Our sorry, battered band of survivors was made to kneel on the floor along one shabby wall of the safehouse. At first I was afraid we were being lined up for a firing squad, but we weren’t even handcuffed. Then again, with half of us outright crippled, and Artheym and three other armed men watching over us, there was little need for cuffs. The Inspectorate captive, whose face had been so badly beaten it resembled a bloodied cauliflower, was kept separate from us, under Amaya’s guard.
My hidden revolver remained jammed into my boot, useless except as a reminder of my own foolishness.
Our injured received only the most cursory and grudging first-aid. The dissidents bandaged (but didn’t splint) Lokh’s ruined arm and cleaned up Cherdane’s bloody face. Helina, who continued to studiously avoid any eye contact with me, gave Lokh and Movar morphine tablets for their pain. She mumbled what might have been an apology to them. Her face was taut and trembling with fear. Never mind being out of her depth, I thought, this girl’s standing on the ocean floor.
With nothing else to do, I tried to observe our captors. I don’t know what I was hoping to learn. There was no possible escape attempt that wouldn’t end in us all dismembered or riddled with bullets. But a watchman is trained to examine the scene, and hostage or not, I was still a watchman.
The armoured dissidents and rubble gangers were cocky, almost relaxed, grinning and joking among themselves as they stacked and sorted the piles of contraband gear. A few of them were even playing king’s-ransom at a folding table in one corner of the saferoom, clinking glasses of whiskey together like rowdy barflies before last orders. The day’s bloodshed was little more than a game to them; the men and women they’d killed, footnotes in the grand story of their revolution. There would be no reasoning with them. As if I didn’t already know that.
The others, most of whom were unarmoured, were quieter, gloomier types. Municipal workers and thickset labourers still in their stained overalls, watching the tunnel entrances with wary eyes. These ones knew that their old lives were over, one way or another. Did they have families? Wives and children, who knew nothing of what they had done? What empty promises had Modvehl given them, to make them take this terminal plunge?
Modvehl himself was an alien presence among them. I noticed the way the others tensed up when he spoke to them. His orders – move this, check that, keep an eye on these radio frequencies – were delivered like friendly suggestions. They were obeyed instantly and without argument. Even the rubble gangers hopped to it when he looked their way.
When he wasn’t ordering his lackeys around, he paced up and down the safehouse, seemingly lost in thought. That was somehow more unsettling to me than if he’d been shouting death threats. He cocked his head as he walked, nodding to himself, his lips forming silent words. It was as if he was hearing something inaudible to the rest of us, carrying on a conversation with someone (something?) that wasn’t there.
I’d seen the Esuloan do something similar back on the campus, using a hidden communicator to radio the escape boat. But this seemed different. Deeper, more continuous, altogether stranger.
I stared too long. Modvehl caught my eye before I could look away. With an easy swagger, he wandered over to smile down at me. The armed guards stood aside for him, as smartly as sentries at the Dawn Palace.
“Watchman. I understand that you know my name,” Modvehl said. His tone had an oily pleasantness that I instantly, utterly hated. “How is that?”
I managed not to glance at Helina, who hovered hollow-eyed behind her master. “Your security isn’t as airtight as you think,” I said. “The Inspectorate knows all about you.”
“Is that so? And why would they tell a mere watchman?”
I shrugged. “People talk.”
Modvehl’s smile told me he wasn’t fooled in the slightest. “We always strived to work in secrecy. But, as you say, no security can be airtight. Especially not within a movement as large and decentralised as the Orphaned.”
“Shit name for a rebel army,” I told him. “Who picked it? One of those little kids you use as gun runners?”
Modvehl chuckled. I despised his laugh even more than his smile. “I’m not surprised the name isn’t familiar to you. So much inconvenient history has been suppressed, wiped from the record. The king doesn’t have room for narratives other than his own.”
“I think the usual sales pitch will be wasted on them, Vehl,” Amaya drawled.
Modvehl ignored her and went on. I got the sense he was a man who liked the sound of his own voice. “The Orphaned were partisans, armed irregulars hiding out across the eastern provinces, striking behind Salvator lines all through the war. Some of them were loyalist troops, cut off from the king’s forces during the Great Retreat. Some were civilians, brave souls who refused to bow to Nilen and his fanatics. Men and women, nobles and commoners, united in their defiance of tyranny. They faced certain death if captured. The Salv even made a policy of hunting down their families in reprisal – that’s how they came by the name Orphaned. But still, all over the kingdom, they found each other, and they fought back.”
There was a vicarious pride, or maybe reverence, in Modvehl’s voice. Again, he seemed to be only half-present, a part of his mind somewhere far away. He reminded me of my childhood cantors in Harranthaen, midway through one of their fiery sermons.
