How Firm a Foundation (90 page)

“And where do you propose we go
to
?”

“I know a place. A place where we’ll be safe—or, at least, if we’re not safe there, we won’t be safe anywhere in Siddar City!”

“Then go!” Claitahn snapped. “Take your Grandmother and
go
. But I didn’t give up everything in Tellesberg just to let gutter trash and street scum drive me out of my home
here!
”

“Grandfather, they may be street
scum,” Byrk said as reasonably as he could, “but there are
hundreds
of them. You wouldn’t stand a chance of stopping them. All you’d manage to do is get yourself killed.”

“And if I choose—” Claitahn began, but for the first time since he’d been a passionate, adolescence-driven fifteen-year-old, Byrk cut him off in midsentence.

“And if you choose to stay here and get yourself killed, Grandmother
will stay
with
you! There’s no way she’ll run away and leave you … and neither will I, you stubborn, stiff-necked,
obstinate
—!”

He made himself stop and glared at his grandfather. Eyes of Raimahn brown locked with eyes of Raimahn brown, and after a brief, titanic moment, it was Claitahn’s which fell.

“I.…”

“Grandfather, I
understand
.” Byrk reached out again, resting his hands on Claitahn’s
shoulders. “You’ve never run from anything in your life, and giving ground before a mob comes hard. I know that. But I don’t want to see you die, and I know you don’t want to see Grandmother die, so,
please,
can we get out of here, you stubborn old … gentleman?”

Claitahn stared at him for a moment, then surprised himself with a harsh laugh. He put his right hand over the younger, stronger hand
resting on his left shoulder, just for a moment. Then he nodded sharply.

“My legs aren’t as young as they used to be,” he said. “So if we’re going to be running away, what say we see if we can’t get a good head start?”

*   *   *

Samyl Naigail gave a yell of delight as he used the smoldering slow match to light the rag stuffed into the neck of the bottle of lamp oil and threw the incendiary
through the display window. Glass shattered, and a moment later he smelled smoke and saw the spreading pool of fire flickering in the depths of the shop. Racks of dry goods and bolts of cloth began to smolder, taking flame quickly, and Naigail’s eyes glowed.

This was better even than bedding a woman! There was a
power—
a wild fierce freedom—in finally freeing the anger which had boiled inside
him for so long. Smoke rose from other shopfronts all around him as the mob rampaged through the Charisian Quarter, torching everything in sight. Fortunately, the wind was out of the northwest. It would blow the wind and cinders away from the central part of the city, and if they happened to set fire to the harborside tenements where the filthy Charisians lived like so many spider-rats in a city garbage
dump, so much the better!

He turned away from the burning shop, reaching into his satchel, and heard a shrill scream. He looked up just in time to see three or four more young men—his age or a little older—run down a girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. They trapped her against the wall of a building, and she cowered back against it, head darting around frantically, looking for any
escape. Then she made a desperate dash for an alley mouth, but one of her pursuers caught up with her first. She cried out again, in mingled terror and pain as he wrapped his hand in her hair and jerked her off her feet. Naigail heard her crying out—begging, pleading, imploring anyone to help her—and he smiled. He watched them dragging her by the hair down the alley where the little Charisian bitch
had thought she might find safety, and then he drew another bottle from his satchel, lit the rag, and threw it through another shop window.

*   *   *

“Behind me—
now!
” Sailys Trahskhat snapped.

Myrahm Trahskhat looked up, then gasped and stumbled back behind her husband. She clutched three-year-old Sindai, their youngest in her arms, while seven-year-old Pawal clung to her skirts, their eyes
huge with terror as the bedlam thundered around them. Thirteen-year-old Mahrtyn pushed himself in front of her, behind her father, his face white and frightened but determined. Behind the boy, Myrahm darted her head around, looking for any escape, but with two small children, outdistancing pursuit was out of the question.

Trahskhat knew exactly what was going through his wife’s mind, and his
own terror was as deep as her own. Not for himself, but for her and the children. Only he couldn’t let that terror paralyze him, and he glared at the three men sauntering arrogantly towards them. He knew two of them—longshoremen, like himself, but definitely not Charisians, and both of them with knives thrust through their belts. The third was a stranger, but he carried a sword and there was a cruel,
eager glitter in his eyes.

