by Kate Elliott
Bee intoned a phrase under her breath, an old Kena’ani curse whose hard consonants made me shudder. Ablaze with wrath, she turned the full force of her indignation on Andevai, for it had to be said of Bee that although petite in stature, when roused she seemed as vast as the heavens.
“You did that?” she cried. “It was so beautiful! How could anyone want to destroy something so beautiful?”
I thought for an instant that a blizzard would blast down from above and bury us in ice, but instead, Andevai looked straight at me.
He said, in an odd tone, “Because they were commanded to do so, and thought they must obey.”
If the earth could have swallowed me then, I would have been grateful. Even my ears were burning, and Bee was struck dumb, and Chartji graciously said nothing, so the world was reduced to his intent gaze and my churning, roiling contradictory emotions like the insatiable whirlpool said to drag down ships in the sea-lane that is the only egress to the fortress of Atlantis.
He went on, as sharply as if he were furious. “After all, I have changed my mind. It is best I leave now. I will find the mansa and do my best to lead him away from you on a false trail. I’ll do what I can to protect you. Fare you well, in peace.”
He walked so abruptly away, out of sight, that I had not even time to part my dry lips.
“Cat,” said Bee in the voice she usually used to inform me that she had spotted a spider dangling from a slender silk thread directly above my head, “is there something you are not telling me?”
“There’s nothing I’m not telling you!”
I marched over to where Brennan and Kehinde were digging. Brennan paused with a foot upon one flange of his shovel and grinned.
“A happy day it is to see again an old friend.” He offered a hand in the radical’s greeting, and I shook it and released it to greet his companion.
Kehinde got up from her knees with what looked like a spanner in her left hand and a blackened spar the length of her forearm in her right. “Catherine Hassi Barahal! Salve!”
“Salve! If I may ask, what on earth are you doing?”
She assessed the debris at her feet: a chunk of metal and charred wood they had only just excavated from beneath snow, dirt, and ash amid the ruins of the canvas and wood gondola.
With a sad smile, she said, “Recovering my press. I’m hopeful that if we excavate enough of the parts and can find the blueprint, which I am assured was placed in a water- and fire-tight container, we can have a replica crafted here in Adurnam. We have already made contact with several machinists sympathetic to the cause who are eager to attempt the task.”
“A press?” I surveyed the extent and composition of the debris. I could not see how a printing press could possibly fit within the space they were digging, much less be conveyed across the Atlantic Ocean on an airship.
She pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose with a wrist and thereby smeared a grainy layer of soot along dark skin. “It’s what they’re calling a jobber press. A new invention from Expedition. It is powered with a foot treadle”—she waved the charred spar in her hand, which I could see was like a short plank of wood—“and is quite small, which is a remarkable innovation, for it lends itself to work within the various secret societies—”
“What manner of secret societies?” I asked, still attempting to see what she saw in the tangled mess in which she and Brennan had been digging. A metal wheel, as big as a cart wheel, lay half uncovered, propped up on a metal cylinder and a flat sheet of blackened metal.
Brennan laughed. “If we could speak of them openly, they would not be secret, would they? A press is a means to print pamphlets and broadsheets to educate the population. About, for instance, the ancient right of the populace to elect their own tribunes, what we might call ‘council members’ in these days. Or to disseminate copies of Camjiata’s legal code, so people can find out what rights had been offered them and then snatched away after the general’s defeat. But a press is bulky, hard to hide, impossible to move quickly, and easy to place a stamp tax on. This is something different.”
Bee stepped forward. “May I?” she asked Brennan, taking the shovel before he could respond with anything more than a startled look at her flushed face and mussed curls. She poked along the curve of the metal wheel and followed a line only she could see out about four strides. There, she used the shovel to lever up a battered tube about the length and thickness of my arm.
“That must be it!” cried Kehinde.
“If there’s a blueprint in there,” I said, “it surely can’t have survived the conflagration.”
She set down treadle and spanner. “It’s lined with asbestos fabric beneath layers of oilcloth. We knew there was a risk that the airship might be assaulted.”
“Did anyone… die?” The words fell hollow from my tongue, like the dead shades of real words. “In the explosion?”
Brennan looked at me, and then toward the alley down which Andevai had disappeared. He looked at Chartji, and her crest flattened, then raised. She cocked her head to the right, snout lifting, and made a show of flashing her claws in a language using body and feathers and hands and expression to speak. All this he interpreted, but such language, the show she made with her posturing and gesture that he understood, could as well have been Greek to me.
“We weren’t here in Adurnam when it happened, of course,” he said. “We only arrived a few days later, after we made your acquaintance, Catherine. Word on the street is that all the watchmen were accounted for, including two who claimed to have been drugged, although a later proceeding charged them with drunkenness. As for the crew, they were not in the yard at the time but celebrating at a nearby tavern. There remains a persistent rumor that the remains of a single body were recovered by the authorities, but the council proclaimed the yard off-limits and have had it chained off since that day.”
“Why are you here today?” Bee asked. “And not some other day?”
Brennan smiled wryly. “We know people, who know people. When we reached Adurnam, certain people I was introduced to, introduced me to the Northgate Poet.”