“They helped Foresters and Hannevara hide from the Salv death squads,” he said. “They sabotaged railways and aerodromes, blew up bridges, slit the throats of Nilen’s Incorruptible. They fed vital intelligence to the loyalists, secrets that won a hundred battles. They made the Salv fear the night, fear the woods and deep valleys where they roamed. While the king was still busy licking his wounds in Tletora, the Orphaned proved that Nilen was not unstoppable. They showed the world that there was still hope.”
“And you…you think you’re their inheritors?” Lokh said, his jaw clenched with pain.
“We are. And not just in a spiritual sense.” Modvehl smiled, showing well-cared-for teeth. Almighty, I wanted to punch those teeth into bloody splinters. “We have veterans of the struggle against Nilen in this very room. Survivors of the Esuloan genocide. Children who saw their parents carted off to the liquidation camps. They’ve all seen the face of the monster. And they know, as I do, that King Charos is just another Nilen to be defied.”
“The king defeated Nilen. It’s thanks to him any of us are even alive today,” Cherdane spoke up. He glared at Modvehl with furious eyes, his face still dotted with dried blood from the crudely-bandaged gash on his forehead.
“Look at this little fucking Royal Pioneer,” Artheym laughed.
“It’s not his fault,” Modvehl said, with infuriating condescension. “He only knows what he’s been taught. What’s your name, watchman?”
“Cherdane.” The kid did a commendable job of keeping his voice level. He’d been with Seventh Watch less than a year, and now here he was, his partner dead and his precinct shattered, a hostage to armed psychopaths.
“Cherdane. You’re a young man. I hope you’ll live to see a better world than the one you were born into. Your generation deserves a chance at freedom.” Modvehl gave the boy’s bloodied face a sympathetic glance. “Charos will never give you that chance. Your loyalty to him is a tragic waste.”
“I won’t break my oath for you, you traitor bastard,” Cherdane spat.
“No,” Modvehl sighed. “I suppose you won’t.” His expression hardened. There was anger there, I saw, real anger beneath the flimsy sheen of civility. “But you will witness the end of the regime you so blindly worship. The blows we’ve struck today, the further blows we are about to strike, they are only the beginning. The Orphaned are everywhere, Cherdane. Across Greater Kauln, across the occupied nations. We have networks embedded in the Ralkovak Kingdoms, deep-cover cells in every city in Tletora, agents as far afield as Blessed Asequhra. Today’s events are not some isolated act of defiance. They are a signal. A message to all of Aede, that the great moment has arrived.”
“The stars are coming down,” I said acidly.
Modvehl glanced at me as if I was an insect on a slide, something to be picked apart under a microscope. “They are indeed, watchman.”
*
We were given a few sips of water – no food – and made to sit there in silence. An hour passed, then another. It’s incredible how long an hour can feel when you’re staring down the barrel of a gun.
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Modvehl spared us no more attention, thankfully, but we weren’t allowed to move or say another word. Artheym paced the dusty concrete floor in front of us, whistling the tune of a schoolhouse hymn, flexing his armoured fingers and smirking. It was a crude, childish sort of intimidation, and it worked very well. Walda Falcieni cringed in fear every time he walked near her. Lokh and Movar sat hunched over in pain, groaning softly to themselves. And Jandra, my poor, trembling, withdrawal-wracked Jandra, just stared at the floor, her eyes blank and empty like an emporium mannequin’s.
She saw no way out for us. And she was almost certainly right.
The activity of the dissidents started to gain pace. They ferried armloads of material out of the safehouse into the radiating tunnels, conventional guns and contraband gear alike. The armoured ones carried around heavy cases and strapped-down crates like were children’s toys, picking them up one-handed and hefting them casually over their shoulders. I wondered how many of those miracle suits Modvehl had smuggled out of Indeleon already. No doubt he was exaggerating the scale of the Orphaned network, but even if they just had a few other cells ready to rise up, the kingdom would be in for an almighty shock.
By now, the adrenaline spike that had kept me going since the bloodbath at the university had ebbed away. I was exhausted, in body and mind. I leaned back against the cracked wall behind me and tried to rest my eyes. It occurred to me that this might be the last sleep of my life.
I had just managed to sink into a shallow doze, in spite of Artheym’s malicious whistling, when there was a sudden commotion at one of the tunnel entrances. Frantic, indistinct voices and loud moans of pain. Artheym swore and raced over to see what was happening, gesturing to the other guards to stay with us. Amaya and several others joined him, guns held ready.
