He waved his hands at the halflings around the factory gate. They raised their placards and waved them, chanting enthusiastically. Magda read Halflings Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! and Ducal Rule—What Is to Be Done?
“We ’ere,” Bert repeated, “are striking, Your Grace, for a bigger slice of the cake.”
“Outrageous!” Chancellor Scroop, at Magda’s side, wiped his forehead with a soaking hankerchief, his magery gone with his concentration. “The city’s budget is stretched to the utmost! We don’t have gold to pay grasping, traitorous, blackmailing, malingering—”
“Oh, do be quiet,” Magda Brandiman said. “Meister van der Klump, how would it be if I met your demands?”
She busied herself straightening her lace-work elbow gloves and fluffing her silk gown’s petticoats. The halfling in cap and knee breeches snapped his fingers, and he and a dozen of his coworkers went into a huddle. They emerged, sweating.
Van der Klump demanded, “An’ what h’exactly would be the terms of this ’ere settlement, Yer Grace?”
“The ducal treasury will grant you all a further two tea-breaks, every hour, with bakery goods fresh from the city’s finest bakeries,” Magda said. She paused. Bert van der Klump’s boot-button eyes fixed firmly on her face. She added, “And four square meals a day at weekends in the workplace instead of the current three. What do you say, Meister?”
“Bert Klump, you ain’t sellin’ us out to the ducal-orcish consortium,” a worker yelled. “We got our principles! No dealin’ with the class enemy—urk.”
A placard dropped onto the worker’s head from the picket line behind her, and she sat down dazedly on the cobbles. The halfling with bulging muscles who carried the placard remarked gravely, “Oops.”
Albert van der Klump hurriedly wiped his hand on the seat of his velveteen breeches and held it out to the halfling duchess. “It’s a deal, ma’am!”
“Congratulations on your shrewd negotiations.” Magda jerked a ducal thumb at the vast brick armaments factories. “Now get back to work.”
Albert van der Klump replaced his flat velvet cap on his greying curls. “Workers of Graagryk! Three cheers for the Duchess Magdelene! Hip, hip—”
“HOORAY!”
Magda Brandiman turned on her heel and strode from the factory gates towards her closed coach, acknowledging applause with a wave of her lace-gloved hand.
Cornelius Scroop stumbled behind her. “Your Grace, are you mad? Those scum know we need the arms factories working night and day! They’re a menace. They’re undermining the fabric of halfling society! They’ll just make further demands until they’ve bled the ducal treasury dry. And,” he added, “the city can’t afford bakery goods. Not for grubby little jumped-up peasants.”
“Aw, c’mon,” the duchess protested. “Let them eat cake.” Cornelius Scroop sniffled with hayfever that even mage-spells couldn’t cure.
“Chancellor, I’ll leave you here to sort out the practical details.”
Two well-built halflings in baggy breeches and silk doublets that did not disguise the bulge of automatic pistol holsters flanked the duchess to her black-painted coach. She nodded to the one who held the door open and accompanied her inside.
Professor Julia Orrin looked up from where she lay across the seat, chewing her thumbnail and throwing dice left hand against right. The female Man sat up, cracking her head against the roof as the coach set off. She tugged the lace froth back from her wrists and fanned her face vainly against Graagryk’s heat, face as scarlet as her frock coat.
“Damned if it isn’t hot as the Abyss! Not like this in Fourgate.” She peered down at Magda, pushing powdered grey hair back from her wet forehead. “Your Grace, are you quite sure you don’t have relatives there? There was a halfling in the Abbey Park, looked just like you, couldn’t be you, of course, she’s a madam, but I used to frequent the bath-houses—”
“I briefly ran the Gibbet & Spigot tavern and bath-house in the Abbey Park last year, but had to give it up to resume my duties as duchess.”
Julia Orrin’s powdered brows lifted. “Really?”
“The barracks, Fyodor,” Magda ordered, removing her dark glasses. “But go by way of the coaching inn. Professor Orrin will wish to return to the north today.”
“I will?” Julia Orrin narrowed her eyes. “Then, madam, I warn you. We at the Visible College are examining very closely our commercial links with Graagryk. Very closely indeed. We may find it uneconomic to continue trading with you.”
“Uneconomic, or merely embarrassing?”
Midday sun pooled the black coach’s shadow on the street. A form of minor magery polarised the windows against the southern sun, and another mage-spell chilled the air inside. The wheels rattled. Magda gazed out through the darkened window at one halfling outrider, spear at attention, riding his lizard-beast through Graagryk’s deserted streets.
“It isn’t a contract with Graagryk, ma’am. It’s a contract with orcs. Questions are being asked. The college’s board of governors don’t like greenies.”
“That is not a term I care to have used in my presence.” Magda icily regarded the large, magic-scarred hands resting in the Man’s lap. One finger sported a silver and lapis lazuli ring. “I remember you from the Gibbet & Spigot. Rattan canes and mustard, wasn’t it, Professor Orrin?”
At the female Man’s expression, Magda smiled.
“Fortunately my professional discretion still applies. Now. The Visible College sells its nullity talismans to the orc marines, and you must be aware that the immunity to magical attack conferred on marines and their weapons is what makes them unbeatable. Like it or not, what you’re doing is selling armaments to greenies.”
The female Man said stiffly, “My colleagues and I prefer to regard ourselves as being in a defence industry.”
“Where does Graagryk’s money go?”
Julia Orrin frowned at the change of direction. “Don’t see what concern it is of Your Grace, but it goes into funding research. I specialise in pure research, myself. I’m proud to say that I doubt if I have ever created a spell that had any practical use whatsoever. Don’t care to visit manufactuaries. We’re not interested in commerce.”
“As long as you have enough money to purchase the expensive range of magical ingredients necessary for your research programmes.” Magda Brandiman removed a long ivory holder from her purse and inserted a slender roll of pipe-weed. Her attendant bodyguard clinked steel and flint until a spark flared. Magda inhaled deeply and blew out a plume of smoke.
“I used to wonder why you didn’t just create the gold you need,” the duchess said thoughtfully, “since it’s well known that there are more alchemists in the Visible College than there are whores in the Abbey Park. Except, I suppose, that such an influx of gold would devalue the currency, destabilise the entire economy, and bring every mage and king of the south down on your back if you tried it. Even magic is subservient to economics and the Gross National Product…”
“We’re northerners,” Julia Orrin said resentfully. “The north is poor. Fourgate Council keeps us on a tight budget. Always has. No way we could manage without outside funding of some kind.”
Magda Brandiman drew deeply on her pipe-weed holder. “You have a permanent and almost inexhaustible source of revenue in the orc marines. As long as you continue to exclusively sell us magic-null talismans, the orcs will continue to buy. It’s a growing business, armaments.”