11: Pressing Matters
The kid looked over both shoulders to make sure no-one was watching us.
“In here,” he said. “Quickly!” He all but threw me through the door and shoved it closed behind us.
I couldn't see a damn thing, so I just stood very still. Let him stumble around in the dark and fall over if he wanted to.
Then I heard a clang of metal, and thought he might attack me. I'd already given him thirty bucks, and he knew I had more. I quietly dropped a hand inside my bag, closing it around my knife.
But I needn't have worried. A light came on as the sound faded, one of those weird power lights like the ones they light the streets with in Newbegin, and now I could see he was even more nervous than me.
I was having a hard time understanding why. Sure, Artisians are notorious for keeping everything secret, and most towns and cities keep the guys themselves all but imprisoned. Few things are as valuable as the knowledge inside an Artisian's head.
But what I'd come here to see wasn't a secret. Everyone in Wosh-Tun knew they had it, and everyone knew Artisian Balkus had built it. People in the upper strata of the city saw the result almost every day.
Me, I just wanted to lay eyes on it. That's why I was here, inside a tiny single-room building that stank of metal and root grease, with a kid called Rigge who was half my age but claimed he was the best thief in the city.
I had my doubts, and on the way over he'd almost backed out. Said it was too risky, that if anyone caught us in the Artisian district we could get jailed — or worse. I just kept jingling my coin bag to remind him why he was doing it.
We got into the district through a hidden tunnel under the wall — I figured the city thieves clubbed together and dug it, for easy access to what must have been prime territory for them — and stuck to the night shadows until we reached the door, where Rigge picked the locks.
I was surprised there were no guards at the building. What if I was a thief myself, and wanted to steal it instead of just look at it?
That thought was laid to rest when the light came on, and I saw the size of it. A great metal monster of a machine in the centre of the room, surrounded by benches and cabinets and shelves, all full of hemp paper. On the floor were metal boxes that I guessed contained the letters.
A prinnapres. I'd heard of them before — according to father and grandfather, back before the Big Wet they used these machines to make copies of stories, thousands of them, for people to read.
After my experience growing up in Lo-Wil, where my brother and I were freaks because we knew our letters, I could hardly believe there had ever been thousands of people who could read, much less want to read the sort of stories our family wrote.
But they insisted it was true. They'd just never actually seen one. Said they were all destroyed in the Big Wet, and nobody thought it was important any more.
Artisian Balkus did. He thought it was so important, he built one.
The Wosh-Tun council used it to write letters about meetings, new laws, market days and things like that. Then they made copies and posted them up around the city.
I'd seen some when I arrived, and at first I thought I was looking at a normal letter that just happened to be written by someone with a really neat hand. Then I saw more, and realised they couldn't possibly have been done by hand. Nobody was that precise time after time.
Then I met Rigge. He knew where they kept the machine.
“There, you've seen it. Come on, let's go.” He kept looking over his shoulder, as if someone was going to walk through the door at any minute. But there were no windows in the building. Nobody could see in, and whoever worked here at the machine — Artisian Balkus, or his assistants — couldn't see out. There was a big hourglass on one of the benches.
But I wasn't quite ready to leave. I walked over to the machine and ran my hands over it. Grease came off with each stroke, coating my hands, but I hardly noticed. I was imagining what it must have been like.
If my fathers were right, there must have been hundreds of them before the Big Wet. Hundreds of machines, making thousands of copies of stories. Stories like this one. Imagine how many people you could tell a story to, and how quickly you could do it! If I could learn how to work that machine, if I could just use it for a few days...
Maybe that was the real reason the Artisians kept it hidden.
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