Though Beckett had demanded an army, what he got was little better than a mob. Men volunteered for his operations by the score-some were gendarmes, some were former soldiers, some were simply shopkeepers and tradesmen incensed beyond reason. Neighbors began gleefully reporting on each other, listing the criminal vices of their fellows in the prurient hope that someone they knew might turn out to be Trowth’s notorious arch-villain. Houses and businesses, warehouses, docks, and ships were raided, and some were burned. Commerce in the city practically ground to a halt, as Trowth’s population laid siege to itself.
It was veneine and djang and iron self-control that enabled Beckett to retain even a shred of command over his army. He no longer had the stomach for more than one meal a day-usually of smoked fish and kale-and slept for no more than three hours a night. He pushed himself beyond the brink of exhaustion, living in an almost trance-like state in which his mind had completely divorced itself from the sensibilities of his body, operating it remotely, fully disregarding its needs, as he rode back and forth across the city, doing his best to supervise the rapidly-deteriorating organization of his raiding parties.
During this time, the middle weeks of True Spring, chilly showers and civil unrest proved a fertile combination for the city’s pamphleteers, who sprung up throughout Trowth like so many radical mushrooms, distributing literature like it was their fungal spore. There were some pamphlets in support of the Emperor, of course, mostly paid for by the emperor himself. By far, however, the pamphleteers were closer to fomenting revolution than they had ever been in the city’s history-free now, while Beckett had seized control of all law enforcement and occupied it with chasing down Anonymous John, to say what perhaps they had always wished to. The Emperor was a tyrant, an oppressive madman, crushing the life from the city with his mad whims. Elijah Beckett was a warlord, trying to seize control of Trowth from its rightful ruler. Anonymous John was a foreign spy, trying to undermine the Empire, or else he was a criminal hero, a freedom-fighter battling the forces of oppression, or else he was a devil, the right hand of the Loogaroo come to visit upon Trowth some divine vengeance.
Somewhere in the core of this swirl of rumor and innuendo, coloring the interpretations and fueling the rebellious tendencies of the city’s most fiery ideologues, was one particular pamphlet. Elijah Beckett never saw it, because he had neither the time nor the interest to concern himself with public opinion. Elizabeth Skinner never knew about it, because the only friends she had left were too preoccupied to draw her attention to it. But it had not escaped the notice of the Emperor, and it was the subject of a public address that would later be known as the End of the Presses.
Word of the impending address had circulated rapidly among the citizens, and a throng of people filled the Royal Square in front of the dense, mismatched architecture of the palace. It loomed above the people, craggy gables and jagged merlons, forests of buttresses and arches, looking like nothing so much as a grim deity, prepared to pass judgment against those foolish enough to worship at its feet. Arrayed along the sides of the Royal Square were the closed carriages of the Esteemed Families: the Vie-Gorgons and the Daior-Crabtrees and the Rowan-Czarneckis, hidden from public view in their shrouded coaches; under mandate to attend, but under no particular obligation to permit the ordinary people to get a good look at them.
Emilia Vie-Gorgon was there, some onlookers claimed. They insisted that they had caught a glimpse of her beautiful, delicate features and her ebon-black skin through the white lace curtains of the Vie-Gorgon coach.
On either side of the square, the twin statues of Gorgon and Demogorgon stood as silent, inscrutable sentries, the last relics of the city of giants upon which Trowth had been built. Here, of all places, the sense of transgression for which Trowth was known, the sense of being a trespasser in a stranger’s garden, was the strongest. It was undoubtedly why the Emperor chose to deliver all of his speeches here. Yet, despite the natural fear that percolated among his audience-the paranoia that they were suddenly subject to as they looked over their shoulders, the abrupt uncertainty that gnawed them-despite all that, the one document that the Emperor had come out expressly to forbid circulated rapidly, passed from chilly hand to chilly hand, stuffed under coats and in shirts to protect it from the rain.
