Chapter Sixteen: An Orphan's Blood

After Penny, Val went to check in on Pudge, who was now working and living above the big printworks just east of the Green Procession. It was in the mini-district of factories and workshops that supplied both the Green Procession and Dunsany Way in the posh part of the city. The four-story brick building had a more or less constant stream of paperboys and papergirls streaming out, many of them orphans delivering limited-circulation periodicals for a daily chit. Val had done that before. They all had.

As she walked there, she passed through a city that was quite obviously changed from just a month and a half ago. For starters, there were fliers posted all around the place offering a five-shilling reward for information on heretical activities. That was new.

The seamstresses had been evicted from the old abbey, and now five of them hung in steel cages dangling from the street posts. One of them was very sick or possibly dead and the rest hadn't been given nearly enough to provide protection from the cold - their regular clothes and the raggedy remains of thin blankets. Some had been pelted with rotten vegetables.

Beware the example of this woman - found guilty of heretical acts by Archbishop Justice II of Wayfair.

Beware the example of this woman - found guilty of lewd & licentious acts by the Wayfair Purity Council.

Beware the example of this woman - found guilty of willful rebellion by the Penitent Brothers of the Pale Order

All of them had signs like that attached to their cages, along with instructions to provide neither sustenance nor succor to the caged women. Val found herself looking for guards and plotting to open the cages. She balled her fists inside her gloves and gritted her teeth, wishing she knew how to use her Gift to free these women and exact revenge. And she remembered Ette's admonition to be careful. She wasn't even supposed to leave the house, let alone perpetrate a jailbreak. She committed the sight to memory and continued toward the printworks.

There was a man at the entrance to the printing press floor screening people for entry. Since it was, in fact, a printing facility, there was no shortage of paper around. Val picked an envelope out of a waste bin and walked right up to the man, waving it at the man as she passed.

"Message for the boss," she said.

The man just nodded back. Val was dressed like a typical courier, and she was dressed well enough that she wouldn't be mistaken for an urchin merely posing as a courier. Val was a bondswoman, and bondswomen knew how to pass unnoticed. She proceeded to the press floor, which she'd only seen twice before after hours. During business hours, the place was a different beast entirely.

The main printworks was the size of a warehouse with a broad main floor and a great crank-driven gantry for moving massive pallets of paper back and forth. They had twelve main presses, each churning out copy for the city's major newsletters, along with twenty smaller presses for books or niche papers. The Eastercamp Pressworks weren't the largest in the city, but they were close. They serviced the whole western third of Wayfair and shipped out crates and crates of books and newsprint to all corners of the globe.

Amid the din of thirty-two chugging presses, printmasters and their assistants jogged back and forth, setting type, feeding paper into the machines, refilling alchemicals, adjusting various settings, and loading stacks of completed paper into crates to be carried away by the gantry. It might take her hours to find Pudge…

"Val? Is… sorry, I thought you were my friend…"

"Pudge!" Val said, and she leapt into a hug. Pudge smelled like sweat, ink, and processed paper, but she supposed that was to be expected. She held him close, part of her wanting to cry because of what she'd seen on the way over. Instead, she pulled herself away and tipped her cap to him.

"Wow… uh… you're really in disguise. With your eyes and your skin and everything…"

Val nodded excitedly, but her excitement was cut short by the realization… "Hey, how'd you know it was me?"

"Your posture and the way you're holding your hands behind your back like that. When I saw you in the corner of my eye, I knew it was you, and then when I saw your, uh, disguise… well… and I think you've grown some, too."

Val had grown some, but Pudge had grown at least as much. He looked practically burly, his forearms corded and taut from his work on the press cranks. When Val observed as much, he beamed and then showed her the press he mostly worked on. It was one of the smaller presses, but that still made it the size of a small carriage. If you hollowed out the bigger presses, you could live inside them.

Val lifted the cover to a crate of prints freshly packed off the press - it was almost as if someone had wanted to keep the print hidden. She read the small poster. "Decree of conscription?"

Pudge's eyes went wide. "You're not supposed to read that… technically, I'm not supposed to, either, but I got to so I can make sure they've come out right…"

"But you did read it, right?"

Pudge grinned. "You're damned right I did. The more you tell me I can't read it, the more I want to. Isn't that how it works?"

"Yeah," Val said. "You printed a lot of these?"

"I, uh…" Pudge turned and called out to a man over by the gantry. "Mr. Revis, can I take my lunch break five minutes early?"

The man gave him a thumbs up. "See you in twenty, Frow!"

Val raised an eyebrow. "Frow?"

