As the crowd continued to hurl insults—which were just as rotten, and, more importantly, free—Whistler wondered if they hated the man because of what he did, or because of what he was. Were they a demon crowd that hated a human? Or were they a human crowd that hated the demonic act? He could not make out their words. He thought maybe some of them did not even know what Gregan did, or why they were there. Others walked, so they walked. Others marched, so they marched. Others hurled, so they hurled.
He watched as they dragged Gregan to the city prison, a place once emptied to bolster the dwindling forces of the Resistance. Some crimes were forgiven to fight a greater crime. Or maybe it was just more efficient to send the criminals to the front line. Yet now that the prospect of the war ending was passing from tongue to ear like the plague, it seemed time for sophistication once more, time once again for lock and key.
Then, glancing back at the closed door behind him, Whistler climbed out of the window and down the frame of the Olive Inn, carefully avoiding the guards below. He abandoned his own prison and headed towards the one where Gregan was locked up, intent on confronting the man who tried to kill him, hoping to understand why, and fearing he might never know the answer.
3 – THE NIGHT OF NOTHING
There were many councils called to discuss the upcoming manoeuvre, what the Resistance hopefuls were calling “the final battle,” and what the Resistance pessimists were calling by the same name in a much more despondent tone. Most meetings excluded any turncoats from the Regime, but Jacob encouraged dialogue, and Rommond arranged a token discussion in his bunker to give the Regime rebels a sense of being involved.
“Trust is earned,” the General warned the smuggler, “but turncoats earn trust too, before turning it like a blade upon those too trusting. There's only one thing to trust wholeheartedly: your doubt, your suspicion, the surety that you can always be betrayed.”
“All the more reason to get them involved,” Jacob responded, “to keep them close.”
“And our enemies closer?”
Jacob grinned. “Close enough to kill them.”
“Well then,” Rommond said with a smile, “let's reel them in.”
* * *
The token meeting saw the bunker crammed with the top brass of the Resistance, all in a show of camaraderie with their compatriots from the opposing side. There were maps and battles plans on show, rather brazenly even, but Jacob noted with a little humour that they were very different to the ones he had seen before. He wondered if even he was only privy to the fakes, if the general put on a different show for each and every person allowed to enter his bunker.
Trust only your suspicion, the smuggler thought. He could not blame the general's caution.
The meeting went well, and if anyone there really did doubt the other, they did not show it.
“We need everyone,” Jacob said. “There's been enough death and destruction 'round here.”
Trokus nodded. “There has. And this war isn't over yet. You've yet to meet the Iron Emperor. You'll think the death and destruction you've seen so far is nothing when you face him.”
“Why did you fight for him?” Jacob asked.
“Fear,” Trokus said. “Fear for my family. And duty. Duty for my people. But you don't know him like we do. To many, he's this far-off symbol. He's so high up, he's almost a god. You demonise him. We deify him. And maybe at the end of it all, he's just a man. But if you've never met him, it's easy to say that. Anyone who meets him is changed by him.”
“Did you meet him?” Jacob wondered.
“No, but one of my brothers' did, and he became a fanatic after that. And one of my closest friends did, one I'd known since I was but a child, and he went from wanting to start an uprising to wanting to crush the Resistance. They say you can't even look him in the eye, or he changes you. So most of us just keep on going, looking after our own, hoping to stay out of the spotlight.”
“Then your own start vanishing off the streets,” Rommond said.
“So you heard of that.”
“The Night of Nothing,” the general said.
“We have other names for it. It was pretty clear the next day when only the dissenters disappeared. Who knows where they are now, if they're even still alive. I shouldn't even be talking about this. I vowed, for my family, to just keep quiet. But I can't help but think that one day, they'll come for us too.”
“What happened?” Jacob asked.
“It was in the first year of the war, when all the Iron Emperor's promises turned to ash. Many rebelled against him, and there was a growing movement forming to oust him from power. They were known as the Blinders. They sealed up their own eyes to stop the Iron Emperor's controlling gaze, and they sought to blind him, so that he could never control people again. It started small, but it grew rapidly, especially with those far from Ironhold, far from the Iron Emperor's reach.”
“What happened to them?”
“We don't know, but I can only imagine they were slaughtered.”
“Alex brought me to Black Fields,” Brooklyn interjected, “where people are left to die.”
“That was later,” Trokus said. “The Black Fields are for today's malcontents. Yesterday's were much more numerous, too many for the Black Fields to hold.”
“Black Fields seemed vast to me.”
“They are, but you really don't understand how much dissent there was early on. He promised us a perfect land. He promised us a cure. He promised an end to war and violence. He promised to restore the balance of all things. All he did was deliver more death and disease. By the end of the first year, some estimated the Blinders had grown to maybe a hundred thousand.”
“Hell,” Jacob said. “That should've been enough to overthrow him, no?”
“It should have,” Rommond grumbled. “We've never even had those numbers.”
