Some beggar in a filthy coat was skulking along after them. Why? They were going to hell. They had already arrived.
“Bastards,” sobbed the man behind her.
“Shush!” Condine snarled furiously at him.
The man in front frowned over his shoulder. “Both o’ you shush.”
Colton turned away from the blubbing, whining pair of ’em, shaking his head. There was the trouble with rich folk, they’d no idea how to cope with hardship. No practice. He scratched at the sore skin under the shackles. Home-made they were, with some rough edges, prone to chafe. But Colton was used to things chafing.
He hadn’t wanted to be a guard. But they’d been offering a coat. Plus meals, even if they were bad ones, and pay, even if it was shit. And by then, what choice did he have? He’d have been a fucking guard dog if they’d offered a kennel. Principles are fine, but only once you’ve got a roof.
They passed three hunched shapes on the ground. Red jackets ripped, stained dark. Soldiers. If the army couldn’t stop this madness, what hope for the rest of them?
Always thought he’d be a weaver, like his old man. There’d been these golden years, just after Curnsbick patented his spinning engine, when yarn came spooling out of the new manufactories so cheap they were giving it away, and weavers were suddenly in high demand. Dressed like lords, they’d been, and walking with a swagger. And, aye, the spinners had faced some lean times, poor bastards, but that was their problem.
Then, around the time Colton finished his apprenticeship, along came Masrud’s weaving engine, and in the length of three summers, the weavers got the way the spinners had before them, which was to say thin. Only made it worse that a lot o’ the spinners had turned their hands to weaving, since that was where the money was, and there was no money there no more.
So Colton was out o’ work. Came to Valbeck, where everyone said there was always work, but everyone had the same idea. So he’d become a guard. Folk looked at him like that was treachery. But he’d needed the coat. He’d needed the meals. And now he was shackled to a chain along with a load of rich bastards. In a cruel joke, they’d even stolen his coat. Hardly seemed fair. But then ask the spinners about fair.
A dog was barking as they shambled up onto the bridge. Frisking maddened around a ruined wagon a bunch of boys were stealing the crates from, barking at no one, barking at everyone. That woman was still sobbing just behind him. No idea how to cope with hardship, the rich. No practice. They’d get some practice now, he reckoned.
“Wait,” said the Breaker in charge o’ the chain, and the column staggered to a halt on the bridge. Strange thing was, Colton knew him. Lock was his name, he thought. He’d been a weaver, way back when. Remembered him and Colton’s old man laughing together at a meeting o’ the guild, before his old man died and the guild got broke up. He was a grim-looking bastard now. But a lot of weavers were. Mostly on account of Masrud’s weaving engine.
Lock walked to the parapet and frowned down at the water.
Filthy water, full of foam and rubbish, streaked with glistening oil. He’d stood here often. This very spot. Considering the waters. After his wife died. Hard to imagine, in this hot summer, how bitter that winter had been.
Maybe it was the cold done it, or the hunger, or the grip, or maybe it was just the hope bled out of her. Got so she just couldn’t be warmed. Got sicker and sicker and then she never woke. His son followed two nights after, eight years old. His daughter was last to go, just before the thaw. He couldn’t remember what they’d been like, really. Couldn’t remember ’em living. But he remembered ’em dead. He’d slept next door to ’em a few nights, while the ground softened. A few last nights together.
He remembered the burying. One grave, and he’d been lucky to get it, there were so many going in the ground. His wife on the bottom, the children on top, like she was holding ’em, maybe. He’d looked down, and thought they were the lucky ones. Wished he was with ’em. He hadn’t cried. He didn’t know how. The gravedigger had put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You should come to a meeting. Hear the Weaver speak.”
He remembered looking over and seeing some rich folk walking past, laughing. Not laughing at him and his sorrows. Not even noticing ’em. Like they lived in a different world from him and his.
They didn’t now.
He turned to look at ’em.
A few men bleeding and a few women blubbing but Lock felt no pity. Didn’t feel anything. Hadn’t felt anything for a long time.
