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… dieV 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 Ghartji. '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. 'Ghartji,' 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 bf 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 Hung 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?
