We left Colhain’s Landing behind and drove on around the shore of the lake. I was starting to get the first impatient stirrings of an appetite. I hadn’t actually eaten in about twenty-six hours, and without any stay-awake to compensate, my energy was flagging.
Jandra looked like food was the farthest thing from her mind. Her brittle smile had faded into a tight-lipped blankness. She kept glancing towards the water, at the hovering drones and the spot where the boat had foundered.
If she’d been hoping for some happy distraction, she was out of luck. The law had descended on Itan Lake. We were barely a mile from Colhain’s Landing when we came across the first roadblock. In the shade of a towering spruce tree, a Royal Highways Division patrol car was parked diagonally across one lane of the road. The other lane was closed off by a makeshift fence of wooden sawhorses. Two nervous-looking young patrolmen in peaked caps were halting and checking the afternoon traffic, lifting the sawhorses aside to let each car through.
We joined the short queue of vehicles lining up for inspection. “Got your badge?” I said to Jandra.
“No. I thought this was going to be a fucking holiday.”
“It’s alright. I’ve got mine.” It was in the glove compartment, right next to the bottle of capsules. I thanked the Almighty I hadn’t packed anything seriously illegal for our trip. All the same, I hoped we could avoid getting searched. The Highways Division were always a twitchy lot. Understandable, since so much of the burden of contraband interdiction fell upon them.
“Do I look high?” Jandra asked flatly. She sat back in her seat and squinted at her reflection in the rear-view.
“You look fine. Just make sure not to stare. Knowing the Highways chaps, they’re probably on stay-awake as well.”
We gradually made our way to the head of the queue. One of the patrolmen – a pug-nosed girl a few years younger than Jandra – rapped on the driver-side window. I wound it down and flashed my badge with a studiedly polite smile.
“Indeleon City Watch,” I told her. “Both of us. We’re off-duty today.”
The patrolman took the badge and turned it around in her hands, holding the worn brass up to the sunlight before passing it back to me. “Nice place for a daytrip. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Well, it’s not your fault, is it?” I replied. I nodded in the direction of the lake, visible as an intermittent gleam through the roadside trees. “Do you know what’s happening out there? We saw the drones fly over. Sounded like there was some gunfire.”
The girl reached under her service cap to scratch her forehead, which I could see was lightly beaded with sweat. It can’t have been much fun standing around in full uniform in this heat. “Dissidents been stirring up trouble in this part of the province for months. Syndicalists, I think. The Inspectorate had them under surveillance, and decided to make a move today. They called us in to make sure none of them slip the net.”
I made a sympathetic face. “Best of luck. I know what it’s like, getting roped into an Inspectorate op.” I recalled that suspected dissidents had also been their excuse for showing up at the cathedral.
“Yeah. Enjoy your break, while you can,” the patrolman said drily. She signalled to her partner, who hauled the sawhorses out of our way. I gave them both a perfunctory wave of thanks as I eased the car through the gap.
We followed the road for another mile, through patches of thick forest and sloping meadows dotted with summer flowers. More drones buzzed over us, startling birds out of the high branches. I wasn’t even sure where I was taking us, but I wasn’t ready to turn around and slink back to Indeleon in defeat. There had to be somewhere we could snatch a few hours’ peace and quiet.
On the edge of the next village, South Welynte, we were held up by another roadblock. This one meant business. Instead of sawhorses, the road was narrowed by coils of barbed wire, and the attending patrolmen were accompanied by a pair of rifle-toting Inspectorate officers. I didn’t waste any time making smalltalk with these ones. I saw Jandra’s expression harden at the sight of them, but she had the sense not to scowl too openly.
My badge got us through quickly enough. But when we entered the village, I saw in an instant that there would be no escape here, either.
The Inspectorate were there in force. The quaintly cobbled town square had been colonised by half a dozen rigs and a six-wheeled black monstrosity that I recognised as a drone hauler. I’d never known they had such a presence out here in the countryside. Several Highways Division patrol cars were parked beside the Inspectorate rigs, looking rather dainty by comparison. Dozens of officers and patrolmen were bustling about the place, unloading equipment and poring over ordnance maps. There were also a handful of shire constables, the sorry excuses for watchmen that kept the peace in these little villages, standing around glumly with their hands in their pockets. Civilians were watching the hubbub from shop doorways and second-floor windows, quiet and resentful.