“What are you doing?” one of them asked. The man with the bloody mouth. “I demand to know what—”
“Shut up!” shrieked the girl with the ripped dress and the red cheeks. “Shut your fucking hole, you fucker!”
Lock looked at the heavy chain. No way any of ’em were swimming shackled to that. All he had to do was push the first couple in and the lot would be dragged after, and down to the bottom of the river, and that’d be that.
He knew it wouldn’t be justice.
But he wondered if it might be close enough.
Two men chased another past with sticks, laughing as they hit him, sent him stumbling, dragged him back up, hit him again. There was some beggar, crouching in a doorway at the foot of the bridge, watching Lock with bright eyes.
The old Breaker who led the column looked right at her and Savine edged away around the corner, huddling into her stinking coat.
She dared not go up onto the bridge, where she would be hemmed in and helpless. She had only followed the prisoners because she hardly knew what else to do. At least with them ahead, it felt as if she was not quite alone. But she could not help them. They could not help her. There was no help for anyone.
Her body wanted desperately to run, every muscle aching with tension, but there was nowhere to run to. All she could do was slink down streets scattered with torn papers, with upended wagons, slaughtered horses, broken machinery, sword clutched under her fetid rag of a coat, casting about for somewhere to hide. Some hole where she could reason out what had happened, and some way to escape it. Some place the madness had not reached. But soon enough she realised it was everywhere. Spread like sickness. Like wildfire. The whole city had lost its reason. The whole world.
She flinched at a woman’s scream, quickly muffled. Saw bodies moving in an alley, someone forced into a gutter, kicking legs, one stockinged foot, one scuffed shoe. “Help me! Help me!”
She could have done something. She had a sword. But instead she hurried on, the wild shrieks quickly lost in the shouts, the crashes, the barking of dogs. She heard a creaking and glanced up, recoiled against the wall. A body swung from a gib on the side of a building. A well-dressed body, hands tied, grey hair in wild disarray. Some mill owner? Some engineer? Some acquaintance of hers, who she had laughed with at some function?
She hobbled on, eyes fixed on the ground as it turned from new paving, to old cobbles, to straw-scattered dirt, to rutted mud. Narrower streets, further from the river, away from the manufactories. The buildings closed in until she crept down stinking man-made gullies paved only with the slops from the cellars, mean windows down by her boots, wretched garments flapping overhead like bunches of mad flags, little patches of the street made into pens where pigs honked and squealed and burrowed in the rubbish.
A murk even more hellish than usual had descended on the city as the sun sank and smoke from burning buildings billowed into the streets. Shapes loomed and vanished, phantoms in the soupy gloom. Savine was utterly lost. Valbeck was become a maze of horrors from which there was no escape. Could this be the same world as the one in which she presided over meetings of the Solar Society, changing lives with a flick of her fan?
Suddenly people were scattering like a shoal of fish, squealing in terror. She had no idea what they were running from but the panic was more contagious than the plague and she fled, fled mindlessly to nowhere, snatched breath sharp in her raw throat, rotten coat flapping at her skinned knees. She saw a man duck into an alleyway and followed, nearly ran s
traight into him as he spun about, a broken-off chair leg in his hand.
“Get back!” His face was so deranged, he hardly looked human. He shoved her and she fell, biting her tongue, sprawling in the street, nearly cutting herself on her sword as she rolled in the gutter. Someone kicked her in the side as they ran past, tumbled over her. She scrambled up, limping on, wincing at new bruises.
Could it have been only that morning she swapped small talk at Mistress Vallimir’s overdecorated breakfast table? Such a fragrant tea, who is the importer? Could it have been only an hour ago she had mused on the price of children with the colonel? Her lovely new sword-belt, such craftsmanship! Now the colonel and his wife were more than likely murdered and Savine dan Glokta was a memory. An unlikely story she once heard.
If fate let her live through this nightmare, she would be better. She would be the good person she had always pretended to be. No longer a gambler. No longer an ambitious snake. If fate would only let her live. Soon enough, she realised she was muttering it to herself with every whimpering breath.