Someone, somewhere, had begun printing copies of Theocles, and selling them for pennies on street corners.
The reasons for the sale were, of course, obscure, but it was serendipitous that whatever rabble-rouser had decided to resurrect the blacklisted play had chosen to charge for it, rather than simply distributing it. The people of Trowth were mistrustful of anything given, far preferring the tacit assurance of value implied when a thing was sold. If it were free, it would have been deemed worthless, but even the few pennies that the printer demanded were enough to convince citizens of its secret value.
William II Gorgon-Vie was, after the fashion of the Gorgon-Vies, a stout man, barrel-chested and apportioned with a generous layer of fat. He was stocky enough to seem short at a distance, but was actually unusually tall. Close-up, William II’s thick-necked frame and slightly rounded shoulders gave the impression, as did most of his family, that he was in fact some kind of bull that had been trained to walk around on its rear hooves. This illusion was supported by his perpetual habit of clearing his throat and snorting.
The affectation of the Esteemed Families was that, the closer the men were to the throne of the Empire, the more plainly they were attired. The Emperor was customarily the most plainly-clothed, in a suit of all black, tailored both to accommodate and to enhance his generous bulk. He wore dark, smoked glasses-a deviation from his traditional uniform that would have been scandalous, had they not been a recommendation from his cadre of doctors as a means to alleviate his constant migraines.
William II Gorgon-Vie was an excellent speaker, though suffered from his tendency to employ poor speech writers. His rhetoric was convoluted and sometimes contradictory, marred by words slightly misused (a flaw for which he was routinely lampooned in the papers), and some fairly unusual substitutions of meaning. He delivered this tangle of literary confusion with a bold voice and an upright posture, a generous suffusion of emotion, and all the pomp and grandeur that might be expected of an Emperor who weighed in excess of two hundred pounds. He was, despite not being particularly comprehensible, always quite convincing.
The thrust of his speech was, or at least, appeared to be that, in the face of Becektt’s ongoing war with criminality, pamphleteering had become a serious threat to the stability of the city. It was impossible, the Emperor asserted, for the Coroners Division to achieve any kind of social harmony while indecent and unscrupulous men consistently attempted to undermine him in the opinion of the public. There was even some suspicion, the Emperor revealed, that the most nefarious and seditious pamphlets-the ones calling the Emperor a tyrant and implying that the Empire might be run more effectively if supreme power was held by a democratically-elected parliament-were being printed and distributed by Anonymous John himself, precisely to engender the sort of civil strife in which he and his criminal compatriots thrived.
Emperor William II Gorgon-Vie did not mention Theocles, and if he thought that this would permit its presence to be overlooked he was mistaken; there was nothing in his speech more conspicuous than that absence.
Consequent to all of this, when the Emperor reached the climax of his speech-declaring that all printing presses were now the property of the Crown, that all printing activities were, by Imperial Mandate, suspended, and that all the properties of Comstock Street as well as all properties of the Comstock branch of the Family Vie-Gorgon were seized and held in trust until such time as their guilt or innocence in the matter of seditious documenteering could be established-the general consensus was that his primary purpose was to finally quell the distribution of that particular and notorious play.
The speech was met with a stunned silence, as the Emperor went on to reveal that a contingent of Royal Marines had already moved to take action on the decree, and would soon be arriving to clear the Royal Square. The audience, moreover, would be searched and all broadsheets, newspapers, and pamphlets would be seized and burned. The Emperor generously added that no one would be prosecuted for such possessions, conveniently leaving out that arresting and trying fifteen hundred people would be fiendishly impractical.
All of this was largely irrelevant to Beckett, except insofar as it temporarily deprived him of seventy-five blood-and-bone armored Lobstermen, who were the only men he had access to with any kind of discipline. While the Emperor seized the printing presses and shut down the business of the Comstock Vie-Gorgons, Beckett was taking the rest of his men on a rampage along the river Stark.