Watcher's Web (16 page)

“Can you see
Pengali flying an aircraft?”

True.

“The guys in
power in this place are the keihu people. They’re shorter,
dark-skinned. You’ll see plenty when we go to the other island.
That’s where they all live, in their huge mansions. They are the
ones who are in the council and who run the Exchange. We want to
avoid them for the time being. That’s why we’re here. Any arrivals
on the main island attract more attention. We’ll walk from here to
the other island, but first, I’ll have to borrow some clothes for
you. A customer of mine owns an apartment here. It’s a bit rough,
as you see, but pretty good for our purposes. He normally uses it
for storage, so I hope you don’t mind a bit of mess. You can stay
there tonight, well away from the council.”

What? By
myself?

Two more
soldiers were waiting when they reached the shore. After a small
nod of acknowledgement, they fell into step behind them.

There was a
kind of market here, people selling things out of baskets. A small
crowd of Pengali congregated around woven mats spread out on the
compacted earth under a tree. Between legs and baskets, Jessica
caught a glimpse of water creatures, barely deserving the name
“fish”, lined up for sale. They were black bristly things with
protuberant frog-like eyes at the top of a wide-mouthed head and
four lizard-like limbs spread-eagled on the mat.

The soldier at
the front shouted at the crowd of shoppers. Towering over the
Pengali crowd and standing out in his white uniform, he had little
trouble clearing the path. Pengali males stepped aside, their eyes
on the soldiers’ crossbows; females squeaked and pulled their
children out of the way.

After they had
passed, however, many stopped to look at Jessica. Some even
muttered her Pengali name, Anmi.

She pushed
away unease. For people who seemed primitive, they sure
communicated fast.

“Why are these
people so scared of these guards? Where do they come from? They’re
not from the . . . whatever people rule the city?”

“Keihu. No,
they’re conscripted soldiers from Miran. Here to keep order. Sad
and sorry as it is, Barresh isn’t truly independent. It relies on
Miran for almost everything; the surrounding nation is a powerful
ally. The soldiers are our friends.”

The Pengali
clearly thought differently.

On the other
side of the square, an alley stretched into the approaching
darkness up the crest of a steep hill. Here, the crowd petered
out.

The air became
unbearably hot and stuffy now they were away from the water. High
walls on either side radiated heat that had collected during the
day. Soon, sweat trickled down Jessica’s stomach, and down her
temples into her neck.

When they had
almost reached the crest, Iztho stopped at a door to the left. He
produced a dark-coloured cylinder from his pocket, inserted it into
a hole at chest level in the centre of the door, and twisted it.
Something grated on the other side and then the entire door started
curling and rolling in like a garage door mounted sideways.

Walking
through, Jessica stared at the mechanism of closely positioned
slats joined by a mesh of twine or metal wire.

The soldiers
stationed themselves in the alley.

As the door
rolled itself back into position with a clatter, Iztho led Jessica
across a dark courtyard into a doorway.

A short
hallway led into a larger room, packed with all manner of goods.
There were crates of glass bowls, baskets of coloured sheets,
bundles of coloured thread, woven rugs, cooking and eating
utensils, jewellery, and a thousand other things, the functions of
which she could only guess.

There was a
low table in the middle of the room, surrounded by dirty cushions.
On the table stood a basket covered by a rough blue cloth.

“My customer’s
servants left some food for you. There is a bed in the other room.
I’m really sorry about the state of this place,
but . . .” He glanced at her, his face almost in
pity. “You simply can’t go through the city like this without
attracting too much attention. I have to be careful enough to find
someone I can trust to explain the situation and borrow some
clothes.”

“And
then?”

“I’ll make
some investigations to find the best way of getting out unnoticed.
I think we’ll want to use some kind of disguise, but I need to see
who I can bribe to get the documentation.”