“Let me live… let me live… let me live…”
Like a poem. Like a prayer. She used to laugh when Zuri spoke of God. How could someone so clever believe something so silly? Now she tried to believe herself. Wished she could believe.
“Let me live…”
She limped into a square of buckled cobbles, a grand building burning at one end. Fire spouted behind black columns, ash fluttering down against the bloody sunset. An old statue of Harod the Great stood in the centre. Figures were gathered around the pedestal, beating at the legs with hammers. Others had tied ropes about its shoulders, straining to drag it down. A gleeful crowd watched, torches in their hands, screeching with joy and fury, swearing in rough voices. Music was playing, a pipe and a fiddle tooting and sawing, a woman crazily dancing, ragged skirts and ragged hair whirling. And a man. A naked, fat man lumbering about. An air of mad carnival.
Savine stood staring, beyond desperate, beyond exhausted. She was filthy as a pig. She was thirsty as a dog. She almost wanted to laugh. She almost wanted to cry. She almost wanted to join the dancers, and give up. She sagged against a wall, trying to breathe. Trying to think. But that mad music left no room for it.
Figures, black against the fires, shimmering with their heat. A tall man in a tall hat, pointing, screaming.
“Rip it down!” bellowed Sparks.
He was a fucking king, and this square was his kingdom, and he’d suffer no other king within its borders. “Rip it down!”
Might be he’d get a new statue up there in due course. A statue of him, wearing the tall hat he’d just stolen that made him look quite the fine article.
Sparks was scared of nothing. The more he said it, to everyone else and to himself, the more true it became. Acres had been scared of everything. Had hidden crying in the cupboard when men came to visit his mother. Sparks hated that weak little cringing bastard, scared of everything. So he’d shrugged him off like a snake sheds its skin. Sparks was scared of nothing.
He grinned at the dancers, waddling and lurching, variously stripped, whipped and humiliated. “Might be we should hang one o’ these bastards!” He shouted it louder’n ever, so everyone could see nothing scared him. “Teach the others a lesson.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Judge?” asked Framer.
Sparks swallowed. He was scared of nothing, but Judge was something else… not only mad herself, but she had a way of turning other people mad. Like she was a match, and they were the kindling. And you never knew quite what she’d think. Might love what he’d done with the square. Might find it tasteless. Those black eyes of hers might slide towards him, pointed tip of her tongue showing between her teeth. “Ain’t this all a bit fucking tasteless, Sparks?” she’d say, and everyone would be looking at him, and his mouth would get dry and his knees all trembly, like Acres’ used to, when he hid in the cupboard.
“You what?” he screamed. Like always, the fear made him angry. He grabbed Framer by his threadbare jacket. The idiot lacked even the presence o’ mind to steal better clothes from one of the gentleman callers. “I’m the fucking boss here, idiot! This is my fucking square, understand?”
“All right, all right, it’s your square.”
“That’s right! I’ll burn what I please!” Sparks strutted up the heap of papers to the top of the pyre, threw his arm around the bastard they’d tied to the stake in the middle of it. “I’ll burn who I please.” And he lifted his torch high, and the fire in the darkness made him feel brave again. “I’m the king o’ this fucking square! You understand?”
And he scrubbed the bastard’s hanging head with his hand and then, ’cause his hair was all full of wine and blood, had to wipe it on his bloody shirt front. Then he hopped down, and grabbed the bottle out of Framer’s hand, and took a pull. The spirits helped him feel brave. Helped him feel like Acres was far away, and the cupboard, too, and Judge even.
He grinned around at his handiwork. Hadn’t decided whether to burn that bastard yet. He’d been thinking not, but as night came on, he started to reckon a man on fire might make a nice centrepiece.
“Help me…” whimpered Alinghan.
But there was no one to help him. Everyone had gone mad, all mad. Smiles full of glistening teeth. Eyes full of pitiless fire. They were like devils. They were devils.
