Since Hawke seems to know quite a bit about the true meaning of these ‘riots’, Shaddar decides to ask him more about what he knows.
Shaddar strides into the main hall and walks over to the barkeep as he works to shutter the windows on the ground floor. His thoughts are filled with curses at the ill luck that has brought such bad times to his life.
“First the Boss – I curse the day he walked into me pub – and now a riot! What can go wrong next?” Hawke is thinking bitterly.
“If there’s going to be a battle, do you think the constables will take part?” Shaddar asks as a way of focusing the man’s words and thoughts.
“Don’t know much about that,” Hawke grumbles. His thoughts change direction as Shaddar wished: “What a hayseed! He doesn’t know anything! All the constables do is make sure that nobody is around. Their job is just crowd control. Constables don’t fight! Particularly around the point of the meeting! I wonder where they’re going to meet up this time? I know it’s the heroes’ turn to host…”
“Where will the final battle take place between the villains and the heroes, do you think?” Shaddar asks, “I’d like to know so I can witness it.”
“Witness it?!” Hawke stops working and his face twists into a look of uncomprehending shock.
“Why, yes.”
“You don’t witness a riot! Not unless you’re a part of the main event!”
“Ah! So it will be in some private setting? They will quarrel in a place where none can see the turmoil of their mighty combat?”
“Of course! You’ll hear it, sure enough! Makes enough noise to rouse the dead, but you’ll be indoors when it happens. All proper folk are.”
“I see,” Shaddar murmurs. “And what if I do not consider myself to be ‘proper folk’?” he thinks.
Hawke snorts and begins working again. His thoughts are now focused on many interesting details about the upcoming riot. He believes that what will happen is that the villains will pour out of the slums, sweeping through the border zone, and then invade part of the streets. Then they will converge on some large and easy-to-secure meeting place in order to meet with the heroes.
“Could be the Market Square or even the Grande Circus this time. I suppose it depends on how large the gathering is to be,” Hawke thinks.
Shaddar decides that there will be enough confusion in the border zones as the mob passes by for him to slip in behind it. And his own skill at disguise will allow him to blend in easily; after all, he has seen the dark cloaks that the villains wore when he visited the slums yesterday. Following such a noisy and raucous group should pose him no difficulty.
He goes upstairs to dress for the occasion and to wait for the riot’s loud beginning.
And loud it is! Within the hour, a dull roar is heard echoing down the alleyways of the border zone as the mob of villains surges into the border zones. A few shrieks and cries from those who didn’t hear the rumors are evident as well, but these sounds are few and far between. The grapevine must be very effective.
Shaddar slips out the back door when most of them have passed by and enters the tail end of the swirling mob.
There are villains dressed as Shaddar is, shifty and dark, but there are others as well, that Shaddar has not seen before. Brawlers with huge brass knuckles, duelists with studded leather and thin rapiers, and burglars wearing small black masks over their eyes. If they weren’t ripping up the brickwork and throwing stones through unshuttered windows, Shaddar would think it was a costume party of tired, dusty cliches.
Shaddar looks down the alley where the mob has come from and sees a huge mess. Wreckage and trash everywhere – a distinct contrast to the normal, pristine shape that the city stays in. This is most likely quite horrible for the citizens to see after the fact.
“Proof of their villainy, I assume,” Shaddar thinks, while shaking his head, “And much work for the slave races to repair and clean up, I note.”
Muffled screams come from every building that the villains pass as they bang on the doors and walls with sticks and rocks, screaming at the tops of their lungs with wide grins on their faces. Their thoughts are filled with glee at the fear they are causing those who live here. How juvenile.
Then they enter the streets.
The streets are beautiful. Marble stonework. Statues that are adorned with gold trim. Finely polished, hand-crafted wooden rails. Huge, painted murals and frescos on the walls of some building give color to the area, but in a gaudy, over-done manner.
The scale of the streets is even larger than that of the slums. Massively wide roads that are paved with perfectly fitted cobblestones of a variety of colors – forming huge mosaics that can really only be seen in their entirety from the top floors of the soaring and graceful buildings in the center of each city block. The building exteriors are much more ornate with many fine details added around windows and doors than any Shaddar has seen in the city thus far.
