hot again. I stared at my feet.

  “What’s this?” a loud male voice shouted over the chatter, and we turned to see one of the overseers come in through the gates with a small group of men. “What are you all doing out in the alley?”

  “When’s the food coming?” one of the hungry girls spat back at him.

  “Shut your mouth, or you’ll be eating my fist, you miserable pile of rags,” he said and then pointed at Dame Franni. “You, what is going on here?”

  “Most of first and third shift is still on their racks,” she replied. “The rest ran.”

  The overseer got a look down the alley at the fallen wall and the trampled bodies. This made him angry and he flexed his grip on his cane. “Where did they all go?”

  “I don’t know,” Franni said and bowed her head.

  We were all looking at him. None of us had our heads bowed. What foolishness has gripped us? We were all behaving like Pia.

  “What about the offer?” another girl asked, her head held high. “I’m from Havish. I want to work for Lord Rahan.”

  “Who told you that?” he demanded and started into the crowd. He took hold of the girl by the hair and struck her with his cane. She crumpled, and many of the girls cast their eyes down.

  “You’re all staying here,” he said. “Do you understand? No one is taking the Exaltier’s offer.”

  “So there is an offer,” another girl said.

  “I’m hungry,” another yelled.

  The overseer got ready to start beating them with his cane, but the girls crowded around him like they had Pia, and he couldn’t do anything in the sudden press.

  Pia took hold of my wrist and pulled me out of the crowd.

  “You’ll come with me, yes?” she asked. “You’ll help me find my parents?”

  Dame Franni helped up the girl the overseer had struck. She got her wits about her, shook off Franni, and bolted. A pair of girls followed her through the open gates.

  Pia seized my hand and pulled me after them. A few followed us, and before I’d even gotten to look back at Dame Franni or the rest, we were out in the streets and moving toward the tithe tower and the plaza.

  The next intersection was packed with people. Some ran. Some stood in place. No one seemed to know what was happening, what to do, or where to be.

  The Yellow Row boss was there with twenty-seven chancellery men and bailiffs. They were arguing with a soldier—an officer of some kind. Pia didn’t notice any of them as she led us toward the large group.

  Back the way we had come, a line of fourteen more soldiers marched toward the intersection. The late afternoon sun caught on their spears and helmets. The crowd jostled. Some ran.

  “Rahan is false. Yarik is the true Exaltier,” one of the bosses said.

  A punch was thrown at the officer, and half of the bosses joined in. The rest of the soldiers charged toward them.

  “Come on,” Pia said, and tugged me around the fight as though it wasn’t happening. “We need to get to the plaza.”

  The girls that had come with us made for the south side of the street and the safety of an alley.

  “No,” Pia said. “Not that way.”

  While she hollered, the soldiers arrived at the intersection. They didn’t yell or shake their fists. They lowered their spears instead and started stabbing the bosses and bailiffs. It happened so fast that the crowd of them stood stupidly for a long moment while the soldiers worked to kill them.

  Pia was still yelling down the alley when everyone started to flee. One of the bosses crashed into us, and the three of us tumbled to the ground. We hurried to our feet before the rest trampled us. The man got hold of us both as he struggled up into the bump and jostle of the fleeing crowd. It was our boss.

  “The weaver’s brother is going to want you,” he said to me.

  He started back toward Yellow Row with a handful of my tunica, and I hurried to follow. The bailiffs ahead of us were trying to do the same, but a pair of soldiers blocked their path. The bailiffs cried for mercy, but the soldiers had none for them. They stabbed them with their spears, one after the other. The boss yanked his dalmatic over his head, flung it to the ground, and fled without me into the alley.

  Pia yanked me back the other way and started down a side street. A few of the chancellery men fled that way, too. One of them shoved us aside, and we tumbled down between two buildings. Pia cursed him, but thankfully fell silent and as she rubbed her new bruises.

