0062104292 (8UP) (18 page)
Authors: Anne Nesbet
“
Inside
the Surveyors’ Court, child. You won’t have seen such a thing before. They kept the old hall—built by the First Surveyor herself, you know—and constructed the new grand structure right around it. The historians had some clout in those days! Of course, the wiring in here’s completely new. And the desks and the bunk beds, all replaced now and again as they age. A thousand claimants have passed through this place, I guess, over the years.”
Bunk bed after bunk bed, all the way down that long, narrow room. They must have expected many people
to come stay in this dormitory, perhaps in other years. Simple worktables and matching chairs stood under the windows. A blank, glassy picture in a frame standing on every table, and a window above, but those windows looked out not on the world, but through a second wall of glass (because the new building had swallowed up this old one), and then, across a space of some kind, at a hundred other, Plainer windows in other Plainer walls.
Apparently the Surveyors’ Court had been built as a square around a courtyard, and all its windows faced in. But even the first layer of windows, the ones that looked like they had been transported over here from Bend, didn’t budge when Linny wiggled them. And beyond them was the second skin of glass, which looked like it might put up a pretty good fight if you tried to break through it.
That worried her. It’s always better to be in rooms you can get out of easily, if you need to.
“What’s that door over there?” she asked. It was a solid old thing, absolutely bristling with locks and latches. “I guess not the way to a privy.”
“Privy’s down at the other end,” said the matron, pointing. “If you want to use it before we get started. Hurry up! It’s cartography first.”
Whatever that was.
Linny followed the pointing finger and found a tiny
room, behind a sliding door, with two metal basins in it, set at different heights. It must be quite a recent addition to this ancient building. Porcelain and metal, and with water that came rushing out of spigots at a touch; this was what a privy looked like, apparently, on the Angleside. An outhouse, indoors! Linny splashed the sink water on her face to wake herself up.
Think! Think!
What did she still have with her to help? She had once had a cookpot, and Elias, and then eventually a Half-Cat. And she had lost them all.
“What do I do?” she asked the blank wall above the basin. The wall said nothing, but as Linny dried her hands on her skirt, she felt the comforting lump that meant Sayra’s birthday present was still there, despite everything, in her pocket.
That half-visible silk butterfly-rose was the only thing in the universe, apart from Linny’s own right hand, to ever have traveled into and out of Away. Just to show it could be done.
All right. Too bad Sayra wasn’t here to save Linny this time, so that Linny could finally get to work saving
her
. Surveyors were miles worse than wolves.
How stupid she had been, to think she could just wander into the Broken City and find whatever it was Sayra needed to come back from Away and be alive again properly.
You better wait for me,
she told the ghost of Sayra’s butterfly-rose.
You better hang on. I’ll show them all. Somehow I’ll pass these unpassable tests and make them bring me all the medicines in the world—
There was a brisk knock on the sliding door.
“Are you all right, claimant?”
Linny put on her sweet-as-a-lamb face again and stepped back out into the dormitory room.
“Sorry I took so long,” she said. “I just got to worrying again—about my friend, you know, and my cat.”
She was laying it on a little thick, she knew, but the matron patted her on the shoulder.
“There, now. You’d better let go of such distractions. The cat is gone. Things that go to the lab men to be studied don’t come back alive. No, don’t look like that!”
Because all of Linny was caught up in one awful thought:
What?
“They’re going to hurt my cat?”
“No, no, they won’t
hurt
it. This is a civilized place, what are you thinking? They’ll make the beast comfortable, claimant, while they take it apart. It won’t feel a thing.”
Linny had to try so hard not to scream that her whole face felt like it was twisting into knots.
“Oh!” she said. “No!”
“Calm yourself, calm yourself, please!” said the
matron. “If you want to pass your tests, you need to focus.”
The matron slapped two things on the table: a plain brown box and a roll of paper.
