++The asylums are a necessary evil. Without them we would be beset by minds touched by demons and evil, our streets haunted by howling phantoms and lunacy. Our fine doctors deprived of subjects for their medical study.++

  Chapter 40

  Reggie took a new route back to his apartment, simply because it was the quickest one through the city. He learned this by scaling a building and taking a quick look out over the rooftops. God, Strength in the 20s really was convenient. His Toughness and undead physiology were nice, too. The climb would’ve been a lot more stressful if falling a few dozen feet had still been life threatening to him.

  Making his way through the city at something between a speed-walk and a jog, Reggie thought on what Norman had told him. It all sounded good, but then a lot of things sounded good. It was the doing of them that always made them messy, Reggie had found.

  For instance, the idea of this union thing seemed like it had a lot of appeal. Little guys banding together to secure themselves? What was not to like.

  Except Reggie was walking past more people now, people in rags and shivering under thin blankets in the night air. None of them seemed involved with the unions. Labour unions, which meant unions for people who had jobs. None of these folks had been mentioned by the unions.

  None of them were let in to sleep inside the union’s multiple bases of operations where the wind couldn’t get to them.

  Lots of things sounded good, it was the doing that made them messy.

  Which didn’t mean Reggie wasn’t still liking the unions. It just meant he wouldn’t be running into it all hasty and thoughtless, doing that was a habit he’d never been able to afford. Sometimes he wished less people could.

  But then, those people would just be as powerless as all the other bums.

  A few rats later and Reggie was still mulling the problem over, though the exercise was purely intellectual. He had his orders from the Lady, and he knew the elves wanted him dead badly enough—just for existing—that there was no luxury of picking and choosing his sides here. Once again, he was out of options.

  Apart from the immortality, exponentially increasing power, various magical abilities that let him infiltrate and manipulate humans as easily as breathing and lack of difficulties with food. Yes, Reggie really was poor and disenfranchised wasn’t he? Other than the vampire thing.

  Self pity got old fast. Reggie slept through the early hours of daylight, though he didn’t need to exactly. He’d brought a few fistfuls of soil with him from around Norvhan and took the chance to rest atop them, replenishing himself. It was hard to describe how. Like some pot in his mind was being refilled. When he came to, though it was still the day, he felt a shade less sluggish.

  He headed for Norman quickly. There wasn’t exactly much else on Reggie’s to-do list, after all, though he made a note to ask the Lady for some payment, if only to keep him from being delayed by finding more work. He was starting to run out of money.

  Norman was right where he said he’d be, pleasantly surprising Reggie, and true to his word he was able to take a walk with only a few minutes’ delay. They headed out into the sun while Reggie pretended not to feel it stinging his skin and Norman pretended not to have already rehearsed everything he was about to say.

  “Do you know what fraction of the wealth we create ends up finding its way back into our pockets?” he asked after a few moments. Reggie hadn’t thought about that, the question was one of those abstract ones he always struggled with.

  “A tenth?” he guessed. Norman smiled.

  “Nowhere near as much as even that.”

  Reggie wasn’t feeling all the awe and outrage Norman probably hoped he would, and the man seemed to realise it.

  “Less than a tenth,” he pressed,” less than a twentieth. Can you imagine? All that money, all those resources, produced and generated by us. Relying on us to create them, and they’re just being pocketed by people we outnumber a dozen to one who aren’t doing half as much work.”

  It was certainly unfair, Reggie had to admit. But then so many things were unfair. At least this guy didn’t have anyone trying to immolate him for no reason.

  “Do you think people with steady jobs in labour have it that hard?” he asked before he could stop himself. If Reggie could hit himself in the stupid…But he wouldn’t have gotten the chance now anyway, because Norman answered him fast.

  “Yes,” he said. “But you have some other group you’re thinking of, right?”

  It was annoying how good he was at guessing.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Lots of people don’t have jobs. Don’t get the chance to have even one twentieth of the money a labourer creates. Lots of people get burned at the stake because everyone thinks madmen are the work of the devil.”

  Norman was quiet for a moment. Reggie had expected some instant retort, some readied defence. That he was met with a long pause instead actually had him respecting the man more rather than less.

  “You’re right of course,” Norman said after a moment, “right about all of that. But the people you’re describing aren’t in a position to change things, they don’t have the chance. Nor the will I fear. They’re welcome at our rallies, they just don’t show up.”

  Reggie spent a second imagining what he’d have done if someone had offered him the opportunity to attend an event like this, when he was still scrounging for the materials to make his future.

  “Or they don’t have as much disposable time as people being supported by an organisation of friends to swear off their jobs and stand around yelling.”

  Again, he’d spoken fast and without thinking. Again, Norman failed to punish him for it.

  More moments of thinking passed them by before the union leader spoke again.

