Slate Spur

Slate Spur began with a sound.

Long before Ada saw the quarry face, she heard iron striking stone: irregular blows answered by sharper cracks, then the heavy scrape of something being dragged. Dust lay on the roadside leaves. The trees nearest the camp looked as though winter had touched them early.

At the gate, Cal presented the survey warrant.

The guard read it, glanced at his coat and called for the quartermaster. Ada kept her face still. Pella stood beside the mule with the expression of a hired guide who had already been inconvenienced beyond the value of her fee.

Quartermaster Venn arrived carrying a slate tablet. He was a small man with clean cuffs and stone dust on only the toes of his boots.

“Western verification,” he read. “You're a long way from the ferry anchors.”

“The ridge trial failed,” Cal said. “We followed the supply record here to check the replacement stones.”

That was close enough to the truth to sound unprepared.

Venn looked at Ada's notebook.

“Copyist?”

“Yes.”

“And her?”

“Guide,” Pella said. “To ground your office appears to have forgotten.”

Cal spoke before Venn could decide whether to be offended.

“We need the lower sorting shed, the anchor inventory and the current route accounts.”

The Arden seal did its work. Not all at once. Venn asked two more questions, then admitted them under escort.

Inside, the camp spread across a shelf of rock below the quarry. There were sleeping sheds, a cookhouse, a narrow infirmary and stacks of blank stones marked for different routes. Workers moved between them carrying baskets of chips. Some were adults. Some were not.

Ada looked for Perrin in every thin shoulder.

The lower sorting shed smelled of wet slate and tired bodies. Light entered through open slats. A row of young workers sat on low benches, checking cut blanks for cracks before passing them to a table where older hands marked the usable pieces.

Perrin stood at the far end, repairing the handle of a basket.

For a moment, Ada could not move.

He was alive. His hair was too long over his forehead. His sleeve had been mended with a colour that didn't match. There was a small scab on his chin. He looked like her brother and like someone who had been practising being older while nobody from home was there to disagree.

He saw her.

His face opened, then closed quickly when he noticed the escort.

“Ada?”

She crossed the shed before Venn could tell her not to.

Perrin stood very still while she put her arms round him. Then he held her so tightly that the notebook pressed between them hurt her ribs.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered.

“Looking at stones.”

He made a sound that was almost a laugh.

Venn cleared his throat.

“Family connections should have been declared.”

Ada let go of Perrin and turned.

“I've declared one.”

Cal stepped beside her.

“Her brother's account will be relevant to the labour and transport record. We can inspect it with the others.”

Venn's mouth tightened. “Of course.”

The foreman came in before the conversation could harden. Captain Rusk was broad, grey-bearded and missing the top joint of one finger. His coat had once been military. Now it was worn through at the elbows.

He looked at Perrin, then Ada.

“Give them ten minutes,” he told Venn.

“We have a schedule.”

“And they'll still have names when the schedule's finished.”

Venn left with the guard, not far enough to forget them.

Rusk pointed to the open doorway. “Stay where I can see you.”

Outside, Perrin sat on a stack of unused boards. Ada crouched in front of him.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Perrin.”

“Nothing important.”

She looked at the scab, the reddened skin around his nails, the tiredness he was trying to hide.

“Mum said you chose this.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because she was cutting bread as though the knife could make more of it.”

Ada stopped.

He looked away.

“They said the wage would go home every week. And it isn't cutting, mostly. I can do the work.”

“Can you leave?”

His shoulders changed.

“Not yet.”

“Why?”

“The advance.”

“How much?”

“It keeps changing.”

He took a folded scrap from inside his sleeve. On it, in a careful hand, he had copied the amounts charged against his pay: travel, lodging, food, tools, a share of a damaged cart wheel he had never touched.

Ada stared at the figures.

“I asked Venn to explain it,” Perrin said. “He said I shouldn't worry about sums I wasn't trained to understand.”

Cal crouched beside them and read the scrap.

“I understand sums,” he said.

Perrin looked at his coat, then at Ada.

“Who is he?”

“Cal.”

“That doesn't explain the coat.”

“No,” Ada said. “It doesn't.”

For the first time, Cal laughed without trying to hide it.

Rusk called from the shed. Their ten minutes were over.

Ada took Perrin's hands.

“I'm not leaving you here.”

He looked towards the other workers.

“Then don't make it only me.”