  Soldiers ran past, chasing the five men who’d fled our way. They were much faster, and every man in black was killed. When it was done, the soldiers tore the insignia from their dalmatics and trotted back the way they had come. Back at the intersection, the officer in green collected the twenty-six black and gray patches.

  “Lieutenant Corwin,” one of the soldiers in blue said to him. “Orders, sir?”

  “Not nearly enough,” Corwin said and chewed on his gray mustache while he counted. “There will be trouble if we can’t clear them out. Baiting them into the open is not working.”

  He looked our way. I tried to hide, but Pia waved and pointed at the dalmatic our boss had discarded. Corwin picked it up and found the insignia on it.

  “Greencoat, sir … lieutenant,” Pia said to him. “He went down the alley.”

  Lieutenant Corwin and his men did not come and kill us, as I feared. A trio of them started down the alley instead, and Corwin tipped his head our way.

  I wanted to curl into a ball and disappear, but Pia pulled me up, waved a goodbye to the soldiers, and started us back toward the plaza.

  “That was exciting,” she said, and hugged my arm. “Have you ever seen a greencoat before? They are from the north. I’ve never met anyone from the north. Have you?”

  I was still thinking about the boss and the weaver’s brother. I wanted to be back at my table. I wanted my patterns and my numbers.

  Pia pulled me along, chattering at me the entire way. The farther we went, the more crowded the streets became. We did not see any more bailiffs or soldiers about, but did pass a group of dead men stripped down to nothing. More bailiffs, judging by the wounds that had killed them and the way they had been looted and abused after death.

  At the next intersection, Pia asked me which road lead to the plaza. I pointed and we continued along Sewer Road. The street was a black ribbon of old stone with a deep channel cut down its center. It had once had railings to keep people from falling in, but only the occasional rotting post remained. I’d seen the thing overflowing with black water, but not that day. It was dry enough that I could hear the scrape of rat claws on the dry bottom. I counted the people we passed to keep thoughts of the rats away.

  By the time I could see the tall tithe tower, the sound of a huge crowd had all eyes aimed down the road. We slowed, but everyone kept walking toward the noise.

  The road widened as it rose up the plaza’s slow hill. It was an immense and dirty circle, as wide as the river, with a scrubby old park and jagged old tower at its center. I could see four of the ten roads that opened onto the plaza, but could tell at once that the crowd was larger than any I’d ever seen there. Three hundred nineteen thousand two hundred five—give or take those coming and going. I couldn’t see the Warrens’ other towers, but the crowds gathered around each was almost as large.

  How did I know that? How could I count people I could not see?

  A few bosses and bailiffs moved up behind us. I spotted one of the overseers from Yellow Row with them. They watched as the rest of us moved past them. It didn’t make any sense. The crowd was acting differently, too. Everyone was looking around. I was looking around. I’d always been counting while I walked—eyes down like the rest—counting stones, counting steps.

  I lost sight of the bosses as Pia kept us moving toward the tower. We reached the edge of the crowd and the dusty circle o
f park that surrounded the tower. More soldiers in blue occupied the wide space. Several rich-looking men in colorful clothes and hats were also there. One of them was near us and he spoke to the milling crowd.

  “An offer,” he said, holding a document high overhead. I could not catch the rest of what he said.

  “So many people,” Pia said and clutched my arm as we jostled with the crowd.

  A large group of men on the south side of the circle began to yell. They had clubs made of broken boards.

  The rich men yelled for calm and for us to stay still. Much of the crowd froze in place—me right along with the rest. I looked down at my feet and hoped someone would tell me what to do.

  A flash of movement had me looking back up, though. Soldiers in green rushed over the hill and south. They charged so fast and in such unison that the thousands all stopped to watch them.

  They surrounded the armed group like the clap of a manacle, but didn’t kill them like they had the bailiffs. They broke them into groups, instead, and took away their weapons.

  “Who are they then?” someone asked.

  “Men from the north,” Pia said.

