"Prince Coxswold would be proud," Gellick said, as they stood before their completed, mismatched stairs. They held up under his weight. They held up when he carried the press up to the hall, with as much ease as Sen might carry a small dog.
He set the press down on a few weight-spreading boards in the center of the second floor hall, where moonlight from the open wall caught it.
"It looks like a beetle," said Gellick thoughtfully, leaning back to examine their work. "A shellaby bug?"
"Then we name it Shellaby."
Sen scratched the name into the black iron with a chisel. Gellick beamed.
"What now?" he asked.
"Now we print things."
"What things?"
Sen grinned, and brought out his copies of the city's papers.
* * *
He explained long into the morning. Gellick sat down on the floor like he was back at his lessons in the Abbey. He probably didn't really understand but listened attentively and made notes anyway, as Sen explained about the city's four papers, all professional prints with the mark of approval from the King: The Soul, The Bridgeling, Fops Bazarr, and The Olde Decrial.
"The Soul focuses on the City's economy," he explained, holding up a copy. "It's taken most seriously by merchants and political wranglers in the Roy. At some point we want to be writing like The Soul, but we're a long way from that now." He held up the next. "The Bridgeling is also for the elite in the Roy, but more for those who've nothing better to do than style their hair and attend parties, like Feyon." Gellick chuckled. "We can learn something from it, for sure. The Olde Decrial is more a paper of record, so it's full of land acts and new statutes handed down by the King. It's too dull, and no one that I can tell really reads it." He tossed the paper away, and brandished the last, Fops Bazaar. There was a woodblock print on the front that seemed to be a kind of cartoon head coming out of a hole in a wall.
"This is closest to what we'll be aiming for, at least to start with."
"I like the picture," Gellick said eagerly.
"Me too," said Sen, and leafed through it, showing the large type and further funny woodblock prints. "It's a paper of almost pure entertainment with little news. It sells best to damasks and navvies who like bawdy tales and crass humors. If we're ever going to get people interested in what we have to say, I think we have to start like this."
Gellick made a sour face. "It's funny, but is it proper? For the Saint?"
Sen smiled. "You're right, it's not proper. But the Saint is boring, Gellick. Everybody knows his stories, it's just not interesting anymore. We need to get down in the dirt to grab people's attention."
The sour expression didn't leave Gellick's face. "So dirt will beat the Rot?"
"It's a beginning point," Sen pressed. "Our goal is to be like the Soul. But we have to start here."
Gellick frowned audibly. "So what dirt?"
"It's mostly scandal that sells the Bazarr," Sen said, and ruffled through the pages again, jabbing a headline on page three. "Look here. In this article they attack the Mercier of Aracor, saying he's been seen in a secret damask lair beneath the Tiptanic Gardens, connected to the old Havercore underground bi-rail line. He likes cross-caste relations, they're saying, with Octapods. That's appealing to people."
"Cross-caste," Gellick repeated, thinking hard. "It's outlawed."
"Exactly," said Sen, "and dangerous. Cross-caste relations are unlawful, so reading this gives people a thrill. If this story is true, the Mercier could be," Sen paused to read the details, then grimaced. "They'd stuff his mouth with offal, bury him to the neck in Induran slop, and wait for him to drown. Ugh."
Gellick leaned in closer, as if there was some further stage to the story. "And then?"
"And then he'll be dead," Sen said flatly, and riffled through more pages. "But that's what people want to read about. Here's a story about an unusual spiking on HellWest, also for cross-caste relations. Here it was a Cassowary and a Euphlact, nobody important, but there's a lot of detail." He scanned the print. "The Cassowary had his guts pulled out of a hole on a kind of spindle." He grimaced. "The Euphlact had to wind the spindle itself."
Gellick looked appalled. "Why would it do that?"
Sen read on. "Because if it didn't, the Molemen would kill their children in the same way, in front of them. If the Euphlact agreed to do it, the children would die quick, merciful deaths."
