“That’s a third of the workforce!”
“If you include the Tyn it is,” he said.
“I most certainly do,” said Katriona.
“That might be the issue here, begging your pardon goodlady.”
They rounded the corner onto Morthrocksey Lane.
“Res Iapetus’s balls,” swore Jon. “Things have taken a turn for the worse.”
“They’ve torched one of the factory sheds!” Katriona shouted.
Jon had whipped the dogs all the way, and he whipped them all the harder to the gates. By the time they arrived all four of them foamed at the muzzle and panted heavily. Katriona jumped down and made for the gate. Beyond she could see the outline of the crowd. A single mass with many heads. All the gates were open. A line of nightwatchmen stood their ground in an arc around the main gate, defending an entrance already breached. There was shouting, a man on a box gesticulating, rousing the crowd. In the orange light of the burning shed he appeared demoniac. The crowd was spellbound.
Katriona hurried on. Jon’s hand closed around her bicep. “Best be careful, goodlady, the situation is ugly. Let me go first.”
The number of men Katriona still called her own was small, and they were armed with nothing but cudgels. From their faces she could see they would not willingly use them on their fellow workers. “We have sent for aid, goodlady, to the watch,” said Jon’s deputy.
“What have you done?”
“I... I only seek to perform my role, Goodlady Morthrocksa.”
“The watch will not come,” she said. “The whole factory is here. They will be vastly outnumbered. The watch will not come!”
“I...”
She stepped close to him, pointing behind her. “Do you not see? They will not send the watch, they will send the army!”
The man blanched. Now what had she done? Whatever was about to happen, he would carry the guilt with him forever. She turned, panicked. One of the factory sheds burned, fire licking from its windows. Shouts and the sound of breaking glass came from somewhere far away. The line of workers faced her and her loyal guards, grim faces lit by their lamps and the flames of the burning factory.
“Steady, Goodlady Katriona, he’s just doing his job,” said Jon.
“And if you did yours this would never have happened! You say you would not harm your friends and relations, but you will see them killed instead. Stop!” she said to the crowd. “What are you doing? It is your own livelihoods you are burning!” She looked at the mill. Smoke poured from a second building. The heat of the shed ablaze seared her front, the cold of the night chilled her back. “What have you done?”
Tears started from her eyes. The crowd ebbed and flowed around a knot of unmoving men about the demagogue. She realised she knew only a few of their names.
“Here she is! Here is the architect of your poverty!” cried the man on the box. She did not know him.
“Is there any here I know and trust and will speak with me?” she said.
The man grinned wolfishly at her.
Another pushed his way out. “Etwen I am, Goodlady Katriona,” he said. He carried a stout iron pole as a weapon.
“What is going on here? Why do you riot?”
“What kind of life do you suppose that we have? Toiling here from dawn to dusk, going home to cold houses that cause our children to sicken and die?”
“Why did you not come to me?”
“Why should we? What does a noble lady like you know of the lives of ordinary folk? This dream of yours to make and build, it is built on a foundation of bone and blood. Our bone, our blood!” shouted the demagogue.
Muted calls of “hear hear” came from the crowd.
“Would you have listened?” said Etwen.
“You have to go home. My men, they have called the watch. But they will not come.” She paused. “The army will come. Do you not see?”
The crowd quietened.
“Good, because we will show them the hard side of justice, the injustice we have had to suffer our entire lives!” shouted the demagogue.
The cheers grew loud again. The front ranks stepped closer, menacing her. Etwen held up his hand, staying them.
“Why now though, I do not understand? Why let it fester?” she said.
“It is because of them!” cried the demagogue. His finger descended, judgmental as a prophet’s. Where he pointed, the crowd parted.
Jeers came from the crowd as Tyns Lydar, Lorl and two others were pushed to the front and forced to their knees.
“Kado love,” spat Tyn Lydar. “All of evil.” Her scarf had been torn from her. Her face was bloody. The wrists of all were bound behind their backs.
“You offer them special preference, these things that live in our midst,” said the demagogue, “while you ignore the woes of your own kind!”
