Last First Snow (14 page)

“Course not,” he said. “But people have a right to know what's going on.”

“They do. We tell them.”

“You're sounding like a bonehead, Chel. Or a witch.”

“Don't.” She went tight like an anchor chain in a storm. “Don't even joke about that.”

“You want to stop people talking, you come after me just for handing out some papers. What's the difference between His Redness trying to scare us today and what you're doing now?”

“You think I'm a skeleton? You think I'm on their side?”

His mouth was dry. He swallowed. “No.”

“We need to stand together, Tay. These sheets aren't printed here. The folks writing them won't get hurt if things go bad. They'll watch us burn.”

“You're the one who almost jumped the King in Red this morning.” That stopped her. He withdrew a step, two, still hunched around his papers. “You were angry then, and you're angry now, and you're angry at the sheets for making other people angry. Maybe we should be angry. Maybe it's wrong to meet with the King in Red.”

“You really think that?”

“I don't know what to think,” he said. “But I wonder if you're so mad at me for handing out these papers because you care about what they're doing in that tent, or because you care about the ones who're doing it.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means.”

“I don't.” But she was lying. She crossed her arms and stared at him. “He has a family.”

“You saved his life. He saved yours. I know how that story goes.”

“Only it doesn't. I tried to help him because I thought he was in danger. I'd do the same for you or anyone.”

“And I'm just anyone, now.”

“You're a bit past anyone,” she said, “and awfully close to ‘asshole.'”

He opened his mouth, not sure what he would say beyond that it would hurt her. But she was not afraid, and in that she was still the woman he'd fallen for the second time they met. Papers jutted from his jacket like a rooster's ruff. He closed his mouth and his eyes and let his thoughts run on while the banjo played. She was still there when he opened them again. “I'm sorry, Chel.” She didn't melt, not yet. “Look, they offered me soul, weeks back, before we came here, to hand the sheets around. We sure as hells aren't getting paid while we're here. I give what comes in to the Kemals at Food Com, and they cut us a break with rations. That's why we get the extra meat.”

“Just you, or others?”

“A few guys in our crew do the work. I don't know more than that.”

“Stop.”

“We'll miss the soulstuff.”

“We just need a few days of peace. Maybe less.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'm sorry for the other stuff I said. I was angry.”

“Me, too.”

“Yeah. But you had reason.”

She smiled, at least.

“Come on,” Chel said. “Let's find a place to dump that trash.”

 

20

Like a gallowglass floating on open sea, Dresediel Lex spread phosphorescent tendrils across the dark. Its roads robbed the former desert of its night. Eight decades of irrigation and water theft had greened the barrens of Fisherman's Vale—for farms at first, but before long the city's people spilled onto land where orange and lemon trees once grew. Climb snakelike roads up the Drakspine ridge, hug vine-strangled cliffs through hairpin turns, mount the dry summit and behold the Vale's endless grid of streets, an urban planner's nightmare branded on unsettled ground.

The roads ran north and south, east and west, under a flat purple-black sky: a hydroponic lattice for a growing civilization. Houses and shops had filled the lattice just beyond the ridge with fire and ghostlight blooms. Ride a mile or two past the hills, though, and the roads emptied, crossing and recrossing trafficless around concrete fortresses of industry.

The Craftsmen who freed Dresediel Lex in the God Wars wasted no time selling it to the world. Free City, they called it, First City Made for Man, by Man. Come all castaways, all ye scorned by gods and people. Come and build yourself a life. Outcasts and Craftswomen heard, and came, and soon bayside rent and property values grew too high for most industry to handle. Concerns that needed room moved to the Vale for cheap land, and workers followed.

Flickering ghostlight illuminated the block-lettered sign of Garabaldi Brothers Printing and Engraving. If not for the sign, Elayne could never have told the printshop apart from all the other sprawling two-story boxes with parking lots out front.

Elayne paid the carriage to wait around the corner. The bay's tack jangled as it pulled the two-seater off into the dark. A big roan raised its head from the parking lot trough, glanced over, and snorted.

Weeds pressed up through pavement cracks, adding points to pools of shadow. Lights streamed through the big windows of the front office, where a secretary with an updo sat behind a desk cluttered with cartoon calendars.

