The crowds around Udrebam stadium had been a fearsome sight, their snarling, hateful protests a deafening din. Still they had worsened since the orientation. Numbers swollen, mood darkened, thirst turning bottomless and bloody.
Lavastro stared out at them with a hole where her gut ought to have been, eyes wide and near sightless as they fell into the never-ending tide of flesh ahead. It seemed almost as if the stadium itself had been emptied out again, such were the numbers. Seemed as though the great structure were surrounded by snarling alphoes, such was their ferocity.
She didn’t miss the calls for her own blood in particular, nor the more general roars decrying the organisers. And yet her focus was only placed half upon the enraged masses.
Balogun had the rest of her concern, gazing at the furious men and women with her eyes narrowed and lip curled in quiet disgust. It was her men who had been best placed and numbered to deal with them, and hers alone who acted to do so. The knowledge was almost enough to take consciousness from Lavastro.
“You must be delicate.” She hissed, speaking as strongly as she could manage into the woman’s ear. “These people are starving, their rage comes from misfortune and a need for blame. Brutality will only-”
She was cut off with a sneering laugh no different from the many she’d endured in meetings, and yet Lavastro couldn’t help but fall silent at it now. Balogun held all the cards.
“I know how to handle dissenters, child.” She snapped. “I may not have been raised by a Deity’s favourite whore, but I was canny enough to be made an Immortal’s queen. Stand back and allow me to amend the issue myself. It is, after all, my men who are down there.”
“This is no time for petty bickering.” Lavastro almost shrieked. “This is serious-”
“Guards, please escort the young Kaiosyni from my presence. She is proving a distraction, and there are adult matters to attend to.”
Lavastro almost throttled the cunt then and there, but she allowed the men to move her all the same. Realising there would be no reasoning with Balogun, only watching.
Below their perch, the crowds were growing ever hungrier. Lavastro saw torches raised, timbers and cobbles waving around like bloodied swords. Even, she swore, the occasional glimpse of a pistol. Her dread only deepened further. If they had gone so far as to arm themselves, the mob’s intentions were terrible indeed.
From the tunnels came Balogun’s men, marching uniformly and sharply. Írìsi troops were ever among the more competent of Unix’s forces, their sand-coloured uniforms pristine as the sunbeams detailed them.
It was their weapons that Lavastro found herself staring upon, however. Short, stout and with barrels ending almost shaped like bells. Blunderbusses.
She feared for a moment the crowd might fall upon them at once, but the marching troops were given some leave to fall out before them. By her estimate there was perhaps a regiment of men below, outnumbered tens of times over by the swarming civilians. The distance kept her from sensing whether mysticism was present among either.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Lavastro hoped with all of her heart it was not.
Commands came out from the soldiers clear and throaty, orders to diffuse and disembark back through the city, assurances that all was being done that could be.
Another glance at Balogun revealed an almost bored expression across the woman’s face, hideously placid and disgustingly neutral. As if the matter were a done thing, as if she were in control.
It revealed her ignorance more than anything else. No man or woman could be in control of so many.
Demands answered orders below, spoken without any semblance of stability by a man at the front ranks of the mob. He seemed frantic, from Lavastro’s view, seemed to gesticulate with a strange desperation, though it was hard to tell from so far. That much at least gave her hope, if one side’s leaders were scared of escalation then it would deter things. With luck.
And yet, fearful or not, the man did not back down, that much she became sure of. Moreso once her magic was touched, light enhanced with Cutaris to sharpen the eyes that beheld it. And soon the seconds stretched on into minutes, conversation into an argument.
Soldiers grew as restless as those facing them, and still no ground was given. The larger force only grew more furious. Weapons and feet shifting amid its mass as countless pairs of arms prepared for hard use. Moving through its ranks like waves upon a sea.
At last things struck a spark. Another man made his way through the civilian crowd; larger than the first, more wrathful, carrying the look of a brawler in place of a clark.
He was far nearer to the guards as he spoke, fists curled tighter. Lavastro watched with dawning horror as his volume heightened, eyes bulging, spittle staining the floor while he roared for shelter and food. Men began to back off from him, guns trembling, then growing terribly still as adrenaline ran through to leave their muscles cold and silent.
Finally the culmination came. A single gunshot rang out, a single body fell. A single crimson cloud hung for a moment where lead had ripped through flesh. All was quiet and stagnant for a long, awful second.
Then the world erupted.
In moments the protestors fell upon the guards, more gunfire rang out to join the first shot but did nothing as the hot death melted into the mass of bodies. Training and physique proved useless next to sheer numbers, soldiers falling beneath the strength of the many, then disappearing as they were swallowed in totality.
Lavastro watched the scrambling mob charge nearer to the stadium, even as it bustled still where the guards had fallen. Then moments later heads were hoisted high, posts driven through their necks and slick with ichor where it still oozed free.
She covered her mouth reflexively, like a girl seeing death for the first time. Still she watched, and still they came.
There was a terrible strength to chaos, Lavastro knew. Her father had warned her about it all her life. The way it consumed everything, burned hotter and stronger by making a fuel of all in its path. She’d still never truly understood before seeing it with her own eyes.
Barricades were scaled and torn asunder almost without pause, desperate fire still striking the crowd, shots landing sometimes in places thin enough that their dead could be seen. The resistance only seemed to strengthen the assault, and still it surged on.
In less than a minute they were within the stadium, soldiers abandoning all pretence of struggling to flee like helpless children before the rush. Bodies made so tiny by distance and scale that Lavastro almost imagined they might be toys.
But there was no denying the reality. It was real men she saw die below, real heads she saw dancing atop spikes, real blood rapidly puddling and drying. And the men responsible had only wetted their appetite in the terrible deed’s genesis.
Like that the urgency struck her. She realised only then that they were storming the building in which she stood, danger bringing fire to her veins.