“Reminds me of national service,” I remarked as we drove around the perimeter of the square. “Everyone just trying to look busy, hoping an officer doesn’t ask you what you’re doing.”
“Looks like they’re gearing up for a ground sweep,” Jandra said. She was smoking again, working her way through a fresh packet of Stevedore Blues. “A big one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many black-bands in one place.”
“Must have been some especially disagreeable dissidents.” I gave her a pained smile. “I’m sorry, Jand. This hasn’t been much of a break, has it?”
She gave a rueful little laugh and patted my thigh. “It’s alright. Next time, let’s go somewhere a bit further out. Like Asequhra, or one of the moons.”
I glanced skyward. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Inspectorate has men on the moons already.”
*
We did our stubborn best to enjoy ourselves in South Welynte. Inspectorate task force aside, it was a handsome village, bigger and prettier than Colhain’s Landing. I was hungry, Jandra was thirsty, and we were both sick of driving aimlessly around. We found a tavern serving decent food on a hilltop overlooking the village, and watched the sunlight on the water deepen from silver to rosy gold as the evening drew in. Bells pealed over the slate rooftops as the cantors called the dusk service.
Chantry bells always gave me a pang of nostalgia. I’d grown up just down the street from Harranthaen’s main congregation. That old chantry came through the war battered but intact. Its cantors hadn’t been so lucky.
“Should we head back?” Jandra asked, when the sun was touching the forested horizon. “Or were you serious about finding us a lodging-house?”
“Up to you,” I replied, somewhat disingenuously. I was on my fourth or fifth beer by that point, and I wasn’t keen to risk those narrow country roads in the failing light. “The roadblocks will have scared off a lot of the tourists. We might land ourselves a bargain.”
“Mm. We’ll have to. Spent enough silver on booze today,” Jandra murmured over the top of her pint. She didn’t look or sound particularly off-kilter, but she must have been, as she’d drunk nearly as much as me. She hadn’t taken any more stay-awake, at least. We’d been talking amiably for hours, but neither of us had said a word about what happened at the cathedral.
We couldn’t see the town square from the tavern’s garden. We knew the Inspectorate were still there, though. Their drones flitted restlessly back and forth over the lake, black insects spoiling an otherwise beautiful sunset.
“I’ll be honest,” Jandra went on. “If we’re cursed to see those bastards everywhere we go…I’d rather be here than Indeleon.”
I smiled, and reached out across the table to squeeze her hand.
I was right about the local lodging-houses. With their usual out-of-town custom interrupted, they were happy to put us up for the night, and at a reasonable price. We made enquiries at a couple of places in the upper village, before deciding on a former almshouse run by a grandmotherly old woman.
“Bless you poor things, stuck out here in the sticks with us!” the landlady cooed as she led us to our room. If she had any qualms hosting an unmarried couple, she didn’t let them show. “Those wretches in black aren’t letting anyone in or out now. Closed off all the roads, they have, and got those awful machines flying about everywhere you look. My sister telephoned from Orrinswood, that’s twenty whole miles north of here, saying they’re knocking on doors, searching houses. Looking for fugitives, they say. Almighty’s grace, they’re doing it just to scare us, you know. Dissident this, syndicalist that – well, I’ve never seen a syndicalist in my life, have you?”
I wondered if she would have been so talkative if she’d known we were watchmen. I judged it was better to keep that quiet.
The room was low-ceilinged, drafty and colder than I’d expected, but clean and comfortable enough. Its solitary window looked out on the sleepy little lane below. Its crooked walls, crisscrossed by ancient wooden beams, were thick enough to deaden the endless thrumming of drone engines.
Jandra and I were happy to sink into bed together after all that beer. A framed print of the king’s coronation portrait stared down at us from the opposite wall. It was a ubiquitous painting, hung up in half the homes and businesses in Greater Kauln. It wasn’t the first time we’d fucked before the unblinking eyes of Charos the Second.
Alcohol and exhaustion sent us both to sleep soon after. With my last coherent thought, I prayed I wouldn’t dream tonight.
For once, the Almighty was kind enough to oblige.
*
I awoke to muffled shouts and a musical clatter of breaking glass. I sat up in bed, my head heavy and pounding with an incipient hangover. A ruddy early-morning glow shone in through the window – it wasn’t quite dawn yet. The noise had woken Jandra as well, and she stirred, rubbing her eyes.
