Cold Magic

30

The inhabitants of the district of Cernwood Fields had gone to ground, shutters and entrances closed, although here and there we saw a gate or a door cracked ajar as if to offer a haven for folk fleeing the soldiers. We struck a steady loping pace down the main street and thence into side streets, pausing at each intersection to consider where the worst sounds were coming from. In our winter coats we appeared nondescript, even Andevai. At intersections, we discovered shops with broken windows. We surprised men patching a shattered casement with planks of wood, but once they had a good look at us, they set back to work.

We had to walk some miles northeast to reach the Rail Yard, and soon enough we left the troubled central streets behind us and strode through a frigid morning. An odd quiet gripped us; Bee said not one word, and with Andevai in our company, I could find nothing to say. He remained silent, seeming half absent, as if his concentration were elsewhere.

The usual morning crowds about their business were nowhere to be seen, only a few people like us scurrying on their way with heads down. A pulsing roar of human voices punctuated by the reports of musket fire faded as we made our way through the somber warehouses on Dog Isle to the bridge beside the long roofs of Eastfair Market. My eyes began to sting from a bitter tang in the air. Folk at the market gates called after us, asking

what we'd seen. We hurried around to the market's rear where laborers off-loaded coal cars and men changed out horses and brought in new teams. Beyond Eastfair Market, the lowland plain began its gentle rise toward the steep Downs and high Anderida. Thirty years ago, according to maps in my uncle's study, this had been countryside. Now three mills built of brick and timber stood one after the next along a line of rectangular ponds and a channel of the Sieve hemmed in by stone banks. Waterwheels groaned where water trapped in the murky ponds raced down toward the channel. Chimneys coughed smoke whose sooty weight swirled over lanes of squalid housing. I tasted the stench of human waste, sweet rot, and hot, gritty ash. Although we were at least half a Roman mile from the nearest of the mills, the sound of the machines made a heart-battering clatter that filled the air. Despite unrest elsewhere, the factories were spinning.

Pausing to catch our breath, we stared over the hard angles and smoky pallor.

Andevai spoke in a low voice, as if the sight pained him. "If you want to go to a place where the mansa will feel some reluctance to follow, that is the place."

Surprised, Bee glanced at him, and she caught my eye and raised her eyebrows.

I shrugged and began walking again. Yet my thoughts spun over and over as I considered the busy combustion of factories and the fire-withering heart of mages.

The Rail Yard was a field of tracks sown from the burgeoning rail system that, in concert with canals, wound down from Anderida to haul coal, timber, and iron to Adurnam's port. Workshops and stables crowded one side of the Rail Yard, but we tramped past them to the high brick wall that surrounded the industrial yard. Its iron gates were chained and its guard posts abandoned.

"How do we get over?" Bee asked, surveying the impressive walls and gate.

"I can break the lock." Andevai searched through the heavy wreath of chains for the lock as I drew Bee back, remembering the force of the shattered cup. After a moment, he laughed and began to haul lengths of chain through the iron railings. A crudely cut lock thumped out of the lacework to the cobblestone pavement. "Someone was here before us."

He shifted the gate open enough for us to slip through, then closed it and looped chains back through. Parallel to the wall ran a series of long, low workshops with big doors, all chained closed. Some of the roofs were half caved in, and most of the windows were shattered, as if a man had walked the length of each building and smashed each individual pane with a sledgehammer. No one had swept up the debris exploded over the dirt.

I looked at Andevai. "Did you do that?"

"How could-" demanded Bee, and then closed her mouth.

A clink of dropped metal falling on metal came quite distinctly from beyond the workshops, followed by a curse in a male voice.

I raised a hand for silence and gestured that they should stay hidden. Then I padded down a lane between empty workshops toward the open space beyond. I drew on my glamor and became brick and dirt and broken glass, the battered surroundings of an industrial yard inhabited by the ghosts of projects abandoned because of destruction. A twisted hulk sprawled across open ground. Its vast ribs curved as high as the surrounding roofs, and flaps of shredded skin stirred in the breeze. Within the ribs mounded more fabric in coils and rumpled hills like the collapsed internal organs of a whale. Pockets of hard snow had settled into crevices and corners, making the remains ' sparkle. Although torn and burned, the airship's skeleton had a graceful beauty.

