Through Fiery Trials Read online

  “Kick the bastards’ arses!” a powerfully built, bearded man whose tunic bore the badge of the Shipbuilders Guild shouted. “Come on, lads!”

  The mob howled in triumph and crashed forward like the sea.

  Most of the guardsmen managed to stay on their feet, lashing out with the riot batons they’d been issued. Eight inches longer than the Siddar City Guard’s standard ironwood batons and loaded with ten ounces of lead, they were more like cylindrical maces than nightsticks, and bone broke as they landed on their targets. None of the men wielding those batons had any interest in simply “discouraging” the rioters, because they had a very good idea what would happen if they went down. They weren’t fighting just to maintain public order or protect a building. They were fighting for their lives, and they knew it.

  Screams of fury turned into shrieks of pain, but the guardsmen weren’t the only ones with bludgeons. Quite a few of the “spontaneous rioters” had come prepared with lengths of two-inch iron pipe whose last three or four inches had been poured full of cement by the members of the Plumbers Guild before they were capped. One of those “spontaneous rioters” leapt into the gap and swung his weapon two-handed, like a baseball player swinging for the stands. The twenty-six-inch-long pipe struck the nape of a city guardsman’s neck like a hammer, just below the protective edge of his helmet, and he went down in a boneless heap as bone shattered under the impact.

  Another rioter came through the gap across his corpse. This one swung low, not high, slamming his bludgeon into the back of a second guardsman’s knee. His target went down; the bludgeon rose high, crunched down once more; and the gap was suddenly a man wider.

  A scant reserve of guardsmen charged forward, batons swinging and thrusting with deadly, trained precision as they tried to halt the incursion. But there were too few of them, and their comrades on either side of the break in the shield wall fell too swiftly.

  “Over them!” someone bellowed. “Run over ’em, boys!”

  Smoke rose in at least a dozen places in the mob as the heads of Shan-weis’ scratched on brickwork, sputtered to sulfurous life, and lit oil-soaked rag wicks. An instant later, more men whose tunics bore the badges of half a dozen of the city’s guilds, hurled their oil-filled firebombs. The glass and pottery vessels shattered as they hit the ground, or the shields … or the guardsmen behind those shields. Men cried out in pain as the flames bit, and the stubborn line began to crumble.

  “Now, boys! Now!”

  A fresh roar of fury went up as the mob sensed victory. Men who might have preferred not coming into reach of the guard’s riot batons were given no choice as pressure from behind drove them forward. At least three rioters went down for each guardsman, but there were thousands of rioters and less than two hundred guardsmen, and no one in the guard had foreseen the intensity of the madness. No one had issued firearms, and a cement-loaded pipe was as deadly as any riot baton.

  The shield wall splintered in a dozen places and guardsmen who’d been assigned to protect a building suddenly found themselves fighting desperately to protect wounded and fallen fellows … or themselves.

  The mob bellowed in triumph and doors and windows began to shatter.

  * * *

  “What the Shan-wei happened?” Klymynt Myllyr demanded harshly. “How did it happen?!”

  “This wasn’t just spontaneous,” Daryus Parkair replied in a weary voice. He’d been out in the city for hours with Brigadier Allyn Zhoelsyn, the Siddar City Guard’s commanding officer, and the smell of smoke had ridden his clothing into Protector’s Palace. “Oh, a lot of it was, but somebody sure as Shan-wei knew it was coming. They were too well prepared and the attack on the Consortium building was too targeted. So far the confirmed count is thirty-seven Guardsmen dead and close to two hundred hurt. I’m sure there’re more to come before the count’s complete. And I don’t have any kind of number on how many rioters got their arses killed or crippled, but I’ll be surprised if it’s not in the multiple hundreds for both.”

  “And the Consortium building?” Bryntyn Ashfyrd asked.

  “Completely gutted. The fire brigade commander tells me it’s a total loss,” Parkair replied in the tone of the man who clearly found architectural damage secondary—at best—to the men who’d been killed or badly injured trying to protect it.

