It is, perhaps, Myrkentown's least palatable district. Narrow houses crowd in upon each other; roofs threaten to shed their shingles, to collapse entirely. No couturiers here; no pleasant taverns or charming places of business. To glance down the neighbouring alley is to catch a glimpse of the local flophouse and immediately regret it: the Lady's reach is broad but this area has escaped her notice for months, an affront to her sensibilities, and she has not yet scoured its streets of their filth, not quite. Within days that might change. They've expected it to. But at this hour and by the Militia's design, these streets are empty: of labourers and whores, of the vagrants who should ordinarily be huddled into their corners, blanket and cup and grubby-faced hope.
She'd arranged a chair for Treadwell. Being Treadwell, she'd made sure that it was a large one.
A scope for his eyes as well, and a drink for his hand. This was the whole extent of her courtesies. It was also the end of the time they were to spend together during this 'demonstration': giving him her greeting and her farewell in quick succession, she was promptly monkeying up a ladder to take her place upon the nearby rooftop with the least-able of her flag-bearers.
At her indication, he sounds his horn: its bellow ricochets down narrow streets and crowded alleys, and the Militia becomes sudden motion.
The eastern quadrant: two distinct detachments come hard from flanking corners, merging into a single body. Three-wide, five deep: quick boots upon cobblestones, a pattern echoed across three of the northern streets. Men clad alike in their unremitting blackness and dividing from hundreds into dozens, when this begins in earnest; men armed largely with modified goedendags - a simple weapon well-suited for almost any purpose. Amongst them, a thin scattering of spotters: armed but divergent in that their eyes are trained strictly towards the rooftops, alert to what the flag-bearers will signal.
Those flags. Does the Councilor see them? Lurid fabric, fastened painstakingly to what used to be shovel-handles. Their bearers are scattered across the sector's rooftops, and they are anything but inert observers. The Marshall murmurs something to the one by her side: the flags he hoists at side and overhead are brilliant scarlet, vivid even against the dim sunrise sky, and even as the Councilor watches he will see how the stance he'd designated is echoed from one rooftop to the next. Transmitted, from one set of flags to the next, a single instruction communicated across the miles which should make communication impossible -
Distant, very distant, the answering crash of barricades falling obediently into place.
The Marshall's smile is small and irrepressible.
If it'd been Kerrak, she'd have had him shout out scenarios: an attacking body from the west, a rioting crowd converging south-east, so that he could see the Militia's ability to respond in defiance of distance and the unpredictable. But this is Treadwell, whose talents lie elsewhere. So it must be her instead, whispering one event after another into her flag-bearer's ear: a collapse of order two miles rear of the Militia's main body, a sudden encroachment of its east-most lines; a barricade breached by the weight of crushing crowds. Each circumstance prompts a new posture: scarlet flags swapped for green, swapped sometimes for surly amber, and troop redirect their movements at a delay of only moments. Detachments adjust their trajectories, diverging sharply into alleyways and shortcuts, rallying at choke-points as if to fight their way free of them. Intermittently one man or another heeds the flutter of scarlet, driving an axe through a barricade's restraints to send the whole thing tumbling down into place, rendering its street impassible.
At a pre-designated interval, one of the flag-holders falls upon his rooftop as if struck dead by a volley of arrows. The nearest, when she sees this, has her flags shoved into a shoulder-sling; scrambles hard across rooftops, leaping one alleyway entirely and hastening to a point midway between the fallen's and her own. There she performs double-duty throughout the remainder of the exercise, and it delays the Militia's movements upon the ground -
Slightly delays.
An hour of this. By the end of it there are militiamen a little breathless but not quite ragged, and the Marshall has descended her ladder to make her return to the Councilor's side. A few quiet words, then: an explanation of the mechanism behind the wooden barricades, and she will show them, if he's interested. Show him the brackets pounded into the sides of certain buildings to harness those barricades flush against the walls; show him how a good stroke of the axe will cut the thing free, sending it crashing down into the street upon its edge. How - if absolutely necessary - they can be made mobile, to be transported according to a need communicated by scarlet flags. There are more such brackets, she explains. Scattered through Myrkentown proper, appended to buildings of particular strategic value.
And that's when the conversation begins in earnest.