Cold Magic

“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 Brennan 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… die?” 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.”