  “Completely?” Ashfyrd pressed. Parkair glared at him and the Chancellor waved one hand. “I’m not trying to minimize anything else, Daryus, believe me. But all of the Consortium’s records were in there. All of them. If they’re gone.…”

  His voice trailed away, and he shook his head.

  “That’s what happened in the streets,” Myllyr said in a voice of iron. “And that’s important. In fact, in the short term, it’s the most important problem we’ve got, and we need to get focused on solving it as soon as Brigadier Zhoelsyn gets here. But in the meantime, what the hell happened to the bond issue and the banks, Bryntyn?”

  “I don’t know!” Ashfyrd threw up both hands. “I know some of it, but we’ll be years figuring out all of it … assuming we ever do! I’ll tell you this much, though—we’re going to find Braisyn Qwentyn at the bottom of it. Or up to his Shan-wei–damned neck in it, anyway!”

  “Meaning what?” Myllyr demanded.

  “Meaning he was the agent for almost half the consolidated buying blocs,” Ashfyrd sighed. “We knew he was. In fact, a lot of us at the Exchequer recommended him to people looking for an agent to manage their purchases—or their entire portfolios, for that matter.” The ginger-haired Chancellor looked much older than his sixty-seven years at that moment. “It seemed like a way to pay old Tymahn back, find a way for Braisyn to recover some of the ground the House of Qwentyn’s lost.”

  “Bryntyn, it lost that ground because Braisyn was a frigging idiot,” Myllyr said, sitting back in his chair. “He’s the one who cut the House’s throat trying to freeze Owain out. In fact, I’d argue he’s the one who caused three-quarters of the problems we’ve got when he killed the House of Qwentyn by blocking Delthak’s efforts to bail him out. Damn it, Henrai was right! That’s what threw everything—and everybody—off the edge of a cliff in the first frigging place!”

  “I know that!” Ashfyrd said defensively. “But we all owed Tymahn for what he did during the Jihad, if nothing else. And it looked like Braisyn had learned his lesson. Recommending him was a way to help him recover his house’s fortunes without anything coming directly from the Exchequer.”

  Myllyr glared at him, but then he shook his head and made a waving away gesture.

  “If you’d asked me, I’d’ve said the same thing,” he admitted. “But what did he do?”

  “He pulled a sleight-of-hand. Or, at least, that’s what we think he did. He converted his buyers’ securities and notes into cash and substituted loans drawn on half a dozen of the bigger banks to finance the purchase of the bonds. And the collateral for the loans was … nonexistent. Two-thirds of it were old House of Qwentyn notes which had never been redeemed and weren’t worth the paper they were written on.”

  “How did he get away with it?”

  “We’re not sure. We’re still trying to find out! My guess is that he had to have someone on the inside of the banks. They may not’ve known everything he was doing—I’d guess most of them thought they were the only ones working with him, that their little piece of it was all of it, but there’s no way of knowing that—but somebody had to’ve been looking the other way to let that much bad paper get past them. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to prove it, but I guarantee you there has to be someone.”

  “I want them found, and I want them found fast,” Myllyr half snarled. “We’ve got to be able to explain how this happened if we don’t want half the capital to go up in flames!”

  “I don’t know if we can stop that from happening even if we do figure out what happened,” Samyl Gahdarhd said heavily. The lord protector looked at him, and he shrugged, then turned to Ashfyrd. “How much of the total bond issue are we t
alking about here?”

  “Probably at least a quarter,” Ashfyrd admitted heavily. “Maybe more than that, if it turns out he wasn’t the only one playing fast and loose with the financing.”

  Gahdarhd’s face tightened—in confirmation, not surprise—and he looked back at Myllyr.

  “That’s going to cripple the Consortium, no matter what,” he said. “It may be survivable from a purely technical viewpoint, but the damage to the public’s confidence in it’s going to be enormous. And here’s another point to consider. Unless I’m mistaken, he was pretty deeply involved with Trans-Siddarmark’s purchasing contracts. Has anybody taken a look at the books over there?”