A new group of armed dissidents burst into the safehouse. They were led by a big Forester youth in glinting contraband armour, but other than him they were all in civilian get-up, and they looked like they’d come off worst in a nasty close-quarters brawl. Their clothes were ripped and scorched, their faces filthy with blood and smoke. One of them clutched a bullet-shattered arm against his chest. Another hobbled along on a mangled leg, groaning with every step, supported by one of his friends.
I can’t say I felt much sympathy.
“Dalhan, what happened?” Artheym demanded. “Where’s Rowalt? Where’s Khuno and Timos?”
“All dead,” the leader of the new group replied hoarsely. He gave a hacking cough, spitting up black phlegm. His armour hadn’t protected him from smoke inhalation, apparently. “The black-bands caught up to us, edge of the industrial quarter. There’s a whole bloody battalion of them coming down Blackwater Avenue. Half a dozen gunships. They’ve killswitched all the drones. The intrusion signal doesn’t work any more.”
“We knew that would happen eventually,” Modvehl said, walking over to inspect the injured men with an unworried smile. “There’s contingencies in place. You men did well to adapt. Helina,” he called aside. “See to the wounded.”
“Adapt?” Dalhan strode up, coughing, to snarl right into Modvehl’s face. “Where’s the fucking venator? You said it would be back in action by now. It could have shredded the bastards in half a second. Instead, we got shot to shit. They blew Rowalt’s face right off his fucking skull!”
Modvehl didn’t flinch at the hulking Forester’s anger. “Dalhan. Control yourself. The venator will be deployed at the appropriate moment. Its operational range is not unlimited. It can’t be everywhere at once.”
He’s lying. All my watchman’s instincts told me so. That answer had been too glib, too smooth. There was a reason that hellspawned machine hadn’t shown up today, and Modvehl didn’t want his footsoldiers to know it.
Artheym came up and put a warning hand on Dalhan’s shoulder. After a couple of very tense seconds, the Forester backed off, staggering into a chair on the other side of the safehouse and coughing like a chain-smoker. Helina and a couple of the overalled civilians took the wounded newcomers aside, applying bandages and painkillers much more diligently than they had for Lokh and Movar.
Modvehl lapsed briefly into one of his odd, distracted little trances, tilting his head to listen for voices from another world. Then he wheeled around to address the onlooking dissidents, as if Dalhan’s abrupt challenge to his authority hadn’t happened at all. “Everyone, our timescale will need to be slightly accelerated. The Interior Ministry is more desperate than I anticipated, to launch a full ground assault so quickly. Artheym, your team will remain here to coordinate the defensive effort and protect our wounded. I’ve recalled our remaining operational teams from Seventh Watch to assist you.”
There were mutters from Artheym’s men, shifty and even frightened looks. Artheym himself merely nodded. This one thinks he’s immortal, I thought. Too arrogant to realise that he’s being abandoned by his master.
“Amaya, Cavire, you’ll come with me to the hypocentre facility,” Modvehl went on. “Helina, you as well. I’ll need you to help me coordinate our operations with the provincial cells. The advance teams should have set themselves up by the time we get there.”
Helina, who was in the process of patching up one of Dalhan’s bloodstained men, stiffened. I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t reply. What could she possibly say? Choice was no longer a part of her world. She was being strangled alive by the chain of events.
Then Modvehl’s gaze flicked to Jandra and I. “The hostages will come with us, as well,” he announced.
That garnered more than a few surprised and bitter looks from the dissidents, Dalhan’s people in particular. We were being offered something – presumably some safer refuge – that was denied to the revolutionary faithful, and they didn’t like it one bit. It was only a minor crack in Modvehl’s edifice of command, but it was better than nothing.
“Why don’t we just shoot them?” the Esuloan grunted. “They’re useless to us now. The black-bands won’t care either way.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Cavire. We’re not the Inspectorate,” Modvehl snapped at him. “I don’t expect the authorities to negotiate for their release. But we need to demonstrate to the city that we are not savages. Mercy is what distinguishes us from the tyrant Charos. We kill only when we need to. The City Watch can be rehabilitated after our victory.”
Lokh chuckled at that. It was a pained, bleak, wheezing chuckle, the laugh of a man who knew he was already as good as dead. He looked down at his ruined arm. “You won’t find a lot of watchmen eager to work with you, after what you did at the Metropolitan University.”
“I believe I can be persuasive.” Modvehl made a curt gesture to Cavire. “Bring them up. Now.”