Rats scrabbled in the wreckage: Three figures huddled around a fractured wood-framed basket, the remains of the gondola. A man plied a shovel; a woman knelt and picked through a heap of debris, trying to free something. The third figure had a troll's plumage, and although its back was to me, it had turned its head so far around it was looking right at me. No head should be able to turn that far. I shuddered, and then, at last, I recognized them.

Fiery Shemesh! Chartji, Brennan, and Kehinde.

Chartji raised a hand in a gesture humanlike if odd in its rhythm, meant to beckon me forward. Then-thanks be to gracious Melqart-she turned her head back properly round to watch what Kehinde was doing.

I ran back to my companions.

"Come, quickly. They're here! Just as you said, Bee."

Andevai had his back to me, and his head positioned in the normal way, but he gestured in the direction of the main gate. "I'll stay here."

"Are you afraid to see the results of your handiwork?"

"I know what it looks like."

"How can you know what it looks like? You were at the inn when the explosion hit."

"Say what you will and think what you must, Catherine," he said with so much force it seemed my lips prickled as though freezing into ice. Bee shivered, eyebrows drawing down dangerously as she frowned. "Someone must stay here to keep an eye on the gate. If I whistle, that will be your signal to run."

If ice had touched me a moment before, I was now flooded with hot alarm. "Has someone been following us all along?"

"It's not what I see. It's what I sense. I can feel threads of cold magic for some distance around me. The mansa is in Adurnam, and he is on the move-which means he is personally searching for you and Maestressa Barahal."

"If you can feel the, ah, threads of the mansa's movement, then can he not feel you in kind? Track us by following you, if he suspects you are with us?"

"He will be able to sense my magic." He bit his lower lip, white teeth furrowing the lip as he studied*me. I did not like that look. It reminded me of our hands touching, our fingers entwining, at the inn. I felt heat flood my face as I blushed.

He looked away sharply. "You're right. It would be best for me to mark a trail back through the city as a decoy, although it is unlikely the mansa suspects I am trying to aid you." He examined the gate as though to memorize the number and ornamentation of its iron finials with their resting eagles and coiled snakes. "It's doubtful he will suppose me to have so much initiative. Or be rebellious." His sour words surprised me. Before I could reply, he went on thoughtfully, finger and thumb tracing the trim line of his closely shaven beard to his chin in a way that was terribly distracting. "Or I could rejoin the mansa and try to lead him away from you until nightfall tomorrow brings the solstice, and thereby Maestressa Barahal's release from the contract."

"Surely a mage House can force my cooperation with or without a contract," said Bee. "Kidnap me. Take me prisoner. I have no one to protect me. My family could not manage it even when they were here."

"It's true," he agreed, "that folk without support or means are at the mercy of those who have the weapons, or the magic, or the followers to coerce them. My village knows that well enough, for it is how we became slaves. What he will not have is a legal contract to force your compliance. But if you do not choose to become part of Four Moons House, then you must find some other power to become client to."

Bee looked at me. "I would rather sit in a cage and starve myself to death than share the bed of a man under the terms I was so insultingly offered!"

"Of course you would!" I agreed. "We'll find another way. With Tank's blessing, we'll reunite with Rory."

Andevai glanced at her and then sharply at me. "Who is Rory?"

"A kinsman."

"Oh. Well. Thus you prove my point. How is anyone to survive without the protection of a powerful patron or the support of your kin?"

"Surely we have laws to which we can appeal," I said.

I turned as Chartji ambled into view, feet crunching on debris and her head bobbing slightly. Her crest was raised, its plumage startlingly bright in the crisp air, in a season where colors were usually so muted.

"Did someone have a question about the law?" She wrinkled her snout to mimic a human smile, but the expression produced a rather more threatening visage.

Bee recoiled, taking two steps back. "That's a troll" declared Bee in passionate tones.

"Bee!" Her rudeness appalled me. "This is Chartji. I won't trouble you with her full name, which I have been assured we would not understand in any case."

More of her extraordinarily impressive teeth came into view as her smile sharpened and her crest stiffened.

I went on quickly. "She is a solicitor at the firm of Godwik and Clutch, with offices in Havery, Camlun, and Adurnam, although I've been told she is originally from Expedition. This is my… cousin… Beatrice Hassi Barahal."

Bee had the grace to look embarrassed by her unfortunate reaction. "Salve," she said awkwardly.

Quickly, to smooth over the chasm of bad manners, I indicated Andevai. "And this is my… my…" My tongue froze. My lips turned to stone.

