I saw a lot of dead men on our forced march across the campus. The dissidents led us over the smoke-shrouded north lawns, away from the rattle of gunfire and the buzz of rotors, and through what was left of the Interior Ministry cordon. The black-uniformed soldiers were not so intimidating in death, their contorted bodies riddled by drone gunfire, their blood seeping into the manicured grass. Slaughtered from above, they probably hadn’t even had a chance to shoot back.
We descended into the waterfront gardens, with their neat tiered flowerbeds and herringbone paths, jarringly tranquil after the carnage. The grey curve of the Velmiris shimmered ahead, through the shaggy green curtain of weeping willows that lined the riverbank. I could hear watchcar sirens wailing on the far side of the river, and scattered explosions somewhere among the faculty buildings behind us.
I walked along with Lokh, supporting him on his uninjured side. The Hannevara’s breathing was laboured, every exhalation coming as a hiss of pain. He kept his broken right arm clasped tight against his chest. It was torture to make the poor bastard walk in that state, but I had to ensure he didn’t slow down. The dark-blonde girl strode beside us like a schoolmarm corralling her pupils, still wearing her savage little smile.
Jandra was in front of me, with the armoured Esuloan prodding her along. Movar, Cherdane and Falcieni followed behind, along with the other Fourth Watch hostages. I saw identical expressions of fear and despair on their soot-stained faces.
Everyone else from our contingent must be dead, I thought, in a fog of numb disbelief. Geisden, Rosbry, Masett, Ontell – men I’d known for years. And it seemed very likely we would soon be joining them.
“Here,” the Esuloan announced, pointing us to a recessed flight of stone steps that went right down to the edge of the river. We pushed through the hanging branches of the huge willow that leaned out over the murky water. There was no boat in sight.
“Where’s our ride?” another of the armoured dissidents asked.
The Esuloan tapped his earlobe and muttered something under his breath, squinting upriver. Then he nodded, as if to some reply only he could hear. “A minute away,” he said confidently. “Artheym’s team are right behind us.”
Some kind of communication device, wired right into his ear? Is that how they managed to spring this trap without the Inspectorate catching on?
The stragglers appeared on the upper pathway moments later. Ten or eleven dissidents, all toting stolen rifles or pistols, along with a solitary Inspectorate hostage who looked badly beaten up. They were led by a handsome, messy-haired young man whose unbuttoned shirt revealed the gleaming contraband armour beneath. This was Artheym, presumably. I remembered his name from my off-the-books interview with Helina. Another of Modvehl’s pet fanatics.
“Good haul, Amaya,” he told the dark-blonde girl, grinning. “You’ve got enough watchmen for everybody.”
“We would have taken more,” the girl – Amaya – replied. “A lot of them tried to run, instead of fight. And you caught yourselves a black-band! I’m jealous.”
Artheym’s grin turned feral. He glanced at the Inspectorate captive, whose face was a swollen mess of bruises and still-wet blood. “He tried to fight. It didn’t go so well for him.”
A large engine blared throatily nearby, growing rapidly louder. I looked upriver to see the escape boat ploughing its way towards us. I’d expected some contraband supermachine straight out of a TV adventure serial, knife-sleek and gleaming black, but it was just a nondescript flybridge motorboat, one of the dozens that plied the Velmiris every day.
The boat raced up to the riverbank, slowing to an abrupt halt at the bottom of the stone steps. Willow branches scraped over its rust-flecked bow. Our captors hustled us aboard quickly and roughly. Movar struck his broken hand on the gunwale in the process, and cried out in pain, eliciting some ugly laughter from the dissidents.
“Take us away,” Amaya called up to the boat’s pilot, when everyone was crowded together on the rear deck. More dissidents on the flybridge pointed rifles down at us. I was sure they were eager to be given any excuse to shoot.