“The man who started his hunger strike today?”
“That he sat down this morning on the steps and that we came here to dig is not quite a coincidence. With the prince’s militia busy dealing with unrest, we knew we could search unobserved.”
“For a time,” added Chartji. “We need to move quickly.”
Kehinde exclaimed as, having unwound the crumbling outer bindings, she uncapped the tube and drew forth the tip-most end of papers so brown they were but one step from curling into dust. She impatiently pushed her spectacles back down to the tip of her nose and perused this scrap end over the lenses.
“Salvageable!” she uttered in tones so fraught they would have seemed at home on the stage. “Brennan! It’s what we prayed for!”
His expression brightened. His grin, like sun, shone on her.
Her eyes widened, as if in surprise to hear herself. Her lips pressed together, and she looked away from him. After gently pushing down the fragile blueprints, she capped the tube. “Chartji,” she said in a crisp tone, handing the tube over to the troll. “You guard this.” She grabbed the spanner from the ground. “We must pull out every part of the press we can carry.”
“We can help,” I said, caught up in her eagerness.
“Cat,” said Bee. “Ought we not keep moving?”
“What has happened to you?” Brennan asked, hand still on the shovel. “Last we saw of you, you and that fine figure of an arrogant cold mage were fleeing the Griffin Inn with an angry mob from Adurnam on your heels. Which, I might add, is when we first got the news about the destruction of the airship.”
“Let me tell you while we dig.”
They were clever listeners and asked all the right questions at the right time. I left out many details I was not yet willing—might not ever be willing—to share, but I laid out the main narrative precisely and with feeling. Bee dug with a vengeance into
the debris, heedless of splinters, shards, and soot.
“I am not at all surprised to hear that a mage House would engage in such an unsavory enterprise,” exclaimed Kehinde, placing the platen from the press into one of the leather sacks they had brought with them. She straightened. “But I admit, I am stunned to hear their claim that Camjiata has escaped!”
Brennan whistled lightly in agreement. “That’s put the lion among the cattle.”
“I think the mage Houses meant to keep it secret,” I said. “But they were forced to tell the truth to the Prince of Tarrant and his people.”
Brennan glanced at Kehinde and then at Chartji. Kehinde nodded and the troll bobbed her head. “So shall we keep it secret, until we have a better idea how best to use such precious information.”
“Who are you, anyway?” Bee surveyed Kehinde and Brennan with a critical eye, then paused, more briefly, on Chartji, color high in her cheeks. “Who do you work for? Who has hired you? Who is your master?”
Brennan chuckled. Kehinde sighed and set back to digging.
Chartji said, “Our tale is simple, Maestressa Barahal. We work without a master and without hire.”
“More than that,” added Kehinde, still digging. “We dispute the arbitrary distribution of power and wealth, which is claimed as the natural order, but which is in fact not natural at all but rather artificially created and sustained by ancient privileges.”
“We’re radicals,” said Brennan with a laugh for Bee’s grimace at the matter-of-fact way in which Kehinde delivered this revolutionary and convoluted sentiment. “And we’ve come by it honestly, each by our own path.”
“Now,” said Chartji, the word followed by a brief trill. “Are we done here?”
“We’re done,” said Kehinde, hoisting each of six sacks in turn with a startled “oof!” “We can’t carry more than this. We must hope it is enough to reproduce the mechanism.”
“I should hope,” said Brennan, “that our own machinists are fully as clever as yours in Expedition, Chartji.”
“So we shall see,” she said with another of those toothy grins. “I never quite know what to expect from you rats.” She turned to me. “What, then, Catherine? What of your legal question?”
“Can you protect us from Four Moons House? Physically, I mean? Can you defy them? Or would it endanger you and your own goals?”
“I’ll give you honesty,” said Brennan. “We can’t defy a mage House. If they got their hands on us, they would destroy us.”
“Kill you?” said Bee in a low voice, glancing at me.
“Magisters and princes are notoriously intolerant of folk who defy them,” he said. “The law firm has remained beneath their notice. So far.”
“Why did you say that about Camjiata’s legal code?” I asked. “He was a monster.”
“He was a radical, in his own way,” said Brennan. “A selfishly ambitious man, so we’re taught, but if you look at his legal code, you’ll see he understood he could succeed only if he offered rights and privileges to the common people that their masters had long denied them. Do not be sure the stories you hear about the war are all true.”
“I’m not,” I said, too quickly, and then I said, “I’m not so sure any longer of what I know.”
His approving nod made me smile and look down.
A whistle, high and strong and shrill, pierced the air like a flung javelin.
“That’s my nephew,” said Chartji. “Cover your ears.”
We did so. A swift exchange of whistling took place between Chartji and the unseen nephew. She was not whistling through lips, as humans would do; did her nostrils flare? Where was the sound coming from? With a last liquid phrase, she signaled and we lowered our hands.
“Mage troops coming,” she said. “Time to go. Do you come with us?”
“Not yet,” I said as Bee nodded. “We’ll put you in too much danger.”
They gathered sacks and tools and made hurried farewells.