“They are not things!” protested Katriona.
“They are not human,” said Etwen, unsure.
“They give the evil eye!” someone from the crowd shouted.
Then another. “They spoil our rations. They steal our work!”
“Aye! And slaves we are and poorly judged, though we work as hard as ye and labour by your sides without complaint, you kado who took our meadows and our...” shouted Tyn Lorl.
A cast stone silenced Tyn Lorl. He collapsed to the cobbles. Katriona ran to his side.
“See! She shows where her loyalty lies!” cried the demagogue. He had stepped off his box and was shoving at his fellows as he exhorted them, approaching a frenzy. “So disconnected are these rich ones that they cannot tell who their own people are!”
“My great-grandfather’s father was a simple man, my station is all bought with honest sweat and toil, as yours could also be!” she said.
The crowd laughed. Etwen shook his head. “You know nothing, nothing at all.”
“These things talk of slavery, we will show you real slavery!” crowed the demagogue.
Hands reached for her. They raked at her clothes, tearing them.
Etwen was at her side. “Steady with her! Steady!”
“Let me go, let me go!” A great terror gripped her. She was certain she was about to be killed, or worse. “Don’t you see? Stop this now, go home or they will kill you all!”
Her arms and legs were tugged mercilessly, but she remained unmolested. The demagogue exhorted his colleagues to stand firm, to not listen.
A horn blared, then another, then another. Shouts came from the gate. Katriona twisted around to see her guards scatter like sheep before wild dogs.
Colonel Alanrys came forward from the smoke blowing across Morthrocksey mainstreet. He wore his dress uniform, darkest red with golden frogging, a bicorn atop his head. Dracon feathers fluttered all along its crest, and he wore a cloak made of the same. He rode upon a silver-grey dracon shod for war. The mouth was unmuzzled. Steel blades covered its sickle claws, its forearms had been fitted with clawed gauntlets. The steel of its weapons clicked on the cobbles as Alanrys trotted to a halt in front of the crowd. Fifty of his men filed through the gates into the wide street, followed by fifty more, their arms and armour bronze in the light of the burning factories. They spread out in a double line, the plumes of their helmets twisted in the heat of the blaze. Their mounts were all as their leader’s, decked for battle, not the suppression of civil disobedience.
Alanrys raised an arm. One hundred carbines levelled at the crowd.
“Leave her!” ordered Alanrys. Hammers clicked back on guns.
The rioters backed away, leaving Katriona dishevelled in a shallow semicircle. Alanrys rode up, entirely unconcerned by the mob, his dracon prancing. “Well well well, Katriona Kressinda-Morthrocksa.” Alanrys leaned over in his saddle. He ignored the workers. “Here you are, disporting with the lower orders. How very you. You should have married me when you had the chance. You would not have found yourself in such poor company.” He surveyed the workers. Makeshift weapons shifted in hands. They had fallen silent, but their demeanour was defiant.
>
Katriona got to her feet. “Listen to me, Alanrys, stand your men down. It doesn’t have to end this way.”
“Rioting and the destruction of crown-licensed property are crimes of the highest order!” Bellowed Alanrys. His words were clipped, rich, projected to the very back of the crowd. “You will disperse or I will run you down. I swear this as Lord Defender of Karsa City, appointed by Prince Alfra himself!”
The line of workers bowed backward, uncertain.
“Alanrys! Listen, this is all a misunderstanding. A mistake. I am sure if I were to negotiate with them, to hear their grievances, then this will all be resolved without bloodshed.”
Alanrys sniffed. He took in the burning factory, the second whose windows vented smoke prodigiously. “A mistake? A burning mill, a riot, you, a goodlady, manhandled. It is you who are mistaken. This is sedition.”
She grabbed at his boot. “Please! If you ever had any feeling for me, do not spill their blood.” She glanced over her shoulder, searching out the demagogue. “There are agents at work here. This is not their doing.”