“You won’t get half a mile down the river,” I said. Paper defiance, but it was all the resistance I could offer. Jandra was hunched on the far side of the deck from me, ashen-faced and trembling. I couldn’t even reach out to take her hand. “You’ll be spotted, and sunk.”
Amaya turned to me with a look of playground-bully contempt. “By what?” she smirked. “Drones? All the drones in Indeleon are ours now. The black-bands won’t dare trust them again. Our sabotage teams are setting them loose on the patrol boats and the bridge checkpoints. You need to understand one thing, watchman – nobody’s coming to save you.”
The boat turned sharply away from the riverbank, jolting us all hard against one another. Cold river water sprayed up onto the deck and soaked my uniform jacket. The pilot gunned the engines and sent us racing across the Velmiris, leaving the burning campus behind. I looked back at the deserted gardens, at the black smoke drifting over those fine old buildings with their high copper domes. The prettiest sight in Indeleon, once upon a time.
*
They took us northwest at high speed, following the bend of the river in the direction of Ninth Watch. The sound of sirens and distant gunfire followed us all the way. The riverside avenues were virtually deserted, but Modvehl’s attacks had left plenty of grisly evidence. Smoke was rising from a hundred places on both banks of the Velmiris. Fires crackled in the remains of Inspectorate checkpoints, some of which seemed to have been suicide-rammed by drones. I saw a high-rise block brightly aflame near the Martyr Alikh Bridge, and a capsized patrol boat with black-uniformed corpses bobbing around it.
For the first time in months, there were no drones buzzing over the skyline of the city centre. A few C-81 tiltrotors wheeled high above, seemingly afraid to descend any lower. The Ministry must have been reeling, desperately trying to redeploy its men in the face of this impossible new threat. This was the kind of bloodshed Greater Kauln hadn’t seen on its own soil in twenty years.
And that meant, inevitably, there would come a brutal retaliation.
Pressed against the rusty gunwale at the back of the boat, I tried to read the expressions of our captors, to find some sign of doubt or uncertainty. All I saw was a gleeful determination, a self-assurance that spoke of total faith in their cause. These ones weren’t like Helina. They hadn’t been chosen as quiet, unobstrusive spies and couriers. They were killers, as fearless and merciless as any Inspectorate jackboot.
Still, they were radicals, not professionals. Having disarmed us, they didn’t subject us to a more thorough search. The little revolver stayed hidden inside my boot. It was a pitiful weapon, measured against all their contraband tech, but it was a weapon all the same. If I got the chance to draw it when they were looking the other way, I could make the bastards wish they’d killed me on the plaza.
And then who’ll protect Jandra, after you run out of bullets and get ripped in half by one of those armour suits? The hard reality of our predicament extinguished my little fantasy of revenge like ice water tipped on a candle flame.
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The pilot steered us up to a commercial loading dock on the west bank, coming to a halt beside an ancient freight barge. More dissidents, some wearing Municipality overalls, came out of a low-roofed warehouse to help moor the boat. They stared at us with a kind of fascinated hatred. Surprised, perhaps, to see watchmen taken alive.
“All of you, get out,” Amaya ordered. “We’ve got places to be. Slow-movers get shot and dumped in the river.” Her words were underlined by a couple of her armed friends dramatically clicking off their rifle safeties.
There was nothing we could do but obey.
Several large cargo vans with blacked-out windows were parked in the lot behind the warehouse. Stolen, or donated – it was hard to be sure. Jandra, Lokh and I were shoved into the sour-smelling back of one of the vans, with the Esuloan and another dissident keeping us under guard. The rear doors slammed shut, leaving us with no view of the outside world, and only the paltry illumination of the van’s flickering interior lights.
The van set off with a screech of tyres, turning a sharp corner on its way out of the lot. Lokh groaned in pain as his broken arm was jolted. He mumbled something in a language I didn’t recognise; some Hannevara prayer.