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“What’s going on?” she mumbled, in a voice thick with sleep.
I rose groggily out of bed, wincing at my headache. I felt every one of my forty years. There were days when I could delude myself I was still a young man. Not today.
Naked, I paced over to the window and looked down into the lane. In the coppery light, beneath the drooping eaves of the old whitewashed houses, I could see an Inspectorate rig pulled up along with two Highways Division cruisers. The black-bands had kicked in the front door of the house across the street from us. As I watched, two of them emerged from inside, dragging a struggling middle-aged man in a tattered nightshirt between them. The fellow shouted and cursed and thrashed as they hauled him to their rig. More Inspectorate men were gathering in front of another house at the end of the lane, while a drone hovered in malignant readiness above the rooftops.
“Raids,” I told Jandra. “Inspectorate are going door-to-door, like the landlady said.”
“Oh, Almighty,” she groaned. She slid herself out of bed and started hunting around for yesterday’s clothes. “We need to go, then. Back to Indeleon.”
“We can’t leave, Jand. They’ll have locked the place down, closed the roads.”
“We’re watchmen. Just show them your badge. We got through all right yesterday, didn’t we?”
“I’m not sure the badge will cut it in the middle of a raid.” The last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to us. There was still a paranoid part of me that feared the Inspectorate knew what we’d seen in the cathedral ruins.
“I’m not staying here to get strip-searched by those bastards,” Jandra snapped, fumbling with her brassiere.
“Fuck’s sake, Jandra. Use some common sense. You know running will make us both suspects. They’ll set a drone on us before we get a hundred yards.” I saw the look in her eyes, the cornered-animal fear, and regretted my harsh tone. “Let’s just wait it out, alright? Let them come to us, if they’re going to. I’ll drive us back as soon as they give the all-clear. We’ve done nothing wrong. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
I could see I wasn’t convincing her. I wasn’t even convincing myself. Right and wrong were very flexible terms, as far as the Inspectorate was concerned. And there was no Orczin here to argue our case.
Jandra’s shoulders slumped. She nodded, more in defeat than agreement. “Have the badge ready, then.”
We dressed ourselves in the dawn light, trying to ignore the sporadic splintering crunch of doors being battered in. The landlady was waiting for us in the darkened parlour downstairs, ashen-faced, with none of the loquacious good cheer she’d shown us the night before.
“They dragged off young Holner Jaren. The greengrocer’s boy,” she told us in a frightened whisper. She flinched and clutched at her string of prayer beads every time a window shattered down the street. “He was a nice lad. Never any trouble. My granddaughter went to school with him.”
“They’ll bring him back after questioning,” I said lamely.
“No, they won’t,” the old woman muttered. She shook her head, glancing out through the half-shuttered parlour windows. “They never do, those devils. They take people, and they don’t give ‘em back, not ever. Nilen’s lot were the same, when they came through here back in the day. All devils, devils in human skins.” The prayer beads rattled in her arthritic fingers. “You two ought go back up to your room. Don’t let ‘em see you.”
“It’s alright. We’ll wait them out,” I replied. My mouth was paper-dry and tasted sour. “Do you have any coffee?”
The landlady seemed glad of the distraction of preparing us some breakfast. She took us through to the little dining room at the back of the lodging-house, where we were out of sight of the street.
Once again, Jandra had no appetite. She paced around the room, hugging herself and examining the old tintype photographs that decorated the walls. I insisted she have a couple slices of buttered toast with her coffee. “You can’t go two whole days with no food, Jand.”
“My stomach feels like it’s shrunk,” she admitted, when the landlady was out of the room. “Every bite’s a struggle. I’ve never felt like this before.”
A stay-awake comedown twinned with a ton of fear and guilt, I thought grimly. “When we get back to Indeleon, just rest at mine. Circumstances being what they are, I reckon we can argue another rest-day out of Orczin.”
“Always overconfident,” she replied, with a mirthless smile.
We were finishing up our sparse breakfast when someone thumped on the lodging-house door. The landlady went to answer it, shuffling with her head bowed like a condemned criminal walking to the gallows. Jandra and I followed her. I reckoned it was best to get it over with, rather than waiting to be summoned.
