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"What? Where? Oh, that. That's the Quill-Pen Rebellion, up to business as usual." "Quill-Pen Rebellion?"
"The Guild of Scribes. That cargo boat's flying a Guild of Letter-Pressers" flag. It must be carrying a printing press from the Artificers" Crescent. You ever seen a press?" "Heard of them. For the first time just a few months ago, in fact."
"The scribes don't like "em. Think they'll put their trade out of business. So they" ve been ru
"Well, hopefully they won't come up with anything that can replace a good team of honest rowers. Here's your dock, sir, quite a bit ahead of schedule if I'm correct. You want us to wait around?"
"By all means," said Jean. "Amusing help is so hard to find. I expect I won't be but an hour." "At your service, then, Master de Ferra."
2
The Crescent was not exclusive to the Great Guild of Artificers, though it was where the majority of them chose to settle, and where their private halls and clubs loomed on virtually every street-corner, and where they were most tolerated in their habit of leaving incomprehensible and occasionally hazardous devices out in plain sight. Jean made his way up the steep steps of the Avenue of the Brass Cockatrice, past candle-merchants and blade-sharpeners and ven-iparsifers (mystics who claimed to be able to read the full sweep of someone's destiny from the pattern of blood vessels visible on their hands and forearms). At the top of the avenue he dodged away from a slim young woman in a four-cornered hat and sun veil walking a valcona on a reinforced leather leash. Valcona were flightless attack-birds, larger than hunting hounds. With their vestigial wings folded back along their stout bodies, they hopped about on claws that could tear out fist-sized chunks of human flesh. They bonded like affectionate babies to one person and were perfectly happy to kill anyone else in the entire world, at any time.
"Good killer bird," muttered Jean. "Pretty threat to life and limb. What a lovely little girl or boy or thing you are."
The creature chirruped a little warning at him and scampered after its mistress.
Huffing and sweating, Jean made his way up another set of switchback stairs and made an irritated mental note that a few hours of training would do his spreading gut some good. Jerome de Ferra was a man who viewed exercise solely as a means of getting from bed to the gambling tables and back again. Forty feet, sixty feet, eighty feet… up from the waterfront, up the second and third tiers of the island, up to the fourth and topmost, where the eccentric influence of the artificers was at its strongest.
The shops and houses on the fourth tier of the Crescent were provided with water by an extremely elaborate network of aqueducts. Some of them were the stones-and-pillars of the Therin Throne era, while others were merely leather chutes supported by wooden struts. Water wheels, windmills, gears, counterweights and pendulums swung everywhere Jean looked. Rearranging the water supply was a game the artificers played among themselves; the only rule was that nobody's supply was to be cut off at the point of final delivery. Every few days, a new offshoot of some duct or a new pumping apparatus would appear, stealing water from an older duct or pumping apparatus. A few days later another artificer would divert water through another new cha
He passed the Avenue of the Cog-Scrapers, where a small crowd of labourers were seated before their shops, cleaning and polishing pieces of metal. Some were under the direct scrutiny of impatient artificers, who grumbled unhelpful directions and stamped their feet nervously. This intersection was the south-western end of the fourth tier; there was nowhere else to go except down — or out along the forty-foot walk to the home of Azura Gallardine.
At the cul-de-sac end to Glassbender Street was an arc of shopfronts, with one gap like a tooth knocked out of a smile. Jutting beyond this gap was an Elderglass pylon, anchored to the stone of the fourth tier for some unfathomable Eldren reason. The pylon was about a foot and a half wide, flat-topped and forty feet long. It speared out into the empty air, fifteen yards above the rooftops of a winding street down on the third tier.
The house of Azura Gallardine was perched at the far end of that pylon like a three-storey bird's nest on the tip of a branch. The Second Mistress of the Great Guild of Artificers had discovered an ideal means of assuring her privacy — only those with very serious business, or very sincere need of her skills, would be mad enough to scamper out along the pylon that led to her front door.
Jean swallowed, rubbed his hands together and said a brief prayer to the Crooked Warden before stepping out onto the Elderglass. "It can't be that difficult," he muttered. "I" ve been through worse. It's just a short little walk. No need to look down. I'm as steady as a laden galleon."
With his hands held out at his sides for balance, he began to make his way carefully along the pylon. It was curious, how the breeze appeared to pick up as he crossed, and how the sky looked suddenly wider above him… He fixed his eyes firmly on the door before him and (unbeknownst to himself) ceased to breathe until his hands were planted firmly on that door. He gasped in a deep breath and wiped his brow, which had sprung an embarrassing quantity of sweat. Azura Gallardine's house was solidly crafted from white stone blocks.
It had a high peaked roof crowned with a squeaking windmill and a large leather rain-collection bladder in a wooden frame. The door was decorated with relief carvings of gears and other clockwork mechanisms, and beside it a brass plate was set into the stone. Jean pressed the plate and heard a gong echoing within the house. Smoke from cookfires below curled up past him while he stood there waiting for some response.
He was about to press the plate again when the door creaked open. A short, scowling woman appeared in the gap between the door and its frame, staring up at him. She had to be on the downside of sixty, Jean thought — her reddish skin was lined like the joints of an aged leather garment. She was heavyset, with a vaguely froglike bulge of flesh at her throat and jowly features drooping like sculptor's putty from her high cheekbones. Her white hair was tightly braided with alternating rings of brass and black iron, and most of the visible flesh on her hands, forearms and neck was covered in elaborate, slightly faded tattoos.
Jean set his right foot before his left and bowed at a forty-five-degree angle, with his left hand flung out and his right tucked beneath his stomach. He was about to start conjuring verbal flowers when Guild-mistress Gallardine seized him by his collar and dragged him into her house. "Ow! Madam, please! Allow me to introduce myself!"
"You're too fat and well dressed to be an apprentice after patronage," she replied, "so you must be here to beg a favour, and when your kind says hello, it tends to take a while. No, shut up."