Neat rows of alternating trees and elegant lampposts line each side of the street. The lampposts look like massive tusks of ivory from some monstrous animal with a glowing sphere that looks like a pearl or an egg at the top of each pole that glows softly, even in the daylight. Shaddar notices that each pair of lamps that a villain passes between flares with a brighter pulse of light.
“A warning system of some kind, perhaps? Interesting.”
The wonton destruction is carried forward into the streets as well, with statues being toppled and defaced, the cobblestones torn up and heaved through shop windows, and other wild acts of vandalism. The citizens within the buildings here are screaming just as loudly as those of the border zones – many of them praying to the Lords of the city and the heroes for deliverance.
Clearly, the streets are home to the upper classes and wealthy, while the working and middle classes live in the slums. But none of the citizens live in what Shaddar would imagine is poverty no matter which side of the border zone they live on. The only folk in Big City that do are apparently the hobgoblin and drow slave races.
Shaddar looks up and down the street to see several other alley entrances into the border zone are disgorging their own collection of villains. The villains now begin to congregate and work in conjunction with each other to cause some major property damage. Trees are uprooted and lit on fire in the middle of the street. A vendors cart is dumped over and smashed to bits, the contents looted quickly.
“Yes, yes. Very pretty. But to what end is this orgy of ruin?” Shaddar thinks impatiently.
Shaddar sees that the news that spread so effectively in the border zone must not have covered as much ground here, for he sees a group of fleeing citizens. A thin line of constables stand between the people and the villains. Shaddar moves closer to this line, hoping that the conflict will now begin in earnest.
He is disappointed. Instead the constables grapple with the villains in a exaggerated display of struggle.
“Flee! We shall hold them off while you escape!” one of the constables screams. These words cause the people who were rooted with fear to turn and run madly away.
Soon, the constables and villains cease grappling with one another with nods and laughing jeers. The villains all begin to move in one direction, with the ring of constables encircling them and ensuring that no stray civilians wander into the fray. Some constables wave their arms in the direction to the flow in the manner of those who are directing traffic.
“These fellows are all in this together!” Shaddar thinks with disbelief. From the minds of some of those around him, Shaddar discovers that they are indeed going to the Grande Circus – a sort of sporting arena.
Shaddar does not have long to wonder as to what it might look like as it is suddenly in view. It is a vast coliseum that is easily 1000 feet wide and 200 feet tall. It has a strange golden bar running around the upper tier, whose purpose Shaddar can only guess at. The tall arches that ring its four levels are graceful and fantastic works of art in their own right.
The villains stream into the entrance and enter the stands. Shaddar is equally impressed with the interior. There must be over 60,000 seats in this facility! Unlike what he would expect, the cheaper seats seem to be the ones closest to the center arena, with the finer seating areas placed near the top. Most impressive are the acoustics of the bowl-shaped space. The roar of the mob is magnified twenty-fold inside the arena and Shaddar can well imagine that the entire city can hear the hoots and yells of the mob from here. Some villains have ripped some of the seats loose and carry them all the way to the top in order to heave them down to the streets below.
On the opposite side of the stadium, Shaddar is relieved to see what must be the Guild of Heroes arrive. He was worried for a moment that Hawke’s thoughts were a fanciful and incorrect surmise on his part. The gleaming scale armor and snapping pendants of heroes are quite in contrast with the dour and scruffy-looking villains. A quartet of heroes blows a martial blast from trumpets and the villains go still.
One man steps forward, his hair perfectly coiffed and a huge smile of fine teeth on display. “We are the heroes! Where is the trouble?” His words echo across the field and presumably, up over the wall.
“Over there! Villains are rioting!” a shill from his band calls out.
“Never fear! We shall do battle and set things right! At them, men!” The two mobs of humans charge at each other with a clamorous noise, but they stop before they actually come into contact with each other. Instead, men all around the arena begin banging pots and metal bars together to make a horrible sound of metal-on-metal, screaming at the tops of their lungs all the while. The sound is awful and seems never-ending, but it is all just a show – just misdirection.
“This place… it’s as if they are all completely insane,” Shaddar thinks with disbelief. He pushes forward through the throng to gain a place near the meeting of the two obvious leaders of the respective Heroes and Villains. He doesn’t want to miss a single word of this outrageous and unbelievable drama!
Chapter 1 < Chapter 17 Chapter 19 >
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