Three black-bands stood on the front steps, unsmiling, with submachine-guns in their hands. One of them, tall and rat-faced, wore a lieutenant’s bars. His cold eyes swept over us.
“Royal Inspectorate,” he said. “We have a warrant to search this property. We’ve arrested a number of fugitive dissidents in South Welynte. We have reason to believe several more remain in hiding. May we come in?” There was a whole world of implied threat in that may we.
“Yes. Of course. Come in,” the landlady said faintly. She had the sense not to ask to see the search warrant.
Two of the Inspectorate men immediately began prowling through the lodging-house, opening doors and cupboards, rifling busily through drawers. One of them went upstairs to search the guestrooms, while the other headed for the kitchen. The lieutenant asked the landlady the usual pointed questions, appearing quite uninterested in her answers, then turned to Jandra and I. He jotted our names down in a wire-bound notepad and talked without looking at us.
“What are you doing in South Welynte?”
“Just visiting. It’s our rest-day today,” I answered, trying to keep my voice calm.
“Rest-day from what? What is your profession?”
I hesitated for a moment, then dug the badge out of my trouser pocket. “We’re watchmen, with Indeleon’s Seventh Watch.”
The landlady give me a brief look of surprise, quickly darkening into contempt. She muttered something under her breath. I imagined that, in her eyes, City Watch and Inspectorate were two sides of the same coin.
The lieutenant, by contrast, seemed neither surprised nor impressed. “If I telephone that precinct and give your names, will the chief-of-watch confirm that you are who you claim to be?”
“Yes.” I didn’t want to think how Orczin might react to getting such a call, only two days after giving us his warning. Not to mention, I would have to explain why Jandra and I had spent our rest-days together.
The lieutenant scribbled in his notebook. “Have you observed any suspicious activity in this town, since your arrival?”
Only yours, I thought. I heard a loud metallic clang from the direction of the kitchen, where his colleague was apparently looking for dissidents hiding among the saucepans. The landlady winced and fingered her prayer beads.
“We saw that boat getting stopped by your drones out on the lake yesterday,” I said. “Other than that, nothing comes to mind.”
“Lying to an officer of the Royal Inspectorate is a serious crime,” the lieutenant drawled. I got the feeling that he used that line a lot, and enjoyed it every time.
I wasn’t going to let him bully me. “It’s the truth. If there are fugitives on the move, we haven’t seen them. And we’re going to be needed back at our precinct tonight, in time for the graveyard shift.”
The lieutenant looked up from his notes in irritation. “You want authorisation to leave this area?”
“Yes.” I was taking a risk here, and I knew it. But there was no telling how long this witch-hunt might last. In my experience, just like watchmen, the black-bands always appreciated having one less problem to deal with. “You’re welcome to search our vehicle, if necessary. I can show you where it’s parked.”
The lieutenant had just opened his mouth to reply when one of his men called from the top of the staircase. “All clear up there, sir. All the rooms are empty. No sign of contraband.”
“Alright. On to the next one, then,” the lieutenant told him. He turned back to me. “I’ve got half a mind to deputise you both to help us search. There’s a lot of houses still to go through, and the local constables are beyond useless.”
“That’s your prerogative,” I replied. “I’m not sure how much use we’d be, though. We’re both hungover as hell. Hardly slept.”
He looked Jandra and I up and down. Unshowered, bleary-eyed and still wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes, we certainly didn’t look our best. “Far be it for me to deprive Indeleon of its fine brave watchmen,” he said drily. “Be on your way, then. I don’t have time to search your vehicle, and our comrades in Indeleon will be needing your help soon enough.”
I thought about asking what he meant by that. I decided against it. The sooner we were out of South Welynte, the better. “Thankyou, lieutenant,” I said cautiously.
“You’re…you’re letting them leave?” the landlady hissed in outrage. “What about Holner Jaren, and all the rest? When will you let them go?”
The lieutenant gave her a cold look. “Not your concern, civilian. Be thankful that we aren’t billeting men in your house. Drafty old shitheap that it is.” He glanced at Jandra and I in dismissal. “You can tell the men on the roadblocks that Lieutenant Aikerl gave you leave to go. Say you’re on City Watch business. Be quick about it, and don’t get in the way of our search teams.”