“No fucking talking,” the Esuloan grunted. He made a fist with one armoured hand. I could see flecks of dried blood on his suit forearms. City Watch blood, undoubtedly.
“Do you feel brave, threatening an unarmed man?” Jandra’s voice was shaky, full of barely-controlled fear.
“Did you, trucking off our kids to die in the black cells?” the Esuloan retorted.
“We’re not the Inspectorate.”
“You’re their fucking errand-boys. Doing whatever they tell you, like good little Nilenists. Stomping on people who did nothing wrong.”
“Modvehl’s using you just the same,” I said. The van bumped over something in the road, shuddering on its axles and jostling us in our seats. “You think you’re heroes? Revolutionaries? You’re just meat to him. He’s happy to let you die in his place.”
The Esuloan frowned at the mention of Modvehl’s name, though he quickly buried his surprise with a sneer. “He’s given us what we need to fight back. You saw how we ripped through the Interior Ministry. Indeleon is ours.”
“Then why are you running away?” It was risky to goad him like this, but I doubted he would kill one of the hostages he’d worked so hard to capture just for back-chat. “You had a hundred people on the plaza. Only a few dozen of you made it back. There’s thousands of troops and black-bands still at Queen Haara Square, and they can call in more from all over the kingdom. Your trick with the drones was a one-off. Sooner or later, the Ministry will take back the streets. You’ll be hunted down like dogs.”
“We’ve got plenty more tricks in store. Shit the Ministry can’t even imagine.”
The venator, I thought. The wildcard that has yet to make its grand appearance. “Whatever you have, it won’t be enough. If you release us now, we might be able to convince the Ministry to cut you a deal. You might get a few years in a work camp, instead of a noose around your neck.”
The Esuloan laughed. “Watchman, you can’t possibly think I’m that stupid. You can’t offer us anything. And we’re not afraid of dying.”
“A lot of people say that,” I replied. I thought of Danry ir-Kobha’s dying spasms, and the rubble ganger drowning in his own blood. “But death always takes them by surprise.”
Without windows, there was no way to see where the van was taking us, but it was a fast and serpentine route, full of rapid, screeching swerves and bone-rattling lurches. The driver must have been keeping to the sidestreets, using the switchbacking alleys of Ninth Watch to throw off any pursuit. Our frantic speed made me sure I’d been correct in calling the Esuloan’s bluff. The dissidents certainly didn’t own the city. Not yet, at least.
We came to a stop so suddenly I was almost knocked to the floor. The van bumped over some very rough ground, stone scraping against its underbody, and the unseen driver slammed on the brakes.
The rear doors opened. We were in a vast field of jumbled grey rubble, dotted with half-destroyed buildings like loose teeth sticking out of a scurvied jaw. The other vans were pulled up on the scree nearby. There was a denser, darker sprawl of ruins in the distance, and then – of course – the massive, looming wreck of the Cathedral of the Blessed Martyrs.
“Here we are,” the Esuloan smiled. “Blackwater Avenue. Get the fuck out.”
*
The dissidents abandoned the vans in the rubble field and forced us all to quick-march into the ruined streets west of the cathedral. It was the first time I’d been back there since that bleak night in the Month of Blooms. The shattered, weed-choked terraces were no less gloomy in the daylight, their destroyed interiors pooled with impenetrable shadows.
I saw a new, deeper misery in Jandra’s eyes as she stumbled along at gunpoint beside me. She’d probably hoped to never return to the scene of her first kill. It must have felt like the Almighty was toying with her, bringing her back here in such an abject state.
Amaya and her friends led us on a mazelike wander in the general direction of the cathedral. We walked through the blasted houses rather than around them, taking shortcuts straight through collapsed walls and down ash-caked flights of steps, into well-hidden passageways and caverns of rubble. That lackwit Petil had boasted about his knowledge of the ruins, but I doubted he ever found any of these paths. For Modvehl’s people, the blast zone was home turf.