Jessica pulled
the cloth off the basket, and found a bowl of noodles underneath.
She lifted it and put it on the table, pretending to be busy. Her
fate was in his hands, and she still wasn’t sure if she could trust
him. The silence in the room lingered.

“Thank you for
doing this.” Hopefully it didn’t sound too strangled.

He nodded and
walked to the door. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Before Jessica
could say anything else, he left. The gravel in the courtyard
crunched with his footsteps. The door squeaked then slammed shut.
Locks rattled.

Jessica took a
deep, shuddering breath. She ate quickly, barely tasting anything.
Then she heaved herself to her feet and crossed to the single
window in the room: a square hole in the wall, with no frame or
glass or curtain.

Outside, the
city stretched down to the water in a mass of black, dotted with
islands of light. The smell of dry stone mingled with the scent of
cooking and a faint, ever-present whiff of sulphur. Sounds of talk,
music and other noises cut through the heat of the night. Not a
single merciful breeze.

In a courtyard
about three storeys below the window, light flooded from a door
onto wispy steam rising from a basin. Hot water springs. She should
have known. Only last year her parents had taken her to New
Zealand, to places where mud bubbled, vents hissed steam and hot
water pooled in silent, deadly springs. That sulphuric smell clung
to everything there, too.

A myriad of
stars, some clear, others barely visible, stretched overhead in a
broad band, as if a painter had shaken out a brush of white paint
on the dark canvas of the sky.

When she was
little, her father used to take her into the bush to watch the
night sky. Then, she hadn’t believed it when her father told her
stars were all great flaming balls of gas. Suns in other systems,
he had gone to pains to explain. Had two of those pinpricks of
light represented the suns of this planet? Was one of those lights
in the sky above her, now, her own familiar sun?

Then another
thought came to her: by showing her the stars, had her father been
trying to tell her something? Her parents said they knew nothing of
her origin and that she was found wearing only a nappy and a cheap
romper suit bought the previous day from the department store in
Pymberton. But was that true?

How much of a
coincidence could it be that of all those flights in the air on
that day, the “accident” had to involve her; someone who wasn’t
really a stranger to this world?

The skin of
her arms puckered into goosebumps despite the heat.

Feeling
uneasy, Jessica turned away from the window and went into the
darkness of the hall, where it was quiet except for the sound of
water dripping into a pool. A stone bath was set into the back
wall. Steaming water dribbled from a spout fed by a stone duct that
came in through a small window near the ceiling. The bath
overflowed on the other side into a similar duct that left the
house through another little window near the floor. The water was
warm and smelled of sulphur. Jessica took off the sarong, climbed
into the bath and scrubbed her shoulders until her skin glowed and
most of the Pengali-applied paint was gone.

She wound the
sarong around her and went in search of the bed. The air in the
second, windowless room smelled of must and other staleness. It was
hot in the room, and breathless amongst more boxes and baskets and
all kinds of merchandise stacked in piles. She stopped to admire
sarong-like pieces of cloth, painted with exquisite geometric
patterns in vivid colours.

In one corner
lay a mattress with some folded cloths she presumed to be
bedding.

She sat down
on the mattress, legs crossed, back straight. She pressed her hands
together in front of her face, closed her eyes and concentrated on
her palms. Everyone else was telling her what to do. Iztho was so
keen to have her in this city that frankly sounded dangerous. Ikay
seemed to want her to stay at the tribe, or at least not go with
Iztho. She had no idea who was right; she was going to find out
herself.

She was going
to weave her web into a light—because that had to be the
wormhole—and was going to try to talk to this Daya guy, and ask him
what he knew, since he was clearly looking for her, and perhaps
didn’t even realise that she was listening in. Whatever he wanted
with her, she’d get it over with so she could decide what to do and
who to trust.

She pulled
together all her strands of concentration and poured them into her
hands. Drops of sweat trickled down behind her ears. The burning
feeling stirred inside her. A ghost of a breeze touched her skin,
making her shiver. A warm glow travelled to her hands, but stopped
there. There was the usual amorphous mist, but no blue aura, no
sparks, no light, nothing. The mist even refused to weave into
strands.