Gellick squinted. "That's horrible."
"People love it," Sen said. "The Bazaar is full of it. Damasks, drugs, torture and punishments. The high brought low. A kind of justice, I suppose."
"Justice," Gellick repeated. "So who will we bring low?"
Sen's eyes lit up. "The one person none of these papers dares to touch. Who gets away with every crime he commits. Can you guess who it is?"
Gellick frowned, straining toward something. "The Saint?" he offered weakly.
"The King."
* * *
They picked cantaloupes.
It was a joke Sen had heard in the Boomfire once, that made all the men nearby laugh. They expanded that joke into an article, peppering in details about the lengths the King went to to hide his obsession with rotten canteloupes, adding a quote from a source high at Court about his favorite color and aroma, and describing the perfect 'maturity' of cantaloupe to suit the King's exotic taste.
'Where are all the rotten cantaloupes?', was the damning final line. Where were they, if not in the King's boudoir, dressed in damask and sprayed with the finest perfumes the Roy had to offer, awaiting their moment in the sun?
Gellick laughed, reading back on the story. "Nobody will believe it. It's ridiculous."
"That's the point," Sen said. "But they can't let any attack on the King stand. They'll tear the dark side apart looking for us. We just need a catchy title."
They put their heads together. A few minutes went by.
"King's Canta-love", Gellick said at last. "Like wordplay."
Sen laughed and wrote it down. "Perfect."
After that they prepared to print. Sen lit a revelatory light and studied the print plates, running his fingers over their cold iron surfaces, marred by rough patches where old runnels of ink had crusted. They seemed to hum with a hidden energy. Old metal letter-blocks were still fixed in place on their faces, set into the lines of columns and rows.
He'd already tried a few test-runs, and knew these were writs of advert for the Euphlact he'd bought it from. The plates were grimed hard with dried ink, so he used a wet rag to sponge the sticky caking loose, then pried the letter blocks out with one of his spikes.
When all the letters were mounded on the boards, he organized them into mounds by type and size. There were big letters for titles, and small letters for the body text. There were also long bars, used for row and column margins, that screwed in to hold the letters in place.
First he set the title row, as large as Fops Bizarre. From amongst the larger letters he spelled out their new paper's name.
The Saint.
Beneath that he wrote their ridiculous headline. It looked powerful already. It would certainly catch the eye.
It took a long time to finish the main text, fishing in the piles for the right letters, setting them in place like pieces in a puzzle. The skies were lightening outside as he finished, knocking the last letters firmly plumb with the haft of a spike. He surveyed the plate in the light, and it sent a shiver of excitement through him.
The plate slotted neatly into Shellaby's jaws. It seemed a thing of immense possibility, poised to spew roots out in every direction. He held a revelatory lamp to one of the inkstones, causing thick black ink to drip down onto the print screen, while Gellick mixed in a little water. They brushed the black liquid level, then placed a stack of two hundred paper sheets in the feed-tray below.
"Here we go," Sen said, and cranked the handle gently. Gears turned, and the arms of the press moved. Gellick gasped in delight as the plate was pushed onto the screen, lifted away with a thin layer of i
nk, the screen slid back, and the plate came down again to leave its marks on the clean paper.
Gellick cheered, and Sen joined him. It didn't matter that the print was sloppy, the alignment poor, the ink running. This was their first edition of The Saint. Gellick pounded Sen on the back, nearly dislocating his shoulder.
They fished the print out, poked at the plate alignment a little, then started turning the crank again, faster this time.
* * *
The next night Sen went out to post.
It felt good to be out in the night air with the familiar weight of a posting sack on his back, walking along streets he knew just as well as the scars down his arms. While the stars turned through the sky and only the bakers, bramblers, and night-market hawkers stirred, he posted the first edition of The Saint.
