Free Vengeance by Colin Harvey

of mankind.
    He turned the corner into the square opposite the shop. The place was unusually crowded, more like morning than early evening. There were so many people he couldn't see her for a moment. People stood in clumps with scarcely a gap between them. An eerie quiet hung there. It was unnatural for so many people to stand in such silence.
    He threaded his way through the gaps, and where there weren't gaps, he made one. He went to the place where she should have been, against the lighted window in front of the lamps. There were others standing there, many of them slack-jawed, but she wasn't among them.
    She might have strayed a little way into the crowd while waiting for him. He stood on tiptoes and when he couldn't see her, climbed a drainpipe and peered out over the heads of the crowd. He still couldn't see her. Starting to worry a little now, he forced his way out into the crowd once more to try to find her, elbowing them aside, looking first this way, then that.
    Some of the people leaned out of windows, looking over the scene. Some were perched even higher, among the gargoyles and stone creatures on the roofs.
    He noticed the mounds, hidden until now by the wall of people. Where the mounds were, the crowd was kept back on all sides, the clear area forming a square within a square. The sheriff and almost all the deputies in the area were there. They all looked harassed and tired, and some of them wiped sweat off their faces, which he realised with a shock wasn't sweat at all. They're crying, he thought.
    There were things lying in the clear area, he realised with a jolt of recognition. Things that wore jewellery and bangles, but were as limp as a bundle of rags. Life-sized dolls. If he looked carefully he could just see the legs and the twisted bodies. They had spread blankets over the bodies, but the blankets had slipped in a few places. One looked like Rosie's friend; what was her name? Carlene, that was it. The doll even had an amulet similar to Carlene's.
    There were strangers in the square. They weren't the sheriff's men but wore another uniform, with the healer's sigil, and bore the insignia of the Quelforn Arcology.
    Amongst them sat others who reminded him of the vagrants who drifted through town, offering cut-price spells and charms. But he'd never seen vagrants looking quite as distressed as these, nor so injured. And still no sign of Rosina. Then he noticed one of the vagrants looked familiar and worry turned to fear. It was Hebe, another of Rosie's friends.
    Amongst the bodies were jagged pieces of broken glass lying about here and there, dark bottle glass. And larger pieces of wreckage, bits of masonry and window frames. But there was still no sign of Rosina.
    At last Gabriel moved. He pushed his way through the last of the crowd, a hesitant, tottering step unlike his normal brisk stride, and walked out alone toward the mounds in the open space.
    One of the deputies laid a hand on Gabriel's shoulder to restrain him. Then he recognised him.
    "Oh, Gabe,” he whispered. “I'm sorry, bud."
    Gabriel said, “I'm looking for Rosie. Have you seen her? I was supposed to meet her here."
    "It was the dyeworks,” the deputy murmured. “There was a leak from one of the vats, the gases reacted...” He led Gabriel to one of the mounds, stooped, briefly lifted one of the sodden blankets by its corner and let it drop again.
    "No,” Gabriel said thickly. “No, that's not Rosie. She must've been delayed.” What was under that blanket wasn't Rosina. The girl he'd been going to marry—she hadn't looked like that. Nobody'd ever looked like that. The face was hers, but the horrible parboiled body—that thing wasn't Rosie.
    He turned and was swallowed up by the crowd, the lobster-red-bodied thing unclaimed. He lurched against the window, in front of the lamps, their meeting place.
    No one looked at him. Their attention was fixed the other way, on the collection of mounds out in the square, which were being carried