The Crimson Skew (33 page)

And a chain of events unreeled before her. The terrified child in the cage would open her hands, and red flowers would bloom from her palms—Datura's gift would blossom once
more. The scent of the flowers would drift, carried by the powerful winds, and the tension of the waiting armies would collapse in the chaos, confusion, and carnage of the crimson fog. The weirwind would descend the slope, and the troops from both sides would be battered into death. When the storm passed, there would be little more than the wreckage of an iron cage.

Sophia could see no way to prevent these things from happening that did not begin and end with persuasion. She had to persuade Datura to wait. She had to persuade the commanders to wait. She had to convince the armies to wait.

But though it was Sophia's gift to have all the time in the world, she had run out of time.

• • •

T
HERE WAS A
crashing sound, and Sophia felt the ground shaking under her feet, as if from the impact of a horse's hooves. The space she had created around herself collapsed; time ran on as usual. She looked desperately to either side of the valley. Had the weirwind descended? Had the troops begun their charge?

“Da-tu-ra!”
came a distant shout. Sophia turned. She could see only a dark blur, racing toward them along the riverbank, but she knew that voice. Even though she had never heard it shout, she recognized it. The dark blur became a moose, charging toward them with its antlers lowered, moving at an incredible speed. “
Datura!”
came the cry once more.

“It is Bittersweet!” Sophia exclaimed, reaching through the bars once more to take Datura's hands. “You see, he has come to find you.”

Datura stood staring, wide-eyed and wondering, as Nosh bulleted toward them. The bugle sounded again, but she ignored it.

Sophia saw, out of the corner of her eye, an uneasy stirring at the front line of the New Occident troops. She imagined how this would appear to General Griggs, who had now ordered Datura three times to release a fog that did not come: first, three figures in a canoe had appeared, and now another who knew the girl by name. Clearly, he was only waiting because he expected the fog to begin at any moment. How long would he wait? She willed Nosh to run faster.

He closed the distance, now fifty feet away, now twenty, and finally Bittersweet slid from Nosh's back and ran to them, soaked to the skin, his face bright with exertion. He threw himself against the bars and pulled Datura toward him. They held each other close. “Little sister,” Bittersweet murmured, his hand on her head.

With effort, she pulled back, and her face was strained with grief. “You must go,” she said, trying to push him away.

Bittersweet was unmoved. “I am not going anywhere.”

“But Mother and Grandfather,” Datura said, dissolving into tears. “If I don't—”

“They will understand,” Bittersweet reassured her.

“They will be dead! They are in winter sleep and will never wake unless I do everything the men ask!”

As Bittersweet and Datura spoke, Sophia felt a tremor of warning course through her. Perhaps, in the past, she would have pushed it aside as her own baseless anxiety. Or, if by chance she listened to it, she would have ascribed it to some mysterious better instinct. Now she knew that it was neither baseless anxiety nor sound instinct; the warning came from the old one, and she raised her head abruptly.

It was not the New Occident troops advancing toward them, as she had feared. It was the muddy river water, rising and falling in mutinous currents. A section of grassy earth disappeared beneath a swell of water; the riverbank was being eaten before their eyes. Sophia looked down, aghast, at the widening fissures in the soft ground underfoot.

“We must move!” she shouted, seizing one of the poles of the palanquin. The others looked at her, startled. “The riverbank!”

Bittersweet was the first to understand. He took up the pole beside Sophia and began straining to lift it.

Casanova followed suit, pushing Theo aside and attempting to lift both poles at the rear of the palanquin. Sophia could feel his exertion through the wood in her hands, but the iron cage did not move.

“It is too heavy,” Datura cried. “They use eight men—you will not be able to lift it!”

Sophia looked at Bittersweet in anguish. She could see in his face the same desperate, fruitless unreeling of what lay before them: the rush of the river, the muddy soil, the crumbling ground, and the heavy iron cage. Before long, the ground underfoot would give way, and Datura's prison would
fall into the water. Datura, trapped inside, would drown.

Sophia's mind worked rapidly through one possibility, and then another, and another; she could see only one way forward, and it was precarious.

“Go!”
she shouted to Casanova, pushing him away from Datura's cage. “Get Fen Carver! Tell him Griggs has agreed to negotiate a truce!”

