Chapter 5 (Part IV): Black and White and Dead All Over

With all of his loose ends sewn up, Vinny returned to the ruined journalism building with a small cart that contained part of the materials he’d secured. He’d kept in contact with Azraea by way of their enchanted objects, but he’d not seen her for days. Every time one of them traveled to or from the ruins it increased their risk of discovery, so he had mostly stayed away while she camped underground in the partially collapsed basement without complaint. Vinny had been incredibly impressed. It was the sort of thing he would have expected a trained operative to do, but not an academic. Although Meingen had surprised him too, so maybe he’d been underestimating scholars.

Vinny had come as soon as Azraea had said they were ready to print; when he crawled out of the coal chute into the basement, he understood why she’d spoken in the plural.

The room was largely cleaned out – the walls were still scorched and rain-damaged, of course, but the floors had been cleaned, buckets put down to catch dripping water, and lamps were lit to brighten the room. Against one wall, there was a rack set over a fire where something was being prepared. Except for the lack of smoke coming from the fire, this all seemed more or less ordinary to Vinny. What seemed strange was Azraea busily chatting with two burned corpses and an apparition of a woman who looked like she’d been a faculty member. One of the corpses, faintly illuminated by the distinctive green glow of Azraea’s magic, fiddled with the fully cleaned and restored printer, He (Vinny assumed it had been a man) made final adjustments, while the other corpse walked over to Vinny, put on a pair of heavy leather gloves like it was getting ready for just another day’s work, and hefted the bundled stack of paper he’d brought. The corpses had some sort of silent conversation about the dimensions of the paper being a poor fit for their small press and took the sheets to a cutting board.

Azraea nodded to Vinny briefly, to acknowledge his arrival, but did not interrupt her conversation with the apparition. After a moment, she turned to the rack over the fire and waved her hand; the smokeless flame returned to her palm and disappeared as she closed her fingers around it. At the direction of the apparition, she took a board and pressed it down on the rack that had been heated over the fire. When she withdrew it, the ghost seemed to applaud excitedly, squeeze her shoulder affectionately, and point out a few more details before evaporating.

“I see you’ve been busy,” Vinny said.

“Thank you for getting the paper here quickly,” Azraea said, “We’re about ready to go.” She held up the rack that had been heated over the fire and showed him the finished plate, made of hundreds of ceramic tiles glued to an iron-backing.

“Charles?” she said, her eyes flashed green as she communicated with the corpses, “This is a bit awkward for me.”

One of the dead men stopped what he was doing to help her lift the plate over another plate filled with soft clay, and then press the two together. Azraea, teeth clenched for fear the thing might come apart, pulled the plates apart from one another, and revealed a mostly clean impression on the soft clay. One of the ceramic tiles had come off the first plate and stuck to the soft clay, but ‘Charles’ delicately removed the piece, and touched up the area with a stylus, before lifting the plate onto the press. He stepped back, and Azraea lit another fireball and hung it out over the soft clay. She looked at it for a moment, adjusted it slightly, and then with a whirl of her finger set it to slowly circling over the clay plate.

“When that’s done baking, we’ll be ready to go,” she said, “Michael and Charles here have been a lot of help. They were down here in the basement printing pamphlets about the protest when the dragon burned the building above them,” she explained, “Their spirits had just been hanging around since then, frustrated they hadn’t gotten to finish their work. Since I reanimated them, they’ve been working around the clock to get this thing together and running again. We have agreed however,” Azraea turned towards them, “That when they have finished this project, they will be moving on to the other side.” Charles flashed a charred thumbs-up, and the burned men went back to work cutting the paper.

“Have you been down here alone with them for three days, straight?” Vinny asked.

“That’s ridiculous,” Azraea said, “How can you be alone with someone?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do,” Azraea said, “And you should have more respect than that, Vinny. These men aren’t zombies or ghouls. They’re honest souls trying to use their last hours in this world to make a difference. Have you any idea how difficult it is to work in a body in that state? To watch what’s left of your own body crumble and deteriorate with each motion, each action? It’s one thing for a spirit to rise for a few minutes or even hours to take revenge on someone that wronged it, but it takes amazing resolve to selflessly work the way these two have been for days straight.”

The corpses stopped to applaud her speech, but one afterward made motions like he was saying something.

Azraea sighed, “Yes, Charles, I know I used a split infinitive there but I did correct them all in the final draft of the pamphlet. I promise.”

The corpse held up his blackened, flaking hands in surrender and went back to his work.

“Okay,” Vinny said, using a similar gesture, “I apologize. Honestly, the truth is, of the two of us I’ve still spent more time in smaller spaces with more dead bodies, and it just wasn’t a positive experience for me.”

“Well, if you could have talked to those people you might have had a different experience,” Azraea pointed out.

“I could talk to them just fine before I killed them,” Vinny said, “Didn’t seem to help.”

That must have unbalanced Azraea slightly, as she didn’t quip back at him. So that’s what it takes to ruffle her feathers at this point, Vinny thought, maybe she really is ready to play with the big kids now.

“Have you given any thought to dissemination?” Vinny asked, “I can get them spread around, but where do you want them to go?”

“Anywhere people congregate,” Azraea said, “A person who finds one alone may read it and forget it, but if two people start talking about it, it’ll stick. Charles said we should distribute in the marketplace, definitely, especially the coffee shops. Michael suggested the taverns as well, provided people aren’t too drunk to read when we pass them out. And it’d be good to get some out to the area outside the walls, maybe even across the lake in Mudville. And we shouldn’t put them all out at once. Start small, and then increase distribution steadily.”

“Got it, but bear in mind: we don’t start distributing until we’re done here. I set up some things to draw attention off in a particular direction, but there’s no guaranteeing someone won’t come here to track down the source of the papers. And if we get caught with ink on our hands, we’ll be in trouble.”

“Got it,” Azraea said, “We should be out of here by tomorrow night.”