“Stay with your mother, Mahrtyn,” he said quietly, his voice iron with command, never taking his own eyes from the other men. “Whatever else happens, look after your mother and the babies.”

“Well, well, well,” the sword-armed man called mockingly. “What
do
we have here?”

“Pretty wife you’ve got there, Trahskhat,” one of the longshoremen said, reaching down and rubbing
his crotch suggestively while his fellow leered and drew the foot-long knife from his belt, testing its edge with a gloating thumb. “Gonna enjoy showing her a really
good
time.”

Trahskhat’s face tightened, and he brought up the baseball bat. He’d had that bat for more years than he could remember. He’d broken plenty of others over the years, but never this one. It had always been his lucky bat,
and he’d brought it with him from Tellesberg when he left the Krakens behind with the rest of his heretical homeland.

Somehow, he didn’t feel lucky today.

“Ooooh! What’s he gonna do with the big bad baseball bat?” the sword-armed man taunted in a high-pitched falsetto. He raised his own weapon, smoky light gleaming on its point. “Come on, baseball man! Show us what you’ve got.”

“Sailys?” Myrahm’s
voice was frightened, and he heard his younger children weeping in terror. But he never took his eyes from the men in front of him.

“Now!”
the swordsman shouted, and the hunting pack charged.

Sailys Trahskhat had a lifetime professional batting average of .302. He’d always been a strong man, but not especially fast, so he’d been forced to hit for power rather than rely on speed on the bases.
Over the years, he’d developed rather amazing bat speed, and the longshoreman with the drawn knife made the mistake of getting a little in front of the others.

The same bat which had hit twenty-three home runs in Sailys Trahskhat’s last season with the Tellesberg Krakens hit him squarely in the forehead with a terrible crunching, crushing,
squashing
sound. He didn’t even scream; he simply flew
backward, knife spinning away through the air, blood spraying from his shattered forehead, and Trahskhat stepped to his left.

The baseball bat slashed over and around in a flat, vicious figure-eight. The other longshoreman saw it coming. His eyes flared with sudden panic as his right hand fumbled frantically at the hilt of his knife and the other arm rose to fend off the blow. But he was too
slow, and the panic in his eyes disappeared as they went unfocused and forever blank as the end of the bat caved in his right temple with contemptuous ease.

That quickly, that suddenly, Trahskhat found himself facing only one opponent, and the swordsman looked down at the two corpses sprawled untidily in the street. His eyes darted back up to Trahskhat and the blood-dripping bat poised in the
big Charisian’s powerful hands, and Trahskhat smiled at him.

“That’s what I’m going to do with the big bad baseball bat, you
bastard,
” he said, all the resentment and anger he’d felt since coming to Siddar City roaring up inside him with his terror for his family’s safety. “You want a piece of me? A piece of my
family
? You bring it on, goddamn you!
You bring it on!
”

The swordsman stared at him,
then stepped back, retreating. But it was only a feint. The instant Trahskhat’s bat started to dip, the man threw himself forward again.

Yet he wasn’t the only one who’d been capable of feinting. As he came forward, the bat which had been waiting the entire time came up again, arcing from below belt level, catching his sword on the flat of the blade and flinging it to one side, then crunching
into the underside of his jaw. The swordsman screamed, teeth and blood flying. He dropped the sword, clutching at his shattered face with both hands as he stumbled the rest of the way forward, and Trahskhat stepped out of his path. The man lurched, starting to go to his knees, and that terrible baseball bat slammed into the back of his skull like the Rakurai of Langhorne.

He hit the pavement
in a puddle of blood, and Trahskhat looked down at him, breathing hard.

“Threaten
my
family, will you?” he hissed, and kicked the dead man in the ribs. Then he looked at his wife and children. “Are you all right?” he demanded.

Myrahm nodded mutely, her eyes huge, shaking with terror and reaction. Mahrtyn, he saw, had already pounced on the knife his first victim had lost, and if the foot of
steel shook in his hand, his eyes were grim and determined. Those eyes were shocked by what they’d just seen, but they met his father’s levelly, and Trahskhat’s heart filled with pride.

And then young Pawal, still clinging to his mother’s skirt with one hand, pointed with the other.