Pudge nodded. "Frowland? My real name? Nobody calls me Pudge around here. It's not professional. Come on…"

Pudge shared a bunkroom with two other printmaster's assistants, but neither of them was in. The bunk wasn't too different from where they'd slept at the orphanage, except Mrs. Lavoie would have fit two more bunks into the room and the orphans didn't get footlockers to stow their things.

Pudge crouched down and unlocked his, creaking the hinges up to reveal a very neat locker: half clothes, one quarter personal items, and one quarter papers and books. He looked up, grinning.

"Mr. Revis says we should keep a portfolio of our best work, in case we need to take a job elsewhere." He pulled out one of the conscription notices, a broad sheaf about the size of a newspaper, maybe twelve by eighteen inches, and tapped a stubby finger against the bottom-left corner. "I put my initials on the proof print to show it's my setting."

NOTICE OF CONSCRIPTION

Men of Harvesthead Ridge

We have been attacked! The assassination of our holy bishop is an attack against our way of life, and it shall not go unanswered!

All men of sound body and mind 16-50 must apply to the Harvesthead magistrate for exemption due to duress or inability, or else be included in a levy of 500 men to be selected for service in the Regency Council of Boleares Imperial Reserves, to be accomplished no later than the 23rd day of Frostfall.

This writ carries the force of law.

Under the beneficent gaze of our Risen King, we thus decree,

Archbishop Justice II

Acting for the Regency Council of Boleares

-FL

Val read the notice twice to make sure she'd got it right. "The 23rd of Frostfall isn't for over three weeks…"

Pudge fished around for a booklet perhaps forty pages long. "We haven't even shipped them out yet. They're to ship out along with all of the soldiers' drill and training manuals we were commissioned by the council to print."

Val started to fold the notice of conscription, which Pudge didn't appreciate. "Hey! I need that for my portfolio…"

"I've got to show this to Ette. He'll know what to do…"

"Know what to do about what?" Pudge asked.

"Boleares is gearing up for war, you soft-pate. Trust me, you don't want to get found with these… if anybody found out you gave these to me…"

"I'm not giving them to you…"

"You are," Val said. "I hope you'll give them friendly-like. And you should, because if anybody finds these copies in your footlocker, you'll be in so much shit you'll need a snorkel. Pudge… you should come to Verdenlecht with us. It's not safe here any more and it's so much better there. Well… as long as you don't flood any empty canals. I know you got an apprenticeship here, but I know they've got a pressworks in Verdenlecht, too, and you already know the language."

Pudge regarded her quietly for a moment before pulling Val into a hug. "Fine… you can have those if it's that important. I can't come with you, though… not yet. But thanks for asking. I hope I'll see you back here again…"

"Probably not for a while," Val said. "But if you make your way to the duchy, ask for Sabine and people will know who you're talking about. She'll direct you to me. You take care of yourself, Pudge."

"Yeah. You, too. Orphans stick together."

"We got nobody else," Val said, even though she knew that was no longer true. And if she didn't get back to the old Vinzenno residence before Ette returned, she'd be in trouble with one of the people who cared about her. She was willing to give Ette pique here and there, but she didn't want to disappoint him like she had ever again.

+++++

Val passed back by the old abbey on her way back to the house, walking past the cages dangling from the street posts, past the empty cage where the dead woman had been the day before. Women who'd done nothing wrong other than disagree with the church's authority. It made her blood boil. It made her want to raze the whole church down.

She found herself taking a good look up and down the street - there were a few pedestrians but nobody who might be a lookout. Val reached into her jacket pocket and retrieved a pin - one of about a dozen odds and ends that she carried about with her for magical purposes. She crept up to the nearest cage as unobtrusively as she could and slid the pin into the lock's keyhole. With that, she incanted the trap spell she'd learned, feeling the warm pulse of energy at the base of her head as she whispered: "Action and reaction is the rule - there is no uncaused cause. This wellspring of energy will flow forth when acted upon, for there can be no other way."

She shaped the hell out of her spirit, probably stronger than she'd ever done before, and the pin disappeared in a flash of yellow and a puff of ozone.

A magical incantation was a bit like a plea for the universe to act just a little differently, just for you, just for this one occasion. Where magic was involved, the rules around reality were malleable and your intent could coax it to doing something different, if only you knew how to pass your energy out into the universe in the right shape. Regular people could pass that energy around internally, such as Ette's meditative intensity when he was beating the snot out of people, but they could toss it out all day long and the universe… perhaps the gods… wouldn't hear them. Everybody could pass out energy, but not everybody could shape it - that was the Gift. But Val could shape hers, and the universe certainly replied when Val called upon it.

