Kurbman turned back to the workers, his voice cracking. ‘We’ve a chance to make a better world, brothers! A better world, you understand? But we have to do it right.’
With a jerk on the chain, Resling and the rest were set marching again. Or stumbling, tottering, weeping and groaning, anyway, watched over by half a dozen sinewy men in workmen’s clothes, sticks in their dirty fists.
‘Bastards,’ he muttered to himself.
He was Karlric dan Resling, and he would see them all hanged.
They were dragged past the burning shell of a carriage. Rubbish scattered the street. Broken timbers, broken glass. He flinched as something burst from an upstairs window – a great desk, tumbling down and shattering, papers spilling across the cobbles.
Some men stood near it, watching. One ate an apple. Another laughed. A shrill, nervous kind of laughter.
They had burst onto the bridge. His office, that was, but he called it the bridge. He’d always loved a maritime metaphor. ‘Get out, damn you!’ Shouting always made them lower their eyes. ‘Get out!’ But not this time. He had not believed it! He still could not! He was the admiral! He was Karlric dan Resling!
They had dragged him from behind his desk. ‘Damn you!’ Dragged him across his own deck. The factory floor, that was, pelted with rubbish by his own employees, who were working with more vigour than they ever had before, destroying the machines he had hired them to operate! ‘Curse you all!’ After everything he had done for these men, for this city. They had manacled him to this damn chain, shackled to two dozen other helpless unfortunates like slaves in bloody Gurkhul. ‘How dare you?’
It was a motley group. The man up ahead with the torn coat Resling knew by sight. A lawyer, perhaps? Beside him was that idiot’s wife, what was his name? Sirisk? The girl they had just added to the chain looked more like a bloody maid than a lady. Her tear-streaked cheeks were pink as a farm girl’s. Where were they even being taken? There was no sense to it. There was no sense to any of it.
A woman with a gaudily painted face leaned from a window above, laughing, laughing, flinging great heaps of papers into the air. Accounts. Receipts. Deeds. Fluttering like demented confetti, coating the cobbles, swirls of elaborate calligraphy smudging in the filth.
It was more than a strike. More than a riot. It was not just his mill, or the mill next door. The streets were infected by revolution! It was everywhere. The world run mad.
What would his darling Seline have thought to see her beloved city brought to this? She who spent her evenings giving soup to the destitute. Feeding the bloody scroungers. Perhaps it was a good thing the grip had taken her in that bitter winter, in spite of all the money he lavished on doctors. For the best. Just as they had said at the graveside.
Down a side street, he saw men pushing over a wagon, its cargo of barrels bouncing across the cobbles.
‘These bastards!’ he snarled at the nearest guard. The nearest Breaker. The nearest traitor. The nearest animal. ‘I am Karlric dan Resling, and I’ll see you all—’
The man punched him. It was so utterly unexpected, he stumbled back and sat down hard in the road, nearly dragging the woman in front of him down, too. He sat in the dirt, astonished, blood bubbling from his nose. He had never been punched before. Never in his life. He felt, very strongly, that he never wanted to be again.
‘Get up,’ said the man.
Resling got up. There were tears in his eyes. What would his darling Seline think if she could see him now?
He was Karlric dan Resling. He was the admiral. Wasn’t he?
He wasn’t sure any more.
‘Bastards,’ whimpered the man beside her, but it was a plaintive little bleat now. Even so, it was tempting fate.
‘Stop it!’ Condine hissed at him through her tears. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’
Could it be worse, though? Men clattered past, snarling faces, clenched fists, sticks and axes. They shouted, whooped, animal noises that hardly sounded like words. One ducked towards her, snapped his teeth at her, and she cringed as they whirled past.
The tears were streaming down her face. They had been ever since the men kicked in the door of the tea shop where she had been spreading Savine dan Glokta’s gossip. They had not needed to kick it in. They could have opened it. Such a charming tinkle the bell always made.
Her father had always been so impatient when she cried. ‘Toughen up, girl.’ Furious, as though her tears were an unfair attack on him. Sometimes he had cuffed her around the head, but the blows seemed to have made her less tough, not more. Her husband had opted for a kind of benign neglect instead. The idea of his being interested enough to hit her was absurd. Being shackled to a chain was the most attention anyone had paid her in years.
The line of prisoners shambled past a great manufactory on fire, smoke roiling up into the darkening murk, a popping crash as a window shattered, showering glass, gouting flame, smouldering rubbish and laths and bits of slate tumbling into the street, and Condine held up a hand against the heat of it, drying the tears on her face as fast as she could shed them.
A workers’ uprising had formed the backdrop to one of her favourite books, Lost Among the Labourers, in which a beautiful mill-owner’s daughter is saved from a fire by one of her father’s roughest hands. The edges of the pages in the passage where she finally yields to him among the machinery had become quite dishevelled. Condine had always particularly enjoyed the description of his arms, so strong, so gentle.
There were strong arms here. Gentle, no. She saw men kicking wildly at the door of a shop. Others were dragging a carpet from a house. Her smarting, weeping eyes darted to yells, squeals, mad sounds. Petty horrors everywhere. No trace of romance in it.
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.