A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifteen: The Bell

That night, the tension on the city's streets finally broke into violence. 

It started – appropriately enough – at a fighting-house, although The Bell was really just a large parlour with peeling wallpaper and smoke-grimed air. 

It had been an establishment of some renown, once. When the railway was first being built, all the workmen and engineers had drunk there. And the custom of men with reliable pay-cheques had allowed the proprietor to put on fights with prize-money of a hundred pounds a side.

But the fancy railway-men had long-since gone back to London, and these days, The Bell's only claim to fame was that the General sometimes drank there, sometimes regaled the regulars with stories about the rebellion in India, and sometimes watched the fights with an expression of bored longing which everyone assumed would one day compel him to get up and enter the ring.

These past few nights, he had been very quiet, but that was little wonder. Everyone in the room knew the police were after him. But it was a point of honour that nobody at The Bell would have dealings with the police. You were safe here as long as you weren't a snitch, and didn't cheat at cards. Every other crime could be borne quite cheerfully – even boasted about – at The Bell.

There were no fights on the card tonight. Even the whores walking up and down between the tables were subdued. There had been a half-hearted attempt to shove some acts onto the stage, but they'd been booed off very quickly, and the audience had gone back to their muttering.

It was usually Ted Warner who found that his voice was the one still going when everyone else had fallen silent – just as he was usually the last one standing in a bar-room brawl. Unfortunately, he let the triumph of both situations lead him down some very stupid roads. The ears of a listening crowd dragged things out of him – boasts and rash promises that he couldn't back down on, because he didn't want to be thought of as the sort of man who backed down.

"It's a bloody disgrace," he was saying, because it was one of the words he always reeled out at moments like this. He had climbed into the centre of the ring, and was thundering from it like a preacher at a pulpit. 

"My brother works at the town hall, an' 'e says the police haven't searched a single human house. They break into the slums and trash them, using the little mother as an excuse. And meanwhile, all those cellars and vaults at the University go unsearched. If it was one of their bloody churches that'd been pillaged, they'd be doing something about it, but because it's us – because the little mother is ours – they couldn't give a damn."

He paused to scratch his elbow. Ted was a new-breed, and his demonic heritage had left him with occasional patches of scaly skin. They were greenish-black with an opalescent sheen, and floated like islands on the rest of his skin, making him look partly bejewelled and partly diseased. Consequently, when he scratched at the scaly patches on his elbow, there was a harsh, scraping sound, which attracted the attention of everybody in the room.

When he was sure all eyes were on him, he continued. "I'd like to wring their scrawny little necks. I could put the whole University on its back – Proctors and Bulldogs too – if they'd stop cowering in their halls and face me like men."

He was relishing the silence that followed this pronouncement – already lining up the next boast in his head – when a calm, flat voice spoke into the hush. 

"So what are you going to do about it?"

Ted stopped and stared. The General had climbed up to the side of the ring, and was leaning casually on the ropes. There was a sudden, unnatural hush – not just of people not talking, but of people holding their breath.