Discontent wasn’t confined to the common man, either. Last night I’d heard Credola Nara arguing with her nephew Pedrag, the Craft-Guilder, outside their apartments; a rare sight for family members to allow such a display in public. Tain had insisted that Councilors, like everyone else who had housing in the upper city, billet residents from the lower city after the evacuation, and it was causing tantrums. Jov was moving all his essential proofing supplies and research materials out of our apartments and into the Manor. Bank staff had been released from city duty for the present to deal with all of the requests to store valuables; none of the wealthy upper-city families wanted to share their homes, let alone their portable wealth, with strangers.
Down toward the lake I passed a ration station, where several arguments had broken out in the line.
“This is half the size it was a week ago,” someone complained, causing a ripple of anger in the still-waiting crowd.
“Reduced again?”
“I heard more food’s gone missing,” a woman near the back muttered, and I ducked my head and moved swiftly, hoping to go by unnoticed. We had exhausted all the vegetables; rations had become blander and less satisfying. I couldn’t be the only one sick of thin fish broth and millet porridge. Things would only escalate as our supplies of the last essentials dwindled.
If the streets were teeming, the bridges were worse. People had been assigned to direct traffic on Trickster’s to cope with the congestion. Strange shapes hung from the sides of the Finger and below the bridge; drawing closer they became people, suspended in slings on great ropes. Engineers, examining the structure for potential weaknesses that could be exploited. There were no series of smaller supports that could be attacked as with the much smaller Bell’s, which had been built only for lighter pedestrian weight. Looking up at the beautiful, immense white stone joining the two halves of the city, it seemed both an impossible task and a criminal one.
I checked in with Eliska, who directed an orchestra of papers and babbling Guild members outside the foot of the Finger. She took me through the day’s progress on the new fortifications. “If we run out of time, or we can’t take the bridge down, or if”—she glanced over her shoulder, dropping her voice—“if the Council were to change its mind about destroying it, we could hold the bridge from the Finger, at least for a while.”
Like spirits rising from the dead, the remnants of the old fortifications were being rebuilt. The two wedge-shaped walls, which spread from either side of the tower like stone wings, had been reinforced and freshly equipped with ledges and crenellations for archers. The old murder holes in the Finger itself had been cleaned out. The layout of the west side of the lake and the buildings on the opposite side left limited space for the rebels to set up catapults. They would have to set them within the range of the Finger’s archers. All our ships, even small fishing boats, were anchored or moored on the eastern shore, clumped together.
“This place was built for defense,” Eliska said, almost grudgingly. “The bridge is beautiful, but you can see how it used to form a formidable barrier. See there, how the wall would have stretched along?”
I nodded. Our ancestors must have feared something, that they had built this city under no apparent threat to withstand an attack that had never come.
And now it had finally come, centuries later.
I left Eliska to her work. She didn’t seem too optimistic about, or committed to, taking the Finger down. Some part of me hoped it would not come to surrendering half the city. Perhaps word had reached Aven from some source. Tain would not attempt any other messengers; the gruesome slaying of the originals had scarred him. It was a continuing source of tension between my brother and him, and the cause of several arguments in Council, where he still pretended we did not know what had happened to the messengers—if word got out about the runners’ desecration, there would be no persuading the city residents that the rebels had a just cause. But perhaps help might still arrive from one of our allies, assuming we had any.
We were back to not knowing who to trust. Tain had wanted to confront the rest of the Council. But we had no time to properly investigate who had known what, and our city’s defense couldn’t tolerate half its leadership suddenly vanishing. I saw what it cost Tain to leash his immense fury, and I knew like mine it was fueled as much by guilt as by judgment of others. No matter what, the priority had to be to find a way to avoid direct fighting with the rebels. Still, he was making no secret of his views that the countryfolk might have had good reason for rebellion, and tensions ran high within the Council. After all, though our own behavior had caused this, hanging over us was the near certainty that the first act of the rebellion had been to take control of the estates, and possibly the other cities. We were asking people to put aside the possible slaughter of members of their family.
It was a conflict I felt, too. Mother, Alozia, all our other cousins … Jovan might be good at burying the parts of himself that hurt too much, but I was not so practiced. I could forget, most of the time, distracted by our own danger, but then everyday occurrences reminded me of Mother without warning: a teapot, a familiar smell, an item of clothing. Our relationship had been difficult, but at least before there had been a hope things might one day be different. The memory of her last message, asking me to visit her on the estate, kept me up at night wondering—what if I had gone?
I walked the length of the shore, trying to clear my head. At the south end, things were further progressed. Every remaining oku in the city seemed to be herded on the grass there, a placid, shaggy little army of beasts, chewing grass and conversing comfortably with their distinctive low hoots. There were even some graspads there, picketed farther up on the shore, though I’d no idea how they were expected to help. Smaller than oku, with paws rather than hooves and long, slender necks, they were less tractable, almost inedible, unable or unwilling to pull carts: less useful than oku in every way. Farmers kept them because the omnivorous creatures ate crop-destroying madges and scatterburr, a particularly virulent species of weed toxic to other animals. You could ride them, if you weren’t too heavy or traveling too far, but I’d never seen one harnessed to pull a load.
A round man carrying a box of bottles almost bumped into me on the path. He swore, clutching at his wobbling load, and I helped him steady it. “Thank you,” he mumbled. “If these bottles cracked…” I looked closer and recognized the style of bottle Jov and Etan frequently used: glass with a wax-lined interior, for storing acids.
“For the mortar?”
He nodded. “We’re going to attempt it today. But this stuff is hard to make, and they’d have my hide if I dropped it.”
“If you’d dropped it on us, that’d be the least of our worries.” Etan had once spilled two heavily diluted drops on his leg and left holes scarred in his flesh. “When are you planning on starting?”
He shrugged. “Later this morning, Credola, that’s all I know.”
I checked the sky. If I left now to meet Tain and Jov, there would be time to return to see the attempt. It was something that ought to be witnessed.
“Credola Kalina!”
Suppressing my instinctive flinch, I forced a smile. “Oh! Lord Ectar, you gave me quite a shock.” I kept walking, slowly enough for him to join me and for me to satisfy politeness, but hopefully conveying an air of urgency.