The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [39]
The pressgangs raided Red Lanes even before news about the attack in River Village had hit the broadsheets. Men with boiled-leather breastplates and collars, heavy cudgels, and shriek-grenades bullied their way into the back rooms of every shop and restaurant. They found sharpsies working as butchers’ assistants and cooks, or just engaging in the untrained labor of carting inventory around. The sharpsies were dragged into the street, beaten and chained, and immediately packed off to the ironclad warships bound for Gorcia.
If a shop owner was insistent about protecting his privacy, the pressgangers would through down their shriekgrenades; a special tympanum, treated with ionized flux, would begin to reverberate with a deafeningly loud, high-pitched wail, combined with a deep, stomach-churning moan. The dissonance between the two sounds was enough to bring the average person to his knees, gasping for breath and vomiting on the floor. The pressgangers, with the specially-treated counter-tympanum in their helmets, were immune. While shopkeeps and customers curled up on the ground in agony, the pressgangs kicked in doors and tore up floorboards.
If a man had employed sharpsies illegally in Red Lanes, the pressgangs found him that day. If he had never done so, the pressgangs rarely apologized for destroying his shop and making him and his customers bleed from the ears.
The work crews in New Bank, where the Family architects had been waging a particularly bitter pitched battle about flying buttresses, and which hired numerous sharpsie day-laborers for unskilled positions, were unscathed by the pressgangs.
All told, the pressgangs managed to fill the holds of two ironclads. Sharpsie men and women—pressgangers didn’t know how to tell the difference, and wouldn’t have bothered to if they did—were chained to each other and then to the floor of the ship. The ironclads would leave for Gorcia with new fodder for the Ettercap War that afternoon.
Thirteen: Valentine Returns
The Vie-Gorgons of Comstock Street are not quite the Vie-Gorgons of Raithower Street, though a certain amount of confusion is understandable. The Vie-Gorgons of Raithower Street, the branch of the family headed by the venerable patriarch James Gordon Vie-Gorgon, were the most affluent Family in all of Trowth. James had wisely chosen to secure a monopoly on the internal railroads of the nation, rather than enjoying control over the phlogiston importation that was disrupted by the ettercap war like the unfortunate Gorgon-Vies. The Raithower Vie-Gorgons were astonishingly wealthy, and had the strongest claim to the Imperial throne after William III Gorgon-Vie, who currently held it. They were known to be ruthless business dealers, and severe but sophisticated dressers. The Raithower Vie-Gorgons held parties only occasionally, and attended them even more rarely, preferring to spend their time deeply embroiled in the intricacies of controlling their vast wealth.
The Comstock Street Vie-Gorgons were third-cousins to the Raithower Vie-Gorgons, and stood on the other side of a relatively peaceable schism. Ever since their mutual great great-grandfather, old Raithower himself, after whom house, street, and plaza were all named, determined that his grandson Albrecht Vie-Gorgon, son of the same Emilio Vie-Gorgon that started off the Architecture War, should receive the bulk of the Vie-Gorgon business interests, while Albrecht’s cousin (by coincidence, also named Albrecht) should inherit only an annual stipend. When grandfather Raithower and then father Emilio died, the first Albrecht took his fortune and moved from Raithower Plaza to Rowan Street, which was promptly renamed Raithower Street in honor of the old man.
The second Albrecht took his significantly less-sizable fortune to Comstock Street, which was not renamed in honor of anyone. The second Albrecht was a shrewd businessman, and managed to parlay his small stipend into near total-control of the print industry by the time his first grandchild was born. Roughly sixty percent of the broadsheets printed in