++This account will either be found by the elves before it’s copied or not. If the former, you will never see it. I’ve watched a Circumscriber die. A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty Workers all swarmed her at once with scythes and picks improvised into crude weapons. She killed half, perhaps more. But she died in the end. They can be killed. They can be beaten.++

  Chapter 39

  The building wasn’t warm. That surprised Reggie, but only for a moment. Too much time around Witchfinders, around elves, around above-the-board taverns and Vampire Lady’s abodes. Too much time getting used to dealing with people who had the spare money to keep their workplace nice and toasty. Two seconds, and Reggie was back to his roots.

  Two seconds was also, as it happened, long enough for the people inside to start panicking. Asses left chairs, guns found hands, hammers cocked back and pistols came a few seconds shy of barking out into the night and adding a few ounces of lead to Reggie’s anatomy. Everything was dangling on a single frayed thread.

  Nobody said anything. That was good for Reggie, as he had something to say and didn’t want his desperate attempt at not being shot to be drowned out.

  “I’m here to see Norman,” he hurriedly told the room, “he said I should check this…organisation out.”

  It sounded weak, as far as excuses to not die went. Apparently not too weak.

  “Hold on,” someone barked from behind the crowd, “wait, I remember you, you’re that idiot who was gaping at the rally a few days ago.” Reggie recognised Norman Bates as he shoved his way to the front of the group and started staring at him like he’d just congealed from someone’s nostril.

  “Not an idiot,” Reggie replied, “but yes that was me. And you said to find you.”

  “I said to find me in the docks.”

  “You weren’t at the docks. They’re not even docks anyway, it’s not an ocean they’re next to. I don’t think you know what docks are.”

  More hammers cocked. Reggie and his big mouth.

  “Don’t shoot him!” Norman snapped, glaring at his own people now, “what the fuck is wrong with you all?” Reggie felt a tug of gratitude at some actual concern being shown for his life. Then Norman kept talking. “What, do you want to bring the guards down on us and then explain to them how a young fella’s brain matter got stuck all over our walls?”

  At the very least, he was appealing to everyone else. Reggie didn’t like being spared for fear of earning his killers a gang beating by the police, but it was better than not being spared. Better by a lot. Guns slowly lowered and the whole room took on a decidedly less murderous tone, which was just fine by him.

  [It would be really funny if you suddenly transformed and killed them all, now.]

  As usual, Reggie ignored Dvo.

  “You,” Norman added to Reggie, “walk outside and speak to me in private.”

  Reggie wasn’t feeling like arguing, with those guns still so very close to people’s hands, so he just turned around and did what he was told. Lead, the great negotiator. The guard was okay by the time he stepped out, though glared at Reggie as if he’d somehow crossed him.

  You punched him in the face, Sycily reminded him.

  “He was a dick,” Reggie muttered.

  “What was that?” Norman asked.

  “Your friends are dicks.”

  “My friends are working to better the conditions of themselves, and everyone in this city. They’re fighting against people who see them as nothing more than disposable fodder to be squeezed for profits and then thrown away when they stop being useful. Tonight, a stranger entered their meeting place unannounced, having beaten up our sentry, and made them all fear that one of the several authorities who wanted to kill them had sent someone to do so. They reacted accordingly.”

  Said like that, it all made Reggie feel like a bit of a dick.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Norman just sighed. “You’ve had it hard, haven’t you?”

  “Fuck off,” Reggie snapped, “trying to get inside my head?”

  Norman stared at him as Reggie found himself yelling. “Well?” he pressed.

  “N…No?” Norman took a step back, raising his hands in placation, “no, I wasn’t—”

  —”I’m fine, fuck you, shut up. I’ve had a perfectly fine life, alright?”

  “Okay,” Norman nodded, “yes, sorry, my mistake you…clearly haven’t had a hard time of it.”

  Reggie got the distinct impression he was being mocked, but saw no use in pursuing it.

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  “What do you want anyway?” He continued, mainly just to give his mouth something to do while his brain focused on calming down.

  I’ve had it hard? How about I fucking kill you, how about that?

  “I…was wondering what you wanted,” Norman said evenly, “since…you’re the one who came looking for me here.”

  What? Oh. Right.

  ‘Had it hard.’ Throwing me for a loop, making me distracted and stupid. Was that on purpose?

  “Uh, well you offered. Said I could do this.”

  “I said you should do this if you had questions, if you were interested, if…well, I suppose I implied a lot. I assumed you’d have cause to do so if you chose to do it. Do you not?”

  Reggie didn’t like Norman, he decided. Didn’t like how he managed to twist everything around and force him to only say things that made sense.

  But he wasn’t here to make friends, he was here to…infiltrate a group of people working to make things better for themselves and manipulate them at the orders of a vampire.

  No time to feel sick now though. Reggie kept talking.

  “What are you planning to do exactly?” he asked, deciding to open up with a genuine question. If nothing else it’d be more convincing, and satisfying his curiosity was a nice benefit on its own. That curiosity wasn’t strong enough to spend time checking them out for that reason alone, but since he was already here he might as well scratch the itch.

  Norman, for his part, looked suddenly eager to explain.

