Mirror Sight (24 page)

“Hello there, Inspector,” Luke said, suddenly projecting his voice ahead of them. “Yes, it is. The new horse the professor got his niece yesterday. A real handful.”

Karigan only saw the Inspector and his mechanical Enforcer as blurs. Something about the Enforcer spooked Raven, or maybe Raven was just trying to prove Luke’s words true, because he whirled on his haunches almost tossing her from the saddle. She held him best as she could, her cap slipping down over her eye. At least it didn’t go flying off in front of the Inspector! She finally got Raven to settle, but foam lathered his neck and his ears lay flat.

Doesn’t like the mechanical.

The Enforcer stood still on its metal spider legs, not making any noise or puffing steam. Its eyestalk didn’t swivel about, though it was clearly planted on Raven. Perhaps the Inspector ordered it to be still, or it had intelligence enough not to spook the horse further.

“My new lad here, Tam, has a way with horses,” Luke was saying. “The stallion will tolerate only him on his back.”

Karigan pushed her cap back so she could see better. The Inspector was chuckling. “If young Tam there can stay on his back! I wish him luck.”

“Best be on our way,” Luke said. “Good day to you, Inspector.”

“You, too, Luke.”

Luke urged Gallant past the Inspector, Raven dancing close behind. She noticed a subtle easing of Luke’s shoulders. She hadn’t noticed him being tense around the Inspector, but then she’d been too busy trying to maintain her seat.

As she thought about it, it was probably a good thing she’d been too busy, or else she would have worried about being discovered. What if the cap had flown off? Perhaps they could pass her off as the professor’s mad niece going out for a ride, but in disguise so she did not break any social codes of conduct. Maybe that would work, or maybe the Inspector would have grown suspicious and decided on investigating further. In either case, it would have invited more scrutiny than she or the professor desired.

What would happen, she wondered, if imperial officials did, indeed, find out who she really was? She couldn’t even appeal to Lord Amberhill because he was “asleep” or whatever, and the professor had shown that Amberhill, as emperor, had grown cruel and unlikely to help her. As a servant of King Zachary from the past, she doubted she’d be treated with much mercy or fairness. No, she did not wish to invite further scrutiny.

A
t Canal Street, Luke reined Gallant in the opposite direction than the professor had taken the day before, away from the Old City. The power canal and rows of mill buildings stretched in this direction as well. They passed a wagon full of cotton bales and a pair of well-dressed men chatting on a bridge that spanned the canal and led to one of the mills.

Karigan tried to imagine again all the industry that must take place in the mill that she could not see with the sun reflecting off the windows. And then the midday bell rang. Raven acted predictably by attempting to bolt. This time it took Luke’s help to hold him back.

“Will you settle?” she demanded of Raven.

Raven canted his head as if considering, then shook it. But he settled.

Karigan sighed in relief. When the bells finished tolling and the last tone faded away, she had a moment or more to observe the doors of the nearest mill complex opening. Men with cudgels and whips exited, followed by workers in worn garments with ankles shackled. They shuffled out of the mills, chain links scraping the paving stones, jingling almost musically. The mill slaves were male and female. Many were children, few were old. Many looked Sacoridian, others had the skin tones and features of other nations: Hura-desh, the Under Kingdoms, the Cloud Islands, and even the desert folk of the Unclaimed Territories. Many peoples of many origins had come under the empire’s rule, and the empire had not discriminated over who it forced to serve.

“Hurry up!” one of the guards yelled at the slaves. “If ya want yer midday rations, you’ll hurry up.”

The slaves did not alter their pace. Most just watched their feet to avoid stumbling over the shackles. Some bent double with harsh coughing.

“The brown lung,” Luke muttered, following her gaze. “From breathing all the cotton dust.”

A guard prodded his group of slaves along none too gently with his cudgel. A boy fell to his knees, looked too tired to stand again. The guard grabbed him by the hair and hauled him to his feet, shouting worse obscenities at him than Karigan had ever heard on the docks of Corsa Harbor.

Karigan touched the sleeve of the jacket she wore. It was used and faded, yes, but was well-made. She thought about how its cloth, and that of all the fine dresses she wore as Kari Goodgrave, were made by the labor of slaves. Slaves dressed in rags. As the line of workers made its way across the canal bridge to the street, one of the guards waved his whip threateningly, causing Raven to sidestep and snort.

“Best that we move on,” Luke said. “They’re making Raven nervous, and you don’t need to see this.”

