Dragonfell Page 10

  We climb down off the coal heap.

  Coal for running the factory; coal, I guess, which came from the Coaldowns. And which can’t ever come from my village.

  The steam-engine room is cavernous and dark. From the walls hang hooks and chains holding up enormous gears; fat iron pipes cross the ceiling. Filling most of the room is a row of huge, silent engines with pistons and stilled gear-wheels. They’re steam engines, like on the vaporwagons, except fifty times bigger, and they run Mister Flitch’s millworks. The floor is covered with dust and sharp bits of coal and pieces of metal.

  “This way,” Maud says, and leads me across the room to a narrow iron staircase that leads to the first floor of the factory. We climb up to a catwalk, and then up another ladder to a big mill room. Here is all silence, too. The floor is ankle deep in fluff.

  “Those are . . . those must be the looms, for weaving the cloth,” Maud says, pointing to a row of smaller machines. Bobbins of thread are lined up in the spinneries, and the belts that turn their motors are still. They’re nothing at all like my da’s wooden loom, which says only swath and whirr and thump-thump. It makes me miss my da with a fierce ache.

  Then Maud grabs my coat sleeve. “Guard!” she whispers.

  Silently we crouch and edge into one of the aisles between the metal loom frames. I hear an echoing clunk-clunk-clunk, and a watchman comes up the iron staircase from the catwalk. He holds up a lantern. Its beam of light shines over the mill machines. Maud and I hold our breaths. I can practically hear my heart beating, and I’m half afraid it’s going to give us away.

  Then we hear his footsteps leaving, and the light recedes, too.

  “Phew!” Maud whispers.

  “Where to now?” I ask.

  “The offices are upstairs,” Maud says. “I mean, they probably are.”

  We make our way from the main mill room, through some other storage rooms, all dark and silent, to a door that opens to a staircase leading up.

  “Wait,” Maud whispers. She points. “Let’s see what’s behind that door.”

  I follow as she crosses to it and puts her ear against the wood, listening. “I think it’s empty.” As she slowly opens the door, a wave of heat flows out. Maud peers in. “It’s Mister Flitch’s workroom,” she whispers over her shoulder.

  Standing on tiptoe, I peer over her head.

  The workroom is two stories in height. In the middle of it are two huge shapes draped in white canvas. The heat is coming from one of them, in pulses. But there’s no fire that I can see. “What are they?” I ask.

  Maud shrugs. “Some kind of machine or device,” she whispers.

  “Let’s have a look,” I whisper back.

  “All right, but hurry.”

  Maud waits at the door while I go across the stone floor. When I reach the first shape, I duck under the canvas. It’s dark under there, but my eyes can see. High overhead, I see gears, pistons, brass gleaming with bits of light leaking in from outside. There’s a heavy smell of oil and hot metal.

  Maud was right; it’s some kind of machine, but I can’t make any sense of it. It’s all hunched and folded into itself. Heat pulses from it, but I can’t see any fire, though it must run on coal, like the factory machines. There’s a faint rumbling sound, as if gears are turning deep within it.

  I want to stay and examine it further, and check to see if the other one is the same, but I know Maud will be getting impatient. When I get back to her, she leads us to a staircase. We don’t make a sound going through the door at the top and into a hallway that is completely different from the factory below. There’s a thick carpet on the floor and framed paintings on the walls.

  “This way,” Maud says, and we pad down the hallway, past doors with brass nameplates on them to a door at the end. We slip inside and close the door behind us.

  Maud pulls the candle and matches from her pocket. “I’ll need light to see,” she says in a normal voice.

  “Shouldn’t you be whispering?” I whisper.

  She shakes her head and strikes a match. As the candle flares, its yellow light washes over her face. “The watchman’s done his rounds. He’ll sit on his rump near the front door drinking tea for the next hour. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  I hope she’s right. Then I turn to have a look at Mister Flitch’s office.

  The walls are covered in some kind of shiny red fabric. There are leather chairs scattered around, and little tables with lamps on them. At one end of the room is a massive polished desk covered with stacks of paper.