“Cartography!” she said. “You won’t know that word, coming from the backward hills, but it means the science of maps. It wouldn’t be a proper test, without maps.”
“Because of her being the First Surveyor, not just the Girl with the Lourka,” said Linny. She was watching the matron unlatch that box with a brisk twist of the fingers.
“Correct,” said the matron, giving Linny a sidewise glance. “Sharpish, are you? Why did you blunder across the bridge, then, in such an inhospitable year, and such a young thing as you are?”
While she spoke, she was setting metal instruments out on the table, and then she unrolled a sheet of paper—fancy thin stuff, with little squares marked off very faintly all across it.
“There you are,” said the matron. “The trainer will step you through it. I imagine it will all seem unusual to you, coming from so far off the grid as you do.”
“I’ve seen a map before,” said Linny.
The matron shot her another one of those pointed looks.
“Have you, then?” she said. “Odd girl, indeed. But good for you.”
Linny remembered too late that she had not only stolen a glimpse of the Surveyors’ map, but actually burned down their camp in the process, and blushed. She lowered her head quickly, to keep the blush private, and started examining the metal tools the matron had just finished setting out.
“What are those things?”
There was a hum in her brain when she saw them, like the hum that came over her when she worked on a lourka. A map might not look much like a lourka, but it called to Linny as a lourka did.
“The cartographer’s kit,” said the matron. “Compasses and rulers and suchlike. Some of what’s necessary, to make a map the old-fashioned way. And they are to be treated with respect, the instruments, claimant. Maps are a serious business. Well, now you’ve only an hour to work, so off I go. Here are a few biscuits to help you focus. The trainer will set the questions for you. Tap the screen when you’re ready for the next.”
The matron flicked her hand against one of those glossy screen surfaces that had been pretending to be a blank picture in a frame. Apparently that screen was the trainer she kept mentioning. Linny had one of the biscuits and slipped a couple more into a pocket for later.
“Any questions?” said the matron.
Well, yes, many questions, but none of them were the
kind that the matron was likely to answer.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” said the matron. “You still have fifty-seven minutes. Use them well, claimant.”
And she left, locking the door very carefully behind her, which showed that trying to seem as harmless as a lamb only went so far, on this side of the river.
Fifty-seven minutes turned out to be not very much time. The trainer showed pictures of the tools on its glassy screen and explained how they might be used. It set little tasks: “Here’s a tiny part of a make-believe city. Use the cartographer’s kit to transfer the picture of it onto the grid-marked paper.”
It woke up her brain, like drinking a mug of very strong tea. This was what the world looked like! And yes, of course, you could make that picture echo not only in your brain, like it did when you looked out from the top of a tall tree or suddenly got a view of the river and what was beyond the river—no, if you worked carefully, you could put that picture down on paper. No wonder those Surveyors had been so intent on their work, up in the hills!
Linny kept forgetting to breathe, her mind got so caught up in the three-way dialogue between her brain, her fingers, and the metal tools of the cartographer’s kit. And every now and then a little silver bell would ring out, from wherever it hid behind the glassy expanse of the screen.
Then suddenly she looked up and realized the matron
had come back into the room without her even noticing.
“Well!” said the matron, examining the screen of the trainer. “That’s quite extraordinary. I’ve never seen that before.”
“Seen what?” asked Linny.
“The trainer claims you’ve actually passed that section! Did you do something to this machine?”
Linny shook her head.
“Must be a fluke, then,” said the matron. “Never mind. A healthy bedtime snack for you now, and then sleep. Tomorrow’s the rest of the tests, and then the fair.”
Linny blinked at the instruments in her hand, at the matron setting down a not-very-interesting plate of something on her food tray. So it really was like being in her workshop in the woods, way up in the wrinkled hills: maps and lourkas, not so different in flavor, if you were Linny. For a long moment, a very long moment, she had actually forgotten everything else in the world.