  “Not yet. Nezbyt’ll be looking at that very closely, and so will Zhasyn Brygs, but Zhasyn’s up to his arse in krakens right now over at the Bank. That’s where the real threat’s coming from, however big a part the Consortium may be playing in the riots right now. When the word broke, we had a huge run, with people demanding their deposits, and there’s no sign of its easing anytime soon. Not just from the Central Bank, either; every bank’s getting hit, and I’m pretty sure some of them—maybe a lot of them; we don’t really know how bad this is going to be in the end—are going under.” Ashfyrd’s expression was grim. “The Exchequer’s going to take a bath from the Guarantee Trust banks, but it’ll be even worse for the independents who never joined the Trust. They’re going under without a trace, and they’ll be taking their depositors’ savings with them.”

  “Langhorne,” Myllyr muttered.

  “That’s why I’m not sure we can stop this anytime soon,” Gahdarhd said, twitching his head in the direction of the council chamber’s window. It was open, and the sounds of rioting—faint with distance, but unmistakable to anyone who’d lived through the Sword of Schueler—drifted in through it.

  “There are already people out there shouting that this could never have happened without connivance from the inside,” the keeper of the seal went on. “And, from what Bryntyn’s just said, they’re right, at least as far as some of the banks are concerned. We’d just finally turned the corner, started seeing some real confidence in the possibility of prosperity at last. Now this?” He shook his head. “It’s going to hit everyone twice as hard expressly because there was so much optimism, seemed to be so much hope for the future. And I promise you, this will spread beyond the city. We’re not just the Republic’s capital, we’re the center of its financial markets—you know that even better than I do—so the consequences of this are bound to spread. Hell, how many of the canal bond buyers are from the provinces, not here in Siddar City at all? We may not be looking at these sorts of riots elsewhere, but investors in places like Santorah and Clahnyr are about to get hit hard, too. And if Trans-Siddarmark gets pulled into this, it’s going to hammer people as far away as Lake City and Talmar.”

  He shook his head again, and Myllyr nodded in ashen-faced understanding. He knew, even better than Gahdarhd, how much anyone’s financial and economic decisions depended on psychology. As the Archangel Bédard had written so many centuries before, what mattered where decisions were concerned wasn’t the truth; it was what the decision-maker believed was the truth.

  And panicked people weren’t likely to think in terms of restraint and the need to let the banks ride this out. The really big investors might, but not the smaller investors. And not the depositors in those banks. They were going to think in terms of the clothes on their families’ backs. Of roofs over their families’ heads … or their families’ next meal.

  “I think Samyl’s probably right, Klymynt.” Daryus Parkair’s voice was harsh but his expression was unflinching. “And if he is, this’ll be the worst shit storm since the Sword. I can’t begin to predict how far into the provinces the ripples will spread, but I do know it’s going to get even worse here in the capital once people begin to realize just how deep this goes. I don’t think Zhoelsyn will be able to handle it with just the Guard.”

  “We can’t put troops into the city!” Ashfyrd objected quickly. The others looked at him, and he raised one hand pleadingly. “Bad as this is, it can still get worse if we convince people who haven’t made up their minds yet that it’s going to get worse. Putting the Army out on the streets of Siddar City would be a huge escalation, and Langhorne only knows where that would end!”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Parkair said, almost compassionately, “but I can’t worry about people’s minds when lives are being lost out there. And don’t forget, we have an election in less than two months. How in hell are we going to manage that if we still have people killing each other in the streets, Bryntyn?”

  Ashfyrd looked back at him, and the distant rioting sounded much louder in the silence which answered the seneschal’s question.

  .II.

  Imperial Palace, City of Cherayth, Kingdom of Chisholm, Empire of Charis.