There was no sign of the security perimeter Koniel had established around the cathedral. I could guess what had happened to those unlucky bastards. Any of them not killed by the subverted drones had probably long since scattered for safety.
We were crossing a devastated, graffiti-covered courtyard when the thunder of massive engines echoed over Blackwater Avenue. A C-81 roared low overhead, giant rotors chopping the air. This one wasn’t a cargo hauler. Heavy autocannons swivelled on bulbous armoured mountings set into its sides. It banked off towards the cathedral, leaving a swirling wake of ash kicked up from the burned-out rooftops below it.
“See, I knew it wouldn’t take them long,” I told the Esuloan. “Drones versus gunships is only going to end one way.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, watchman,” he snapped back at me.
“They didn’t see us,” Amaya declared. “They’d have opened fire if they had. Everyone, move.”
On the far side of the yard, hidden by a scorched, sloping mess of collapsed upper floors, a brick stairway descended below street level. We scuffed and slid our way down into a crumbling cellar, where seeping rainwater had turned the ash and dust to sludge underfoot. Amaya and Artheym tapped at their suit sleeves, and a ghostly bluish light began to emanate from their armour, illuminating the narrow black passages branching off from the cellar. The other armoured dissidents lit themselves up in concert, becoming bizarre, animate light-sculptures.
“This way.” Amaya indicated the passage to the left. “Single file. It’s tight.”
She wasn’t kidding. We were forced to squeeze one-by-one between the mould-black brickwork, our shoes squelching in puddles of collected damp. Gun muzzles and muttered threats prodded us onwards, deeper and deeper into the claustrophobic darkness, with only that sepulchral armour-glow to light our way. It was difficult enough for the able-bodied. I heard Lokh and Movar groan and curse in pain as they scraped their injured limbs.
This miserable journey went on for two or three hundred yards, periodically opening out into lightless basements and forgotten utility rooms, only to narrow again. Some of the tunnels forked or zigzagged abruptly at ninety-degree angles. I quickly gave up even trying to guess our position relative to the surface. The dissidents seemed to have carved out their underground maze with great care, using the ruins to hide their excavation work. The whole blast zone was probably honeycombed with these tunnels.
Ninth Watch never stood a chance, I thought.
Finally, light gleamed ahead of us, brighter and whiter than the armour-glow. I heard humming generators and muffled voices, and the echo of a larger, deeper space.
We came out into a wide, concrete-walled bay that might have once been an underground garage or industrial storeroom. Half of the roof had been caved in by the atomic, but what remained was still large and intact enough to house dozens of people. Several tunnel entrances had been bored into the walls of this apparent safehouse, and strip lighting had been jury-rigged to the cracked, dripping ceiling. Equipment was stacked high on every side – conventional crates and footlockers, gun-racks heavy with smuggled rifles, and the odd contraband containers I recognised from Saldein Heights. There were hundreds of those metallic cases, each one undoubtedly containing some horrible new weapon.
We were met by a motley welcome party. Dissidents in full gleaming armour and in grubby denims, tattooed rubble gangers in ripped army-surplus fatigues, gun-toting civilians in dusty working clothes. And, to my genuine astonishment, Helina, looking even paler and more pitiful than the last time I’d seen her.
Her eyes bugged in shock when she recognised me. But she had the good sense not to say anything. She quickly averted her gaze from my face.
The shabby crowd parted as one of the dissidents made his way to the front. Aside from his glinting silver-black armour suit, he was nothing special to look at – average height and build, a bland, almost forgettable face, close-cropped black hair. But I saw the way the other dissidents made way for him; the deference, even fear, in their expressions.
“Amaya. Artheym,” Modvehl said, with a broad smile of greeting. His voice had the cadences of a shire aristocrat, sharpened by a hint of a west Indeleon accent. “Good to have you back with us. And, to our honoured guests from the Inspectorate and the City Watch – welcome to the house of the Orphaned.”