Chapter 9 (Part II): Resistance

"I was born thousands of miles from where I stand now, and for every mile I have traveled, I have seen a thousand men die. I have warred with nations studied by archaeologists, I have fought in battles studied by mythologists, and survived battle with races that no longer exist. When I took this land from the dwarves, I decided I was done, like a boulder fallen from a mountainside, I had come to rest, and no earthly force has been able to move me since. But now the dragon sends her worshippers to uproot us, to drive us out. So be it. Let me rise from my rest, abandon my stillness, and meet the storm. Bring me Akaibara and bring me my armor, and let me show these specs in time what their ancestors feared."  

-          Marcus Hoaetorosu

The situation in the streets of Kingstown after Syliva's coronation was confused to say the least. Syliva’s mercenaries and her Firebrands continued the task they’d already begun that morning, hunting down anyone and everyone associated with the king’s family. Cousins, second cousins, in-laws, staff, servants, administrators – the list of undesirables seemed to increase by the hour. Basically the Firebrands were looting, raping, and murdering, and they didn’t want to stop, so the list broadened as necessary to sustain their terror campaign. Since the Firebrands were almost exclusively pulled from the ranks of the Nationalists, the list predictably focused on non-whites, non-humans, immigrants, scholars, and anyone who fell within a certain economic range.

The formal guard, Caelia’s actual military and law enforcement forces, were a mess. Many of their best men had been members of the king’s personal guard, and had been killed the night prior by Syliva herself. Those among the Kingsguard who hadn’t been on duty were rounded up the next morning convicted of crimes against the state, with guilt evident by association, and promptly and unceremoniously executed. Some survived, but not by being foolish enough to run out into the street and play hero.

The cityguard, which handled law enforcement within Kingstown, was divided. Having already been enforcing Syliva’s dictates as chief counselor to the king, many among the guard, including Captain Medes, the man who’d started the riot on College Street weeks ago, assumed they would continue to defer to her authority despite the fact that she’d murdered the man who’d given her the authority to issue them commands, along with many of their fellow officers.

Most of the guard had hated serving at her behest, and now that the legitimate source of her authority was gone, they refused to do so. For many, that meant going home and locking themselves in with their families, or leaving the city altogether, but for some that meant trying to continue to do their duty – to protect and serve the public trust. They even ousted Medes and his supporters and appointed a new captain, Kaira’s former mentor, Retger Schroeder. The man had only been a guard since he was laid off from the school, but he’d trained about twenty years’ worth of the best men in the cityguard and, as some of the men had pointed out when he hesitated to accept the position, no one had the experience necessary to prepare them for what was happening now.

Unfortunately, the actively violent Firebrands outnumbered Captain Schroeder’s men by at least a two to one margin, and the Firebrands had the backing of Syliva’s mercenaries. Some of the mercenaries were little more than hired thugs, but the ones she’d brought in to participate in her investigations as Chief Counsel were former veterans, professional solders that had been organized into her new “Blackguard”. The men of the Blackguard were quite simply better armed, better armored, and far more ruthless than Schroeder’s law enforcement officers.

It was physically impossible for the cityguard to restore order in the streets, so the best they could do was take up positions around certain locations. The cityguard barracks and armory, of course, were fortified and defended as their headquarters, and many among the cityguard brought their families there for shelter, since they knew that it wouldn’t take the Firebrands long to declare them traitors and start raiding their homes. By design, the barracks sat right on the entrance of one of the major aqueducts, so the guard were prepared for a siege, and to fight fires – though none were sure they could stand up to a dragon if Syliva decided to resume active participation in the violence.

Schroeder also ordered the public library defended. He knew he couldn’t afford the men necessary to stop a mob from destroying it, but he hated to think of the damage two or three idiots could do with a torch while everyone was distracted by more important things. He soon had to allocate more troops, though, because the presence of even a few guards unexpectedly made the library an impromptu refuge for people fearing persecution. Among those sheltering there were the inhabitants of an orphanage that had caught fire – every one of the children had escaped safely, but they’d been thrust out onto streets littered with dead bodies. Although filled with very burnable books, the old library itself was built of the same stone as the castle and walls of the city. The orphans’ caretakers had known even Syliva couldn’t set flame to it easily, so they’d herded the panicking children there as quickly as possible.

Schroeder was a pragmatist, though, and besides teaching a number of martial arts, he’d taught military history for decades. As shocking as it was to see the violence in Kingstown actually happening, in a detached, rational portion of his mind, he knew he’d seen it all before, many times. It had happened in Caelia (before it was given that name) and it had happened in many other countries in many other eras. It was never exactly the same, but there were patterns he was willing to bet on.

Among those patterns would be burning the ethnic ghettos of Kingstown. It was remarkable it hadn’t happened already. Besides rooting out everything associated with the previous regime, the Firebrands had been focusing on exacting revenge on people they knew, ‘cleaning up’ the parts of the city they personally interacted with. That had been lucky for the city – no one wants to set fire to the apartment building next to their own. But eventually they’d turn toward the ghettos, where most of the city’s non-white or non-human residents had been concentrated over the centuries.

