The public assembly in the Tram square didn’t look like an unruly crowd of rioters. There were no brandished torches, no drunken shouts, and no smashed shop windows.
Instead, five hundred exhausted, stone-faced working people stood in total, disciplined silence beneath the cold copper glare of the platform gas lamps.
They were weavers who had climbed up from the cellar looms, gray lint clinging like frost to the wool of their shawls and the bristles of their caps. They were drillers from the deep sandstone galleries of Tier Two, white limestone powder crusted around their boot laces and deep in the creases of their leather jackets. They were salt-blowers with scarred, reddened forearms from three decades of working the boiling vats. Their skin smelled of bitter salt water, sulphur, and dried coal soot. Mothers stood in the front ranks. He held swaddled infants wrapped tightly in frayed gray wool blankets to keep out the greasy mist that drifted down from the ceiling chimney pipes.
Between the rows of wet cobblestones, steam rose in thick white plumes from two massive iron cooking pots that Doma’s kitchen girls had dragged out onto the platform. The rich, heavy smell of boiled salted beef—a ration no civilian in Rookvale had tasted since the winter of Year Minus Four—hung in the cold air, thick enough to make the hollow-cheeked apprentices swallow hard, their eyes fixed on the heavy ash paddles resting against the cooking pot rims.