“Yes, and they were poised to strike,” Trokus continued. “Poised to blind. But they were blind themselves. They didn't know that the Iron Emperor let them grow, let them show who among his people could not be trusted. And then, just a week before their planned operation to oust him, he implemented his own secret plan. The Night of Nothing. First, all the power went out. We were plunged into darkness. People tried to hide, but the Iron Emperor had a secret force ready to seize everyone even remotely suspected of supporting the Blinders. I lost many of my family then. I was lucky I didn't lose my wife. She cared nothing for the Iron Emperor, but I pleaded with her not to show it, and never to act on it. We think now that it was the Iron Guard he used, but we still don't know where they took the people.”
“That's pretty grim,” Jacob said. “I can't blame you just putting your head down then.”
“Maybe it's not the right choice, or the just choice, but it's the one we made to survive. When the Night of Nothing was over, those hundred thousand people were gone, and so were thousands more who were suspected of being sympathisers. It took a year for that dissent to grow, and in a single night the Iron Emperor plucked them out like little more than weeds. In a single night, the chance of rebellion was crushed.”
“Let's see what a single day will do then,” Rommond said.
4 – IRON BARS
Whistler tucked his tell-tale tangles into his cap and hid himself amongst the crowd. He had learned a lot from Jacob. A smuggler of things was also a smuggler of people, even if it was just himself. He mingled with the mob, copying their chants, mimicking their movements.
“We've had enough war!” one of them shouted as they congregated outside the prison.
“Can't even trust our own!” another barked.
“Child-killer!” a third spat, firing the spittle towards Gregan as he was hauled towards the prison door.
Whistler was still alive, so he did not think the last claim was entirely accurate, but for the purpose of his little mission, he thought it best if he play dead.
; Gregan did not protest. It looked like he might have done before, when he was first caught, but he had the bruises to show that protesting did not do him any good. Squelched tomato still dripped from his face and hair. The guards seemed to loiter at the prison door far longer than they needed to, just long enough for the angry crowd to get in another throw.
Then Gregan was hauled inside, into what must have then seemed like the safety of the cell. The crowd continued to yell and holler for a time, and the walls of the prison were now the target of their throwing arms. Whistler felt unsettled by the madness of it all, but he mouthed the insults all the same, and when he was handed a rotten apple, he lunged it half-heartedly at the bricks and mortar. The walls did nothing to him.
The fruit ran out before the insults did, but soon they too died down. It seemed it just was not the same when the crowd could not see their target's reaction. They came to boo and shame. They needed to see the red cheeks of the shameful, or make them red with tomato juice. The people, united in this moment of condemnation, began to disperse, back to their separate segments of the city, leaving Whistler exposed again.
It was then, in that moment of panic, that he remembered one of Jacob's smuggling routes, all of which he had made the smuggler teach him with as much precision and attentiveness as he gave to Jacob's first lesson on decorum with his spoons. There was another way into the prison, part of the underground network of tunnels that Rommond was now using to work the war effort. While the general had sealed off some of these, to prevent what he called “the riff-raff,” Whistler was almost certain that the one leading from the old butcher's shop to one of the cells was still in operation. He just had to hope that was not the cell they put Gregan in.
Whistler disappeared into the city smog, which gathered at knee height, bumping into people regularly, being pushed and shoved, and finding he had to push and shove in turn if he was to get anywhere. He did not like Blackout, and wondered how on earth it had produced someone as kind as Jacob, so gruff in appearance, and so gentle beneath.
Eventually he found his way to Raw Royce's, the old butcher's shop. It had a different name before, but the population of Blackout had changed a lot. Now it was run by Royce, a balding, rose-cheeked man in a blood-speckled apron. A demon, Whistler noted, with that skill he once did not understand why he had, and once thought useful. Now it did not matter if someone was human or maran. They could still be fighting on either side.
“Half a pound for momma dearest, boy?” The butcher greeted him with a smile.
“Eh, no. I, uh, was wondering if I could use … the tunnel.”
“The tunnel? Whatever for?”
“Just, like, to play in.”
“Not much good playing down there, boy. Sure, it's full of vermin!”
“I was … hoping to catch a pet.”
“A pet!” the butcher shrieked. He hammered his cleaver through a piece of meat. “Those aren't the types for pets. You should visit Ivory Tom in the Gold Quarter if you've got some coils to spare, which by the looks of you, you don't. He's got some fine specimens there, though there's not much demand for pets nowadays. He's only still in business because the Treasury still is, and they still want their fineries, so they do. But me, well, I'll always be in business, because people love their meat, come rain or shine, or shine and shine, as the case may be!”
“I've always wanted a mouse,” Whistler said. It was not wholly a lie. Uncle Alex had one when he was little, and it was an adorable creature, scurrying around the dig sites, helping in those small discoveries.
“Can't say I understand why,” Royce said. He scrunched his mouth up, working it around visibly as the cogs of his mind worked, gestating the notion. “All right then, boy, but if you don't find one in half an hour, you get back out here and go back home if you have one.”