“I advise you to sleep now and not to fret overmuch,” said the matron. “Fretting blurs the brain. Put it out of your mind for the night. After all, in recent times it’s always been a lark for the claimants to come over here and eat their biscuits and parade about the fair for a bow and a laugh.”
“A lark!” said Linny, trying to fight back the shiver of anger that rose up in her. “If I fail, they want to kill me. That’s what they said.”
“Not a lark this year, no, of course not. But we must put everything into its historical context, mustn’t we? Long ago it was also very serious, the judging of the claimants. Deeper and darker. I’ve heard the historians speak on the subject, how the girls went into the dark and didn’t come out—”
That wasn’t turning into the comforting speech the matron had probably had in mind. She stopped in the middle of a sentence, peered closely at Linny, and shook her head.
“It all seems very hard, I must say. Well, good night and good luck to you. Whatever happens, I suppose we’ve done what we could.”
And out she went through the doubled door, the old and the new, and the doors both slapped shut behind her.
For a few desperate minutes Linny just sat there, trying to think her way out of this box with no exits. She did not yet really believe there was no way out. Linny had always been stubborn that way, about not giving up. There are ways forward, and then when those ways are closed, there are other ways around, and when the trail breaks off or fades out, there are still other secret ways, always. That was Linny’s approach. But this place right here had the most walls and closed doors she had ever experienced. Even without wolves or snakes, it was horrible.
As awful as this room was, however, she figured it had to be better than being cooped up in a tiny cage, like the poor Half-Cat. It was better than fading away to nothingness, up in the hills, like poor Sayra. It might even be better than having to run around dangerous places with the
madji
, like (as far as she knew) that lummox Elias was having to do. Those three thoughts braided themselves together: she would have to have courage. That was the only way.
All right,
she thought. If she sat here like a good girl, maybe she could pass their stupid tests, whatever they were (and maybe not), and maybe if the tests went well, they would bring her medicines when she ordered them to in her bossiest queen-of-the-world voice (and maybe not)—but the Half-Cat couldn’t wait. She would find Sayra’s medicines somehow and sometime. She would. She had promised. But first there was the Half-Cat to save from the murderous lab men, if it hadn’t yet been taken to pieces.
She took all the tools in the mapmaking kit, and she took the little carving knife from her lourka bag, and she went over to take a closer look at that other door, not the one she had come in by, and not the door hiding the indoor privy, but the mysterious, much-bolted old door at the other end of the room.
L
ocks and latches were no match for someone with as many years’ training in pilferage and lourka making as Linny had had. She used the mapmaking kit’s sharp compass to jimmy open the simplest locks and whittled herself a key from a sliver of the door itself to get herself through the last one. It was a comfortable bit of work, almost like being at home and breaking into her father’s workshop for the thousandth time.
But what she found beyond the door and all its latches was not like any workshop she had ever seen. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dim evening light, she saw that the room, quite large, was filled with blocky cabinets, each holding a number of long, flat drawers, stacked one on top of the next. She slid open one of those drawers, and large sheets of paper lay there. She thought for a moment, running her fingertip over the old paper: this was the room that had belonged to the First Surveyor. It
was hard to see anything properly, but these surely must be drawings or diagrams. Or maps.
What to do about the light, though? That was another thing Linny knew well enough. You can’t take your winking candle into a space with windows and not expect someone in the village to notice. All the windows across the courtyard . . . they were sort of the Plain version of a village, Linny figured. Here it wasn’t really question of a winking candle, because light came on when you pushed the round switch by the door, but to hit that switch would be like shouting her presence in this room to all lingering Surveyors who might be looking across that courtyard for some reason.
She scooted over to the outside windows and looked out for a moment at the second skin of more modern glass and all the ripply rectangles across the way. She was beginning to think she might have to carry each of those maps, one at a time, into the other room to look at them, when a string brushed against her cheek and turned out to be attached to thick curtains, rolling down and down. Somehow she had missed them in the dark. So she lowered the blinds, turned on the light, and got to work.
