A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter Read Online Free PDF

artless, of their country. Only the banking houses thrived, the dour honesty and canniness of Blavek’s bankers have always attracted the rich merchants and investors of the Continent.
    So the ancient hermit-city of Blavek, as the country’s only seaport, found itself in the position of also being Tamlaght’s most cosmopolitan city. Its cheap labor, uneducated, unskilled peasants lured by Blavek’s siren-song, made it attractive to those businesses whose factories turned imported materials into exported goods. Thus was created the industrial quarter of the capital city, an island of modernity in a stubborn mediaeval sea. An island regarded with an almost superstitious suspicion and contempt.
    Across the Slideen to the south has grown the sprawling Transmoltus district. Here, spreading from the seed provided by the docks and shipyards, is the most modern addition to Blavek. Made possible by the invention of mechanization on the Continent and the reluctant importation of steam power barely a century ago, the Transmoltus is the industrial quarter of the whole nation. Here crowded scores of factories producing every conceivable product, from steel to cheap jewelry, from leather goods to clothing, from glass to furniture, from patent medicines to dairy products, from the products of slaughterhouses to coal yards. And sarcophagi, of course.
    Almost none of which, except the latter, are intended for domestic consumption. Virtually all of the materials are imported, though Tamlaght is certainly rich in untapped natural resources of its own, and virtually all of the products are for export. Blavek treated the Transmoltus like a cancer, a thing to be contained. It was not about to be allowed to spread beyond its strict confines. While raw materials came in and finished products go out, the Transmoltus has no outlet for its other produce: incredibly noxious factory wastes; criminals; hungry, ignorant, jobless people; armies of street-bred urchins; the envy and loathing of the outside world.
    Dreary roads, black with cinders and coke, wind around the sides of the monolithic factories. Heaps of variegated trash, which the scanty vegetation fails to cover, glance and glare like the eyes of a basilisk. The air is heavy with smoke which hangs like a pall over the lifeless earth. Not a bird nor a reptile nor an insect is to be found. Above all this rise dark masses, huge and strange, an agglomeration of regular buildings, symmetrically pierced by tall windows, and surmounted by a forest of cylindrical chimneys continually vomiting clouds of oily smoke. Red lightning flashes like fire through the black curtain that veils the sky, while a distant roaring resembles thunder or the beating of surf on a rocky shore.
    The Transmoltus is dirty, smoky, loud, busy, odorous, rough, ugly and squalid. While it has made the City immensely wealthy, no one in the City liked to be reminded that it existed. Not one of them would have been caught dead on the south side of the Slideen, which, naturally, would probably be their fate if they were to go there. Even the police do not patrol the district’s streets except in pairs, and not at all at night.
    The simple people of the countryside consider the Transmoltus an abomination, a literal outcropping of the Kingdom of the Weedking, their Hell, and treat it as anathema, avoiding looking in its direction, passing too closely to its borders or speaking its name aloud.
    Lying in the broad, shallow Slideen between the City and the Transmoltus is the artificial island on which the royal palace, the houses of the Privy Council and the various chambers of the government have been established. The island spans the river nearly from bank to bank. Over the years so many bridges and buildings have been built across the river that it now runs in tunnels beneath broad causeways.
    Thud is still in the chair, which after all really does hold him, when Bronwyn wakes in the morning. A slender needle of light lancing through a