*
They dragged us to the surface through another maddening maze of waterlogged tunnels and crumbling stairways. Lokh’s condition was worsening; he struggled to keep up, and Cavire had to shove him along, cursing him all the way. When Cherdane protested that the dissidents were moving too fast for our wounded, Amaya spun around, pressed a pistol muzzle right into his face, and told him he’d be complaining out of a new hole if he didn’t shut up.
At the top of a mouldering staircase, a creaky steel door opened into the roofless remains of a small restaurant, its scorched seating booths open to the sky and overgrown with twenty years’ worth of twining weeds. Evening was drawing in now, and the surrounding ruins were being swallowed up by long shadows. The Cathedral of the Blessed Martyrs lurked on the horizon a quarter-mile away, black and corpselike.
Gunfire rattled in the gloom, seemingly coming from every direction. Muzzle flashes strobed the broken rooftops. Unseen gunships thrummed frighteningly close. Amid the noise, I could make out the distant, ragged cries of dying men.
“Almighty, they’re right on top of us,” Cavire growled. He carried a stolen Ministry rifle, using its barrel to jab Lokh and Movar out into the blasted street ahead of him. Three more armoured dissidents followed him, fanning out to scan the surrounding rubble with guns raised.
Modvehl strode out of the collapsed restaurant, flanked by two armoured men. He tilted his head to one side, gazing into the middle distance, his lips moving silently for a moment. “The advance teams will help Artheym hold them off,” he announced. “I asked them to prepare firing positions parallel to the avenue. They have anti-aircraft gear to counter the gunships.” He looked perfectly relaxed, as though this was no more than a peaceful sunset stroll. Behind him, Helina picked her way awkwardly over the rubble, looking more pathetically out of place than ever.
“How long until the venator’s ready to go?” Cavire asked.
“Not long,” Modvehl told him. Another lie. “When we reach the hypocentre facility, I’ll determine the proper time to deploy it.”
Amaya, who had dragged the battered Inspectorate hostage along with her, tapped her earlobe and frowned. “Spotters in midtown say a Ministry strike force is mustering on Queen Haara Square. A big one, regiment-sized. Tanks, as well. And there’s jet fighters coming in from the Air Corps base at Kavenan.”
Modvehl murmured something under his breath, and nodded, as if giving his assent to an unheard request. “It’s alright, Amaya,” he said amiably. “I have a contingency in place.”
Whatever voices he was hearing, I was quite sure they weren’t the same ones his subordinates spoke to on their hidden radios. The man’s communing with demons.
“We need to keep moving.” Cavire glanced down the length of the wrecked terrace ahead of us. “Don’t want to be caught out in the open when the jets get here.”
“The jets won’t be a significant problem,” Modvehl reassured the Esuloan. “They’re being deployed as a propaganda effort, nothing more. Another sign of the king’s desperation.”
I’d heard enough. I took a step towards Modvehl, ignoring the barked warnings from his guards and the guns they levelled at me.
“You’re out of your fucking minds. All of you.” I waved an arm at the devastation that surrounded us. “The Ministry will send ten thousand troops after you. They’ll bomb this whole district down to the bedrock, until there isn’t even one brick left for you to hide behind. They’ll pump chlorine into your tunnels and gun you down when you stumble out choking for air.” I stared in furious exasperation at the student dissidents, at those fresh, arrogant young faces. My words were punctuated by an extended burst of gunfire, a few hundred yards away. “What do you think you’re going to do, against the whole damn kingdom? Are you all so fucking keen to die for this madman?”
They sneered at me. Cavire spat contemptuously on the ground; Amaya shook her head and snickered. But I saw some brief, ephemeral flickers of doubt and fear among their footsoldiers. Helina said nothing, but she gave me a wretched look. She, at least, had no illusions.
Modvehl regarded me with an expression of mild, dismissive amusement. “Let me ask you something, watchman,” he said calmly. “You and your colleagues impounded a lot of our gear over the past few months, didn’t you? Interdicted our boats on the Velmiris, caught some of our street couriers?”
Jandra gave him a glare of helpless hatred. “You mean the kids you fucking brainwashed.”
“Oh, no brainwashing was involved. Those brave young souls volunteered themselves for the cause. Their courage still leaves me in awe,” Modvehl replied. He didn’t sound awed at all. “But when you handed the contraband over to the Inspectorate, where was it all sent, do you think? Where’s their evidence lockup?”
Cold realisation struck me. I saw Jandra and Helina’s eyes go wide in unison. “Queen Haara Square.”
Modvehl smiled. “Exactly. Tons and tons of it, sitting down in the underlevels, being studied and catalogued by their technicians as we speak. They must think it’s all inert. But even under all that concrete, my network can still reach it, and send it instructions. Instructions like…this.”
The eastern sky lit up a burning, glowering, terrible red.