She took a rolled-up piece of newspaper and stuffed it in the lock, triggering the trap she'd just enchanted. With a snap and a crunch of little parts, something broke inside and the door swung open by an inch or so. The woman in the cage roused and turned to face Val, staring in incomprehension. Her nose and cheeks were red with frostnip.

"What…" she muttered.

"It's unlocked… get the hell out of here," Val whispered. She pulled another pin out of her jacket pocket and continued on to the next cage. She was going to free all of them.

After she broke the lock on the second cage, Val nudged the woman, huddled up and shivering beneath her raggedy blanket. Without a word passing between them, she helped the woman out of the cage and continued to the third one…

"Hey! That boy's letting the criminals out!" somebody shouted. Val peeked around the back of the cage to see a street vendor pointing and shouting. Now alerted, four or five pedestrians also watched on in morbid fascination.

Val would have liked to free all of them, but even her righteous indignation knew it was time to be scarce. She dashed down the street, not even making it past the last of the cages when somebody reached out and grabbed her. Strong arms wrapped around Val and she found herself lifted up into the air.

She remembered her combat training and threw her head back, feeling the crunch of cartilage as her head slammed into some bastard's nose. When he released his grip, Val landed on her feet, her hand already reaching for her knife. Before she could react, a pair of big men clad in blue and red armor grabbed Val and dragged her back.

"Help! Help! I'm being kidnapped!" she shouted.

And, to her surprise, it actually sort of worked - some of the onlookers ran across to aid her, and once again she found herself free of the Penitent Brothers as a handful of upright citizens rushed across the street and into a great big brawl with the brother-knights.

The brawl didn't last too long after the knights brought their knives to bear - their usual pikes were back leaning against a wall, but knives were still a lot deadlier than fists. Val drew her own blade and stabbed the nearest knight right in the thigh between the gaps in his armor before bolting for safety once again. A large man tackled her, knocking Val's cap off, grinding her face into the slick, sour cobblestones, and her knife got forcefully wrenched out of her hand.

"Help!" she shouted again - nobody came to her rescue this time. At least she'd done some damage to the bastards first.

Val found herself dragged up a set of stone steps and brought into a sweltering room that smelled of bread and braising meat. As her eyes adjusted to the relative darkness, she realized she'd been brought into the kitchen of the old abbey. She struggled to free herself, but the brothers soon found a roll of packing twine and used it to painfully bind her wrists.

"Listen, you little shit," one of the brother-knights said. "Freeing church prisoners is a very serious matter and I'll have your hide for it. Where in hell's bells did you get the key? Tell me who paid you and we might go easy…"

"Not after he smashed Rez's nose like that," the other brother-knight said. He squatted down to Val's level, frowning into her face, pale eyes angry, his breath sour. "Uh… if I'm not mistaken, this isn't a boy. This is the girl that's got a five-crown bounty on her head…"

"I'll be damned, I think you're right…" the other said. "Let's bring her upstairs to fra - he'll know how to deal with this."

"You're hurting my hands," Val said.

"Good."

With her wrists still painfully bound, the brothers brought her through what had, until recently, been the seamstress's brothel. It had been ransacked and then hastily refurnished with sparse and church-ly furniture and many carvings and etchings of the pale circle that represented the church's Pale God. She cried and pulled at her bindings until her wrists bled, but the brother-knights didn't care. Heck, they appeared to revel in Val's panic.

"Please don't take my blood," she sobbed. "Please…"

"Shut up."

Upstairs, in a little austere bedroom that might once have been a prostitute's domain, they tied Val to a rickety old chair and waited, the two brother-knights, one blond and very pale and one very dark-skinned with the curly red hair of the people in the far south, both of them scruffy, sour-breathed, and angry at Val. After a minute a bald-pated monk with blood-dappled robes shuffled in, his expression worried.

"Our Brother-Knight Vex didn't make it, I’m afraid," he said.

"What do you mean 'didn't make it', fra?" the swarthy knight said.

"I mean he was stabbed right through the femoral artery, both jagged and precise. He bled out before we could get him a healing potion…"

"How many healing potions do you think we'll get out of the girl?" the pale knight said.

The monk shrugged. "If we take four or five drams a week, indefinitely…"

"Assuming she's not living past today," the knight clarified.

"Then I should think five or six hundred… potions of the highest quality if she's the right child. I'll have to do a quick test…"

With that, the monk swabbed Val's bound arm and inserted the needle of a phlebolic, pumping carefully as the blood was drawn along the little glass tube and into a small glass globe a bit smaller than Val's fist. When Val struggled and broke the first phlebolic's tube, he had a second one at the ready.