Elayne ignored the office and walked to the side lot, through an unmarked, unlocked entrance, down a dirty hall, and opened a pair of grease-stained double doors into pandemonium.

Copper, iron, steel, and lead clacked, clattered, and convulsed. Gears realigned and pistons pounded. Torrents of paper surged over drums the size of carriages. Folding machines snapped their jaws. Guillotine blades cut long strips of newsprint into pages. Surgical lights slammed into every surface and edge. She breathed a lungful of hot paper and vaporized ink and melting lead.

With a twist of Craft, Elayne stopped her ears and reduced the noise to almost-bearable levels. When she regained her balance, she saw the workers, forty or so earmuffed humans in tan jumpsuits, staring at her.

The last few days had accustomed her to scrutiny. She waited.

A tall, broad man emerged from behind the giant press, leading a square woman with a smear of engine grease on her cheek. The woman looked Elayne over, and thumbed toward stairs that led to a lofted office. The woman went first, the big guy at her side. Elayne followed, and two more large men broke off from the group to follow her in turn. The others stood, watching, until the boss glanced back and they all thrilled again to work.

Elayne climbed the stairs. Her ears were stopped, but the mechanical percussion still shook her bones. Below, the presses ate fresh paper. Rollers rolled, folding machines folded, stacking arms stacked. Humans moved among the metal. She remembered an early experiment with Craft in which she'd opened an anthill to watch workers tend the queen. They looked like that.

“Talks Drag On,” read the headline on the broadsheets they printed. “Wardens Threaten Protesters.” Thousands of copies. She didn't expect so many.

The office was austere. Two desks, one unwashed coffee mug each. Three gray metal filing cabinets against the wall. A cheap calendar hung over the cabinets. Scrawled appointments dimpled glossy paper. This month's picture was a view of a waterfall near Seven Leaf Lake eight hundred miles north, white water banked with a vegetative green nobody saw in Dresediel Lex outside of calendar paintings.

The two toughs followed them in, which Elayne didn't like. When the door closed, the maddening grind of the machines stopped. Noiseproof wards around the office. Effective. The others removed their muffs, and Elayne unbound her ears. After the shop floor chaos, the office's dampened air felt dead.

The woman and the tall man sat, and Elayne sat too, in the room's sole remaining chair.

“I didn't say you could sit,” the woman said.

The tall man laughed—not a cruel sound: rounded, full-voiced, blunt. Something skewed in his head.

“I prefer to conduct business sitting down,” Elayne said.

“Is that why you're here? Business?”

“Of a sort. Are you Ms. Garabaldi?”

“Why don't you start with why you've come?”

“I'd rather know with whom I'm speaking.”

“We all have lots of things we'd rather.”

The man laughed, again, too loud.

“I'm here to talk with the Garabaldi Brothers.”

“You're talking with one of them.” The woman nodded toward the laughing man. If she knew about the grease on her cheek, she didn't care. “And the sister.”

“What happened to brother number two?”

Garabaldi took a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook from her desk, tapped out a cigarette, stuck it in her mouth, lit. “Dead.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

“So was I. Who are you?”

“Elayne Kevarian.”

The ember at her cigarette's tip flared red. “Don't know that name.”

“No reason you should,” she said. “I want to learn who hired you to print those broadsheets.”

Her lips pursed around the cigarette filter. “Lots of people hire us to print things. They don't hire us to talk.”

“You know the job I mean. The sheets you're printing downstairs.”

The brother chuckled, a low unhealthy sound. The sister's eyes were amber-green and deep. She nodded, not in response to the question.

Hands seized Elayne from behind, big, heavy mechanics' hands, and squeezed, and lifted, and pulled. The chair toppled. She fell back, dragged toward the door, heels scraping over the rough carpet.

“Take her out,” the sister said. “See her off.”

Elayne closed her eyes, and noise and terror filled the room. All lights save the cigarette ember died. A million demons' hammers rained down on a million anvils, rhythmless and unreasoning, a bone-jarring, teeth-rattling clamor that built and built. The brother screamed, a high, whimpering sound. The mechanics who held Elayne stumbled back, clutching their ears, blind in the darkness that rolled from her skin. She recovered her balance, and straightened her lapels.

