As the machines fell silent and the wheels ceased, children crept under the threads to hide, and women and men turned to stare at the opposite door. Whip raised, the foreman advanced on that other door, ignoring us. He halted dead as a man stepped over the threshold and into the hall.
The mansa had come.
His was a presence one could never forget after meeting him: tall, imposing, and utterly commanding. A woman dropped to her knees, sobbing. His gaze, across the length of the hall, caught me. Pinned me.
"Got it!" said Bee triumphantly.
With a snick, the lock opened. She flung open the door. We bolted, and I slammed the door shut behind us, then leaped down three steps at a time after her, down into a black pit, for the lamps had all gone out.
On the stairwell's ground floor, we had a choice of three doors. I yanked at the doors leading outside, but they, too, were locked and chained. We could go back through the ground-floor hall of the mill, where we knew his soldiers had entered, or out through the weaving shed that was attached as an annex to
the main building. In the weaving shed, looms still clattered, the floor humming beneath our feet as the machinery vibrated in full spate.
The door, unlocked, opened easily and we plunged over the threshold into a long, wide building whose timber roof was inset with windows. People bent over their work, oblivious to our entrance, unaware of the changed tenor of the mill, subservient to the deafening roar whose rhythms fell like a dance around us. Bee's mouth moved, but I could not hear her. Far, far away, down the length of the shed, stood a double door, our last hope for escape.
The machines closest to the stairwell shuddered and coughed, missing their beats. The engine in its adjoining house thudded and hissed and whined as the magister's descent down the stairs killed the fiery heart of its combustion. The laborers did begin to look up then. A woman wiped strands of hair from a sweaty forehead. A man stood poised with shuttle in hand, looking confounded and bewildered. We ran the length of the weaving shed-a good, long way-as the looms one by one fell silent behind us like voices smothered.
We ran, but it was already too late.
The far door opened and armed men wearing the fine jackets and bearing the bows and spears of mage House troops walked through. They halted, blocking our escape. Midway, we stopped and surveyed the walls of the structure. The windows were too high to reach. I turned, and Bee turned beside me, as the mansa and his attendants swept into the weaving shed. The last looms thunked and shushed in a kind of choking clut-clut-clut as they wheezed out their death rattle.
We had nowhere else to run. Even if I might hope to conceal myself and sneak past them, I could not conceal Bee. And I would not abandon her. Never.
"Bee," I said in a low voice, "if you grab a spanner and climb up on one of the looms, maybe you can reach and break one of the windows and climb while I rush him."
"Cat, I can't reach."
"But he'll kill me and force you to marry Andevai. Or himself!"
"He can try," she said ominously.
"He has the right. It's in the contract."
"I'm beginning to wonder what that troll would say about the legality of that contract, if it was forced on the family when they were under duress. As I'm sure it must have been."
"Too late to ask her now. If you run while I attacked-"
"With what? Sarcasm?" She took my hand in hers. "We'll face this together."
The mansa was a storm whose strength could not be evaded. He had a breadth of shoulder that made him fill whatever space he stood in, and a bold, striking face whose lineaments were stamped by both his Celtic and Afric forebears. He wore his silver-streaked black hair in many small braids tied off with tiny amulets. He was a man to respect, but also to fear, as we must fear him, because whatever else he might be, however fair a ruler of his House, however wise or capricious, intelligent or heavy-handed, in his command, he had already demanded my death.
He was not, I suppose, a man accustomed to having his will crossed.
I tightened my grip on my cane, yet I could see no means by wh ich I could force a way through for us, not even if it were night and my sword alive in its spirit form.
As chaff parts where a current flows, the laborers shrank away from their stations to huddle against the wall. In such circumstances, what could they hope for except to behave as rabbits caught in the open by a roving hawk: freeze, and pray to the gods to let the predator overlook them.
Bee and I stood alone in the middle of the shed to face him and his attendants: the djeli, Bakary, who looked more weary than victorious; two men in nondescript clothing who might have been House seekers, and a pair of cold mages. The older cold mage I had never seen before, but the young one was the man who had attacked me at Cold Fort. Six soldiers escorted them.
There was one more. There was Andevai, pushing to the front to stand next to his master.
He had betrayed us after all.
A dull, dead emptiness engulfed me. Bee's hand tightened on my fingers, but the pain of her grasp could not rouse me out of this soul-sucking extremity of despair. I had allowed myself to hope, but he, too, had betrayed me
Who had I been, to think I could defy a mage House? Me, whose name was not even a true name, for I was not a Hassi Barahal; I had scant memory of my mother, Tara Bell, and had until a few days ago no knowledge at all of the creature who had evidently sired me, a father who had never acknowledged nor shown the least interest in me. I was nothing more than an afterthought, a piece of refuse to be glancingly tossed to one side. At least as a sacrifice I had some use in the world. I shook off Bee's hand and stepped in front of her.
"Here is the eldest Barahal daughter at last," said the mansa with more gravity than anger, in the tone of a man who regrets the necessity of creating an unpleasant scene but accepts that the situation is one that has been forced upon him. "We are not too late. Andevai, kill the other one."
"No."
I thought a machine had exhaled or that the steam engine in its housing beyond the shed sighed a last protest. Yet in the world beyond these walls, no voice cried, no wheels rumbled, no child Laughed or wept.
The mansa looked at Andevai, and the temperature in the shed dropped precipitously.
"No," said Andevai calmly in answer to whatever command he had seen in his master's gaze.
A voice-impossible to tell who or where among the onlookers-sobbed softly.
"No," Andevai said for a third time.
The mansa looked astounded.
"Andevai," said the djeli, in the tone of a schoolmaster, "consider what words you speak before the mansa."
"I have considered them. If we prosper only through the suffering or death of another, then that is not prosperity. I will not do it."
The mansa's anger crashed over us. Wires snapped; a win-dowpane cracked, although no shards fell. Not yet. And yet, I was no longer afraid.
"What is this defiance?" asked the djeli. "The slave does not command the master."
"It is wrong to kill her. I won't do it, and I won't let you do it, Mansa."
When the mansa spoke, he did not shout. Likely that would be beneath his dignity. "The child of the children of slaves cannot know the taste of wisdom. His kind do not know wisdom, because they gave up their honor long ago."
Andevai said, "I am no longer ashamed of where I come from, although the House made sure to tell me over and over again that I should be grateful to be allowed to enter where I was not wanted. I should never have been ashamed. I just did not see that before. You need me, Mansa."
The young mage sniggered but swallowed his laughter when the mansa raised a hand.
"Do not believe for even one breath, child of slaves, that I
need you more than you need me. I brought you in when you were a ragged, barefoot, ignorant youth."
Suddenly every person in that wide space was slammed to their knees as though felled by a hammer blow. Every one, even the other two cold mages. All, except the mansa, and the djeli. And Andevai.