Chương 12: Cargo

He turned around. He knew he shouldn't. Sable had told him to keep his eyes on the dark and be a boring nobody, and the smart thing, the safe thing, was to let the canvas move and the merchants handle it and mind his own three silver. But the thing in that wagon was awake, and the men guarding it kept their knives pointed at it instead of at the night, and Kaito had never once in his life been able to leave a broken thing alone. So he turned, and he walked to the third wagon, quiet, while the camp slept.

"Kaito." Sable's voice was a wire pulled tight.

"What are you doing. We agreed. First light, different road. What are you doing."

"I have to see it."

"You do not have to do anything. That is the whole point of being nobody—" He lifted the corner of the canvas. He'd braced for teeth. For something pale and wrong with too many eyes, something half out of the world the way the red in his sight had promised all day long. He got faces. Children. Six of them, seven, packed into the wagon on a bed of straw and sacking, knees to their chests, dead silent, staring up at him with the cold night coming in. The oldest maybe twelve.

The smallest young enough that an older girl held it asleep against her chest with one hand over its mouth, ready, in case it woke and made a sound. Not one of them screamed. Not one of them gasped. They'd been taught not to, and the teaching had gone all the way down, and that was the worst thing he'd seen since he got here. Worse than the wolves. Worse than Vorr. A wagon full of children who knew to stay silent when a stranger opened the dark.

"They're children," he breathed.

"Sable. It's children." And the red was on them. Every one of them. The same dull broken red he'd seen in the bridge and the bog, curling low through every small body in the wagon. Half out of the world. He'd read it right all along. He'd just read it as a monster.

"Oh," Sable said, very softly.

"Oh, no. Kaito, they've been unregistered. Someone took them off the rolls. All of them. That's what you've been seeing. That's the thing I couldn't read. They're not in the System anymore. As far as the world is concerned, these children were never born."

"Why would anyone—""To hide them." A man's voice, low and hard, right behind him. He hadn't heard the merchant come. The knife was out, not pointed at Kaito, not quite, not yet.

"Put the canvas down. Slow. Quiet." Kaito put the canvas down. He didn't step back.

"You took them off the rolls," he said.

"Why." The merchant looked at him a long moment, weighing how much he could say to a man he might have to kill for hearing it. Then, low and fast: "Helvast. The lord there takes a tithe of children. One in five, off the books, into his service, soon as they're big enough to hold a tool. The System counts them for him. Tells him exactly who's owed." He jerked his chin at the wagon.

"You want to save a child out of Helvast, the first thing you do is make the System forget it ever existed. Then you put it in a wagon and you pray no soft-hearted watchman lifts the canvas in the night. Now get back to your post." He went back to his post. He sat the rest of the watch with the cold sitting in him, and he didn't sleep when his relief came, and he was still awake at first grey light when the riders came down the road. Not six this time. A dozen.

These ones carried a banner and rode in order, and they didn't pace the caravan at a distance. They came straight in, and the lead rider held up a sealed paper and called out that they rode for the Lord of Helvast, and that the caravan would stand and be searched for stolen property. Stolen property. Kaito watched every merchant in the camp go grey at the words. Bram came out to meet them, hands open, voice smooth, a man who'd talked his way past trouble a hundred times.

And Kaito stood at the edge of it and watched Bram do the math the caravan woman had told him about, the math that ended with we get paid and we go home. He watched Bram decide. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"We've no quarrel with the lord," Bram said.

"There's been a misunderstanding. We're carrying — there's a wagon. The third one. I think you'll find what you're looking for in it. We were lied to about the cargo. Take it, and we'll be on our way, and there's no trouble between us." He was going to give them the children.

"Kaito," Sable said, very quietly.

"I know what you're about to do. I want it on the record that it's the worst idea you've had since you walked into your own tower, and that includes the bridge. You cannot fight twelve riders. You're a Wanderer with a knife. If you step into this, you don't reach Solara, you don't disappear, you don't get to find out who's waiting for you. You become a man a feudal lord wants dead. Please. For once in your short stupid life here. Be the nobody."

Kaito watched a soldier swing down off his horse and start toward the third wagon. Toward six children who knew not to make a sound.