"Please restrain her arm, Brother-Knight Cauldon."

"No! No, please! I didn't do it! I didn't do anything! Help!" Val screamed, but that only earned her a gag. She couldn't see through the tears and, though she felt the pain in her arm, she was too panicked to note whether the new phlebolic had been inserted yet. They were going to test her blood and find out that she was the one they'd been looking for, and then they would drain her dry. She didn't even know why they were doing it.

She prayed to Valkyrie. She prayed to all of the old gods she could think of, from Oestel to Axter the often-cruel trickster god. And she cursed the Pale God, though nobody could tell what she was saying through the gag. Even Val wasn't sure what she was saying - she wavered between cries for help, curses, and wordless screaming as the monk drew her blood and she was helpless to resist. After what felt like hours but was probably only two minutes, he finished his work and withdrew the phlebolic, not bothering to bandage her arm. A little trickle of blood welled up but quickly clotted.

This was it. She was going to die in a little shitty bedroom in the old brothel. Ette would come back home and think she'd run away again. He might never find out what had happened to her, and he and Ginn would never find out what they'd done to drive her away. Her friends here would think she'd gone off to Verdenlecht, never to return. Her friends in Verdenlecht would think she'd returned here and abandoned them. It wasn't fair.

The monk returned with two other monks carrying about a dozen glass containers between them, each of them much larger than a phlebolic. The monk shuffled over to Val and nodded for Brother-Knight Cauldon to restrain her arm again.

"The girl carries the blood of the ancient line. Don't worry. After the first one or two, she'll be too weak to struggle further." He crouched to Val's face level, offering a sad smile. "Your blood will help hundreds of sick and injured all across the city, child. Do not think the King of the Dawn will not smile upon your sacrifice. I will say prayers for you tonight."

"You and your prayers can go to hell," Val spat through her mask. She wished she could spit in his face. She wished Valkyrie would swoop down from the heavens and kill them all… no… a quick death was too merciful for them. She wished…

The monk pulled at the clot on her arm and re-inserted the phlebolic needle, this time connected to a substantially larger container. Val didn't know how much blood she had, but it must have been a lot because they expected it to fill quite a few more containers. As her blood trickled up the little glass tube, she wept, wondering how such people could be so cruel. It wouldn't even be a fast death…

+++++

There were sounds of a distant commotion below. People shouting, furniture crashing, the clank of metal against metal.

"Brother-Knight Ossow, please investigate that disturbance," the head monk said, not bothering to look up from his work pumping the phlebolic.

The door opened and the commotion sounded a lot less distant. More shouting, more crashing. The monks looked to one another with worry. Brother-Knight Cauldon released his grip from Val's arm and reached for his pike. Val managed to spit her gag out around the time she snapped the glass pipe sticking out of her arm.

"You're dead! You're all dead," she shouted. She had no idea what was happening below, but an icy certainty filled her.

As the brother-knight took a step past her and toward the door, Val pushed back with her feet as hard as she could, crunching the old wooden chair she'd been tied to against the stone of the wall. She managed to stand and then land down on the chair with all of her weight which, modest as it was, proved enough to finally break the chair into pieces.

Wielding the splintered arm of the chair like a club, she swung with all her might, earning a very satisfying scream of abject fear and pain as the splinter drove into the head monk's eye. She grabbed the little blade from his belt and proceeded to demonstrate exercises 4-9 from Ette's book on blade exercises (even though the knife was a bit short for that).

The monks couldn't have told you that the blade was too short. Not only had they clearly not been practicing their weapons drills, they could no longer attest to the efficacy of the blade on account of being dead or dying. As Brother-Knight Cauldon turned to inspect the screams of pain and sounds of commotion behind him, as he lowered his pike toward Val, a broad figure rushed up behind him and wedged a big blade right into the joint between his helmet and pauldron.

"I…" was all he got to say. Ette pulled the dying man out of the doorway and tossed him down the stairwell.

"Ette!" Val cried, and she ran to him.

He pulled her close, running his fingers through her hair. "Thank the gods I got to you in time… you shouldn't have…" He was crying, too. "I'm glad I found you. Looks like you've been busy, too… we need to make ourselves scarce, child."

Ette set Val down, grabbed her hand, and started down the stairs. As they dashed out onto the street unopposed, Val reflected that she was just about done with Wayfair for the time being, and when she came back it wasn't going to be just her and Ette. She would bring a lot more than that, and they would pull the Pale Order apart brick-by-brick if they could.