The fire took hours to get under control, even with bucket brigades. Jon could have snuffed it in a few minutes, but he was already getting strange looks from some of his fellow workers, and he had no wish to deepen their suspicions. It didn’t matter if it took ten minutes or ten hours to burn itself out at this point, though. Everyone who was going to die from the flames was already dead, and no one who was dying from the smoke would make a miraculous recovery once the flames were finally snuffed out. The damage was done.

For now, all anyone could do was watch as the smoke billowed skyward, as it was driven by a sea breeze away from the coast. Jon stood there, passing buckets back and forth with everyone else, but his thoughts weren’t on the fire. They were on Rian and his sister. 

He’d taken her to a doctor, but as weak as she’d been, Jon doubted very much that a doctor could do anything to save her. He didn’t expect a town like this to have a water blooded healer that might be able to work the sort of miracles a frail girl like Mara would need to pull through. 

No, the only miracle would be if the dwarves managed to keep the angry masses of people from becoming a full-blown riot. Most of the humans didn’t know any of the dead, but all of them were upset that it could have been them, and rightly so.

“It could have been any of us,” Jon agreed, doing his small part to stoke the fires of outrage in the crowd. “Two accidents in a month! How is that okay?”

That was the message that quickly spread through the crowd. Two accidents but only three coins a day. Apparently, two accidents a year was just far enough apart for everyone to forget about the first one. Two accidents in a month, though, were just enough for everyone to feel like they were in constant danger. 

Though he’d started out trying to minimize his presence in the whole affair and staying in the background for obvious reasons, he was thrust into the limelight when Rian began to rage publicly after Mara’s death that evening. The man was a firebrand, and he was inconsolable as he drunkenly shouted, “We’re less valuable to the shorties than the little cans of clams and mussels we spend the day making! All of you know it’s true! Every last one of you knows you could be next!”

Jon tried to calm him down because he seemed to be the only person that Rian wouldn’t challenge to a knife fight for daring to disagree with him. Still, no one else really wanted to get involved. That was just the way it was here. Everyone wanted to make a little money, and they all figured the next bad thing would happen to someone else instead of them. 

“Jon knows it’s true,” Rian shouted, ignoring Jon’s attempts to placate him. “If he’s brave enough to run into a burning building, then he’s brave enough to know what has to happen next!”

“Getting you to bed before you get into real trouble,” Jon guessed, trying to tamp down the mood, unsuccessfully.

“We need to fight them!” Rian roared, getting onto someone else’s table in the cramped bar that stood in the shadow of the cannery. “We need to protest better conditions and more… and more…” 

The man’s protests dissolved into sobs after that, and he quickly exited the spotlight. Jon understood. It made him think of that day long ago when he’d been forced to give Boriv’s bloody investigation the air of legitimacy as a 16-year-old heir to the Shaw estate. 

Right now, the hot head just wanted to burn the world down and simultaneously make everything return to the normalcy of only a day or two ago, which he’d never experience again. It was the worst of all worlds, and Jon found it unlikely he’d get either.

The dwarves might have gotten away with it, despite Rian’s loud complaints, if they hadn’t announced that they were laying off nearly a third of the workers once the investigation was done the next day, though. The next morning, Jon was standing around gawking at the damage like so many others when he heard the news.

When the smoke had cleared enough that people could enter the building, Jon could see that the blaze had burned out a large section of the cannery, reducing line two to nothing by ashes. All of the complicated boilers, rollers, and pressers that turned metal into cans and sealed them shut were completely destroyed, and Jon doubted very much that they’d be fixed any time soon. 

There were notices posted, too, though, letting everyone know when and how many workers were going to be let go. Jon helped those that couldn’t read, but they still went to the shift supervisor anyway. 

“Those who cooperate are much more likely to keep their place, but we just don’t need as many hands until everything is up and running again,” the dwarf told them, but no one was happy about it. 

It was exactly the wrong message to give to a bunch of desperate people with nowhere else to go. Jon was sure that it was that, more than the deaths, that caused the protests to start a few hours later. 

The dwarves had expected that the biggest pain would be their lost production. He expected they wouldn’t be happy to deviate so far from whatever their schedule was as they dropped down to one line while they made expensive repairs. The kingdoms below were a web of contracts and commitments, so it wouldn’t just be lost revenue when all was said and done. There would also be penalties and loss of honor for failing to honor one’s obligations.

Those problems were doubled a few hours later when almost everyone walked off the job. Whether they were shucking shells or cleaning up fire-damaged equipment, slowly, the word spread that the dwarves were going to fire people, and no one wanted to hear that. 

The rumor seemed to change every few minutes, and Jon delighted in watching it mutate. The shorties were laying half the people off for six months. No, they were laying everyone off, but only for six weeks. Some even said that if they couldn’t find the culprit behind the fire, they were going to start taking people before a firing squad and kill everyone who didn’t to talk. 

By lunchtime, the whole place was nothing but shouting and demanding that someone do something. Rian had at times attempted to take charge of the mob, but ultimately it was too chaotic for him to really handle. Finally, the someone that did something turned out to be the dwarvish overseer of the facility, Lord Goldgen. 

Jon had seen the sour dwarf from a distance before and noted that he kept his beard cropped short, which was a sign of obvious disdain for being on the surface. Someone more important than him had ordered the dwarf to be here, but he didn’t have to like it. 