  And everywhere there is gold, glimmering in the light from Maud’s candle. There’s gold in the picture frames, on the corners of the wooden box on the desk, on the stopper in an inkpot, woven into the patterns of the carpet on the floor. There’s a fireplace that has a gilded mantelpiece, and resting on that are little statues made of gold. Over that is a huge portrait of Mister Flitch with a golden frame around it. He’s been painted standing in front of a factory machine, holding a bolt of cloth in one hand; a pile of gold coins sits on a table next to his other hand. His gray-green eyes have a golden glint in them, and it almost looks like he is watching us. His gray-bearded face looks sour and pinched, somehow, as if he isn’t very happy.

  Maud has already crossed to a bookcase near the desk. Quickly she starts pulling out books—they all have pages edged in gold and the letters of their titles are stamped into the leather covers in gold. “No, no, no,” she mutters, examining each one and setting it back on the shelf. “Rafi,” she says, without looking away from what she is doing, “go and check the desk.”

  My feet sink into the lush carpet as I cross the room. The desk has three drawers on each side, with gold handles, of course, but they only have paper in them, and ink, and another book that I take to Maud. “Just a ledger,” she says, “for keeping accounts. Keep looking.”

  The center drawer is locked.

  “Any luck?” Maud asks, coming to stand next to me.

  “Not really,” I answer, and point to the locked drawer. “We don’t have the key.”

  “Hmmm.” Maud crouches and examines the drawer, crawling beneath the desk and knocking the underside, then peering into the keyhole. “The book must be in here.” As she gets to her feet, she sees the portrait of Mister Flitch watching us.

  For a moment she stares at it.

  “That’s him,” I tell her. “Mister Flitch.”

  She nods. She studies the picture for another moment, then shakes her head and turns back to the desk. She yanks open one of the other drawers and pulls out a penknife—made of gold, of course. “We’ll have to break the lock.” And before I can protest, she shoves the knife into the lock, gives it a twist, and the drawer pops open.

  The only thing in the drawer is a key. It looks heavy, about the size of my hand, and gilded along its edges in a pattern that looks almost like scales.

  “Ohhhh,” Maud breathes. She reaches in to pick it up. Weighing it in her hand, she turns to survey the room. “There. Bring the light.”

  Holding the candle, I follow her to one of the walls. She moves a low table out of the way and points. A keyhole. And then I see it—the outline of a door built right into the wall. With shaking hands, Maud puts in the key, turns it, and pushes the door open.

  I follow her into the room on the other side.

  The room is about half the size of the office, and it is stuffed full of things. I stand there, looking around. On one wall is a gold-framed painting of a dragon perched on a mountainside with its wings half open and fire streaming from its maw. On a table below it is a stand with some kind of curved swordlike thing resting on it.

  “Wait,” I say, stepping closer. “Is that a . . .?”

  “Oh, Rafi,” Maud says, her voice shaking, and I turn to her.

  She’s standing in the middle of the room. Tears gather in her eyes. “It’s a collection,” she whispers. “His dragon collection.”

  And I realize that she is right. It’s not a sword on the table, it’s a tal
on, curved, black, and wickedly sharp.

  Next to the table is an open chest. I step closer to see, and Maud joins me. It’s full of flat night-black platelike things with ragged edges, about as big as my hand. Maud reaches in and lifts one out. “It’s a scale,” she says.

  My eyes are drawn back to the painting on the wall. A scale from that dragon, I guess, and so is the talon.

  “This is awful,” Maud says, her voice full of tears.

  I can’t even answer. All I can do is nod my head.

  “Oh no.” Maud points, and pulls me to a nearby wooden display case with a glass top. Inside it, pinned to a velvet background, is a row of tiny . . .

  “What are they?” I ask, trying to see them better. They look like silvery insects. But I know they’re not.

  “Dragon-flies,” Maud says sadly. “A kind of very tiny dragon. I’ve only read about them. They lived in groups of fifty or more at the edges of ponds and streams. Can you imagine how beautiful they were? Hovering over the water, glinting in the sunlight?”

  I nod, because I can imagine what she’s describing.