  “Couldn’t be. Too far away.”

  But here they were, and the many thousands of us watched the greencoats cross the plaza with the men they had disarmed. They were talking to each other. I could not understand it.

  The hushed crowd watched the whole thing, and much of my fear bled away.

  The rich man’s voice rang out over the calm. “My name is Master Ovid Pickesh, loyal servant of Exaltier Rahan Yentif. He bid me to make it known to all the people of the Warrens, that he has given you your freedom and asks for your labor and your service. Men willing to fight with us as freemen, speak to the greencoats here on the north side of the plaza. People from the East, go the plaza west of here.”

  The crowd murmured. A few men started around toward the north side of the plaza.

  Pia squeezed my hand. “See? There is an offer for us. We must find my parents.”

  I wanted to remind her that I was not from the East, but even as she squeezed my brown hand in her white hand, she seemed not to recall this. “You must help me find them.”

  The rich man kept shouting about the Exaltier’s offer, but the crowd started yelling again. I looked back the way we’d come and saw the bosses handing out stones and sticks.

  We were between them and the soldiers. It was also much later in the day than I’d thought. The soldiers were starting to light torches and lanterns. Pia did not move from the spot, as though she did not know what to do next. She looked around the crowd, hoping perhaps to spot her parents there.

  “I want my mother,” Pia said, and hugged my arm. “I’m hungry.”

  I was, too, and many in the crowd yelled at the rich man for bread.

  “There is plenty on the way,” he said. “Wagon trains will be here soon.”

  But this went unheard as the new group of men moved up and started throwing stones.

  The people caught with us between the soldiers and the bosses all began to yell and run. Pia sagged from her hunger and her wounds and made no move at all. If we’d not been standing there on the edge of the park, we would have been trampled.

  Soldiers charged out again, this time right toward us.

  “Where can we go?” Pia asked, still rooted to the spot.

  I pointed at the soldiers that were about to run us down.

  “To the church? Good idea, Emi,” Pia said, grabbed my hand, and started us toward it between the columns of charging soldiers. I ran along with her. Stones fell all around us, as the soldiers charged by on our right and our left. They stirred so much dust I could not see the sky, the soldiers, or the ground beneath my feet.

  But Pia kept right on, and pulled me through the dust until we’d made it to the circle of tan stones that surrounded the tower. The pikemen who’d always stood guard there were absent. The entrance faced us—a rectangle of ugly old stone and an ugly old door.

  The cloud of dust began to settle, and on the far side, I could hear the shouting of the soldiers. Groups of them moved around us like shadows.

  “Well done, Emi. We’re clear of that mess. Maybe the priests will give us a coin or let us sleep in a spare room.”

  The priests Pia grew up with must be altogether different than those in the Warrens. We would find no charity or mercy through that door. This was not where I meant for us to go, and felt like a terrible fool. We would be killed the moment the dust settled and someone saw us standing on church grounds.

  Pia was not deterred, though, and pulled me closer. The door was open a handbreadth. It was dark inside.

  Behind us, the crowd started yelling again, and another group of shadows rushed by. I could almost see the soldiers’ faces.

  Pia pulled me inside and closed the door. We were wrapped in such darkness and silence that I could hear our dry panting and the pounding of our hearts.

  I closed my eyes and clutched Pia. I was as terrified of what was inside as of what was outside.

  “Hello?” Pia said, and I flinched in anticipation of the boom of voices. No response came, and I almost smacked her.

  “We can’t stand here,” she said, but the longer we did, the better I could see. It was an ugly room. Tables lined the space, each empty except for an occasional saw or bowl. The place stank of incense and leather.

  “What do they do here?” Pia asked. “Healers tables, maybe? How terrible.”

  The noise outside grew, and a rock clattered across the stone and struck the door. We both leapt away, while the old door creaked back open, as if it hated the dark and the quiet and wanted to let in the crowd.