When they dragged him from his office, he had been sure the city watch would come. When he was tied to the stake, he had no doubt the Inquisition would arrive to deliver him. As darkness fell and the great riot became an orgy of destruction, he had still hoped that soldiers would tramp into the square and put an end to it.
But no one had come, and a great heap of legal papers, and engineers’ drawings, and official pronouncements, and lewd etchings, and broken furniture from the offices around the square had built up to his thighs.
A pyre.
He did not suppose they would actually light it. They could not possibly mean to light it. Could they?
He had wondered if it was a questionable neighbourhood in which to lease an office. But to be taken seriously, an engineer needs an office, and the rents in the better parts of Valbeck were out of all compass. They had said the Breakers were entirely under control. Had been taught harsh lessons. That the Burners were just a rumour spread by pessimistic moaners intent on talking down the city. They had pointed out the brand-new and thoroughly modern branch of Valint and Balk, and talked of gentrification.
Now flames spurted from the windows of the brand-new and thoroughly modern branch of Valint and Balk, ash and flaming promissory notes drifting down across the square, and the Burners had vomited forth from the shadows, in person, a demented legion, capering about him with their torches and their lamps.
Someone slapped him across the face, laughing, laughing. Why did they hate him? He had made the world better. More efficient. Countless small improvements to the machinery and operating practices at several manufactories. He had been steadily building a name for himself as a diligent worker. Why did they hate him?
“What a day!” someone was screaming. “The Great Change, come at last!”
He caught a choking waft of smoke, stared desperately about to see if his pyre had caught light, but no. So many bonfires, glimmering through the desperate tears in his eyes.
“Help me…” he muttered, to no one. All it would take was a stray torch. A stray burning paper on the capricious breeze. A stray spark. And the longer this went on, the wilder they became, the more likely his destruction.
A woman ripped down her dress and another poured wine over her bared breasts and a man shoved his face between them like a pig into a trough, all shrieking with desperate laughter, as if the world would end tomorrow. Perhaps it had ended already. The fiddle-player capered past, sawing discordant music, broken strings dangling from the neck of his instrument.
Alinghan closed his eyes. It was like some story of the Fall of Aulcus, chaos and debauchery on the streets. He had always thought of
civilisation as a machine, cast from rigid iron, everything riveted in its proper place. Now he saw it was a fabric gauzy as a bride’s veil. A tissue everyone agrees to leave in place, but one that can be ripped away in an instant. And hell lurks just beneath.
“Stack it up, you bastards!” roared the one they called Sparks, the chief Burner, the chief demon, the temporary Glustrod of this square, and men and women flung more papers in Alinghan’s face, and they fluttered and curled and whirled on the hot breeze.
“Help me…” he whispered, to no one.
Of course they would come. The city watch. The Inquisition. The soldiers. Someone would come. How could they not?
But Alinghan was forced to concede, as he looked down in horror at the steadily growing heaps of paper about his legs, that they might come too late for him.
“The Great Change!” someone shrieked, cackling with mad delight. “What a day!”
“What a day!” bellowed that bastard with the squint. Mally could never remember his name. Nasty little bastard, she’d always thought. The sort that’s always peering in at windows, looking for something they can snatch.
“We’re fucking free!” he shrieked.
Mally wanted to be free. Who doesn’t? In principle. It’s a pretty dream, to go running through the flower garden with your hair down. But she didn’t want to be free of getting paid. She’d tried that, and it hurt like you wouldn’t believe. That’s how she’d ended up whoring in the first place. No one had forced her to it, exactly. It was just that a choice between whoring and hunger weren’t no choice at all.
They’d broken down the door o’ the tapping house and dragged out the gentleman callers by the feet, made ’em dance for everyone’s amusement in the glare of the burning bank, dressed, or undressed, however they’d been at that moment. One portly old gent shuffled about the heap of papers with his hat still on but his trousers around his ankles. Another fellow, a lawyer, she thought, that one who was always going on about charity and liked to cover his face while he was having his cock sucked, was naked as a babe, whip marks on his hairy back glistening in the firelight.
A Little Hatred Page 26