At times he felt Adjunc patrolling the streets nearby, their dead limbs thudding over the cobbles, but by roof and sewer they were easy to evade. He posted a combination of his old routes, moving smoothly and efficiently to get all two hundred copies up before the dawn, finishing at Lord Quill Square. For a moment he stood looking at that old hero, thinking about the future and the past. The last time he'd done this, it was when he was chasing Sharachus. So many things had changed.
On his way back he passed through Belial. The streets were unadorned as ever, though the rich tapestry of pain rising off the many yards came in greater detail than before.
It didn't take him long to find Daveron's yard, just as the Abbess had described it. From the outside it seemed like any other, with blank stone walls and a metal gate. It seemed strange to think that Daveron would be inside, helping cause the pain. Against the weight of that real-world suffering, the silly, salty message of the Saint seemed like a frivolous, pointless thing. Could the Saint really rise on roots such as this?
He stood in the shadows for some time, thinking about Daveron, and the Molemen, and the trauma his new paper was going to cause in the city at large. The parts of him that were tinged by King Seem steeled the rest of him against it.
It was not going to be easy. The King would not be kind. But it had to be done.
THE SAINT II
The next night the Molemen were abroad in strength.
Sen saw them as he carried two hundred more copies of The Saint on a fresh route, touching on his path of the night before. They were moving north up through the lanes of Carroway in russet-clad brigades of five Molemen apiece. They walked in tight formation, carrying revelatory lamps with assorted weaponry clanking at their waists.
Perched high on the rooftops or peeking out from a sewer grating, Sen watched their brigades swing out then return back to a kind of roving command center that trundled down Plowman's Way, the central artery of Carroway. It was a large armored cart towed by Ogrics, carrying trunks of weaponry and a large wickerwork cage holding four terrified children.
Sen cursed under his breath. Of course, they were sweeping up flyposters, the majority of whom were children. They would doubtless be tortured for any information they might have on The Saint, and low caste as they were, they would be unlikely to survive. They were guarded by a single brigade, five Molemen who flanked the cart and walked alongside it at a slow, steady pace, each coordinating smoothly with the other brigades as they spread out like the King's red arms deep into Carroway.
Steadily their brigades swept ahead, clearing Carroway street by street, pushing through the night markets as if they weren't even there, flushing every caste on ahead. They knocked on doors and conducted terse interviews with terrified denizens, a Spindle here, a Bellyhead there, a Gawk and his family, asking what they had seen of this new posting called The Saint, when they had seen it, and why they hadn't reported this trespass against the King sooner.
The citizens of Carroway babbled and stammered answers, while Sen listened from above. They hadn't seen the paper, or they hadn't realized it was unlawful, or perhaps they'd seen a neighbor across the street reading it closely.
Sen stood atop a telegrammatic wire post and tracked the movement of all the brigades, adding them to the map in his mind. In total there were thirty Molemen in Carroway, six brigades of five, all here for his two hundred copies. He wondered if there were also thirty Molemen in other districts too, scouring for children out flyposting, for the sound of a chuttering press, for the guilty look of hawkers who might have sold paper or ink in bulk, or passed along a press, or seen a figure out at night plastering reed papers to the walls.
The pattern their patrols made was exquisite. Each brigade splintered away from the command cart in smart geometric patterns that skinned the city's streets with an impressive deftness. They were like gears in a perfect clockwork mechanism falling into alignment, lining up to perfectly stopper and flush every avenue, alleyway and street so none could escape.
Except for Sen.
He dropped down in one of the streets after they'd passed, to study the deep burn marks they'd laid atop his first copy of The Saint. It was the King's brand, set with a red hot stamp, marking his posting out as treasonous. For any to be caught even looking at it was now a capital offence, punishable by the spike. For any to be caught posting it the punishments would be much, much worse.