  “About ten years ago they went extinct. There aren’t any more like them in the world.” Tears are flowing down her face now. “How could he?” she whispers. “How could he?”

  And then I see something else. Leaving Maud, I step closer to see it better. On a small shelf is a single teacup. It’s painted all over with blue flowers. My hand goes to my pocket, and I pull out the shard of teacup that I’ve been carrying with me since I left the Dragonfell.

  Maud has come to stand beside me. “The dragon from your village,” she says.

  All I can do is nod, feeling a heavy weight of sadness pressing down on me.

  “He must have done what the Skarth dragon said,” Maud says. “He drove the Dragonfell dragon away from its lair and killed it.” With a finger she gently touches the edge of the teacup. “And took its hoard.” She turns to survey the room. “Is this why? Just to collect dead pieces of dead dragons?” She shakes her head. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I manage to answer. And then I spot something. “Look,” I say, pointing. On a pedestal against the opposite wall is what we came here for. Passing a shelf of eggs of all different sizes and colors, we go to the book.

  It doesn’t seem like anything special. It’s small, covered with plain, brown leather. Like the Ratch book, its edges are singed.

  Maud reaches out and opens it. “Oh my,” she gasps, and leans closer. “I think a dragon must have written this by dipping its claw into ink.” She turns a page, and then another that folds out into what must be a map. “Yes,” she murmurs. “Very nice.”

  “We don’t have time to read it now,” I tell her, and I snap the book closed, almost catching her nose.

  “Rafi!” she protests. Then she straightens and looks around at Mister Flitch’s collection, and her face grows sad. “I’m glad we have the book, and the map, but I wish we’d never found this room. It’s the worst place I’ve ever been.”

  I agree completely. “Let’s get out of here,” I say. I stow the book in the pocket of my coat, and we go out of Mister Flitch’s dragon collection room and back into the office. I pinch out the candle, and we step quietly out into the hallway, closing the door of the office behind us.

  Suddenly a lantern flares with light. The hallway isn’t empty.

  Stubb and Gringolet are there waiting for us.

  Chapter 21

  “What a coincidence,” Gringolet says in her rough voice. “You turning up here, Rafi Bywater, right exactly where we want you.” She stares almost hungrily at me. “Have you made your choice yet?” Stubb looms behind her, with his long arms folded and a sour look on his face.

  Maud and I have our backs to the office door. At Gringolet’s question, which feels more like a threat, I feel my spark begin to flare up, and I take a deep breath, when Maud grabs my hand and squeezes it. “Just wait, Rafi,” she says quickly. “Wait.”

  “For what,” I gasp, trying to keep ahold of myself.

  “Just . . . just trust me,” she says. Then she lets go of my hand, steps forward into the light shed by their lantern, raises her chin, and speaks in a voice that is haughty and completely unlike her. “Don’t you two idiots know who I am?” she demands.

  Gringolet blinks and then studies Maud over the rims of her smoked spectacles. “Never seen you before, girlie.”

  Stubb’s eyes widen. “It’s her.” He elbows Gringolet in the side. “I know her, Gringy. It’s Miss Flitch.”

  Miss What?

  “That’s right,” Maud is saying. “And I order you to leave this boy alone.” She points at me. “He is with me.”

  “I beg your pardon, miss, but we don’t take orders from you, miss,” Stubb says. He takes off his round hat and holds it in his hands before him, like a shield. “Just from your father, miss.”

  Her father? I stare at Maud, and I feel like my heart has dropped out of my chest and landed on the floor with a thud. Mister Flitch is Maud’s father?

  “Don’t be stupid,” Maud snaps. “I am acting on my father’s orders, of course. And surely,” she adds snidely, “his orders to his daughter supersede his orders to you, don’t you think?”

  “His orders to you . . . ,” Stubb repeats, trying to figure it out.

  “But—” Gringolet starts to say.

  “So!” Maud interrupts. “Don’t you dare lay a hand on me, or on him.” She takes a few steps down the hallway.

  I stand there, too frozen to move.