Not receiving even a portion of the public funds that were funneled into the other parts of the city, Old Town was, architecturally speaking, rubbish. Many of the wells no longer accessed full cisterns due to building projects further south having mucked with the waterways under the city. The ancient stone buildings were beautiful but they weren’t up to code, and they were surrounded by wooden structures that had never been given the attention they should have been by safety inspectors, except when they’d been paid to evict someone.

That the people in the Kingstown ghettos had been able to keep their own city within a city standing without the support afforded to everyone else was a testament to the inhabitants’ devotion to their homes. Unfortunately, if a fire started, all the love and care they had to give couldn’t make up for a lack of professional architectural engineering or consistent access to water. To make matters worse, the neighborhoods north of Old Town shared an ambiguous border with the poorest part of Kingstown, which in all regards was even more of a deathtrap.  The people most reviled by the Nationalists were all packed into a tinderbox, with angry Firebrands on one side and extremely flammable tenement housing on the other.

And Schroeder couldn’t defend Old Town or the homes north of it. Even if his men weren’t outmatched, they couldn’t fight rioters and fires at the same time. Barricades and patrols could only hold off the Firebrands for a while. As soon as their enemies started throwing torches, fireballs, or burning bottles of liquor, his men would be just as trapped as the ghettos’ inhabitants.

So he’d decided to try something he’d never read about in any history book – he decided to get ahead of the problem. Rather than surround the ghettos with barricades and armed men, and try to defend them against a siege, he’d very carefully laid out a path from the ghettos to the city gate. It hadn’t occurred to the Firebrands that the passage in and out of the city should be a concern to them at all, and if they noticed Schroeder’s men establishing fortified checkpoints in strange places – blocking off certain streets, boarding up certain buildings – they apparently hadn’t caught onto a pattern. It was Schroeder’s hope that the ghetto’s occupants could be safely evacuated out to the countryside. They would be homeless, and the countryside wasn’t incredibly friendly right now either, but they’d have a better chance out there than in the city.

There was, however, one massive obstacle to executing this plan – convincing the people to leave. Most of the poorest residents north of Old Town had gone out the gate some time ago; many didn’t have actual homes to defend, and even those that did weren’t invested enough in their rented shacks to stay. Old Town was a different matter, though. Many of the residents had ties to the place going back decades if not centuries, and though not prosperous on the grand scale of things, their businesses and homes were filled with far more accumulated property than they could pick up and carry. Of course, some Old Town residents had beaten a path to the gate when the opportunity presented itself. The Dwarves, in particular, did as Schroeder asked. They had kin living in underground cities that ringed the kingdom, and they had strong faith they would be welcome and safe there. Most had already been packed and waiting for an opportunity to make a run for it, and while they waited, had been beseeching the others to follow them, promising them refuge with their people. Many of the people, especially the humans, were even swayed by their stout friends, and followed them out of the city.

But many others stayed because they couldn’t take everything with them, and so they refused to leave their home to have it looted by the Nationalists. Or they stayed because they were too old or had too much invested in Kingstown to start over somewhere else, and would rather see it through to the end. Schroeder and his men struggled to convince them that they didn’t have the resources to fight a fire if it started, but many people were intractable, and eventually Schroeder realized that some had simply resigned themselves to their fates. They wanted to die where they’d lived.  
Still others thought that Schroeder’s plan was a trick. The ethnic Gnomans, in particular, were very aware of what happened during a regime change, were very aware that they’d been singled out as enemies of the state, and were very interested in getting the hell out of the city. Thanks to certain stereotypes about Gnomans, though, the guard had never treated them especially well, and so the halflings thought this apparent free pass out of the city would have them walking straight into an ambush, to be wiped out by the guard in one volley of arrows. A few knew Schroeder wasn’t a career guardsman but rather a former teacher; that gained him some credibility but not enough to roust everyone.

And finally, there were the orcs and the elves, gods bless them.

Some left of course, but many of the orcs felt that, after years working menial labor jobs in the poorer parts of the city, this was finally an opportunity to make their ancestors proud. They had never gone to war, but now war had come to them. They wanted to fight. Schroeder had given up arguing, told them to grab their family weapons, or whatever they could, and escort the other groups to the gates. Once that task was done, they’d fall in with the guards at the checkpoints, and eventually fall back to the cityguard’s barracks, where they’d be getting a crash course in drill and command, and become formally deputized members of the cityguard. Provided they fell in line, Schroeder would be glad for the help.

The elves, of course, were much the same as their orc cousins, although they’d never admit it. They wanted to stay and fight like the orcs, though their perspective on the whole thing was quite different. Many of the elves were quite young, Schroeder’s age or younger, but a few were greatfathers and greatmothers who’d been in this city since before the ghettos were ghettos, before Old Town was old. It was around them, around the protection they offered and the resources they shared, that the other minorities had gathered. Truth be told, these especially old elves had had the money and means to up and move to a better maintained part of the city once the kingdom started punishing the ethnic neighborhoods, but there were two forces that had kept them where they were.