The office wards dulled sound. Easy to invert them, to amplify the noise outside. She tossed both mechanics back against the wall and bound them with chains of starlight. Then she killed the noise.

Light returned. What the sister saw—and it was always so important, in Craft as in street magic, to consider what others saw, what they thought they knew, and what conclusions they might draw from that knowledge—what the sister saw was a black tide that ebbed to reveal her two bruisers bound to the wall by sorcery, and Elayne, free, with black fire burning in her eyes. Elayne righted her chair on the carpet, and sat down.

The brother had drawn back from the desk, teeth bared. The cigarette shook in the sister's hand. “That wasn't nice,” she said.

“I repay in kind.”

“I guess you do. Excuse me.” Garabaldi walked to her brother, hugged him, comforted him with words Elayne didn't try to overhear. He put his earmuffs on. The sister hugged him harder, and only when his rictus-grin softened did she return to her seat. “Let my guys go.”

“Can we have a conversation?”

“They only would have scared you.”

“My line of work doesn't reward assumptions of that sort.”

“Let's talk.”

“In private.”

“Sure.”

Elayne raised her hand. The mechanics slumped to the ground, and after a moment found their feet. She took her faintness, her exhaustion, wadded it up in a ball and tossed it to the corner of her mental attic with everything else she didn't have time to feel. The Craft was ideal for manipulating soulstuff on a large scale, for adjusting wards and building binding bargains and cheating death, for moving slowly and with grim certainty. Yes, she could toss a few hundred pounds of mechanic around without preparation, but she didn't enjoy the process.

Sister Garabaldi waved them good-bye. “Get lost, boys. If she's still here in fifteen minutes, come get her with an army.”

The door opened, and closed again behind them.

“Private enough?”

“Yes,” Elayne said. “What's your name?”

“You can call me Dana.”

“Mind if I have a cigarette?”

Dana tossed Elayne the pack. Elayne caught it in midair, with Craft, fished out a cigarette the same way, and lit it with a flick of her fingers. Again, wasteful, but again, appearances. “I am sorry I scared your brother.” The cigarette was a pleasant relief, the constriction of her throat and lungs a reminder she was alive, a little boon to a body that worried it would be forgotten each time she called on Craft.

“It's okay. He scares easy.” She smiled at him, and he smiled back. “Good kid. Works well, and the others like him. There are doctors, and they say some new drugs coming down the pipe might help. I don't know. Don't feel like I should decide that sort of thing for him, but he can't really decide for himself.”

“Let me be clear,” Elayne said. “I work for the King in Red, not the Wardens, and I have not come to make trouble. You know about the situation in the Skittersill.”

Dana lowered her head—not quite a nod, but Elayne took it for one.

“The Chakal Square crowd formed to protest some high-level work under way in the Court of Craft. How do you unify a district around a knotty question of wards and bargains?” Elayne exhaled smoke. “You educate them. You flood the area with eloquent, forceful, and above all angry broadsheets, calls to action, indictments of those who stand on the sidelines. Fair enough. But now that the protest will likely end in peace, the broadsheets turn to warmongering. Which leads me to wonder, who paid for all this?”

“We only print the stuff,” Dana said. “Client asked us to provide a service, we did. It's a free city.”

“Nothing in this city's free. Not even the water.” Elayne leaned forward, and tapped ash into Dana's ashtray. “Let me tell you a story.”

Dana didn't object.

“A young woman is in school—working toward mastery in mechanics, maybe. Or golemetry? Anyway, her older brother dies, something sudden. Heart failure, let's say.” And from the sudden tension in Dana's face, she'd guessed right. “Leaving her with a family business and a brother who suffers from a mental condition. Theirs is a business of relationships, and such a fast transition puts those relationships under strain. The sister treads water, but she wasn't groomed for this business. She can keep the machines running, but accounting and client management are foreign to her. The bottom line creeps up, the top down, and if she slips, a hundred fifty employees fall. So when someone shows up talking secrecy, security, and large direct transfers of soulstuff, under the table, she doesn't think too hard before she says yes.”