"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."
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!"