Whistler disappeared into the back of the butcher's, catching the man's final words: “And don't pick a rat! No one likes a rat!”
The tunnels were dark, lit only by the faint glow of oil lamps dotted very far apart. They were kept alight as part of the protocols of war, so that the Treasury members could escape the city. Rommond was as keen as ever that those protocols were kept in place.
Whistler scurried through the passage as quickly as he could. As much as he hated the awful scalding of the sun, he did not like the cold and the dark that Jacob seemed to prefer. He did not want to hide. He supposed that was more of his mother's blood in him. Maybe they were not so far apart after all. He found himself musing a lot on that lately.
In time he found the rusty ladder that led to a hatch into the prison above. The hatch was heavy, and the rust had almost welded it shut. There were many times when he wished for physical strength, for his boyish arms to be replaced by the muscle and sinew of manhood. This was one of them. It took his whole weight to make the hatch door budge. He remembered one of Rommond's sayings: “Put your shoulder into it, boy, and the rest of you will follow. Shoulder first.” It was no wonder that the general called his most elite platoon the shoulder of his army. Yet they were gone now. Sometimes the sayings were just sayings, just words.
When the hatch was fully opened, Whistler scampered up, finding himself in an open cell right next to Gregan's. It was just the two of them. No other prisoners. No guards.
Gregan almost leapt out of his skin. “Blimey, boy. You almost killed me.”
Whistler glowered at him, his dust-covered hair in his eyes. “Wouldn't that be fair?”
Gregan gave the faintest chuckle. “Would've thought you'd had enough of me.”
Whistler did not respond to that remark. He had enough of the violence and hate, for sure. He had not had any of the answers. That was why he was there.
“I just wanted to know,” Whistler said, shaking the dust from his hair. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you try to kill me?”
“You're one of them.”
“But I'm not.”
“Yeah, I suppose you're worse.”
“How?”
“You're the blurring of the lines.”
“I don't understand.”
“You're what happens when they mix with us. We end up with 'people' like you, a bit of both. Can't tell what part of you came from where. Can't tell your allegiance. It's all a blur.”
“Isn't that a good thing? Like, to heal our differences?”
Gregan laughed. “You don't heal that, boy. You keep scratching that scab till it peels off, till it shows the ugliness underneath. See, you demons talk about your disease, your search for a cure, but you're the disease. And you, boy, you half-breed, are the evidence that we're infected. Humanity's been pushed to the brink, but screw it, I don't want to save it if I'm saving half of them as well.”
“I don't get it,” Whistler said. “You'd rather we all die?”
“Better than the demons living.”
“But what if we all can live?”
“Not while I have any say. It's them or us. Well, I say 'us', but you ain't included in that.”
“But you don't even know me.”
“Doesn't matter. There's enough of them in you. That's all I need to know.”
Whistler shook his head. “It doesn't make any sense.”
“Give up, boy. You can't save everyone.”
“No,” Whistler said. “I don't care what you say. I don't care if you hate me. I'm going to keep trying. My mom always told me to keep trying, to keep fighting, to keep—”
“Your mom's dead,” Gregan said.
Whistler halted mid-breath. “No.”
“She's dead. She's been dead for days.”
The boy shook his head, scattering the dust. “You're lying.”
Gregan smiled. “Did no one tell you?”
Whistler faltered. He pushed the unlatched door of the cell open and made for the door, back into the li
ght outside, where the sun revealed many things, but did not reveal his mother's passing. “She's dead,” he heard Gregan calling from inside. The door slammed shut, and it felt like it slammed on his heart.
5 – THE LOSS-MAKERS
“So,” Rommond said, sitting down before his lieutenants, “who tells him?”
The silence answered that question well enough.
“I must have told thousands of families by now,” the general mused. “It almost doesn't mean anything any more. And from me, it must come across as insincere. Miss, your son is dead. Followed by: Have you got another son of fighting age? Because to me, it's a loss of soldiers, a loss of infantry. I have to plug that gap. I am a loss-maker, and I only hope that I make greater losses on the other side.”
“Isn't the smuggler close to the boy?” one of the lieutenants suggested.
“Yes,” Mudro said. “But we haven't told him either.”
“The funeral's in just a few days.”
“That's why we're having this conversation now,” Rommond said.
“Have we not maybe left it a little late?”
“He's been through enough, that boy.”
“Haven't we all? We can't protect people from death.”
“I'm not sure I have enough heart left to break, and I think I'd need a lot to tell that child. He's still starry-eyed, still sees the good when it's buried by evil, still has the cheer when it's swamped by sorrow. I've killed a lot of people in this war. I'm not sure I can kill what's left of his innocence.”
“I think Jacob has to break the news,” Mudro said. “But we need to break it to him first. He was close to Taberah too. They lost their child together. I think you're going to have to deliver that news, Rommond. I think it means more if it comes from you.”
* * *
The general made no more delay, asking around for Jacob, finding he was much more difficult to pin down than he expected.
Hometaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Action Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 6) Page 2