“A bad dream?”
“I dreamed of the Veins. I dreamed the sea broke through again.”
Joseph’s hand relaxed a little on Garth’s shoulder. “Well, ‘tis no wonder the Veins give you bad dreams. The first few years I went down I suffered nightmares too. Garth, the horror will never cease, but you will learn to cope with it.”
Garth was silent a long minute, staring at the ceiling an arm’s length above his head. The dawn light was just beginning to creep through the window, and Garth could see cracks in the old plaster spreading like fault lines across the ceiling.
“Father?” he asked eventually, and Joseph, who had been about to sink back into his own bed, stopped at his son’s tone. “Father? Why is it so unfair?”
“What, Garth?” Joseph asked softly, although he knew what Garth meant. He had often asked himself the same question as well.
“The Veins. Why are those men condemned to such cruelty in the Veins, never seeing the sun again?”
Now Joseph was quiet a while. “I know it seems cruel to condemn men to such a fate, but the alternative would be to crowd them into prisons almost as dark and cruel as the Veins. Garth, there is nothing we can do about it.”
Garth sighed, and Joseph gave his shoulder a gentle shake. “Come on, Garth. We’re both wide awake now, so we may as well breakfast and go down for our day’s labour. At least we only have today and tomorrow. Then we’re home. Back to Nona and the bright sun of Narbon.”
Garth swung his legs over the side of his bunk and slid to the floor. “Yes, then we’re home.”
Joseph did not miss the slight inflection in Garth’s voice, but he chose to ignore it. Garth would have to come to terms with the Veins in his own way; Joseph could give him support, but little else.
Garth did not see Maximilian again. He thought of little else but the man, but there was no excuse he could use to hunt him out again, and Garth fully realised that to do so would only put Maximilian in danger. Jack had been suspicious enough when Garth had insisted on looking for his fictitious forceps, and Garth did not want to draw further attention to the man.
But soon he would leave, and Maximilian would be left to his continuing horror.
As he plodded up and down the dark tunnels of the Veins with his escort of guards, sometimes ducking his head to avoid the low hanging wall or squeezing through narrow spaces, Garth swore that when he returned next year he would somehow manage to free Maximilian.
A year. He would have to wait a year. Would Maximilian manage to survive a year? Would he still be here when he returned? And how was he going to release him when he found him again?
And what had that curious verse meant? Release the dream, set him free to test the king’s true worth? How was he supposed to find the mythical Manteceros? Questions flew about Garth’s head until it ached—and yet he could find the answers for none of them.
Nothing made sense, least of all Maximilian’s curious unwillingness to be rescued, and his even stranger remark that the Manteceros would not help him.
“Father?” Garth asked on the evening of their last day as they slumped wearily towards the overseer’s office. “What’s a changeling?”
Joseph regarded his son with some surprise. Garth had seemed curiously reluctant to come to the surface at the end of their shift, and Joseph had been forced to call him several times; the boy had finally edged towards the cage, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder at the blackness behind him.
“A changeling?” The wind was blowing cold off the sea, and Joseph huddled closer into his cloak. “A changeling is a babe who is substituted for another.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps for a stillborn child, if the mother is desperate enough to give her husband an heir. Why do you ask?”
Garth shrugged. “I heard it in a dream, nothing more.”
Joseph paused at the doorway of the overseer’s office, his hand on the door. His eyes were concerned. “Garth, do you want to talk to me about anything?” For days Joseph had wondered if Garth was holding something back. Even given the circumstances under which they currently worked, Garth had seemed overly quiet and withdrawn.
But now Garth flashed him a friendly grin, and Joseph relaxed a little. “Father, I’m fine. Really. Now, can we go inside out of this wind?”
The interior of the overseer’s office was warm and well-lit—and was, Garth immediately noticed, the cleanest place he had yet seen in this forsaken corner of Escator. He had never been inside the overseer’s office before, for Garth had always been occupied with something else whenever Joseph had made one of his rare visits.
But this evening Joseph had to sign off his duty for this year, and he had asked Garth to accompany him.
A large man with a head of exuberant red hair rose from a spacious desk before a roaring fire. “Joseph Baxtor! Finished already?”
Joseph smiled and shook the man’s hand. “Fennon, I’d like you to meet my son, Garth. This year has been his first down the Veins. Garth?”
Garth stepped forward, smiled politely, and shook the man’s outstretched hand.
“Garth, this is Fennon Furst. He’s been the overseer here for, what? Twenty years?”
Garth managed to keep the smile on his face only with the most strenuous of efforts, but he dropped his hand as quickly as he could.
Furst laughed. “Not quite, Joseph. King Cavor appointed me when he first came to the throne. Sixteen years, more like, although it feels like sixty!”
Garth let the men’s continuing banter wash over him. Furst? The same name as the man Maximilian said had been among those to put him down here. Had he meant only that Furst, as overseer, had literally put him down the Veins? But no, for Maximilian had been missing some seventeen years, and Furst had been here only sixteen years. Perhaps there was another Furst about…and perhaps not. Garth frowned, trying to make sense of it.
Joseph noticed, and his own smile died fractionally as he stood up from the book he had just signed. “Come on, Garth. A bath and a meal, and an early night. Then in the morning we leave.”
SEVEN
THE MEDALLION
Garth found it hard to settle back into normal life once he and his father returned home. He worked and learned at his father’s side, and he smiled at his parents and the patients who came through the surgery door. The Touch flowed cleanly and in ever-increasing amounts from his hands. He laughed for his mother, and helped her about the house when Joseph gave him the occasional free morning or afternoon. Sometimes he spent these free hours carefully and nonchalantly asking some of the older and wiser men about Narbon’s marketplace and craft halls if they’d heard about the Manteceros, if it truly lived or if it was only legend, but the men just smiled at him and shook their heads, wondering at the preoccupations of youthful minds. And so, clueless, spring broadened into summer, and the days lengthened and were filled with the noise of the busy harbour town and the heady scent of the summer blossoms hawked by street vendors. Nona’s kitchen continued to be a haven of peace and of a seemingly endless supply of hot, sweet tea and raisin buns.
But everything had changed.
Maximilian haunted Garth’s waking moments, and continued to work the rock-face of his dreams. Every fourth or fifth night Garth would endure the recurring nightmare as the sea burst through the rock-face, drowning Maximilian. Never would he try to flee the water; always he stood calm and accepting as the waters consumed him.
Sometimes it was not Maximilian who stood there, but a tiny baby, squalling among its woollen wraps as the sea rushed in.
Garth had learned not to wake screaming, for then his parents rushed in, but he still woke nevertheless, eyes wide and staring, mouth open and gasping for air, staring at the ceiling above his head and imagining he could see scores of hairline fractures splinter their deadly way across its surface.
After a month, Joseph took him aside one afternoon as the last patient left the surgery.
“Garth, what’s wrong? No,” he said firmly as Garth opened his mouth, “don’t try to tell me nothing’s wrong. Something is wrong, very wrong.”
They sat down on a pair of chairs close to the windows. A gentle breeze wafted in, carrying with it the muted cries of the wharves and streets. Garth studied his hands. Daily he asked himself if he should tell Joseph about Maximilian, but daily the sense of danger grew. Garth somehow understood that to involve Joseph at this time would be to endanger him. How he understood that Garth did not know—perhaps it had something to do with the Touch.