“Daddy,” he said, seven-year-old voice quivering with fear and yet reaching for some comforting familiarity in
a world which had gone insane. “Daddy, you broke your bat!”

*   *   *

“Come on!” Major Borys Sahdlyr barked. “We’re behind schedule already!”

“So what?” Kail Kaillyt shot back. He waved his sword at the smoke belching from burning shops and tenements, the motionless bodies littering the streets and sidewalks, and laughed drunkenly. “This is the most fun we’ve had in years! Give the lads a little
slack!”

Sahdlyr glared at him, but Kaillyt only looked back at him unrepentantly. The major’s second-in-command was intoxicated with violence and the release of long-held hatred, and in some ways that was worse than anything wine or whiskey might have produced.

Damn Father Saimyn!
Sahdlyr thought bitterly, even though he knew he shouldn’t. But still.…

He made himself draw a deep breath of smoky
air. As one of the handful of Inquisition Guardsmen who’d been smuggled into Siddar City as part of the planning for the Sword of Schueler, Sahdlyr had done his best to instill some sort of discipline into the volunteers Father Saimyn and Laiyan Bahzkai were recruiting. Unfortunately, his superiors had been too enthralled by Father Saimyn’s reports to listen to his own warnings that the loyal
sons of Mother Church were far more enthusiastic than organized … or experienced. It was one thing to smuggle in weapons; it was quite another to train civilians in their use. Even people like Kaillyt, who’d served as a member of the Capital Militia, had strictly limited training compared to their regular army counterparts.

Nor had it been possible for Sahdlyr to rectify those shortcomings. Actually
training
any large body of men required space and time, and it wasn’t something which could be done in secret in the middle of a Shan-wei-damned city. He’d done his best, but the unfortunate truth was that he’d been largely restricted to lecturing Father Saimyn’s “officers” on theory, and that was no substitute for hands-on time working with their weapons and their troops. He’d deeply envied his
fellows who’d been sent to less citified parts of the operation. Scattered around the estates of Temple Loyalists in the Republic’s central and western provinces, where farmers, foresters, miners, and rural craftsmen already resented the wealth of the eastern provinces’ urban populations,
they’d
been able to actually
drill
the men they were responsible for leading. They’d been able to put them
together and train them as
units,
accustomed to taking orders and obeying them.

Sahdlyr had warned Father Saimyn—and even Father Zohannes—that without the same opportunity, he and his subordinate commanders were unlikely to retain control of their units here in the capital when the day finally came. It wasn’t the men’s motivation he mistrusted. It wasn’t even their
willingness
to take orders;
it was their … reliability. They’d never been given the chance to acquire the habit of obeying their officers when the violence actually began.

But had Father Saimyn listened? Of course he hadn’t! And neither had Father Zohannes. Or Sahdlyr was confident neither of them had allowed it to color any of their reports to Archbishop Wyllym or the Grand Inquisitor, at any rate. And Father Saimyn was
probably—
probably
—right that it wasn’t going to matter in the end.

It had become apparent over the last few five-days that the government had started to realize, at least dimly, that trouble was brewing. They obviously hadn’t guessed how deep their danger truly was, however, or they’d have taken more precautions. True, Daryus Parkair’s decision to empty most of the Capital Militia’s arsenals
and send the weapons to be held under guard at Fort Raimyr, the main Army base north of the city, had deprived the insurgents of arms Father Saimyn had assumed would be available. But Fort Raimyr was fifteen miles from the capital and the Army was understrength at the moment. Despite a few belated troop movements, there couldn’t be more than five thousand men stationed at Raimyr, and they were peacetime
soldiers with a peacetime mentality. They’d need time to get themselves organized and move, and they’d be badly outnumbered if even two-thirds of the men Father Saimyn had promised would join the insurgency actually turned up.

There was time, Sahdlyr told himself, and so far the uprising’s sheer suddenness and ferocity were carrying everything before them, but it was messy. And it was throwing
him behind schedule. He should already have reached Constitution Square and the Lord Protector’s Palace, and here he was instead, trying to drag his men away from the arson and looting—and, undoubtedly, rape, he thought bleakly, looking at a half-naked young woman lying sprawled in death almost at his feet—going on throughout the Charisian Quarter.