  “It’s going to get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better,” Duke Delthak said flatly over the com. “Trust me, Ashfyrd and Brygs still haven’t found all of it, and the momentum’s all on the downward spiral now. People are absolutely panicked, and it’s spreading to every security and stock issue, even ones that don’t have a thing to do with the Canal. People are desperate to get out before their investments tank, whatever their investments are, and they’re taking any price they can get for assets that should be—will be, when the panic passes—worth hundreds or thousands of marks. They’re all desperate for gold, something they know will hold its value. Something they can hide under the mattress or bury in a hole in the ground, and that’s exactly what a lot of them are doing—pulling their deposits out before their bank goes under so they can hide it somewhere ‘safe.’ And that’s taking even more cash out of circulation and, even more importantly, out of the banks, which is only driving the failures. Over a third of the Siddar City banks have gone under already, and Nahrmahn, Owl, and I figure half the remainder are likely to do the same thing. This won’t be a recession; it’s going to be a depression. The mother of all depressions. I don’t think anyone in Siddarmark’s ever seen anything as deep and as bad as this is going to be, and the repercussions will spill over onto everybody doing business with Siddarmark. The Border States, the Temple Lands, Silkiah—even Desnair! The funny thing—if it’s not obscene to call anything about this ‘funny’—is that the mainland realm that’s going to get hurt least badly is probably Dohlar because of the way public opinion operated against anybody in the Republic’s doing business with Dohlar.”

  “And Myllyr’s going to lose the election,” Sharleyan said grimly.

  She and Cayleb shared an outsized rattan chaise lounge on their suite’s balcony, gazing up at a moonless, crystal-clear sky swathed in stars. A gentle breeze sifted across them with the scent of flowers from the gardens below, nightbirds and wyverns sang or whistled softly, and they could hear the distant sounds of late-night traffic from the streets beyond the palace wall. It was a beautiful, restful, tranquil scene, far removed from the imagery of riots, arson, and political invective sweeping Siddar City like a plague.

  “Of course he’ll lose,” Nynian Athrawes said from the chambers assigned to her and Merlin. “Everybody’s going to blame him for it. And, much as I hate to say it, they’ve got a point. It did happen on his watch, and it happened despite the warnings we kept dropping in his ear.”

  “Fair’s fair, Nynian,” Nahrmahn said from his computer. “We didn’t warn him about Qwentyn. Or not where the Canal Consortium was concerned, anyway. We warned him about Kartyr Sulyvyn and the fact that Qwentyn was paddling around in the same muddy waters, but we completely missed the way he was embezzling everything in sight where the bond issues were concerned. We didn’t pick up on it until that first call came in and couldn’t be covered.”

  “All right,” Nynian conceded. “That’s fair enough. But we did know he was providing a conduit for a lot of Sulyvyn’s transactions. For that matter, we knew he was lending the House of Qwentyn’s reputation to Sulyvyn and the oth
ers to cover some of their shadier doings, and we passed those ‘rumors’ along. That should’ve sounded warning bells with Ashfyrd and Brygs if anyone had bothered to check the rumors.”

  “Yes, it should have,” Cayleb sighed. “But it should’ve done that for us, too, and where the Canal was concerned, it didn’t. It sailed right past us. Probably because we were all so delighted by how well the bonds were doing. Everything was finally going right. Who wanted to look a gift dragon in the mouth when that was true?”

  “What are they going to do about it?” Irys asked from Manchyr, after a moment.

  “I don’t know.” Delthak’s com image shrugged. “I don’t know what they can do. Technically, the bonds are still good, however they were purchased. Eventually, they’re supposed to be paid off out of the Canal’s earnings, and that hasn’t changed. It’s the banks holding the worthless collateral that are the problem, and the Consortium isn’t directly involved with that. But nobody seems to understand that, unfortunately.”

  The duke leaned back in his chair, scowling out at the afternoon sunlight of Old Charis.

  “The bonds were issued by the Exchequer to fund the Consortium, and the Exchequer got thirty percent of the purchase price in cash when the bonds were originally sold. I wasn’t sure about the wisdom of selling them on a margin that way, but the Canal was supposed to be the wyvern that fetched the golden rabbit, and letting people buy in on the ‘installment plan’ was supposed to kickstart the Consortium.

  “Now, though, there’s not a chance in hell the Exchequer’ll get the other seventy percent from the people who get wiped out in the panic, and that means the Consortium won’t see the capitalization it was supposed to get. Worse, since it all started with the Canal bonds, the Consortium’s tainted in the public’s eyes. Then there’s the loss of all of the Consortium’s records when its headquarters burned. Believe me, the rioters couldn’t have picked a worse psychological target—from our viewpoint, anyway—than that.”