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? 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 indigna-tion, 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 Tank! 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.