Sen touched the black papery ash where the red-hot brand had seared his reed paper, and thought about how far the King would go to protect his grip on the city. This brand was just another tool, like the Molemen or the Adjunc or the law on caste, like the spikes on the HellWest frigate, where offenders were hung and left to rot, so all could see the jealous power of the King. It was the whole system of the city laid bare, aimed primarily at deepening the fears of the populace so they were kept apart, and afraid, and stuck to their own caste for suspicion of all others.
So the King maintained his brutal rule.
It made Sen angry.
Always before that anger had been a distant thing. Everyone knew that the King was cruel. He'd done awful things to Sharachus, and his system had broken the lives of Mare, Alam and even Feyon in different, terrible ways. Sen's own skin condemned him to death because of the King, but he'd only ever felt that as a kind of empty opposition for everything the man represented.
This was different. This wasn't just cruelty and madness enacted by the unwitting Adjunc. This was the corruption of great intellect and ability toward a brutal, unfeeling end. The perfect fluency of the Molemen's maneuvers through Carroway brought it home to him with stark clarity. These were an ingenious people, descendants of the Mjolnir Federacy and capable of truly amazing works, but this was what the King had forced them to turn their hands to.
Torture and pain. Control and fear. They were the hands of the King more surely than the Adjunc, which were no more than trusty, bloodied dogs. The Molemen thought, administered, and they had feelings too, even if they pretended not to. Sen had seen it in Daveron; a sense of honor, a sense of what was right, though all of that was crushed beneath the tradition of desiring the King's fealty above all, as if it could provide absolution.
Standing with his fingers on ash, Sen wondered at how the Molemen were surely the most corrupted of all castes in the city, kept on a leash so tight they actually slipped it onto themselves, and onto their children, and onto their children's children.
It disgusted him. It was an outrage. His first posting had been immature and juvenile, and for that they had done this? The children caught up just for flyposting did not deserve what they would receive, but still they would get it. How many of them in that wicker cage would survive the night? How many would survive but be forever changed, just like Mare? And who would care for them, as Avia had saved Mare?
Nobody. They were all low caste, and it meant nothing to the King to erase a few more orphan Ratfers and Bellyheads. It meant nothing to force the Molemen to torture them to death.
Anger sparked the beginnings of a plan.
First, he redoubled his postings. He tore down the old copies with their brand of the King and pasted up fresh ones in their place. He followed close behind
the Moleman brigades and stripped their work just as Sharachus had once stripped his, posting two for every one torn down. It was difficult to keep up as there were so many of them, but though they were smooth and efficient, they were not fast. They did not use the roofs or the bi-rails. They did not even conceive that such routes were possible.
They did not know he was there, yet he knew where they were at all times, in the shape of the map and the perfect pattern of their movements and the feel of the air around him. He knew when any of them drew near, and when it was time to move on. The blanketing fear of the people of Carroway only made the bright, purposeful sense of the Molemen easier to feel, like landsharks burring through the Absalom dusts, given away by their rearing red fins.
So he reclaimed their tracks behind them. He placed five postings in a mockery of the King's brand on one wall, reaching up to places their stubby arms would struggle to reach. He pasted papers to the flagstones underfoot, then high up around lamp posts, on windows where their brand would burn through the fragile glass and on finely carved wood where the damage would be irreparable. Always he did it just one step behind their perfect, mechanical advance.
Once he saw Daveron.
It was just off Lord Quill Square, as a brigade advanced in lockstep along Joval Way, stopping to brand one of his papers. Daveron was amongst his brothers, looking every bit the part in his fealted red, watching the street at the angle he'd been set. The pieces of Sen's plan fell into place without him even needing to think. It was easy to get himself into position over the Lord Quill rooftops, and easy to drop down in a place that only Daveron would see him.
In full view of a revelatory lamp post, he slapped up a fresh copy of The Saint.
Daveron's call rang out. He pointed, and his brigade broke into smooth action. One produced a small bugle horn and blew into it, letting a shrill wail peal through the night. One plucked a crossbow from his back and locked a bolt into place, taking aim. The other three spread and charged, drawing their weapons seamlessly.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 29
