It all went back to the blockade; Marcus was no expert, but he knew that much. Trade overland to the north and east, with Murnsk and the League, was obviously impossible. At the declaration of war, the mighty Borelgai fleet had weighed anchor and put Vordanai ports from Nordart to Essyle under their interdict. Any Vordanai trader who wanted to take his goods to a foreign market risked being blown out of the water by a ship-of-the-line, and the only cargoes coming in did so in black-sailed ships, by the dead of night. Fortunes were being made, rumor said, by cruel men who risked capture or death for the chance to sell their wares for a hundred times what they’d cost.

North of the Triumph, at the base of the bridge, a pamphleteer had set up shop. His table was covered in stacks of flimsy paper, each weighed down with a stone against the wind. The pamphlets had changed, too. Instead of the familiar caricatures that had served as bylines—the Hanged Man, the Drunkard—each sheet bore spots of colored ink in its top-left corner for easy identification. Two black dots meant the author was aligned with the Conservatives, who dominated the Directory, while a bewildering array of colors indicated allegiance to the hundred different factions that made up the Radicals. Other combinations meant other splinter groups Marcus had never heard of, some of which might have merged or disappeared by the time their manifestos came back from the printers.

Cartoons were popular, as usual. Marcus stopped to examine one marked with blue and green dots. Directory President Maurisk, caricatured as a near skeleton, was strapping a fat man in a headsman’s black hood to the table of the Spike. “I’m sorry,” he was saying, “but you’re now surplus to requirements.” He was surrounded by hundreds of double-circle grave markers, piles of them reaching into the sky like jagged mountain peaks. The caption read HAVING SPIKED THE REST OF VORDAN, THE PRESIDENT ELIMINATES THE EXECUTIONER.

Farther down, where the rainbow of color turned to solid black-on-black, another cartoon showed a heroically proportioned Maurisk with a sword in either hand, facing down slavering caricatures of a Borel, a Hamveltai, and the Emperor of Murnsk, along with another figure Marcus didn’t recognize. Behind him was a girl, her dress half torn off—nothing like a woodcut nipple to boost sales—labeled VORDAN. The caption read YOU’LL HAVE NO MORE OF HER, YOU BLAGGARDS! The girl was weeping in her hands, but Marcus thought she was intended to look a little bit like Raesinia.

The pamphleteer, a fat man with wispy eyebrows and a bald, spotted pate, caught Marcus’ frown and raised his hands defensively.

“I just sells ’em, sir,” he said. “I ain’t responsible for the contents.”

“Who’s this?” Marcus said, tapping the fourth figure. It was a big man with a hatchet nose, almost birdlike in appearance.