The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [83]
Another rueful smile. “We both know that this is never going to go to trial. Where are your men? Beckett and that Vie-Gorgon pissant.”
“They’re at the Castle already,” Skinner said. “Gathering evidence.”
Wolfgang glanced over Skinner’s should into the coach. “Well. Why did they take the coachman?”
Skinner only smiled.
Twenty-Seven: The Disaster at Vlytze Square
The weather of First Winter in Trowth often vacillated between damp, raw, chilly days and damp, raw, considerably warmer days, unlike Second Winter, which simply plunged the city into a deep freeze for two months. After the psychestorm’s cold front had broken up in the treacherous air-currents above the Trowth sea-wall, the rain came in from the south.
A heavy, steady downpour fell from black clouds that were mercifully lacking in the terrible psychological effects that came with the green clouds from the north. The rain muted the fires in Mudside, enabling the Committee for Public Safety to look out at the plain of muddy ash and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. The afternoon following the raid, Edgar Wyndham-Vie would announce to a small congregation of umbrella-clutching gentlemen victory over The Sharpsie Threat.
The Committee for Public Safety had, in fact, spoken too soon. Based on the information gathered from the raid at Mudside, they simply presumed that they had vastly overestimated the number of sharpsies living in Trowth. This was not an unreasonable assumption, since sharpsies rarely paid their taxes and humans could neither distinguish one sharpsie from another by sight, nor recognize their guttural native names. Moreover, the fires that the gendarmes had started served to obscure the wooden tunnels that had sunk into the mud by the riverside. Nearly two thousand sharpsies had fled through those tunnels, and it would eventually become clear that those who remained had allowed themselves to be arrested on purpose, to give their fellows time to escape.
After Wyndham-Vie’s speech, which would be lambasted in the broadsheets for months to come, but before night had fully fallen on the city, a massive explosion rocked Old Bank. The method and elements of that explosion would never fully be determined, because immediately following it a wave of sharpsies boiled up from the Arcadium and seized the twelve square city blocks at the top of Old Bank hill.
Some had brought barricades with them, perhaps old pieces of their homes. Others raided offices, shops, and houses on the hill for desks, chairs, tables, bookcases, anything that could be piled up in the streets, choking off the narrow lanes and alleys that made up the neighborhood. They carried weapons; sometimes they used the tools of their trades: hammers occasionally, but usually meat cleavers and long butcher’s knives. Others had improvised weapons: broken chair legs, long coils of rope with iron hooks or pulleys on the ends, sometimes even the stone downspouts that the Crabtree-Daiors used for their gutters.
The barricades were constructed and manned by sharpsies that hurled rocks from their slings and bottles that they’d filled with phlogiston at any authority foolish enough to approach; meanwhile, a smaller but still sizable group of sharpsies staged raids on the three Vaults where their fellows were being held. The few Lobstermen that had been set as guards were caught unawares by the suddenness and size of the attack, and despite their strength and speed, they were rapidly overwhelmed by the sharpsies, who now demonstrated a speed and agility, especially in close-quarters, that seemed to catch everyone unprepared.
It took little more than an hour for the sharpsies to take control of the top of the hill, and murder anyone that even looked like a gendarme or a pressganger. It did not take much longer for them to break out their fellows and arm them.
The gendarmerie in neighboring New Bank and North Ferry responded fairly quickly. They gathered their members together, a few thousand strong all told, and