"I can't," he said. He didn't have a plan. He had about four seconds, a knife, and the one thing in the clearing nobody else could see. The patrol was using the System. He could see it now that he looked, a thin sweep of pale light going out from the lead rider's sealed paper, washing over the camp, counting, checking faces against a list. That was how they meant to find what they came for.

Except the sweep washed straight across the third wagon and found nothing, because there was nothing in there the System would admit was real. The soldiers were going to have to use their eyes. Which meant all he had to do was take their eyes somewhere else. He looked at the nearest wagon's wheel, and at the knot of dull red worked into the axle, the failed value he'd half-seen the day before and forgotten. The kind of broken thing the world hadn't gotten around to dropping yet.

He reached out and pulled it the rest of the way out, the way he'd dropped his own ceiling on Vorr. The wheel came off. The wagon slammed down on its side with a crash that brought the whole camp up out of sleep, the mules screamed and tore their picket loose, and for ten whole seconds the clearing was bolting animals and shouting men and a dozen riders fighting horses that had decided they would much rather be anywhere else. Kaito was already at the third wagon. Canvas up, arm in.

"Out," he hissed.

"All of you. Now. With me, quiet, out the back, into the gully — go." They went. They'd been waiting their whole short lives to be told to run. They went fast and silent, the big ones grabbing the small ones, and Kaito put himself between them and the camp and herded them over the lip of the hollow and down into the brushy streambed in the last of the dark. A box opened across his sight as he did it. [Skill gained: Protector's Resolve.] Something settled into him, low and warm and steadying.

His legs stopped shaking. The bone-deep tired of a sleepless night pulled back off him. He didn't understand it and he didn't have a second to try. He scooped up the smallest one, the child the girl had kept quiet against her chest, and he ran. The gully carried them down and east, away from the camp, and the chaos behind covered the sound of seven children and one man crashing through the brush, and the thing the merchant had said turned out to be the truth that saved their lives.

The patrol couldn't track what the System wouldn't show them. By the time the riders got their horses in hand and worked out what had happened, there was nothing left to chase. Seven children who didn't exist had walked clean out of the world, and taken a watchman with them. Sable walked him to the waystation, furious and frightened and helping the whole way.

It was half a day down a side track, a low stone house run by a woman who took one look at the children, and at the red Kaito couldn't stop seeing all through them, and didn't ask a single question. She'd done this before. There was a whole quiet network of it, houses and people moving erased children toward the free cities, and Kaito had just handed them seven more and a story they'd rather not have on their road. He stood in the yard while she took the children in.

The smallest one, the one he'd carried, looked back at him from the doorway with the same far-too-old eyes he'd seen on a girl in an Ashfen market. Then it was gone inside, and he realized he'd never even learned its name.

"You did a good thing," Sable said. She didn't sound happy about it.

"I want it clearly on the record that I'm proud of you, and that you have also just set fire to everything."

"The caravan?"

"Gone. Bram will tell the patrol you acted alone, because it's true and because it saves his neck. You don't have a caravan anymore. You don't have a road to Solara with twenty other people for the bad luck to land on instead of you. What you've got now—" she paused "—is a lord. The man who owns Helvast Province has a thing he wants very badly, which is your name and your head, and lords who lose property post a price on whoever took it. You wanted to slip into the biggest city in the world as a nobody and vanish."

A long breath.

"By tonight there's going to be a number on you, Kaito. Nailed to a board outside every guild hall in the province, under a bad drawing of your face. You stopped being nobody about an hour ago." He stood in the waystation yard with the dawn coming up and his legs not shaking, on account of a skill he'd earned doing the one thing she had begged him not to do, and he found he couldn't make himself sorry about a second of it.

"So I'm wanted," he said.

"You're taking it remarkably well."

"I had a whole careful life once." He looked south, down the track, toward a city three hundred kilometers off where somebody was already waiting for him, with an entire province that wanted him dead laid out in between.

"A rack fell on it. Being careful didn't save me then, and it isn't going to hide me now. They want to put a number on me, let them." He started walking.

"I've got somewhere to be, and somebody waiting, and I still can't tell if that's the best news I've had since I died or the worst. Come on. Let's go find out before the bad drawing does."