  She turns and meets my eyes. Come on, she mouths desperately, and there’s nothing else I can do but follow her, stumbling past Stubb and Gringolet, who watch us go with their mouths hanging open. Down the stairs to the main factory floor, past the iron looms. When we get to the big double doors at the front of the factory, we hear a shout and the clumping of big feet down the iron stairway. Stubb and Gringolet coming after us.

  “Don’t ask me any questions, Rafi,” Maud says quickly. She pushes me out the doors, then takes my hand and pulls me down the front steps and across the cobbled street. “We have to get out of here.”

  In the alley, my four goats get to their hooves and clatter after us as we go around corners and down darkened streets, leaving the factory behind us.

  When we’re far enough away, I stop. Maud takes a few more hurried steps, then stops and turns back. “Come on, Rafi.”

  The goats cluster around me. The alley we’re in is narrow and filled with trash and puddles, and it smells dank, like the river.

  Slowly I shake my head. “You’re Mister Flitch’s daughter.” Saying it out loud makes it even more real. “I can’t believe it,” I say to myself.

  Maud steps closer. In the moonlight, her face looks like it’s brushed with ash. She bites her lip. “Here’s the thing, Rafi . . .”

  I study her. “What’s the thing, Maud?”

  Her eyes go wide and worried. “I know you don’t mean to look as if you want to skewer me, Rafi, but you do.”

  I don’t even bother trying to make my face less fierce. “The thing is,” I tell her, “that you lied to me. You’ve been lying to me the entire time!”

  “I know!” she says. “I know, I know, I know!” Her hands are clenched into fists. “I should have told you, but I knew you wouldn’t trust me as soon as I did.” Then she steps closer and pokes me in the chest, and it surprises me so much that I take a step back. “And anyway, what about you?” she demands. “You have been lying to me just as much as I’ve been lying to you.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Even more maybe,” she insists. “Let me ask you this, Rafi. Can you see in the dark?”

  I take another step back. Oh no.

  “Well? Can you?” she asks.

  I nod, but then, knowing she can’t see me very well in the dark alley we’re in, I add, “Yes.”

  “And you don’t feel the cold either, do you?”

  “No,” I grate out, and my heart begins pounding.
>
  “Yes, I thought so,” she says. “You keep forgetting to shiver.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mutter.

  “I’m a very noticing kind of person, you know,” Maud says with a lift of her chin. “And you understood the Coaldowns dragon when it spoke to you, and the Skarth dragon.” She waves a hand. “And then there are the goats. Very interesting, those goats, following you around like they do. And that’s not all of it! That strange woman back there at the factory. Gringy?”

  “Gringolet,” I say dully.

  “Her,” Maud says with a nod. “She knew your name. She’s been hunting you! And you never even thought to mention that? Or tell me what she wants with you?”

  All I can do is shake my head.

  “So you see, Rafi,” Maud concludes, “you’re just as bad as I am.”

  It’s true. I am. Worse, maybe. Poppy pushes her nose at me and I scratch her chin and lean back against the brick wall of the alley.

  Then Maud gives a trembling sigh. “No.” She shakes her head. “No, that’s not true. It’s not the same. I might as well face up to it.” She looks up, and her hazel eyes are shiny with tears. “I—I should have told you right from the start who I am. My name isn’t even Maud, it’s Madderlyn, though I hate that name, and yes, my last name is Flitch, and I . . . I thought I had good reasons for lying to you, but . . . well . . . maybe I didn’t, really. You were just so nice, and I liked you so much, and I didn’t want you to hate me. I’m very, very sorry.” A tear escapes from one eye and slides down her cheek, and she turns her face away, trying to hide it. “I’m not like him, you know,” she says in a tiny, sad voice. “I’m not interested in dragons because I want to collect them, or kill them, or whatever he’s doing with them. I really do think they’re wonderful. But you don’t have to believe me, Rafi. You don’t have to stay. I’m sure you could do whatever you have to do next much better without me.”

  She’s right. I probably could do better without her. I wouldn’t have a bad time of it, either. I’d have Poppy’s milk, and the cold of being outdoors doesn’t bother me, even though winter is coming. And I’m used to being lonely. I could easily leave her behind. All I have to do is decide to go.