The first reason the old elves stayed was pride – elvish tradition valued autonomy and self-command. It was anathema to be coerced or compelled, especially by anyone or anything that was not another, older elf. Essentially, they had stayed where they were because their culture was one of contrariness.

The second reason was that, given their very long lifespans, elves could become very, very good at many things, and some of the things these elves had become good at were not legal. Although racketeering cases against Caelia's elf families had never gone anywhere, it was common knowledge that most businesses within and around Old Town, the North Side, and even on the waterfront outside the city, paid protection money to the "White Rose," Kingstown's largest elf family. Kingstown’s most influential organized crime family was both racially and ethnically elvish, devoted to millennia old traditions and principles. Schroeder knew that, right now that might be the city's saving grace. Besides being contrary and headstrong against anything that would challenge them, elvish culture generally demanded that if you promised something, you would sure as hell make good on that promise.

A human gang extracting extortion money from a ma and pa business might turn their backs on the owners while another gang did the same, but not the White Rose. If you paid them protection money, you were not only protected from them but from everything else, and almost every business north of Downtown paid dues to the White Rose. With the Firebrands inevitably on a collision course with the White Rose’s dominion, half of Old Town’s elves were preparing water brigades and defensive plans, and the other half had disappeared to the south end of the city intending to slow down the Firebrands and distract them away from the ghettos.

What that distraction would consist of Schroeder was not told, and Schroeder did not ask, but after vigorous negotiation, Schroeder did get one concession from the head of the White Rose – if the ghettos became unsavable, the elves would make the choice to withdraw and join their little resistance at the cityguard barracks, rather than burn to death in their own homes just to spite the Firebrands.

That still left a number of undecided individuals though, mostly halflings and humans who wanted to evacuate the city but didn’t trust the cityguard to get them out safely. While Schroeder had been racking his mind over how to get them moving, White Rose runners (who apparently moved by the roof tops) brought word that the various Firebrand hunting parties were now moving north despite the elves’ harassment, and were – bit by bit – coming together into a larger group. By the time they made it to the ghettos, there’d be hundreds of them, armed with clubs, chains, and torches, and behind them were a sizable number of Syliva’s mercenaries. To make matters worse, they’d certainly hit Schroeder’s evacuation checkpoints before they reached the ghetto. Schroeder was hoping the angry mob would function like a fluid, and take the path of least resistance, following side streets around the evacuation route, rather than plowing through it, but he wasn’t confident that would be the case. If they attacked the checkpoints, and cut off the evacuation, they’d not only beat, perhaps kill, many of his men, they’d cut Old Town off from the gate.

And that’s when his most unlikely reinforcements of the night showed up: an Arbarii woman, the same one who’d come to town with Kaira, and a shady halfling. The Gnoman, a foreign businessman Schroeder had encountered once or twice before, had ostensibly just been out for a stroll, but when he found out that his kinsmen were being a pain in his ass, he took it upon himself to resolve that situation. Schroeder didn’t know what cultural insight the Gnoman had for people who’d likely been born in this city, but apparently he was more persuasive than Schroeder, because it was quickly evident that he was winning the negotiation.

Meanwhile, the woman, Azraea, was eager to know what she could do to help. According to one of the White Rose scouts, she’d already taken down some firebrands harassing people north of Old Town, and with her Gnoman friend she had persuaded many of the remaining people there to get moving. Another of the scouts said he’d personally seen her take down several men earlier in the day, at a coffee shop near the burned down mansion. The Arbarii men and women still present seemed to be excited by the dramatic war paint she was wearing, though one old woman kept calling her Salmon Roll.

“I feel I should be clear, Captain Schroeder,” Azraea said, “that I’ve not been exercising restraint. I understand if as a law enforcement officer, that’s a problem for you.”

“It’s not,” Schroeder said straightforwardly, “We’re past the point of making arrests and subduing suspects. This turned into a war twenty four hours ago when the king and all of his heirs were assassinated. It’s kill or be killed. I wish Kaira were here, though… No offense.”

“None taken,” Azraea said, genuinely, “I wish she was too.”

“I don’t have time to give you a run down on our strategy, or how to fight with a guard unit,” Schroeder said, “But right now, I desperately need someone to get the rest of the people here to either fight or move, and it sounds like you’ve already had some luck north of Old Town. I’ve been trying, but I need to haul ass to the gate to make sure we don’t lose it.” He showed her the route traced on his map, “Any part of this gets broken, these people are screwed, but if the gate falls, we’re not only trapped, we have no hope of getting reinforcements.”

“Do you expect any?” There was no reason to expect the county guards to abandon their stations to help the people in Kingstown, and as far as Azraea knew, the highway guard were about as likely to sit by and place bets as do anything to help.

“I have a friend,” Schroeder said, “I haven’t talked to him for months, but I know him; if he knows what’s going on here, he’ll turn up. Gods willing, he won’t come alone. So, get these people moving if you can, and then… well, I don’t have time to think about that, so make shit up. If Kaira hangs out with you, I figure you’re smart enough.”