This was it, the records room. Martha moved further inside; It was larger than she’d expected, a long, rectangular room crammed with the machinations of money.

  Shelves lined the walls, floor to ceiling, groaning under the weight of bound ledgers and stacked rolls of parchment. Tables stood in the center of the room, scattered with loose documents, quills, and inkpots. She quickly realised the immensity of her task, of the sheer volume of it all. She couldn’t possibly move all of this, even with help and time.

  Then she heard it.

  The unmistakable sound of men-at-arms. They were patrolling the streets, outside the courthouse. Perhaps investigating the noise of her forced entry. The cart, the escape route all seemed impossibly far away now. To be found here now would mean a rope, a short fall, and a sudden stop. Yet to leave them now was to surrender. Martha searched the room, and stopped finally on a washerwoman's bucket, carelessly left in a corner.

  Water.

  She snatched up the bucket. Baptism she thought, hoisting the basket over what looked like the newest row of parchment, and tipped the bucket. A dark tide cascaded down the tightly bound rolls. Parchment drank it in, darkening like a spreading bruise. Ink, the meticulous script of tyranny, began to weep, to bleed its secrets into the flood. She moved on to the shelves, a frantic priestess performing a perverse sacrament of destruction.

  Still, not enough. Martha dropped the bucket. Her hands, already raw, clenched. Wet parchment tore with a sickening, fleshy rip. Let their deeds be as easily undone, she thought. Ink smeared her fingers, mingling with blood from a split nail. She wouldn't stop.Ugly, brutal, hand-to-hand combat with paper.

  Then a noise, the faintest sound scrped behind her. She whirled around, muscles coiled tight, a dripping, half-shredded document clutched in her hand, a useless, pathetic defense against whatever waited beyond the doorway.

  And there stood her sister. Alice. Materialized like a wraith from the pandemonium beyond. Her face was a bloodless mask, stark white and drawn. A fine layer of dust coated one pale cheek, a smudge of the world's ugliness upon the delicate features of a porcelain doll.

  "Martha." The name escaped Alice's lips, not a question, but a bare thread of sound. "What… what in God's holy name are you doing?"

  She looked down at the scene before her, at the chaotic mess she had created, at the water-soaked floor, the scattered, mangled remnants of records, the pervasive smell of damp and decay. It looked, not like the righteous act of defiance she had envisioned, but like the frantic, uncontrolled thrashing of a creature driven mad by fear.

  "We have to go," Alice breathed. "They're… they're killing people. Out there. In the streets."

  Before Martha could even begin to formulate a response, the thud of boots crunched on the stone floor of the corridor outside.

  "Anyone in there?"A guard. The single word slammed into Martha's consciousness.

  Her breath seized, trapped in her lungs. All the frantic energy of a few moments before dissipated.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Then, impossibly, miraculously, Alice moved. She stepped forward, a small, slender figure, almost lost in the shadows, yet she moved with a newfound, almost shocking resolution, positioning herself between Martha and the doorway, a fragile, improbable barricade against the looming threat.

  "Just us, sir," Alice called out, her voice was astonishingly steady. "Just… cleaning up, sir. Master Belknap’s clerks, they made a terrible mess of things, sir. Clumsy fools. Tripped over their own two feet, I’d wager, the lot of them."

  "Belknap’s gone. Bolted long ago. Best get yourselves out of here. It’s not safe."

  "Aye, sir," Alice replied, her voice unwavering, a performance that bordered on the miraculous, given the circumstances. "Thank you, sir."

  The heavy thud of boots faded, retreating down the corridor, their rhythm slowly swallowed by the ambient noise, leaving behind a silence that felt even more profound, more charged, than before.

  Martha stared at her sister, utterly dumbfounded. Her timid, gentle Alice. The one who cried over injured birds. Lying to a guard, with a sweet composure that Martha herself, in that moment, could never have mustered.

  "Come on," Alice urged. She grabbed Martha's arm, her fingers closing with a surprising, almost painful strength. "We have to go."

  “No,” she rasped. “Not yet. It’s not… finished.” She said.

  Alice didn’t argue, didn't plead; those were luxuries they no longer possessed. She saw it in Martha’s eyes – a feverish glint, a single-minded focus on ruin. Martha wouldn’t leave, not until every ledger was pulp. Alice understood, with a chilling clarity, that if they were to get out of this alive, she had to be the one to change the terms.

  Her eyes scanned for fuel, for a spark. Not just the damp parchments, but something dry, something eager to burn. And then she saw it. Tucked beside a stack of forgotten ledgers, almost hidden in the shadow of a tall shelf – a careless pile of discarded papers, bone-dry and brittle. Closer still, nestled amongst them, a glint of dull metal – steel and flint, likely left by some clerk for lighting lamps or kindling fires in the hearth during colder months.

  With that same newfound economy of motion, she moved. No hesitation, no tremor. She knelt by the dry papers, fingers closing around the steel and flint. This wasn't for warmth; this was for release. This was for escape. Flint kissed steel with a sharp, decisive snick. Sparks, tiny frantic stars, rained down onto the waiting tinder of paper.

  A delicate tendril of smoke, a promise of inferno, curled upwards. Then, with alarming speed, flames bloomed, licking at the dry pages, devouring ink and script with hungry orange tongues. The fire crackled, a sudden, sharp counterpoint to the room's damp silence.

  She began adding the small pieces of wood to the burgeoning flames. One by one, then handful by handful, she fed the infant fire, her movements precise and deliberate. The fire responded instantly, greedily. As the wood caught, the flames surged higher, hungrier. Orange and yellow tongues now danced with furious energy, licking at the base of the nearest shelves, reaching for the dry parchment rolls stacked above.

  Heat began to radiate outwards. Smoke began to billow, stinging Martha’s eyes and making her cough.

  Alice saw surrender fin Martha’s eyes. “Come on!” Command edged her voice, pulling Martha towards the exit, away from the roaring fire.They burst through the courthouse doors and stumbled headlong into the street's chaotic roar. They were thrown into the bellowing mob, a monstrous, multi-throated beast; the crackle and snap of flames devouring wood and thatch; the percussive thud of boots on cobblestones.

  And then she saw them. Brutal spikes, thrust into the stone like crude, iron flowers. And then Martha saw what bloomed atop them. Heads.

  Severed cleanly, crudely. These were the heads of Belknap’s men, Martha was sure. Their faces, frozen in the rictus of death, hled a variety of horror. One’s mouth gaped open in a silent scream, teeth bared like a snarling dog, tongue lolling black and swollen. Dried blood, black as tar, matted their hair and crusted around the base of the spikes, with blood that still dripped sluggishly onto the stone steps below. The skin of their faces was stretched taut over bone.

  The mob roared around them, their cheers washing over the gruesome display like waves against a bloodstained shore. But for Martha, time seemed to warp and slow. The roaring fire, the cheering crowd, faded into a background hum.

  Was this victory, or just another kind of horror?

  “Victory.” She whispered to herself.