'I am Andevai Diarisso Haranwy," he said, coolly enough.

"I believe we have encountered each other before. Greetings of the day to you, Chartji. May you find peace."

"And to you," said Chartji. She then began speaking in what I guessed was an older dialect, the one I was pretty sure Andevai's grandmother had spoken.

Andevai's flaring eyes revealed his startlement. Then he flashed a grin. A grin! Had I ever seen him smile with such delight? The troll and the cold mage ran right down through a series of exchanges whose rhythms sounded very like the usual local greeting but whose tones had an appealing music I could not duplicate. Chartji did not miss a beat, and Andevai lookedBlessed Tanit! I was like a runaway wagon careening down a hill. His charming smile did not alter our situation one bit. With the day passing and our plight as unsettled as ever, I broke in.

"My apologies, but we ought to move farther away from the gate."

"I take it you are here illegally, just as we are?" said the troll.

I walked up the alley between two workshops, and the others followed. Both Andevai and Bee pulled up short when we came into sight of the wreckage, the gaunt ribs, the listless folds of torn fabric skin, and the shattered spars and planks of the gondola amid a dusting of ash and shattered tiles and bricks and who knew what else? Maybe the dust of human bones.

Bee intoned a phrase under her breath, an old Kena'ani curse whose hard consonants made me shudder. Ablaze with wrath, she turned the full force of her indignation on Andevai, for it had to be said of Bee that although petite in stature, when roused she seemed as vast as the heavens.

"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!"

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.

"Chance you be Missy Baker's cousins?" she asked. "Down in Wellspring Terrace? She's expecting a pair of lasses from the country, up for the work."

"We're not," said Bee at her most confiding, with a smile that could melt suspicion into sweet candy. "Is there a hiring office here?"

"Toombs Mill is full up, as well I know," said the woman. "That's yon first mill, there. You may check at them others, Calders and Matarno. I don't know aught of them, except it's a fair long walk to get there."

We thanked her and Walked on, past men pushing wheelbarrows filled with rags and another leading a donkey pulling a covered cart whose concealed cargo stank so badly we had to cover our noses. Toombs Mill was a great beast of a building, fully four stories in height, with a dwelling house attached on one side like a small child to a stout parent, and at the far end a long low wing that I guessed housed the weaving shed. The din of its machines chased us along past a wharf where idle men watched us with the kind of stares that made us walk faster. These men with starving eyes had about them a sallow-cheeked desperation that made the villagers of Haranwy, despite the ties that chained them to Four Moons House, seem the more fortunate. Yet how could I judge? Why should laborers live in such deplorable conditions and entire villages be chained by custom and law to a master? Weren't both terrible things?

On we walked past a dye works with its pungent odor and thence along a lane of dreary one-story brick warehouses. The steady roar of the mills serenaded us.

"This racket will drive me mad!" cried Bee.

"Aren't you mad already?"

She essayed a punch to my shoulder, but her heart wasn't in it. The day's walk and last night's escape were taking their toll even on her resilient frame, and the constant ringing, thrumming

clatter was surely enough to unsettle the firmest resolve and drum into oblivion all coherent thought. We walked the length of Calders Mill and onward toward the twin stacks of Matarno Mill, at the end of the race.

Men winched bales out of a barge and loaded them onto a flatbed wagon. Bales of finished cloth had been stacked on another barge for the journey downstream. Dusk turned the water black; even the last glancing rays of the sun could wake no glistening shimmer on that foul liquid. A pack of scrawny boys fished from the bank, shivering without coats. Two braced themselves each on a crutch; one was missing his right leg below the knee, the trouser leg tied off with a bit of string.

A long, low howl scraped the air like a wolf marking its prey. A second, shorter blat replied, and a coughing toot-toot-toot roused briefly and wheezed to a halt.

All my life in Adurnam I had heard echoes of these calls from the comforts of the Barahal house. Only now did I see what they announced.

The rhythmic scratching brawl of the looms stepped down piece by piece. Within the queer alteration of sound formed by its cessation, the ringing clamor of the mules fell silent, and slowly the din settled and the ground ceased humming beneath my soles until all I heard was a buzzing in my ears. In the fury's wake, an avalanche rumbled into life. A man unlocked a chained set of double doors on the ground floor of Matarno Mill, and workers spilled forth like stones and dirt racing down a cliff in an unstoppable tide. They wore wooden clogs rather than the leather shoes we could afford, and the noise made by feet striking stone, wood, and earth washed all before it. But most strik-i ng was their silence. You would think that after a day hammered by noise and unable to exchange a single civil word in a normal tone, folk would be ready to chatter about their thoughts and

hopes and gossip. By the worn and exhausted faces flooding past us, I could see that no one had the strength to speak.

