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didn't have to go to Bracebridge for them. Isn't that enough? I once hoped
...'
But Mistress Summerton never did quite say what she'd once hoped, other than
that it was plainly something other than for Anna and
I to be sitting here in winter with the smell of the Easterlies upon us. I
could have told her about many things, about the real truth of how I
could change this Age, but she was old and cold, her hands were like a frail
bird's, and the best it seemed we could do was sort out some blankets for her,
and feed her fire, and commiserate with her about her madly blooming roses,
which tore at our clothing as we walked back towards our ferry and the greying
lights of a city which was preparing for war.
Butterfly Day was a fantasy of summer. This time, the workshops of the
Easterlies were pounding to a rhythm set by no guild. Swords from
ploughshares, or at least sharpened spikes from railings, and bombs from
paraffin and sugar. Even guns of a sort  crude and aetherless things at least
as likely to blow your own hands off as to stop a charging cavalryman, but
guns nevertheless, which, like Grandmaster
Harrat's electricity, were a technology which the guilds had long known
about but, apart from the boom of ceremonial cannons, repressed. Saul had a
touching faith in his guns, but he wasn't walking here in
Northcentral. He'd forgotten about the power and pull of these buildings, or
he'd never really known. He failed to understand what he was really fighting,
which was aether and money  the true might of the guilds, which roared
unabated in these streets and shone in the purring, wyreblack mass of the
telegraphs which scribbled the sky, SHOOM
BOOM 
for money was magic as well. How, otherwise, could the aether engines of
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Bracebridge still pound the earth when they produced nothing? Anna had shown
it to me through Stropcock's old haft, so surely she of all people could
understand. Mawdingly & Clawtson, by the public records, produced a little
under a quarter and slightly more than a fifth of all the aether extracted in
England. The French and the
Saxons, they tended their own industries and mysteries and guilds, whilst
aether from the wildernesses of Thule, Africa and the Antipodes was like the
people of those regions; strange and wild and notoriously difficult to tame.
I'm no expert on company affairs, Anna, but I do know that all companies are
owned by shareholders  and that those shareholders are mostly the guilds. And
Mawdingly & Clawtson is majority-owned by the
Telegraphers' Guild. It's a major part of their wealth, Anna! Stropcock,
Bowdly-Smart, he's just a henchman who goes through the motions of spending
the income they pretend they have on imaginary cargoes and the contents of
empty warehouses. But the Chairman of the Board, Anna  it's down in black and
white, and I've still got the page in my pocket if you don't believe me  is
Greatgrandmaster Anthony Charles
Liddard Seed Passington!
All these years, almost all my life, there's been this creature, this figure.
It used to be Owd Jack who betrayed Goldenwhite. Then it was the trollman, or
Grandmaster Harrat's dark guildmaster. Up here in
London, it was poverty and money, and places like this street where the
guildmistresses wear white gloves to show that they never have to touch
anything dirty. I've even seen him sometimes, Anna, or I've thought I
have. He's come out of the stuff of shadows and bad corners of my dreams. But
he was none of those things  and he was every one of them.
The dark guildmaster was the real, living man who went up to
Bracebridge more than twenty years ago with that chalcedony in a wooden
casket, and he used Grandmaster Harrat in that experiment, and he used my
mother as well  and your mother and father  and many people died and
suffered as a result. It's him, Anna. There are records of speeches he made in
neighbouring towns. He came and gave his orders and went away and took none of
the blame. Even
Grandmaster Harrat didn't know who he was. But for all that, he's just a man,
Anna, which to be honest is almost a disappointment. But we can bring him
down.
You've got to understand. You've got to help me .. .
We found a small, quiet park with pale winter-bare sallow trees through which
the honeyed stone of Northcentral glowed like firelight through a tapestry. In
the cold shadow of its walls we walked the spotted marble paving and sat on a
bench. Anna shoved her hands into her tattered pockets. The sounds of London
had receded. A russet squirrel ran along a branch.
`You're just saying that we could ruin yet more lives.'
`It's
Anthony Passington, Anna! He's the man who destroyed our parents.'
`But I know him. I've accepted his hospitality, and he's always been decent to
me. He doesn't seem ..
`How do you expect such people to seem?'
She shrugged and shivered. Her lips looked chafed. She had a smear of soot on
the end of her nose. `He's Sadie's father, Robbie.
Despite all that's happened, I'd still like to think that she and I are
friends. And it's her guild, too.'
`Why do you think she's being forced to marry Greatmaster
Porrett? The Distemperers' Guild is one of the few which doesn't have shares
in Mawdingly & Clawtson. The Telegraphers need their wealth to keep going.
That's exactly why they're being sucked in ..
Anna smiled. She gave her knees a jiggle. `And Sadie always said it was just
about paint.'
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`Can't you see it's all part of the same thing? It's not these buildings
around us which make the guilds what they are, Anna. It's money, and money's
all about belief England's already in a mess, so can you imagine what would
happen if everyone knew that one of its major sources of aether has failed, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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