Their dinner eaten and their stories exchanged, the four fugitives agreed to get some sleep. After some searching of the underground room, during which an eclectic range of objects were disturbed and hastily replaced, two more ancient-looking sleeping bags were produced for Bál and Cire. The four slept close together in the center of the room, Hakim dimming the light so that it gave out only heat.
Within moments, Bál felt himself being taken by sleep.
Several hours later, he was dimly aware of movement around him, of whispers at the door, but soon he fell back into unconsciousness. When he was finally wakened, it was by someone shaking him roughly on the shoulder. Blinking blearily, he saw it was Adâ, who looked paler than usual.
He rolled over and clambered out of the sleeping bag.
Hakim was seated on an overturned bucket, clutching something like a large, cheaply produced book. Cire was crouched next to him and reading over his shoulder.
“What’s happened?”
Hakim didn’t answer. Closer up, Bál realized that Hakim’s knuckles were white and that he was squinting down at the page.
“What is that?”
“It’s a newspaper,” Adâ muttered distractedly. “It’s like a periodical to tell people current affairs.”
“What’s wrong with word of mouth? Or a town crier?” But he was ignored.
He joined Cire on Hakim’s other side. He couldn’t make any sense of the sweeping scrawls across the front page, but that was nothing new—the language rings could translate only speech, not text.
“What’s happened?”
“What’s happened,” Hakim replied quietly, his voice at odds with his expression, “is that the opposition is dead.”
“This was just run down here by one of our friends in the press,” Adâ explained. “It’s tomorrow’s edition. It’s meant to be an independent paper, but . . .”
“This Government Has Lost Its Way—We Back TNP,” Cire read.
“Our friend said that the TNP have been intimidating the editorial team for a while, but the paper stayed independent. But it sounds as though they’ve found some way to get to them.”
“Over a century of independent journalism,” Hakim intoned, still staring at the page, “down the drain. That’s it. They’ve won.”
“But,” Bál said, struggling to deal with these concepts only partly because of his tiredness, “if the TNP is so violent, so corrupt, then why don’t people do something? It’s quite obvious. If there is a tumor in a part of the body, it is the duty of the other parts to cut it out. My uncle would never stand for this. If this were Thorin Salr—”
“This isn’t Thorin Salr,” Hakim exclaimed, jumping to his feet and hurling the paper to the floor. “This is so utterly, utterly different. The universe, it may shock you to hear, does not revolve around your tiny kingdom and its bigoted peasantry.”
Bál leaped up as well, though to a considerably shorter level than Hakim’s. “At the very least, the peasants do something. They go out and till the land, a hard day’s labor, and they deal with the consequences if they fail. They don’t skulk like rats underground and moan about how awful things are. They take action!”
Hakim flushed. “What you just said—about the tumor and the body—is exactly the kind of language being used by them! Immigrants, gays, dissidents . . . I suppose they all need to be cut out too, do they? And the ones with the biggest swords are, I assume, the ones to do it?”
He leaned in very close to the dwarf, so that their noses were almost touching, and spoke with quiet, cold fury. “Perhaps, Bál, you might consider your position. You might just find that you’re on the wrong side.” He shook his head and stormed off, disappearing into the shadows between the covered objects.
“People need to know,” Bál bellowed after him, “and that won’t happen if we continue to hide down here like cowards. This is your people’s problem, not mine.”
But Hakim had gone.
Bál looked around. Cire and Adâ both avoided his gaze. He realized after a moment that he actually was shaking with rage, his skin and lips prickling hot with anger. He instinctively reached for his ax but balled his fist when he realized, yet again, that it had been lost. He felt the pounding urge to smash something up, to vent his emotion on some pathetic object or weakling. It suddenly occurred to him that the gang of abductors were the first enemies he had never taken vengeance upon, and another wave of frustration overtook him.
He turned on the spot a few times, unsure what to do with himself, then marched back to the sleeping bag and lay down, his back to them.
Several minutes passed, and he felt his anger dissipate. He still didn’t look up but kept his face firmly set toward the gloom ahead of him.
“People need to know . . .”
Bál loathed to look around, but Hakim’s tone had changed from thundering to airily inquisitive. Suppressing the urge to lash out again, Bál lifted his head in time to see the elf emerging out of the shadows from another direction, gazing distractedly into the middle distance.
“People need to know,” Hakim said again, with more conviction. “People need to know.”
“What do you . . .” But Adâ’s question faded as Hakim wandered off again, enraptured with his own thoughts. There was a flourish from somewhere, and one of the dustcover sheets fluttered to the ground, closely followed by another.
“What are you looking for?”
There was still no reply.
Bál sat up properly. He was now more curious than angry. Hakim’s last movement had revealed a highly polished metal cylinder with a transparent glass orb mounted upon it. Even as he watched, lightning sprung from its center, sending bright blue forked fingers to claw at the inside face of the glass.
“What is all this?”
Adâ was quick to respond, eager for an excuse to move discussion along from the argument. “Nowadays, this is a storage space for the university. A lot of the outdated books and machines get dumped down here. But during the last civil war, this was used as a secret meeting space for the republican leaders.”