Karigan thought she did. She did not want to see it, but she had to witness what the emperor, Xandis Pierce Amberhill, had wrought, what he’d done to his people, and those of other nations. She couldn’t look away from the gaunt faces, misery etched in their expressions, the children looking as defeated as the adults. No, they were not children. The youth had been worked and beaten out of them. They would not know joy or play. But Luke urged Gallant into a trot, and Raven was so eager to follow he burst into a canter. Karigan had no choice but to look away and contend with the stallion.

They passed only one more mill complex, and it was the same scene, with hundreds of exhausted, shackled slaves shambling along the street like some parody of a parade. This was the future, Karigan thought, that she had to change.

 • • • 

The canal dog-legged to the south and the hooves of the horses thudded across a bridge that spanned the dark, quiet water. Only subtle ripples revealed that it flowed with any current. Karigan felt herself ease, breathe more freely, as they left the mills and slaves behind. Luke kept them at a trot, Gallant’s tail swishing as though they were finally getting down to business.

The city extended well beyond the canal, breaking up into neighborhoods of small houses and tenements. It was a rather sorry looking area with smashed windows, overgrown gardens, and broken fences. Trash rotted in the street. It was not the tidy, well-kept neighborhood the professor lived in.

“I don’t linger in this quarter,” Luke told her. “Most folk here aren’t bad, but the few who are won’t hesitate to murder you for a pair of boots.”

And so they trotted on, crossing another bridge over the river, the water here glimmering with a swift current. Once they were across, space opened up between buildings, and eventually habitation became sparse enough that trees grew freely, and the people had small plots of land to farm.

Eventually Luke slowed Gallant to a walk and Karigan did likewise with Raven. While still energetic and eager, the stallion had calmed down quite a bit.

Karigan tried to place the location in the context of her own time, but the land was too changed. They were well east of the city now, that much she knew. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Well, I like to take Gallant out to the Big Mounds where there is a lot of open space,” he said. “Good for riding, a breather from the city.”

The
Scangly Mounds,
she thought with a thrill. At least this one familiar landmark remained.

But when they reached the mounds, several had been flattened—mined for gravel—and others that Luke pointed out, had been mined for artifacts by archeologists who found only . . . gravel. Karigan used to ride Condor to the Scangly Mounds when she needed to get away from the castle. She was dismayed by the destruction. But even their remnants lent her some comfort, another link to the past, and several of the mounds still stood. She rode Raven up the biggest, which appeared to be more a granite outcrop than a mound. Scrub alder and grasses grew out of its crannies, and lichens studded the nubbly rock. She gazed at the panorama that surrounded her. While the landscape was familiar, something . . . something beyond its current condition was out of place. The mounds couldn’t have moved, could they? She scratched her head, puzzled. Maybe she wasn’t remembering correctly, or perhaps the forces that had created a river where Sacor City once stood had also changed the topography.

From this vantage, she also had an excellent view of the Old City in the distance. In the past, she used to look back and see the castle rising high and proud over Sacor City. Now it looked like no more than a rocky mount. Only a good spyglass would allow her to see the details of the ruins, and perhaps that was for the best. Smoky plumes rose from beneath the mount, from Mill City, spreading a grayish-brown haze across the view. A dirty sky—she could never have imagined it. All was quiet here, except for crows that squawked and flew-hopped from brush and scrub.

Luke reined Gallant up beside her. “Grand view, isn’t it? Sometimes I try to picture what it looked like in the past when there was a castle up there. A shame everything was destroyed. It must have been amazing.”

“It was,” Karigan murmured. Then hastily added, “I mean, yes, it must have been.”

Luke raised an eyebrow and gave her a sidelong glance. “It leaves a strong impression, those ruins. Growing up beneath them, I had nightmares. Thought the ghosts of the old ones, the people who lived up there, were going to come down and do terrible things to me. But I was just a boy then. Some will swear there are still ghosts, but I’ve never seen ’em.” They sat in silence for a while, then Luke stood in his stirrups and shielded his eyes from the sun as he gazed into the distance. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s Mr. Harlowe coming along. Professor said he might join us out here.”

Cade? She looked where Luke pointed and saw a man driving a mule cart along a dirt track that bypassed the mounds. It could certainly be Cade, but she wasn’t sure. He turned off the track and guided the mule toward the mounds.

“Shall we go down to meet him?” Luke asked. Without waiting for an answer, he reined Gallant down the slope of the outcrop. Karigan shrugged and followed.

It turned out to be Cade Harlowe after all, and he took the cart into the mounds as far as was possible without losing a wheel. He hopped off the cart and greeted them, giving Karigan an odd look.

