Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

“What?” she cried.

“I suppose I’ll be the one who has to spend tedious hours combing out those knots and tangles!”

“Oh, Cat!” She embraced me so tightly I grunted in pain. “How I missed you!”

I sniffed hard and pushed her away. “Of course you did! Who else has the patience to comb out your hair?”

Dressed as we were, we did not look so strange walking along the dingy row of houses, each with a door closed to the world and a pair of steps leading up to it. A woman with two very young children at her skirts slouched past us with a basket weighing heavily on her arm; once, perhaps, you could have seen its straw weave, but now it was blackened by coal dust. The children were very thin, and all were shod in crudely carved wooden shoes. Yet she in her shabby clothes was as neatly made up as she could make herself, and she took a moment from her weary errand to nod in a friendly way.

“Chance you be Missy Baker’s cousins?” she asked. “Down in Wellspring Terrace? She’s expecting a pair of lasses from the country, up for the work.”

“We’re not,” said Bee at her most confiding, with a smile that could melt suspicion into sweet candy. “Is there a hiring office here?”

“Toombs Mill is full up, as well I know,” said the woman. “That’s yon first mill, there. You may check at them others, Calders and Matarno. I don’t know aught of them, except it’s a fair long walk to get there.”

We thanked her and walked on, past men pushing wheelbarrows filled with rags and another leading a donkey pulling a covered cart whose concealed cargo stank so badly we had to cover our noses. Toombs Mill was a great beast of a building, fully four stories in height, with a dwelling house attached on one side like a small child to a stout parent, and at the far end a long low wing that I guessed housed the weaving shed. The din of its machines chased us along past a wharf where idle men watched us with the kind of stares that made us walk faster. These men with starving eyes had about them a sallow-cheeked desperation that made the villagers of Haranwy, despite the ties that chained them to Four Moons House, seem the more fortunate. Yet how could I judge? Why should laborers live in such deplorable conditions and entire villages be chained by custom and law to a master? Weren’t both terrible things?

On we walked past a dye works with its pungent odor and thence along a lane of dreary one-story brick warehouses. The steady roar of the mills serenaded us.

“This racket will drive me mad!” cried Bee.

“Aren’t you mad already?”

She essayed a punch to my shoulder, but her heart wasn’t in it. The day’s walk and last night’s escape were taking their toll even on her resilient frame, and the constant ringing, thrumming clatter was surely enough to unsettle the firmest resolve and drum into oblivion all coherent thought. We walked the length of Calders Mill and onward toward the twin stacks of Matarno Mill, at the end of the race.

Men winched bales out of a barge and loaded them onto a flatbed wagon. Bales of finished cloth had been stacked on another barge for the journey downstream. Dusk turned the water black; even the last glancing rays of the sun could wake no glistening shimmer on that foul liquid. A pack of scrawny boys fished from the bank, shivering without coats. Two braced themselves each on a crutch; one was missing his right leg below the knee, the trouser leg tied off with a bit of string.

A long, low howl scraped the air like a wolf marking its prey. A second, shorter blat replied, and a coughing toot-toot-toot roused briefly and wheezed to a halt.

All my life in Adurnam I had heard echoes of these calls from the comforts of the Barahal house. Only now did I see what they announced.

The rhythmic scratching brawl of the looms stepped down piece by piece. Within the queer alteration of sound formed by its cessation, the ringing clamor of the mules fell silent, and slowly the din settled and the ground ceased humming beneath my soles until all I heard was a buzzing in my ears. In the fury’s wake, an avalanche rumbled into life. A man unlocked a chained set of double doors on the ground floor of Matarno Mill, and workers spilled forth like stones and dirt racing down a cliff in an unstoppable tide. They wore wooden clogs rather than the leather shoes we could afford, and the noise made by feet striking stone, wood, and earth washed all before it. But most striking was their silence. You would think that after a day hammered by noise and unable to exchange a single civil word in a normal tone, folk would be ready to chatter about their thoughts and hopes and gossip. By the worn and exhausted faces flooding past us, I could see that no one had the strength to speak.

o;Should we keep running?” Bee shouted. “Up into the hills?”

“No! We’ll be easier to catch in the countryside. I think Andevai is right. We’ll be hardest to track in the machinery.”

“Then where?” Soot streaked her face; she had lost her bonnet, and her hair spilled over her shoulders in an unruly mass of black curls.

Blessed Tanit! I could not help myself. I began to laugh.

“What?” she cried.

“I suppose I’ll be the one who has to spend tedious hours combing out those knots and tangles!”

“Oh, Cat!” She embraced me so tightly I grunted in pain. “How I missed you!”

I sniffed hard and pushed her away. “Of course you did! Who else has the patience to comb out your hair?”

Dressed as we were, we did not look so strange walking along the dingy row of houses, each with a door closed to the world and a pair of steps leading up to it. A woman with two very young children at her skirts slouched past us with a basket weighing heavily on her arm; once, perhaps, you could have seen its straw weave, but now it was blackened by coal dust. The children were very thin, and all were shod in crudely carved wooden shoes. Yet she in her shabby clothes was as neatly made up as she could make herself, and she took a moment from her weary errand to nod in a friendly way.

“Chance you be Missy Baker’s cousins?” she asked. “Down in Wellspring Terrace? She’s expecting a pair of lasses from the country, up for the work.”

“We’re not,” said Bee at her most confiding, with a smile that could melt suspicion into sweet candy. “Is there a hiring office here?”

“Toombs Mill is full up, as well I know,” said the woman. “That’s yon first mill, there. You may check at them others, Calders and Matarno. I don’t know aught of them, except it’s a fair long walk to get there.”

We thanked her and walked on, past men pushing wheelbarrows filled with rags and another leading a donkey pulling a covered cart whose concealed cargo stank so badly we had to cover our noses. Toombs Mill was a great beast of a building, fully four stories in height, with a dwelling house attached on one side like a small child to a stout parent, and at the far end a long low wing that I guessed housed the weaving shed. The din of its machines chased us along past a wharf where idle men watched us with the kind of stares that made us walk faster. These men with starving eyes had about them a sallow-cheeked desperation that made the villagers of Haranwy, despite the ties that chained them to Four Moons House, seem the more fortunate. Yet how could I judge? Why should laborers live in such deplorable conditions and entire villages be chained by custom and law to a master? Weren’t both terrible things?