Fellow workers,

I cannot give you my name, but I am an ally to your cause. I labour in a printing-works in the city, and we have been given an order to print a series of illustrations for posting all around the city. It is a series of four images, to be printed in five colours, no expense spared, and it represents an attack on our movement and our safety!

The images are as follows:

The first in the series depicts a young man, a ground-worker, leaving his home for a day of labour. He carries a hammer over his shoulder. In the background can be seen two towers – modelled upon the Old Tower and the Grand Tower (at a perspective impossible to achieve from any real location in the city). His clothes are in good repair, and he has the healthy complexion and expression of a young labourer in the prime of his health. He is crossing a street filled with groundsfolk of various professions attending to their own trades.

The subsidiary characters of the series are visible – his parents stand at the door of their building, attending to their own labour. A young man of a similar age and appearance can be seen in the street, wearing the uniform of a probationary officer of the Temar Company.

In the second image of the series, the young man is leaving a workshop at the end of the day, carrying his hammer low by his side. He is stepping into an alley where several dark figures are huddled conspiratorially, one of whom is beckoning the young man to join them. These figures are dressed in ragged labourer’s clothes, apart from one who is in the garb of an Erthani mate.

In the third image, the young protagonist stands atop a cart, brandishing a sheaf of agitator’s literature and addressing a crowd comprising enthusiastic fellow agitators, the conspirators from the last image, and shocked citizens. His face is twisted by anger and blotched with drunkenness, and his clothes have become stained and torn. His hammer lies broken upon the ground by the wheels of the cart, alongside discarded bottles of Erthani spirits. At the left side of the image, the young Company officer watches stoically, while the labourer’s parents observe from the right margin, their faces a study of shame and despair.

In the fourth and final illustration, the young man, his clothes in tatters, lies mortally wounded under a militiaman brandishing a club. On the same street as the first illustration, a detachment of militia is engaging a gang of agitators. The honest workers can no longer be seen, and their smashed tools lie in the agitators’ wake. The constables are being directed by the young officer, now in the uniform of a Second Lieutenant. The labourer’s parents watch weeping, while the conspirators can be seen escaping down a side-alley, unnoticed by the constables.

A more naked, unsubtle piece of propaganda I have never seen! If you can publish a mockery or a reply to this laughable series before the series itself is printed, it shall lose all currency in the public view. Please do so with greatest haste – there are but a few days before this shall be distributed through the city!

Signed,

An ally