City of Lies - Lian Tanner [4]
“You can’t,” said Goldie. “You agreed.”
“No. You agreed. I never said she could come with us.”
“Don’t be so stubborn. You know she’ll be all right.”
“Will she?” Toadspit’s voice rose angrily. “I’m glad you’re so sure. But then you’re not responsible for her, are you.”
“No, but—”
“Well, I am. And I say she goes home.” He shouted over his shoulder. “Did you hear that, Bonnie? You’re going home.”
“But why?” By now, Goldie was shouting too, with frustration. She could see the night trickling away. At this rate she wouldn’t get anywhere near the museum, which meant she would have to leave her parents alone again, tomorrow night or the night after.
“Because she’s too little,” said Toadspit. “She’s only ten.”
Goldie shook her head in disbelief. “You’re just trying to make things happen your way, as usual. Well, don’t expect me to hang around while you take her home.”
“Who asked you to hang around? Not me.”
“Good, I’m going, then.”
“Good!”
They glared at each other for a moment longer; then Goldie turned and stamped off up the hill. Behind her a stone rattled across the road, as if someone had kicked it.
Ha! thought Goldie. If he was in a temper now, he’d be in a worse one soon. She slowed down a little and waited for Bonnie’s protests to begin.
But it was Toadspit’s voice she heard, as brittle as glass on the night air. “G-Goldie?”
She spun around. Toadspit was standing on the far side of the bridge, staring at something on the ground.
The night grew suddenly colder. With a sick feeling in her stomach, Goldie raced down the hill and across the bridge. And there, in the stark light of the gas lamp, she saw what Toadspit was staring at.
In the middle of the road, Bonnie’s longbow lay abandoned. The quiver had been tossed to one side, and arrows were scattered around it like fallen wheat. One of them was stained with blood.
There was no sign of Bonnie.
Toadspit was so pale that Goldie thought he was going to faint. Her own skin felt like ice, and she had to force herself to scan the ground around that terrible arrow.
“I—I don’t think the blood is Bonnie’s,” she whispered. She pointed to the telltale marks in the mud. “There were two men. See their bootprints where they ran toward her? They took her by surprise. Look at the way her prints are scuffed.”
She broke off, remembering the men who had swaggered past them. They must have doubled back and seen Bonnie come out of hiding. They must have waited until she was close enough to grab—while Goldie and Toadspit, who were supposed to be looking after her, shouted at each other.
She swallowed and studied the ground again. “I—I think she stabbed one of them with the arrow. It’s his blood. And look, one of them has—has picked her up. You can see where her footprints stop and his get deeper, as if he’s carrying something. Here, they went this way.”
Their argument forgotten, they set out to track the two men through the dark city. To Goldie’s relief, Toadspit was steady on his feet again, but he clutched the bow in his fist, and there was a grimness about him that she had never seen before.
They lost the bootprints many times. For all their skill, they could only track what they could see, and the light from the moon and the watergas lamps was never enough. Sometimes the prints disappeared altogether, and they had to search in every direction until they found a fresh smear of mud, or a pebble kicked out of place.
It was all too easy to make a mistake. Once they followed the wrong person for nearly three blocks and had to backtrack quickly. After that, Goldie borrowed Toadspit’s folding knife and cut notches in a stick to show how long and how wide the bootprints were, so they wouldn’t be misled again.
The children tracked the two men past the space where the Great Hall used to be, and past the gray stone carcass of the House of Repentance. At last they saw warehouses looming out of the darkness, and the newly repaired iron levees that protected Jewel from the sea. Rising above the levees were the masts of ships.
“The