Well, so much
for that idea.

She really
should have learned while she was at the tribe. And she shouldn’t
have left, and . . .

Shit.
You
really fucked up, Jess, admit it.

She blew out a
deep breath.

Yeah,
Mum, sorry about the language.

For now, she
had better catch some sleep.

The light on
the wall next to the door, was a glowing pearl sitting atop a metal
coil. One of those pearls that were charged at the plant that the
Pengali operated.

The light
stand had a long handle, which she presumed was for turning it on
and off. It wouldn’t go further down, but when she lifted the
handle up, a small spoon-like contraption flung up and lifted the
pearl off the metal frame, and the room went dark. Dark as the
inside of a whale in fact.

Jessica
fumbled her way back to the mattress, spots dancing before her
eyes, when she became aware of a bluish glow from behind.

Somewhere down
the bottom of a stack of boxes near the door, blue light spilled
through a crack, so bright that when Jessica tried to peep in, she
couldn’t make out anything for the glow.

Holy shit. Was
this something she should worry about? Something she should turn
off before going to sleep?

She heaved the
boxes that stood on top onto another pile, until she uncovered the
source of the blue light: hundreds of transparent balls like the
eyes of dead fish. She picked up one of them. It was heavy, about
the size of a marble, and perfectly smooth. She clamped her hand
around it. The surface remained icy cold.

Strange.

She opened her
hand. The marble stared back at her, glowing blue light, its smooth
surface revealing none of its purpose. There were no holes to
thread a string, or indentations of any kind. The touch of her hand
did not warm the surface. This was one heck of a weird thing. She
wanted to drop it back into the box, but it clung to her palm.

What
the. . . ?

Jessica held
her hand upside down, but the bloody thing wouldn’t let go. Sparks
and waves of heat whirled under her skin, and disappeared into the
glass-like material, which glowed ever brighter blue with each bit
of energy it absorbed from her. She tried to wipe the marble on her
knee and take it off with her other hand. Sparks flew from her
fingers. The glass glowed red, then white and then sang with a
deafening tone until it shattered. Jessica screamed. Pieces of
glass flew everywhere. Clattered on the floor, against the walls
and ceiling. The light near the door had turned itself on
again.

Silence.

Jessica
gasped. The palm of her left hand was red. Blood dripped from small
cuts the flying glass had made on the skin of her arms. There were
also cuts in her shins and feet. Very carefully and still shaking,
she sank to her knees and, using a corner of her sarong, wiped
fragments from the floor. She hoped to hell these things weren’t
valuable. Things that collected energy were bound to be.

Chapter
14

J
ESSICA WOKE
with a shock. She sat up, peeling sweaty sheets from her legs,
wondering why she was awake, since it was still pitch dark. But
then she heard faint shuffles from the darkness of the hall—and a
giggle.

She heaved
herself up and groped around the crates on either side of the door.
The bottom crate still glowed faint blue, allowing her to see
enough to find a makeshift weapon: a metal bar of some sort. She
closed sweaty hands around it, and she waited, pressed against the
wall next to the door.

Voices came
closer, Pengali voices, female voices. Familiar.

Jessica
lowered her makeshift weapon. That sounded like . . .
“Ikay?”

A moment of
silence, and then a couple of dark figures came in through the
doorway. “Anmi, Anmi.” Ikay enclosed her in a hug, with her
characteristic minty smell, and her paper-skinned arms, and the
rough touch of a tail.

Jessica
dropped the metal bar.

It
had
been
wrong to leave the Pengali settlement.

She stroked
the old female’s hair, recognising the rounded shape of Dora over
her shoulder.

Ikay led her
into the living room. More dark silhouettes stood next to the
window, or sat on boxes or on the table. There were at least six of
them, and others were coming in from the courtyard.