Casanova did not protest that this was a lie. He did not ask how the lie would be made true. Without a word, he ran toward the boulders that served as a bridge to the western riverbank.

Sophia turned to Bittersweet and Theo. “Keep her alive,” she said. Then she ran uphill, toward the soldiers who stood, unmoving, like rows upon rows of black teeth, preparing to devour the valley whole.

S
ORENSEN AND THE
Elodeans had given their testimony, and Mr. Fenton had summarized the narratives offered by the seven witnesses, explaining to the judges what evidence was laid before them.

Gordon Broadgirdle, he asserted, was Wilkie Graves, a known and notorious slaver. Graves had made his way into New Occident and pursued a political career, shedding his old identity and taking on a gang of armed men to dissuade the intervention of any who might get in his way. Though there was not yet evidence to prove it, Broadgirdle had likely begun his plot to kill Prime Minister Bligh months in advance—all
with the intention of starting the war he had effectively begun in the summer of 1892. What had been proven beyond doubt, Fenton argued, was his treatment of Gerard Sorensen and the Eerie, who had been most cruelly used in pursuit of his agenda.

The judges heard this summary solemnly. “You may be seated, Mr. Fenton,” the chief judge with the impassive face instructed. All of Mr. Fenton's witnesses shifted slightly, their attention turning to the defense.

“Mr. Appleby?” said the judge. “Please present your evidence.”

“I certainly will, Your Honor,” Mr. Appleby said, rising. “I have counseled the prime minister to tell you the truth, and I hope you will take this into consideration as you determine the next steps. Prime Minister,” he said, nodding to Broadgirdle.

Broadgirdle rose, and with the confident air that always hung about his person like an ornate cloak, he strode to the dais instead of remaining by the table. Shadrack considered him with reluctant admiration. There was nothing in the man's expression to suggest that he was the target of multiple devastating accusations—that he was on the very verge of losing not only his high position, but his freedom. He seemed, rather, the same self-assured politician he always was, primed to deliver a momentous speech that he knew already his audience would applaud.

“Your Honor and members of parliament,” he began, looking at them all with a slight smile. “I will heed Mr. Appleby's wise counsel, and tell you the truth about my past, thereby
filling in the considerable holes left by the testimony of these . . . ahem, unusual witnesses.” He cast his eye over them wryly. “What these seven don't know would fill a chamber much greater than this one, Your Honor. In fact”—he shook his head with a low chuckle—“what they don't know might fill an entire Age. For you see, honorable judges, members of parliament, you are right—I am not a native of New Occident. Nor am I from the Baldlands. In fact, I am not of this Age at all.” There were murmurs of considerable surprise.

Shadrack frowned. He had expected a well-crafted response from Broadgirdle, but he had not expected this. He noticed out of the corner of his eye that Cassandra was looking sharply at Broadgirdle with something like concern. “I,” Broadgirdle said, waiting for the suspense to climax, “am from the Age of Verity.”

The murmurs from parliament shifted to become something more disbelieving—more ridiculing. “My father was a criminal,” Broadgirdle said, cutting into the murmurs. There was instant silence. “He came from another part of this Age of Delusion—Australia. As the testimony from Pip Entwhistle has intimated, he was a desperate man prone to dramatic and excessive measures. One of those excessive measures was to flee his native Australia when threatened with life in prison for a crime he had committed. He escaped to this hemisphere, where he landed on the western coast of the Baldlands and met my mother. My mother died at my birth.” He covered his eyes briefly with his hand, and Shadrack recognized the falsity in the gesture—but he doubted any of the judges would. “With
a motherless infant and a criminal past, he made his way east, toward the middle Baldlands.

“You can imagine the kind of life I led,” Broadgirdle continued, his voice low and strained, “with such a man as a father. It was a difficult life. And it was made more difficult by a discovery I made when I was fifteen. Due to the circumstances, of course, my father had brought very little with him from Australia. He had a small wallet with him, however, that contained all of his identification papers, and I had occasion to examine the contents when my father was taken ill. I found in the wallet a surprising piece of dreck—dreck that described me
by name.
I lived in Australia, a grown man—an important man. A man of influence and power. The fact that my father had kept this piece of dreck spoke to me clearly: coming to the Baldlands had not only been an act of desperation, it had been an act of selfishness. He had stolen from me the future I ought to have had.