Just before the first wave reached us, I looked at Bee, and Bee looked at me. We needed no words to share what must have been obvious to both of us. It simply had not occurred to either of us that the mills would shut down for the night, because they relied on daylight for their workers to see. Then the wash hit us, men and women and children in faded and mended clothing, the women with their hair covered by scarves and faces pallid or ashen, depending on their complexion. So thin they were, faces pinched, hands trembling; one young woman was rubbing her right ear, and a man with stooped shoulders leaned heavily on a comrade, as though he were about to faint. A boy no older than Hanan passed, his gait made awkward by the evident pain caused him in his right leg, for he grimaced each time that limb pressed into the ground. A very small girl passed holding a bloody rag to the back of her head and crying, although not one soul paid the least attention to her.

Bee pushed forward against the tide, and with an elbow here and a shoulder there, we pressed through the crush toward the mill's doors, where a pair of foremen watched as the workers departed. In such a commotion, it was easy enough to be what I was not. I was not walking into the mill but rather was part of the outward flow; Bee was twisting her bracelet, as if anxious about a missed tryst, no one important. Hidden within the glamor of misdirection, we got inside the stairwell; very dim it was, with no windows and only one lamp burning midway between each floor. The clomping of many feet echoed in the stairwell as folk pushed down.

Shoved against the brick wall, we swam like birds against the current upward, for laborers from the upper floors were only now coming down. At the first landing, we slipped into a vast,

low room with big windows where the encroaching dusk gave us little enough light to see by. Brushes were hung from a rack on the wall. Spinning mules stood in their ranks, fiber pulled in long threads but now still. Bee knocked her knee against a wheel, and I jammed my toe when I kicked a runner lying so low along the floor I had not expected it. White flickers of lint drifted and warmth lingered. Dust tickled in our nostrils. A bloody knot of human hair lay on the floor.

"Did you see how young those children were?" whispered Bee.

Footsteps clumped behind us. We turned.

A night watchman with a lantern and a knotted whip walked in. "Here, now, off you go, girls! I've no time for your malingering! We're closing up!"

We hurried away down the long room to the opposite door, by now drowned in gloom, down the cold, silent stone steps, and again outdoors. Out back, connected to a one-storied annex, rose the engine house, where the engine still hissed and wheezed. A pair of watchmen stood by the door, talking and laughing. Bee grabbed my arm and tugged me with her as she marched to the door. As they looked up to see her, she bobbed her head and rubbed her hands as if nervous.

"Begging your pardon," she said in a soft, un-Bee-like voice, "but we're come up from the country for we were told we could get jobs here."

"What kind of job were you thinking?" asked the younger man.

The elder gave a frown. Bee burst into tears.

I said, "Oh, please, we're good girls. We were sent up to live with our cousin on Wellspring Terrace and take a job here, for there's no husbands for us at home. But she died, and her husband said a terrible thing to my sister, like he meant to…to mistreat her. We've just enough coin to make the trip home, but

nothing for a roof tonight, and it's so cold, and we're so frightened."

Bee bleated out another anguished sob.

"All we ask is one night. In a safe, warm place, like you'd hope for your own sisters and daughters."

"Probably that bastard Tom Carter," said the elder. "For his wife died three months back. Some say he shoved her down the stairs, and her pregnant! The baby died, too."

Bee wept noisily.

"All right, then," continued the elder with a sigh, "and don't you go being disrespectful," he added, with a stern nod at the younger man. To us, he said, "I'll tell them to let you lie on the floor just inside the door. But how much sleep you'll get I could not say, for it's a cursed din."

"Do they keep the furnace lit all night?" I asked, hoping he would say yes.

"Yes. It's easier that way than drawing it up each morning." He opened the door.

And, indeed, inside the stone walls of the engine house it was smoky and noisy and hot, but it was combustion, and if anything would hide us from the mansa, it was combustion.

We curled up against a wall, out of the way, in our coats. The workers in charge of the furnace ignored us. It was smoky, and noisy, and hot, but we slept.