He looked down at her contemptuously, and she knew then she had made a mistake in appealing to his better side. “Feeling? I never had any feeling for you, Katriona. I merely wished to have you, and your father’s money along with you. As you were unwilling to be had, so I remain poorer than I should. I am not inclined to listen to you.” He swept his gaze across the crowd. “Let this scum crawl back to their hovels. They will know their place, or by all the driven gods I will put them in it, and the rest into the hands of the Guiders!” He shoved Katriona away, and rode back to the line of his men. They stared out impassively from under tall helmets. With anguish she understood that had Rel not been sent away, he would be there among them.
“This is your last chance! Return to your homes, or we will have no choice but to remove you by force! Some of you will die! Many of you will die!”
Alanrys’s monstrous mount pawed at the ground. Plumes of steam snorted from its nostrils.
“We will not be cowed! We will not live like animals!” shouted the demagogue.
“You bring this upon yourselves,” said Alanrys. He drew his sabre and held it high over his head.
“Lances!” he shouted. Three dozen guns were put up. Three dozen lance points dropped. The men of the second rank kept their carbines trained upon the crowd.
“Stand firm!” shouted the demagogue. Murmurs of assent grew in strength. The crowd swelled forward, seeming to grow in size.
Katriona was caught halfway between the crowd and the soldiers. Fifty yards of even ground separated them. If the dragoons charged, it would be slaughter. She turned from one to the other. “Stop! Stop! I will listen to your demands, I swear.”
“This night some of us may die!” called the demagogue. “But the world will take notice! We spill our blood in the names of all those who toil for selfish masters! Let the workers of Ruthnia unite! Today is the beginning of revolution!”
“As you wish,” said Alanrys.
Etwen’s resolve wavered. He lowered his cudgel. “No, wait—” he began.
“Fire!” ordered Alanrys. His arm dropped.
The blast of fifty ironlock carbines discharging simultaneously ripped the night in half. Glimmering trails of blue marked the passage of the bullets across the open ground. Katriona screamed as they found their marks in the crowd, punching men and women off their feet, blasting limbs from bodies, shattering skulls. The slain flew backwards with the force of the impact. The crowd shifted, moaning, a single creature dealt a grievous blow.
“Charge!” shouted Alanrys.
Bugles sounded. Dracons roared and sprang forward. Faced with the reality of its peril, the crowd disintegrated.
The dracons poured past Katriona, snapping and croaking, their riders holding their lances in deadly stillness, targets marked. Pennants she had once thought so bright and bold whickered murderously past her ears, each chasing a foot of sharpened steel.
The dragoons rode headlong into the crowd. Every spear accounted for one life. The impact of the charge bowled over dozens more rioters. Many died under the bladed claws of the dracons. The crowd screamed, a shrill and horrible noise from five hundred throats.
The real slaughter began.
The dragoons unsheathed their sabres, and lay about them. The dracons leapt high, bearing down fleeing men to the ground and ripping them to pieces. Workers scattered in all directions. Some hurled themselves into the filthy trickle of the Morthrocksey. Some ran as hard as they could for the railyards and the wall at the far side of the complex. Others dove into the alleyways between the factory sheds, tugging wildly at locked doors. Another group pushed past the line of dragoons, whose efforts to subdue the crowd had broken them up into small knots of two or three. These ran right at Alanrys’s second line.
“Reload!” Alanrys said.
“Goodlady Kat!”
A small hand grabbed her ankle. The dragoons fired. The bullet passed through her, but she was not wholly there, she was a mist, the bullet a breeze.
“Do not open your eyes, Mistress Kat,” warned Tyn Lydar. “Do not open your eyes, or you shall never return.”
“I am cold.”
“This place is not of the Earth.” Tyn Lydar’s voice was layered, a multiple of voices speaking as one. Like the crowd, one from a multitude. “Do not open your eyes.”
Kat did as she was told, keeping her eyes screwed shut, terrified they would flicker open. There was a sense of movement all around her, of presences that watched and waited.
She could still hear the battle, distant, but present. Screams. Gunfire. Isolated now, no longer massed volleys.
Carriage wheels clattered. Dogs bayed. She heard a familiar voice. It kindled warmth in her heart. She started forward. The fingers slipped from around her ankle.