“I left my father on that very day, and I have not heard of him since. I will leave aside the intervening years, as I tried—without success—to recover the fate my father had stolen from me. And then the course of my life was changed again—by Pip Entwhistle.” He looked at Pip with what seemed a smile of genuine warmth. “Yes, indeed. You did not know it, but the piece of dreck you sold me set me on a new course. For it mentioned me by name as a great political leader in a great war, uniting the western continent.”

“But . . .” Pip protested, entirely out of turn. “But that newspaper made no mention of a Wilkie Graves.”

“Wilkie Graves is not my true name,” Broadgirdle said with a gleaming, assured smile. “I recognized at once the meaning of the paper in my hands. Now there were
two
pieces of dreck, both of which described my illustrious future. It was clear that I was destined for such a path regardless of which Age I inhabited. Within the year, I had joined the Nihilismian sect. Of all the misguided people in our world, I understood that they, and they alone, were attempting to restore the Age of Verity that we had all lost. With their guidance, I began to see more and more the true nature of the world around me. I realized that there are certain people, certain paths, that will transcend even disruptions of the kind that occurred ninety-three years ago. And I was one such person.

“I have tried,” he said, leaving his explanation and past behind, his voice rising to a crescendo, “to bring this misguided Age of Delusion closer to its true path—closer to the Age of Verity that is irrevocably lost to us. We
must
,” he said, pounding his fist on the podium, “correct the mistakes of this deluded Age. We
must
do everything we can to align ourselves with the events that transpired in the Age of Verity. That Age is beyond saving, I know.” He looked at the parliament judges with reproach. “But to sit here idle while Verity runs away from us—it is inexcusable. Every one of my actions,” he said, with an air of great self-righteousness, “has been an effort to keep us on track. An effort to recover the world we have lost. An effort to save what little can still be saved.”

—11-Hour 04—

INSPECTOR GREY, GLANCING
around him, understood at once that he was outmanned. He had only eight officers, and half of them looked terrified. Grey turned back to the scarred face before him and wondered if it would be better to lie about Broadgirdle's whereabouts. On principle, Grey never lied, but in this instance, he reasoned, such a course might be the only way to prevent his officers from being killed.

“The prime minister is not in the State House,” Grey said firmly.

The man before him slowly took the grappling hook from his belt and held it with a casual air. The others around him followed suit. “You can tell us where he is, then.”

“I don't know where he is. The prime minister fled the State House as we were taking him to chambers.”

The man with the grappling hook frowned, and suddenly the hook was whirling in the air like a lasso. “You are lying,” he said.

The officers drew their pistols. The nineteen men before them began whirling their grappling hooks. Grey, his hands at his sides, sought desperately in his mind for a way to avoid the confrontation. He could think of nothing. As the man before him drew the circling hook over his head, preparing to launch it, a sudden whoop sounded, piercing and clear, from the colonnade behind him. A chorus of shrill, exuberant cries echoed the first, and Grey watched in amazement as a fist-sized rock
flew past him, hitting the man with the grappling hook soundly on the ear.

He fell back, stunned, and a volley of smaller stones followed, pounding down on the twenty men like a hailstorm. Grey turned his head in astonishment and looked up at the gallery of the State House.

The inspector was of strong constitution, but he nearly fainted when he saw his own daughter, grinning from the gallery. She gave him a cheerful wave before launching another missile. Grey stared at her, aghast. Beside her were some twenty-five or thirty street urchins, all of them enthusiastically pitching rocks at the men on the steps. The stones were small, but many hit their mark, and as they continued without pause, they made it impossible for the men to throw their grappling hooks.

The anxious parent in Grey wanted to run up to the colonnade and drag Nettie home. The inspector in Grey reasoned that he and his men were getting the very help they needed. He agonized for several seconds, watching as several of their attackers fled the steps and two others huddled down, covering their heads with their hands. There would be no other chance, Grey realized. The inspector prevailed over the parent.

“Cuff them,” he shouted to his men. “I want to see them all in the station within the hour.”