'Surely a mage House can force my cooperation with or without a contract,' said Bee. 'Kidnap me. Take me prisoner. I have no one to protect me. My family could not manage it even when they were here.'
'It's true,' he agreed, 'that folk without support or means are at the mercy of those who have the weapons, or the magic, or the followers to coerce them. My village knows that well enough, for it is how we became slaves. What he will not have is a legal contract to force your compliance. But if you do not choose to become part of Four Moons House, then you must find some other power to become client to.'
Bee looked at me. 'I would rather sit in a cage and starve myself to death than share the bed of a man under the terms I was so insultingly offered!'
'Of course you would!' I agreed. 'We'll find another way. With Tank's blessing, we'll reunite with Rory.'
Andevai glanced at her and then sharply at me. 'Who is Rory?'
'A kinsman.'
'Oh. Well. Thus you prove my point. How is anyone to survive without the protection of a powerful patron or the support of your kin?'
'Surely we have laws to which we can appeal,' I said.
I turned as Chartji ambled into view, feet crunching on debris and her head bobbing slightly. Her crest was raised, its plumage startlingly bright in the crisp air, in a season where colors were usually so muted.
'Did someone have a question about the law?' She wrinkled her snout to mimic a human smile, but the expression produced a rather more threatening visage.
Bee recoiled, taking two steps back. 'That's a troll' declared Bee in passionate tones.
'Bee!' Her rudeness appalled me. 'This is Chartji. I won't trouble you with her full name, which I have been assured we would not understand in any case.'
More of her extraordinarily impressive teeth came into view as her smile sharpened and her crest stiffened.
I went on quickly. 'She is a solicitor at the firm of Godwik and Clutch, with offices in Havery, Camlun, and Adurnam, although I've been told she is originally from Expedition. This is my… cousin… Beatrice Hassi Barahal.'
Bee had the grace to look embarrassed by her unfortunate reaction. 'Salve,' she said awkwardly.
Quickly, to smooth over the chasm of bad manners, I indicated Andevai. 'And this is my… my…' My tongue froze. My lips turned to stone.
'I am Andevai Diarisso Haranwy,' he said, coolly enough.
'I believe we have encountered each other before. Greetings of the day to you, Chartji. May you find peace.'
'And to you,' said Chartji. She then began speaking in what I guessed was an older dialect, the one I was pretty sure Andevai's grandmother had spoken.
Andevai's flaring eyes revealed his startlement. Then he flashed a grin. A grin! Had I ever seen him smile with such delight? The troll and the cold mage ran right down through a series of exchanges whose rhythms sounded very like the usual local greeting but whose tones had an appealing music I could not duplicate. Chartji did not miss a beat, and Andevai lookedBlessed Tanit! I was like a runaway wagon careening down a hill. His charming smile did not alter our situation one bit. With the day passing and our plight as unsettled as ever, I broke in.
'My apologies, but we ought to move farther away from the gate.'
'I take it you are here illegally, just as we are?' said the troll.
I walked up the alley between two workshops, and the others followed. Both Andevai and Bee pulled up short when we came into sight of the wreckage, the gaunt ribs, the listless folds of torn fabric skin, and the shattered spars and planks of the gondola amid a dusting of ash and shattered tiles and bricks and who knew what else? Maybe the dust of human bones.
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 mc.
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 Bren-nan 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.'