“Goodlady!”
“Demion!” she called.
She followed his voice, flying faster as it grew louder. Demion was shouting, remonstrating with a soldier, not Alanrys. He mustn’t. Alanrys was dangerous, Alanrys...
Reality quivered against her, the membranes of being struck like a drum. She was readmitted, stumbling onto the cobbles.
Warmth returned, the fierce heat of burning buildings. The screams were loud once more, but few in number. Dracons croaked rather than roared. Someone was sobbing close by. She looked around her feet. There was no one there. And then there was. Tyn Lydar appeared. Tyn Lorl too, and Tyn Elly. The whites of Tyn Elly’s eyes were blood red. The collars of both female Tyn glowed dull orange, the scarves they wore around them gone to ash. The stink of burnt flesh came off them. Tyn Lorl lay upon the ground and did not move.
“Dead,” said Tyn Lydar. “Dead, dead, dead.” She stared accusingly at Katriona. “One less of those who are too few to begin with.”
“Katriona!” called Demion. “I came as quickly as I could.” He took her upper arms in his hands. “What happened?”
“The... the workers. A riot. It was the concessions I gave to the Tyn, but I think there was someone...” She pulled away from him. She looked over the fallen. The wounded cradled the dead. There were body parts strewn across the ground, and blood, black slicks of it glinting in the light of her burning factories.
There.
She pulled from Demion’s grip, ran to where the demagogue lay fallen. A bullet had taken his shoulder, leaving a bloody mess in its place. The parallel claw-strokes of a dracon had opened his belly. One hand was draped on this wound, fingers in the flow of blood pulsing from it. He lay in a lake of his own fluids. Incredibly, he was still alive. Demion was at her shoulder.
“Kuh... Kuk... Kuh...”
She lifted his head. His blood soaked warmly through her sleeve. “Do not die! Please. Stay with us here. Do not let your spirit go. If you remain, I will do my best to see your demands are met. I did not know, I swear I did not know.”
He mouthed something, she leaned in closer.
“Only because you chose not to
know.” His voice was a breath, barely audible.
Something wriggled against her ear. She jerked back.
The flesh of the man’s face writhed as if infested with worms. His head snapped from side to side and he cried out.
“Hold on!” she cried. “Please! Someone help!” But people sat in the gore of their fellows, and none came to her. When she looked back to the man, she gasped with shock.
Holdean Morthrock was in her arms.
“Holdean!” Demion’s exclamation was as explosive as a gunshot.
Holdean smiled at Katriona viciously. Blood welled from the corner of his mouth. “You got what you deserved.” He coughed. A flood of dark fluid rose from his lips. The bleeding from the claw mark to his chest was easing.
“Why did you do it?” she said. “How?”
He held a palsied finger to his bloody lips, and died.
Katriona turned questioningly to her husband. He stared back at her, uncomprehending. He pulled her to her feet.
Reptilian croaks and rattles broke the eerie calm. The dragoons were returning. Their sergeants and lieutenants barked orders. The reptiles were hard to control with air so heavily laden with blood. A soldier rode past, wrestling with the reins of his dracon. His features contorted with the effort.
One dracon lay dead, scales opened by industrial knives. A soldier limped past, supported by two of his colleagues. One of them stared ahead, face white, mouth hanging open. His eyes were as dead and flat as those of the survivors of the massacre. A trooper on foot fought his mount, attempting to close the muzzling plates of its chamfron. Red jaws snapped at his face.
A woman’s wail cut across the street, rising, falling.
Etwen was being led across the square in chains. Two of Alanrys’s men had him by the shoulders, their dracons being led by two more behind them.
Etwen stared Katriona dead in the eye. “Our conditions are poor. Giving the Tyn that treatment, it made them angry.”
“Hold a moment!” said Demion as the soldiers made to drag him on. “Why was Goodman Holdean agitating you?”
“Holdean?” said Etwen.
“The demagogue,” said Katriona.
Etwen looked blank.
The Iron Ship Page 44