“Afternoon, Miss Goodgrave,” he said, “or is it Tam?”

“Kari—” She almost gave her full name, but recalling that Luke did not seem to know everything about her secrets, she stopped just in time. “Just call me Kari for now.”

Cade gazed hard at her, and she guessed at what he was thinking—that it was not appropriate to call her by her first name and that her dressing like a boy was extremely improper. He shook his head.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked, thinking this could not be a coincidence.

“Officially? I have an imperial permit to do some test digs. Not that the mounds have not been entirely sifted through by other archeologists.”

“Unofficially?”

“Unofficially I am here to show you how to use a gun.”

This time it was Luke who frowned and shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. “The professor is allowing this?”

“Yes,” Cade replied. “We come out here for target practice sometimes. Civilians aren’t supposed to own guns,” he told Karigan, “though Inspectors are more lenient with the Preferred families. In any case, we shouldn’t be heard out here.”

“Heard?”

“Yes. Guns are loud.”

Karigan thought it silly that a weapon should be noisy. There was no stealth in noise as there was with an arrow or a dagger.

“I’ll go graze the horses and keep watch then,” Luke said warily. “No point in inviting trouble.”

Karigan dismounted Raven, who was behaving admirably, and handed the reins over to Luke. He rode away, Raven trotting alongside him.

“How much does Luke know? About me?” she asked Cade.

“He knows that the professor is a member of the opposition and holds you in high regard. Luke may have his own suspicions about whether or not you are really the niece of Bryce Lowell Josston. Though he is loyal, he has not been informed of your true background, that you were a Green Rider from long ago.”

“Am.”

Cade looked at her quizzically. “Am?”

“I am a Green Rider. Not was.”

Cade dismissed her words with a curt nod and began unloading some bales of hay from the mule cart, as well as a target printed on cloth, much like archers used for practice.

She helped him place the bales in front of one of the mounds and drape the target over them. His deference from last night was replaced by his usual stoic and efficient self. They returned to his cart, where he lifted a wooden box out from a false bottom in the cart’s floor. Inside the box, nestled in red velvet, lay a gun and a variety of small tools. Karigan blinked hard trying to see it. The metal glared in her eyes, making them water and blur. It was just like when she tried to look at the professor’s gun last night. She turned her head so she could see it on the edge of her vision. This was better but not by much. The metal was blued steel, inscribed with some intricate image she could not make out. The wooden handle was stained in deep blue.

“This is a Cobalt-Masters revolver,” Cade said, sounding very instructorial. “It’s the firearm of choice for mounted units and Inspectors, only theirs aren’t so fancy. This one was
acquired
from an Adherent.”

Karigan wondered who “acquired” it and how, but Cade didn’t say and went on to describe, instead, the parts of the weapon. Trying to see it all was bringing on a headache, or maybe it was her lack of sleep getting to her. She tried to listen closely knowing this was important information to take back to her own time, but there was a buzzing, like a whole hive of hornets in her ears, that competed with Cade’s words. She could not concentrate, and only heard bits and pieces about caliber and percussion and powder.

Then he broke the gun in half. She squinted. No, not broken. The device opened on hinges.

“The cartridges breech load,” he explained.

From a satchel at his waist, Cade withdrew brass cylinders and started pushing them into holes in the halved gun. Karigan closed her eyes to cut the glare and relieve the headache. It helped, but she still couldn’t hear Cade clearly until he asked. “Is something wrong?”

She opened her eyes and made a point of looking at his face and not the gun. “Keep going. I’m fine.”

He hesitated, then nodded. “I need to make sure you are listening. These weapons can be dangerous if misused.”

“Weapons are supposed to be dangerous,” she said.

“Which only accentuates my point.” He snapped the two halves of the gun back together. She heard it and saw his movement more than witnessed the two pieces joining. “I am going to demonstrate the firing of the Cobalt. Here is how you sight the target.”

His words once again competed with the hive of hornets exploding in her ears. He raised the weapon, arm outstretched with elbow slightly bent. She watched his face and not the Cobalt, how his brow furrowed and eyes squinted at the target, his head slightly tilted. His intensity reminded her of an archer.

“I’m exceptionally good at fifteen yards,” he said, “and proficient at twenty-five. Long-arms are more accurate at greater distances. Now I cock the hammer like this. The trigger will release it and the percussion will . . .”

His words were drowned by the buzzing. His gaze never left the target. Karigan’s gaze never left his face. Thunder blasted beside her and nearly knocked her off her feet. She cried out, heart pounding wildly.