  “We have a lot of plans, most long-term. In the short, we’re making ourselves a nuisance. Causing enough problems and inconvenience, with loud protests blocking streets and cutting off transit, that we can’t be ignored. Then we wait. Let the problems mount.”

  “And if the city just has its guards kill you?” Reggie asked. Norman blanched.

  “That’s a grim thought,” he noted, “but…well, we have planned for it. By our reckoning, they can’t afford to. Too many skilled labourers are among us, the city would take weeks, maybe months, to replace us if we all died.”

  Which did not, Reggie noted, mean they were safe.

  He wasn’t a businessman, he’d never owned a business in his life and would probably combust if he ever did, but Reggie had always had a knack for thinking things through in abstract terms. He wasn’t smart, it’d been made clear enough to him already that smart people didn’t hear voices where there was thin air, but he could figure stuff out given time. He put some time into it now.

  Weeks or months, Norman had said. Which meant a lot, but not necessarily a crippling span. Not for a city this big. The larger a settlement, the more insensitive it became to the shifts of time. Reggie knew this from how Norvhan’s stores differed to those of the smaller villages dotting the landscape on its non-grimwood side, how much more dangerous a missed harvest was for six hundred people than six thousand.

  This city had a lot more than six thousand, a lot more than six hundred thousand. It had enough that its stores would be big and its leeway wide.

  Which was probably why the unions still existed. It also meant there were a lot more people in the city who could fill any given job. That’s what people were, right? Things that did jobs. That’s how you got to see them when you were an elf or rich, at least.

  And there were so many people here…

  But Reggie was over-engineering this, needing to wipe out the whole union? That was a worst case scenario. He wouldn’t put it past the city’s rulers, wouldn’t put anything past the elves, but there was a much less exertive solution they had at their disposal.

  “What do you do if the city starts killing your members to try and force the others into complying?” he asked Norman.

  “We fight, as we’ve done already where some of the guards or Circumscribers tried that.” Norman said it with a lot more anger and savagery than Reggie had expected. That wasn’t a bad thing of course, you needed a lot of anger and savagery when you were trying to make your life better. If anything the answer had him feeling much better about the whole union thing.

  “And if you lose?” Reggie asked, more to see what Norman would say than out of any real wonder.

  “Then we’ll make a good accounting of ourselves, kill as many of those bastards as we need to.”

  Norman’s fire was nice and admirable, but Reggie didn’t think much of it. Lots of people talked big, lots of them even meant it. Very few kept that violence when the actual violence started. It wasn’t that they were cowards. People just didn’t like hurting each other.

  Granted, Reggie had seen first hand the way a mob of angry people possessed one another with a killing lust bigger than any one of them. Maybe one Norman’s spine wouldn’t last, but if he had a hundred friends all only half as angry as him…they’d get shit done.

  Or so he hoped.

  “Why don’t you come and see me tomorrow,” Norman offered, “and take a walk with me?”

  Reggie was surprised by the offer, considering rather quickly whether it was some roundabout attempt to kill him.

  Probably not. There were no witnesses here and about fifty people in the warehouse, along with twenty guns. There were, Reggie was forced to admit, easier ways to kill him. At least at this precise moment.

  “Sure,” he said, “what time?” Norman just waved a hand.

  “Just meet me where I first told you to whenever, I’m doing nothing else that day so I’ll be in the office the whole time.”

  “You’re doing nothing else?” Reggie asked him.

  “Well,” Norman grinned, “I am, but having inconsistent plans is a habit I’ve gotten into.”

  Right. It made him harder to predict, and thus harder to murder.

  “Still a lot of rearranging to do to your schedule just over me.”

  Now it was Norman’s turn to be confused, staring at Reggie like he’d just said something incredibly stupid.

  “What?” Reggie asked, self-conscious, not liking the feeling.

  “I don’t know how strong the people of wherever you come from are, but over here being able to knock a man twice your size on his arse is considered somewhat unusual strength. Workers though we may be, skilled fighters are still going to come in handy for us when everything kicks off.”

  Reggie almost laughed. He’d gotten a bit too suspicious for his own good and missed the obvious. Forgotten that he was powerful now. How many men in their early twenties could demonstrate the Strength he already had? Practically none. From Norman’s perspective he was looking at a hobo version of Ludvich’s younger self, some one-in-a-thousand Worker who, by the standards of an elven Class, was almost not shit.

  That was the sort of person you wanted to get your hooks into and keep around, pretty much regardless of what they said. No need to make this more complicated than it was, Reggie was just a potential asset and being treated as such.

  “Fair enough,” he said, able to at least appreciate the value in making it hard for people to kill you, “I’ll…I’ll think about it.” Probably a bit too late to feign reluctance, but he gave it a go anyway. Reggie had a lot to learn about this infiltration thing, he thought.

  A lot to learn about lots of things apparently. He bid Norman goodbye, smiled at the guard whose jaw he’d given a durability test—and who was now glaring back at him with a not-particularly-friendly expression—and started making his way through the dark to head back to his apartment. Reggie had maybe half an hour until dawn, and he was feeling slightly peckish again.

  Enough time to snatch a few rats, hopefully.