The bar at the Seastar had grown harder, somehow. Renado was certain it was bruising his chin now, as he slumped against it and cradled the warm mug of cider against his cheek. He wasn’t sure where Tass was… perhaps she had moved in with the resident gamblers at their corner table. Or maybe she had died with the others and the grief had so blinded Ren that he had imagined her continued existence at his side.
It would be easy to check, but he didn’t have the energy. He slumped at the bar. When his laziness left him, perhaps he would go find an enemy to kill. One of the Grey Brethren. The old priests in their tattered robes who had undone his family. If he had been there, throughout the last year, would it have still happened? He could only blame fate. He lifted his head enough to drink another mouthful of warm cider.
“They’re gatherin’,” a man muttered, marching inside from the damp Sheld morning.
“Where?” a woman’s voice asked. It was Tass, sitting down the bar from Ren a few stools. He watched her stand up.
The reply came: “Worker’s Rise. The last hold. This will be the end, I suspect.” Ren turned around in his stool and regarded the man who had replied. Their newsman was a small white man, a southerner, but his formal linen tunic placed him as an uptown merchant from this very stead.
“How many?” Ren asked.
“All of them, I imagine,” the man said. “Looked like it. Whoever’s in there won’t be for much longer.”
“Tass, stay put,” Ren ordered. He rose to his feet and tilted toward the door. He heard her rise, in hesitation, and stayed her with a pointed finger. She’d stay as ordered, so he could find her when he returned.
He marched out the door. The fog was brushed by a gentle breeze, cool off the water. It started to wake him, sober him. By the time he reached the streets near the huge stone dome, he was ready enough for whatever was to come.
True as the man had said, Ren found an army around Worker’s Rise.
There were two ways into the big parliament: the tunnel in the base, and the doorway at the top, accessed by stairs carved into the dome leading up from the tunnel to the very peak of the slope. The tunnel was full of men in grey uniforms. In a procession like religious ritual, they carried two different types of things out of the tunnel, to be deposited in a growing pile in the courtyard. The first was debris, presumably broken and dragged from barricades. They also dragged away the bodies—the men in Sheld uniforms, the men in mercenary garb, the men in their own grey armour. There was only one way to breach such a tunnel, and it a gradual show of brute force. With superior numbers and great casualties, they would inevitably crush the resistance. There was not a thing Ren could do but sit and watch.
He walked around the whole structure to see whatever he could. There were archers up on the slow incline at the top of the dome. Their arrows found marks occasionally, but they were all looking at the front of Worker’s Rise. There was no rear entrance, no back door or hidden passage. The steep incline went full circle, and Ren was back on the outskirts of the courtyard, where crowds had gathered to watch what semblance of government they had once known fall to shambles and bloody carnage, strewn about the maw of death that Ren regarded.
If he entered, he would surely die. If he climbed it, his dying breaths might be heard by men he knew after they had killed him after assuming his allegiance incorrectly. He also had no guarantee that anyone in Worker’s Rise—once held by the Lord Employers he knew—would know him. Ren had tossed away his green eye… he was a young man with sleepless red eyes and a rancid breath.
Ren walked down the cliffs of Sheld again, stumbling from the sun back into the salty, foggy, marina. Tass came out of the Seastar when she saw him, her crinkled green dress hidden under a thin silk shawl and her eyes rimmed with tears. He just shook his head, and she hung hers. They stood in the mist for a moment, listening to the bells and shouts of the harbour hands. Then she tried to hug him, but Ren didn’t respond to it.
“I’m going back to the Dispatch,” he said. “There’s money, and hopefully, there are loyal friends too.”
“I can’t leave,” the woman whispered, stepped back from him. “Not if there might still be news of him, of Lerran, in this city. I’ll stay and follow whatever I hear… if there’s even a chance.”
“Tass,” Ren said.
“I won’t leave him,” she growled. “Not until I see a—”
He listened to the silence of her self-interrupted words. A moment later he said, “I’ll stay, and we’ll find him together. But we need that ship, that money, and those men, regardless. It might take a day or two to get there, but I think you should come with. We’ll return together as soon as we can.”
Tass nodded, and wiped her eyes with the corner of her white and yellow wrap. She smiled, weakly. “I’ll trust you,” she said. “You might be the only person left I do.”
Ren blinked, and walked past her. He had never known her that well—Ren was eleven years younger than his brother, and they had never been close. But he trusted Tassina’s vulnerability and he trusted her loyalty. “I’ll get my things,” he said, over his shoulder. “Just what we need for a few days.”