Free Web NovelChapter 188: The Workshop
The weaving workshop on the street west side had given them three weavers and two bodies.
The first man had grabbed a shuttle when they came through the door, and the rider on his left had cut him across the chest before the swing connected. He was on the floor beside the loom with his hands still curled around nothing.
The second hadn’t fought. He’d stood against the far wall and looked at them, the rider read his hands, soft across the palm and unmarked, and put the blade into his throat where he stood. The blood from that one had spread across the workshop floor and under the loom frame and was still running toward the drain channel in the stone when they left.
The three weavers were outside now, moving up the street under the trailing rider’s direction.
The rider stepped back into the lane.
Two arbans were working the east row of buildings across from Gal, one at a doorway and one coming out of a shop with four people ahead of them. Further north a man from an earlier arban’s work lay face-up on the paving stones, two arrows in his chest, the blood from the wounds pooled and dried darker. Nobody had moved him.
A jaghun commander called from the next building north. The rider turned and went.
The ironworker’s door was still shut. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
Gal observed the building from where he stood. The forge vent above the ground-floor window had years of smoke staining around its frame, the wood darkened in a wide ring from the heat that had poured through it across every working season. The door was wide, built to move material through.
The smoke coming in from the north had shifted the afternoon light to something flat and orange, and the scent in the street had moved away from stone dust into cold iron and coal.
Nothing moved inside the building.
Nasan snorted, "They’ve had time to think it over," and left it there.
Chaqu moved around the east corner without being told to cover the back access. Orkhon took the west side. Gal and Nasan went to the front.
Gal tried the door. The bar held.
He drove his boot into the latch side and the lower bracket gave. He hit it again and the door came inward, and he went through.
The forge was against the right wall, cold, the coals long since out. The tool rack above it held tongs and hammers in sizes, a hardy block at the anvil base, a swage block on the floor beneath.
Ten people against the far wall.
An older man was at the front, one step ahead of the others, arms at his sides. Behind him, three women to the right, one of them holding a child against her chest. Four men of varying ages on the left.
A younger man, second from the left in that back group, had one hand on a pair of tongs he’d pulled from the rack. He was holding them down at his side.
The older man said something in Bulgar.
Gal didn’t bother to answer.
He gestured. Left arm for the men, right arm for the women. He held the gesture and then repeated it.
The older man didn’t move.
Gal stepped forward and put his hand on the man’s arm. The man braced his feet and pushed back, a slow press against the grip, the kind a man put in when he’d already decided.
Gal hit him across the face with his open palm, hard enough to take his balance sideways. The older man went into the left wall and caught himself with one hand on the plaster. He was still looking at Gal. His knees didn’t fail him.
Gal left him against the wall and turned back to the room.
The younger man had raised the tongs. Both hands on them, the gripping end toward Nasan, three meters to his right. He wasn’t moving forward.
He’d planted himself in front of the women’s side of the room and was holding that space with the tongs between himself and Nasan, and that was the full extent of his plan.
Nasan had an arrow nocked.
Three seconds. Nobody moved.
Chaqu’s foot came down on the stone floor through the rear door, and the younger man’s attention broke left for one moment.
Nasan stepped in and brought the bow grip across the bridge of the young man’s nose, horizontal, a hard shove into the face. The man’s head rocked back. The tongs dropped.
Both hands went to his face and he went to his knees on the forge floor.
Nasan picked up the tongs with one hand and set them behind him. He looked at the man on his knees.
"Can’t even fight like a man, that’s a worker here." he said, and nothing else.
One of the women moved.
She went fast and low, to the right side of the back wall where a narrow window sat above the workbench, and she’d been watching it because her route to it was already thought.
Both hands hit the bench and then Orkhon closed the distance. He got both her arms and pulled her back from it. She twisted and got her elbow free and drove it into his chest.
He took it and shifted his hold to take the elbow away. She tried again and he immobilized her.
The room was still.
Men on the left, women on the right, the older man braced against the left wall with his hand on the plaster, the young man on his knees, the woman standing stiff where Orkhon held her arm.
Gal walked the left group. He took each man’s right hand in turn and turned the palm up.
The first man had the hammer callus thick at the base of the index finger and across the palm, and the forearms showed the burn scarring from sparks, small pale marks from wrist to elbow on both sides.
The second man the same, older scarring and the swelling at the right wrist from long grip work.
The third man’s hands were similar, the callus still building.
The fourth man’s hands were different.
The center of his palm was smooth where an ironworker’s would be worn through, no burn scarring on either forearm. What was there was a ridge along the inside of the right forearm, from the wrist toward the elbow in the line a bowstring left after enough years of drawing.
Gal pulled him out of the left group and put him on his knees beside the young man.
He killed the young man first.
Blade through the side of the throat, forward. The man made one cry, his hands came up from his face and he pitched forward onto the forge floor.
The archer went the same way, fell sideways against the anvil base and lay there with one arm across the iron and blood from his throat running down it.
The older man closed his eyes.
One of the women wailed and stopped.
The rest were silent.
The genuine craftsmen stood against the left wall and looked at the floor in front of them.
Chaqu moved the craftsmen out first, each one through the front door and into the street with a flat motion.
The women and children followed.
The older man came last, on his own feet, and he didn’t look back through the open door.
Nasan was scratching the left side of his jaw with two fingers and not mentioning it. The young man’s tongs had caught him on the return when he stepped in. He’d feel it for a week.
Chaqu looked at the next building north.
"That door’s twice the width," he said, and started moving.
Two arbans were visible further up the street, each at a different building. From the side street to the east came the noise of a door giving under force and then shouting immediately after.
Gal looked at the wider door and went toward it.