While the assembly drew together on the north side of the cannery, Jon took the opportunity to retrieve his brand and a rare moment of relative privacy in the now deserted boarding house to clean and load the thing. Then he wrapped it in cloth and carried it in his bag in case things got ugly. 

By the time he joined the gathering where the dwarves were attempting to dispel the rumors and explain what would happen next, they were already halfway to ugly. Nine dwarves stood on that catwalk. Only one of them was talking. The rest were just there menacingly, and each held brands shouldered and ready to fire if things got out of hand. 

For Jon, this was the perfect image of why humans would never be free. Not without removing the dwarven boot from their necks, anyway. In that position, with those weapons, the dwarves could easily hold off this crowd until there wasn’t a man alive left to oppose them. It broke Jon’s heart that the only reason they didn’t do it was because then they would have to do their dirty work themselves. 

“Not another word out of any of ye,” Goldgen yelled. “I have had enough of this mutinous behavior in the face of this sabotage!”

“It wasn’t sabotage!” someone from the crowd yelled, “It was carelessness! Your carelessness!”

“Yeah,” another man closer to Jon shouted. “Our lives mean nothing to you. You let this happen!”

“Ye all signed contracts when you started work here!” Goldengen said, holding up his papers like a shield, “stating that you would assist in any and all investigations related to accidents, labor disputes, and—”

His words were interrupted as someone through a rock. It bounced loudly off the metal wall behind the dwarf, but the dwarves around the Foreman leveled their weapons at the crowd just the same. Only Goldengen kept his strange-looking brand at his side. Jon was sure it was about to get ugly, or at least it would have, if he weren’t here. Silently he stole the fire from each brand, one at a time, dumping it into the metal of the catwalk and rendering each of the weapons useless. 

Only then did he step forward. “People have died under your care, and you are bound by the laws of your people to pay restitution for that! You are responsible for these needless deaths.”

The brands that had been pointed at random in the crowd swiveled as one to Jon, and the people nearest to him began to step slowly away, but he had nothing to fear and instead stepped forward as the crowd of angry workers parted around him.

“A dwarf honors his debts,” the Foreman yelled, “All next of kin will be paid out in silver eighths for—”

“My friend Rian lost his sister in your death trap, and to him, no amount of silver could replace her. How will you make him whole?”

When the first dwarf looked at his weapon in confusion, Jon knew that someone had already tried to kill him. A second dwarven guard looked at the first, but Goldengen didn’t notice as he shouted it back. “It was not me that killed his sister, but the saboteurs! She might even have been one herself, but we will…”

The rest of the words were lost in the roar of the crowd as they booed and hissed. Mara hadn’t been the most well-known person on the islet, but Rian was very popular, and for the dwarf to casually besmirch his family like that angered a great many people. 

That was when Jon produced his own brand that he’d recovered earlier and pointed it at the overseer. “I agree Jon shouted. There will be an investigation and a trial, and in the end, we shall have Justice!”

Goldengen drew his brand, “Ye think you can threaten me with a stolen weapon, boy? Ye know nothing, not even how to use the thing!”

“I know that if you lay down your weapons and surrender, we won’t kill you where you stand,” Jon shouted back before adding in the stone tongue. “None of your weapons will fire, but mine will. I promise you that.”

The overseer was as confused by the sudden use of stone tongue by a human as his men were by their inability to kill him, but Jon knew that surrender wouldn’t be what came next. He waited until Goldengen pulled the trigger of his strange brand before he fired. Strangely, all of the fire present in the dwarf’s weapon didn’t burn. It was like it had more than one round in it, but Jon didn’t see how that was possible. Still, he dispersed the fire harmlessly in a blast of flame to shock the crowd before he fired himself, hitting the dwarf in the chest. The overseer slumped forward before he fell off the catwalk he’d been addressing the assembled crowd from.

That was the signal that unleashed the mob. As soon as everyone realized just how powerless the dwarves were, they charged forward. They didn’t know why, and they didn’t care. All that mattered was that, for the first time in a long time, the dwarf’s magic was failing to protect them.

Jon didn’t charge forward with them, though, and neither did Rian. Instead, the other man clapped him on the back and said, “What now?”

“Now we have a trial,” Jon said, “And after we hang the stone men for the crimes they’ve committed, then we’ll see about arming everyone before more of them arrive.”

“Swords and bows won’t do much against brands,” Rian said, “Though I’d dearly love to make the bastards pay.”

“I agree,” Jon said as a plan started to crystallize in his mind. “We’ll use their weapons, and once we have an army, we’ll raid their facilities further down the coast.”

“What if we can’t figure out how to reload the damn things?” Rian asked, “What if they don’t have enough dwarvish powder for all that.” 

“Then we’ll make more,” Jon said simply. “I was hoping to leave all this behind and find some peace, but that doesn’t look like it’s in the cards.”

“Wait - so you didn’t come here to overthrow the dwarves?” Rian asked?

“No,” Jon laughed. “I came here because someone convinced me I needed to get my boots fixed, but hey - now that I’m here, why not overthrow their tyranny or die trying, right?”

Jon said it almost like it was a joke, but he knew the truth was anything but funny. This would be enough to make the stone men raze the whole area, so if these people were already damned, they might as well go for broke.