Chartji turned to me a final time. “You’ll find the Adurnam offices of Godwik and Clutch in Fox Close.” She added, in the language of the Kena’ani, gesturing to include Bee, “Peace upon you and in all your undertakings.”
Then they were gone. Bee and I were left staring at each other in the shadow of the shattered airship’s ribs.
“I’ve never before exchanged words with a troll,” she said in a choked voice. “Yet the creature seemed quite unexceptionable.”
“No doubt because she is a personage of sensibility and intellect. About you, I admit, I retain a great deal of doubt. Don’t you think we’d best get moving, before we’re discovered by whatever that whistle warned against?”
We hurried down the alley, pausing to overlook the gate with its loosely wrapped chain. I caught a glimpse of our companions crossing the rail lines before they cut behind a distant brick warehouse. Where was the nephew? Just how far had the whistle carried?
Bee used her shoulder to shift the gates. She squeezed through the gap and under the loose chains. I heard a steady thunder of hooves, and I grasped Bee’s wrist and pulled her to the right along the high wall.
“We can’t go back the way we came,” I said. “If I do not mistake my ears, a host of mounted troops approaches.”
She shook her arm out of my grasp, but only so she could trot alongside me more easily. “Do you think it’s really possible we can find a place to hide overnight in one of the mills?”
“In that racket? I should be surprised if we could not. Who, after all, is likely to be sneaking into the factories?”
“Radicals meaning to inflame the workers.”
That her lips were set grimly did not surprise me; we were, after all, in a desperate situation. “Is there something wrong with radicals?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“Considering the Hassi Barahals have been accused of spying for Camjiata—”
“Really, Cat. Who supposes Camjiata to be a radical? He was a general!”
We fled around a corner just as the first rank of a troop of horsemen arrayed in the splendid turbans and knee-length jackets of a mage House appeared before the Rail Yard. I doubted they had seen us, but fear lent wings to our feet. We held our skirts away from our legs and ran into an overgrown field of dead grass and abandoned waste. Where a few scrawny trees gave shelter, folk had used the cover for their commode, so besides the cinders and smoke and clatter and hum, there was also a stink rising so strong it seemed we plunged straight into Sheol, if Sheol looked like a factory district whose chimneys thrust as spears into a cloudy sky smeared with cinders and ash. A rickety wood bridge crossed a stream whose water oozed sludge. A dead rat was caught in the weeds, rigid with indignation, no doubt, at having drowned. Since rats could swim as easily as they could scuttle, I wondered if it was the poisonous water that had killed it. Its corpse made me think of Rory, and my steps faltered.
“Hurry!” Bee picked her way across the bridge. A horn cried behind us. Farther off, a series of shrill whistles chased into the distance, but as we hurried up a stony path between heaps of discarded brick and wood so in pieces it wasn’t even worth scavenging, the troll signals became drowned beneath the pulsing hum of the three mills.
“Should we keep running?” Bee shouted. “Up into the hills?”
“No! We’ll be easier to catch in the countryside. I think Andevai is right. We’ll be hardest to track in the machinery.”
“Then where?” Soot streaked her face; she had lost her bonnet, and her hair spilled over her shoulders in an unruly mass of black curls.
Blessed Tanit! I could not help myself. I began to laugh.
“What?” she cried.
“I suppose I’ll be the one who has to spend tedious hours combing out those knots and tangles!”
“Oh, Cat!” She embraced me so tightly I grunted in pain. “How I missed you!”
I sniffed hard and pushed her away. “Of course you did! Who else has the patience to comb out your hair?”
Dressed
as we were, we did not look so strange walking along the dingy row of houses, each with a door closed to the world and a pair of steps leading up to it. A woman with two very young children at her skirts slouched past us with a basket weighing heavily on her arm; once, perhaps, you could have seen its straw weave, but now it was blackened by coal dust. The children were very thin, and all were shod in crudely carved wooden shoes. Yet she in her shabby clothes was as neatly made up as she could make herself, and she took a moment from her weary errand to nod in a friendly way.
“Chance you be Missy Baker’s cousins?” she asked. “Down in Wellspring Terrace? She’s expecting a pair of lasses from the country, up for the work.”
“We’re not,” said Bee at her most confiding, with a smile that could melt suspicion into sweet candy. “Is there a hiring office here?”
“Toombs Mill is full up, as well I know,” said the woman. “That’s yon first mill, there. You may check at them others, Calders and Matarno. I don’t know aught of them, except it’s a fair long walk to get there.”
We thanked her and walked on, past men pushing wheelbarrows filled with rags and another leading a donkey pulling a covered cart whose concealed cargo stank so badly we had to cover our noses. Toombs Mill was a great beast of a building, fully four stories in height, with a dwelling house attached on one side like a small child to a stout parent, and at the far end a long low wing that I guessed housed the weaving shed. The din of its machines chased us along past a wharf where idle men watched us with the kind of stares that made us walk faster. These men with starving eyes had about them a sallow-cheeked desperation that made the villagers of Haranwy, despite the ties that chained them to Four Moons House, seem the more fortunate. Yet how could I judge? Why should laborers live in such deplorable conditions and entire villages be chained by custom and law to a master? Weren’t both terrible things?