  “I like talking to people with other experiences. It helps me add to mine, helps me learn and make sure I do as much as I can for as many as I can. Thanks for that opportunity.” It was a fucking weird thing to be told and Reggie didn’t know how to reply, but fortunately didn’t have to. “But I can tell, John, that you’re new to this city.”

  The last part took Reggie by surprise. “How come?”

  “Because you’d have other complaints about the way we treat our madmen if you weren’t. Follow me.” Norman kept moving and Reggie kept after him, with both of them making swift progress through the city’s bloated arteries. It took them maybe twenty minutes, at a brisk pace, to cross the miles separating them from where Norman wanted them both to head.

  A building of course, everything in Lorwick was a building. All the life in this land had long since surrendered to human artifice. This time, the structure was far less indulgent in its make than the ones Reggie was growing used to. Huge, all the same, but not decorated in splendour or shows of exerted wealth.

  It was a rectangular sort of ‘L’ shape that reached a few stories, with walls covered by uniform windows. The grounds around it were covered in grass and well maintained, and the whole thing was circled by an iron railing that looked thick enough to hold back a bear.

  For the life of him, Reggie couldn’t say what it was. He had no idea what the purpose of a place so big and so broad might have been, why a person would spend so much money constructing it. He turned to Norman, and the silent question must have been clear enough in his eyes.

  The man answered it without prompting.

  “This is an asylum,” he said. Reggie felt like he’d just been stabbed. “You’ve heard of them, then?” the man asked him.

  “They’re…prisons. Prisons for mad people.”

  Reggie had never given them much thought before, to him madness had always been a distant consideration. Some worldly oddity that he might encounter one day, but could safely ignore as being purely hypothetical. Anything he might have called madness had just been the work of demons. Remarkable how peeling back a bit of superstition would broaden your horizons and let you see yourself all the clearer.

  “That’s one way to put it,” Norman told him. “A nice way. Prisons are better than asylums. Any prison, than any asylum. They’re tortured in here. Beaten, doused with frigid water, starved.”

  “Why?” Reggie didn’t notice his hands curling into fists until blood had already started running down the knuckles where nails bit palms. Warm, not cold. Warm because he was burning up more blood—stolen human blood—to keep it so.

  And right now, he wasn’t feeling particularly monstrous for it.

  “Because people don’t want them on the streets,” Norman told him. He was about to continue, but trailed off.

  “Because they think they’re dangerous.” Reggie cut in. “Or unnatural, or…demon-tainted. Evil. They think they’re immoral, that they were born bad, and that the badness is just manifesting as…how they are.”

  Norman stared at him. Reggie stared back.

  “When did you figure out I was one of them?” he asked at last.

  “I had my suspicions since last night, tried to test them when we met up today and finally led you here on a hunch. Looked like the hunch was right.”

  It was right. And Norman was a clever, observant, dangerous man. Reggie made a note of that, because he was, technically, still infiltrating the union.

  “Your people are planning to do something about this place?” he asked, nodding at the asylum, waiting to see if he was still just an infiltrator.

  “We’re not just planning on it. We’re working to help the people here, and on the streets, and everywhere. We’re working slowly. Steadily. But mark my words, we are fucking working and we are going to get what we’re working for. I’ll see to that myself or die in the effort.”

  It all sounded good of course, but that was the problem. So many things sounded good. It was the doing of them that made them messy.

  But the problem with things that sounded good was they still gave you hope, still got you motivated, still had you doing things and making promises. Taking chances. Reggie didn’t know what he was going to say when his mouth opened, he really wasn’t in charge of it at that point.

  “Then you’ll have my help,” he told Norman, “until this is through.”

  A bit of a stupid thing for Reggie to say he had to admit. He was sent here to infiltrate them, though, and whatever else it did this had definitely managed that. His moment of impulsivity had been about the best lie he could’ve told, one that even he didn’t realise was deception at the time.

  Even Norman lapped it right up, grinning broadly and slapping Reggie on the shoulder, then wincing apologetically as he saw him start thrashing and stumbling away on reflex.

  “Sorry,” the man muttered, “but this is going to change things. You’re our ninth real fighter now, and each new one we get is seeing our strength grow even faster than before. We even had a Witchfinder join last week, if you can believe that?!”

  Reggie couldn’t actually, most Witchfinders were dicks. Three in four, going by his own admittedly limited experience. Was this one just some asshole taking the title for credit? He hoped so. Reggie had had enough experience with Witchfinders already.

  “What do we do first?” he asked Norman, and Norman grinned. “There’s a rally tomorrow, it’s going to be a big one. The overseers are getting angry at their loss of production and the guards are still smarting over the bruising they’ve been given a few times before when they tried to break us up. Things might get nasty fast.”

  Reggie nodded. “You want me there to crack a few heads open if they do?”

  “I do.”

  Everything Reggie did seemed to lead him into more fighting. Well, that was fine. Fighting was just what the world was made of.

  “Alright,” he told the man.