We gathered up our things and stepped out of the parlour into the cool morning. We didn’t make eye contact with the Inspectorate men hanging around their parked rig. Broken glass glittered on the cobblestones. As we headed off down the lane, I counted three kicked-in doors, gaping dark and broken in those tranquil housefronts.
The landlady’s hoarse, scratchy voice followed us. “I oughtn’t have let you two under my roof,” she hollered. “Don’t you bloody well come back.”
“I don’t fucking plan on it,” Jandra said under her breath.
We were turning a corner into the sidestreet where I’d parked the Hawker when a louder shout reached my ears. I looked back over my shoulder to see another local being dragged out of his house. This one was a big, powerfully-built man, with the deep bronze skin of a Forester. He was naked except for a pair of baggy shorts, and his face was already gleaming with blood. Two Inspectorate officers and a Highways Division patrolman were trying with all their might to force him to the ground, while he wrestled and spat and swore. Hearing the commotion, Lieutenant Aikerl and his men rushed out of the lodging-house with their guns at the ready.
“Let me go! Let me fucking go!” the Forester bellowed. He lashed out with a desperate punch that knocked one of the Inspectorate men sprawling. “Leave off, you bastards-”
The patrolman drew his pistol and whipped the Forester hard across the jaw with it. The big man grunted in pain, spitting blood and what looked like a few teeth onto the cobblestones.
“Stop resisting, you redskin fuck,” Aikerl barked. “I’m within my rights to have you shot.”
A young woman and two children stumbled out of the man’s house, barefoot and wild-eyed and weeping. The woman – a Kauln girl, not a Forester, by the looks of her – screamed her husband’s name and tried to run to his side. One of Aikerl’s men levelled his gun at her and yelled at her to stay back.
“Evaris, we should go,” Jandra pleaded. She gripped my forearm, trying to pull me towards the car. “We should go now.”
Absent-mindedly, I nodded. But I couldn’t turn my eyes away from the scene.
“You can get in our rig alive, or inside a body bag. All the same to me,” Aikerl told the Forester. He clicked off the safety of his submachine-gun. “Shall I count down from five?”
I couldn’t hear what the Forester said in reply, but I figured it was something along the lines of fuck you, because Aikerl responded by pointing his gun in the direction of the man’s sobbing wife. The woman cringed back into the doorway and tried to shield her cowering children with her body.
“Five,” Aikerl said flatly. “Four.”
The Forester slumped to his knees. “Bastards,” he moaned, bowing his head. “Bastards. Bastards.”
Aikerl signalled to his men. “Bring him. We’ve wasted enough time on this.”
The woman wept wordlessly and clutched her children close as her husband was dragged towards the yawning doors of the Inspectorate rig. The Forester no longer struggled, but he still shouted, his voice heavy with blood and pain.
“You’ll burn. You’ll all fucking burn, do you hear me? This whole fucking kingdom is gonna go up in flames.”
Aikerl slapped him, backhand. “Oh, shut the fuck up, will you?”
The Forester did not. He kept ranting, right up until those black steel doors slammed shut. “You’ll burn for what you’ve done to us. All you fucks, and your bastard king. It’s in the stars, all in the fucking stars.”
I barely registered Jandra tugging on my arm, urging me to go. I knew what I was about to hear. The same words the rubble ganger had hissed to me with his dying breaths.
“The stars are coming down. Do you hear me, you fucks?” The Forester’s voice cracked, full of terror and fury and mad defiance. “The stars are coming down!”
The rig doors closed. The shouts were reduced to a muffled incoherence. There was a moment of silence, broken only by the low sobs of the Forester’s wife and the thrum of the ever-present drones in the sky.
“Evaris, Almighty’s sake, please can we fucking go?” Jandra begged me. Her expression was every bit as tortured as when she’d shot the ganger.
I snapped out of my idiotic trance. “Yes. Sorry, Jand. Yes.”
I led her to the Hawker as quickly as I dared. I would have sprinted, if I could have done so without instantly making us into targets.
We drove out of South Welynte and into the brightening day. My badge and Aikerl’s name got us through the roadblocks relatively unmolested, though we got plenty of frosty looks from the black-bands. Beyond, the country roads were totally empty beneath a cloudswept spring sky.
I stepped on the accelerator and didn’t ease off it until Itan Lake had slipped out of sight behind us, its silver gleam vanishing among the trees. I wondered if we would ever see it again.