“In fact,” Hakim said, throwing aside a sheet to reveal an archaic wooden chest, “they even left some of their effects behind.” The chest bounced open with an alchemical burst, and after a few moments rummaging, Hakim produced a bundle of staffs and bayonet rifles.
“The universities always supported the republicans,” Adâ continued as Cire went to help Hakim relieve a few more objects of their coverings. “The war actually ended upstairs. One of the princes was due to be inducted as a student, and the revolutionaries took it as an opportunity to take the royal family hostage.”
Bál’s brow furrowed. “You mean you don’t have a king here anymore?”
Adâ shook her head. “We haven’t for over a hundred years now.”
“Where I come from, it passes from father to son—unless a king is really pathetic. But it then always passes to someone else in the bloodline. How do you decide who’s in charge?”
“By voting.” Adâ glanced at Hakim, evidently concerned this would reignite the political argument, but he appeared not to have heard. “Every citizen has a right to decide who runs the country, and any citizen of age is eligible to run for public office. At least it did run like that, until this crisis hit.”
“And that works?” Bál said incredulously.
“Well, not really,” Adâ said, smirking. “But it’s the least bad system we’ve got. People will always disagree about some things, but it’s a check on unaccountable power—the kind of unaccountable power that the TNP is amassing through intimidation, the power that lets them serve their own interests at the expense of others’.”
“Aha.” Hakim’s sigh of recognition went up from somewhere in the mass of objects, and a final sheet sank to the floor. Even as he and Adâ got up and drew closer, Bál still couldn’t make out what the contraption was. Mounted on three legs was a large cuboid with several glassy eyes protruding from its front and oily dark humps rising out of its back. To the dwarf, it looked something like a malformed metallic toad.
Hakim sent a charge into the box, and it whirred into life. Bál leaped to the side as a wide cone of light swept out of the eyes, showering a juddering off-white box onto the wall opposite. The box flickered, thin black worms wiggling over it, and then there was an elf in a suit and hat, prancing his way across an ultrareflective floor.
“This is a camera,” Hakim said, preempting Bál’s question. “It’s a recording device we use for entertainment purposes. Something like a moving painting.”
It was so far out of his frame of reference that it took at least half an hour for the three elves to communicate to Bál that what he was seeing was a film. Even after he had seen the innards of The Golden Turtle, which had entirely baffled him, this still made no sense to him at all. Once he had finally been assured that the projector wasn’t actually alive, that the beam of light was harmless, and that there wasn’t actually a tiny elf dancing on the wall, he began to get the idea.
“So you use this projector to play back recorded footage . . . I think I understand. But what in the gods’ names is the use of this to us?”
This time neither Adâ nor Cire seemed to know the answer. They all looked toward Hakim.
Taking up his lecturing tone, Hakim explained. “The problem—as you said, Bál—is communication. As long as things seem to be getting better and they aren’t confronted with the nasty details, people have become quite happy to make minorities scapegoats and hand over power to unaccountable authorities. Well, we must confront them with those details—force them to see what’s actually going on around them. The media has fallen to the TNP, so we must take matters into our own hands.”
“So you’re saying we should film what’s going on and show people?”
“Precisely. The TNP may have won credulity, but I still have enough faith in the public that, if they really see what is happening, they will stand up to them. We can avert this crisis before it’s too late.”
“Okay,” Adâ said, “but even if we do film enough abuses, how will we get it out to people? You said yourself that the media is now under TNP control. No one will be willing to broadcast a film that will provoke reprisals.”
Hakim lapsed into silence. His plan apparently hadn’t gotten this far.
“What if,” Cire ventured after a moment, “we use the university’s broadcasting system? The TNP won’t be keeping a constant watch on it—the students wouldn’t allow it. We might be able to buy enough time to send a broadcast out . . .”
“Yes,” Hakim exclaimed, looking up. “That could work. This projector is very old, but I’m sure I can recalibrate it to function with the newer technology.”
Bál zoned out. This was too much to comprehend in his half-sleeping state. Alchemy was bad enough—the mysterious power that sorcerers and conjurors could muster at will had always been unsettling to him—but the thought that ideas could be beamed out to reach everyone, whether they were willing or not, that people’s minds could be influenced from a distance . . . it was the stuff of nightmares.
“This may put any or all of us at great personal risk—not that this is anything new. But are we all clear on that?”
Adâ and Cire made vague noises of assent.
Bál didn’t answer immediately. He resented a little being pulled into this. Admittedly, he had wanted to see more of the wider world when he had left Thorin Salr, but that had all been bound up with the Apollonians’ mission to find the Risa Star and stop the Cult. And it was fair to say he hadn’t exactly gotten what he’d been bargaining for. Yet he had to grudgingly admit that he owed these elves a debt. They had stood alongside him in the defense of his homeland, and all they were really asking of him now was the same.
“Very well,” he said eventually. “I’ll help you. I suppose I won’t be going anywhere anyway until we can find a dimension ship.”
“Good,” Hakim replied coolly. “Then we’ll be needing this.” Out of one of the rucksacks, he produced a burnished golden egg, gleaming in the light from the alchemical orb.
Bál grimaced. “Great. I’ve always wanted to be an elf.”