  Pia ran for it, and almost yanked me off my feet. She made for a stairway I’d not seen and raced up the dark spiral. The stench of the incense was replaced by the stink of unwashed men and the cheap leaf they chewed. The walls were greasy from their spit. Pia didn’t stop until we ran out of stairs and were back out in the open air.

  The tower top was ringed with a low railing of the same stone and covered by a square of thin roof. A single heavy chest opposite the stairway was open and empty. Looted, I supposed, of whatever had once filled it.

  “Emilia,” Pia said. “Look.”

  I tried to, but the vantage robbed me of all my sense. I could not look at it all at once, nor make myself comprehend it. The streets of the Warrens ran like an ugly tangle of threads that lay this way and that around the plaza. The thousands of low buildings were dirty, unhappy, and gray. But beyond this dark place that I knew so well was a tan wall lit with torches. Men in blue and green moved upon the walls, and a fortress on the far side of the river blazed in the light of a hundred firepots. The river was as crowded as the streets, with ships of all sizes moving to and fro in the dim light. Flames rose from many, and the city beyond the river seemed to roar. The Chancellery burned so brightly I could see the entire palace. Crowds gathered at every intersection and River Road teamed with men upon horseback. And beyond it all, the cathedral was gone. Dust and smoke rose everywhere, and the din of Bessradi’s millions filled my ears.

  Below the tower the crowd in the plaza had given up whatever fight had riled them. A number of men lay motionless where we had so recently stopped to hear Rahan’s man speak.

  And he had not given up, either. I found Master Pickesh yelling the same offer at the crowd.

  “Your Exaltier calls you to serve. Come all. I have an offer.”

  “Can you believe it?” Pia asked, and my gaze drifted out over the vast sea of muted colors. I could not. I had counted the people of Bessradi, but I’d never before seen it all at once.

  “Can you believe it?” she asked again. “The offer is real.”

  I nodded for her. She was too tired to look beyond the plaza and the man who had given her such hope.

  “We can sleep here,” she said, and started moving the chest. “We can find my parents in the morning. I don’t know where, but maybe the morning will show us something. Help
me, can you? Close the hatch.”

  It shut for me with a squeak, and I helped her push the chest on top of it.

  We curled up upon the landing and closed our eyes.

  6

  Emi

  Bowels

  “Emi,” Pia said and thumped me. “Emi, wake up.”

  She tugged me by the arm hard enough to bounce my head on the stone floor of the landing.

  Leave off.

  “I know how to find her,” she said. “Get up.”

  I rubbed my eyes and my head, and stood as I was told. The sight of the city shocked me again, as it seethed around us. The Warrens was a wash of massive crowds, though many looked to be moving calmly north and west. New ships were on fire, while other angry-looking ships crawled around the fortress upon their many hundreds of oars.

  Up upon the fortress towers blue pennants flew—Rahan’s pennants. Across the river, the thousands of horsemen remained. They wore yellow, and far off atop the palace the same color flew. Yarik’s pennant. There were two Exaltiers in Bessradi.

  I thought my way through the order book to the one of solid yellow, and several of yellow and white. I’d made many of them. Nine hundred thirty-four altogether during the spring and summer. Far more than any other. We used to make more of the blue. I’d never made one that was the green color of the north. Yellow was replacing blue and those in green were trying to stop them.

  Emi tapped my arm. “So, the rows, the girls in each lodge. They are organized by size, right?”

  I took a big breath and yawned to try and wake up to what she was asking. I was cold from sleeping out in the night air, but had been able to curl up my legs and stretch out my arms. Lying back down would be so easy.

  “Emi, are you listening?” Pia said and started to cry. “I’m not sure I can remember how big she is, though. You have to help me.”

  I blinked at her a moment and caught up to her thinking. Yes, the lodges were built to size, but I was not sure how this helped her. I pointed around the city, and thought to ask her where her mother would be. Which row was she on?