Above His Proper Station (11 page)

Anrel bit his lip, nodding. “You're right,” he said. “That's how the sorcerers think.”

“It's how the
emperor
thinks.”

“I've never met the emperor, but I've known sorcerers,” Anrel said. He frowned. “Tell me, if you would—how long do you think we have before they come?”

“Not long, I'd guess. No longer than it takes for them to prepare.”

“Do you think they'll come for you and the other wounded first?”

The watchman's expression changed. He had already been pale with the pain of his broken leg, but now what little color had remained drained from his face. He had been almost sneering as he spoke, but now his expression became one of wide-eyed fear.

“No,” he said very quietly. “They won't. They probably take it for granted that we're all dead, that you slit our throats as we lay in the street.” He looked around wildly. “We could be killed before they know we're here.”

“If they have already reported your deaths, well—they might not want those reports proven wrong,” Anrel suggested.

“You're right,” the watchman said, grabbing at Anrel's sleeve. “You're right!”

“I'll send a note,” Anrel said, pulling his arm away. “I'll tell them where you are.”

The watchman looked up at him, and didn't say anything more, but Anrel could guess what he was thinking.

Would it
matter
if the Emperor's Watch knew these men were still alive? They were all too badly injured to return to active duty any time soon; perhaps it would be less of an embarrassment, more convenient, if they all simply vanished.

The watch might not in fact be that ruthless, that heartless, that careless of the lives of its own men—but what did it say about them, that this watchman was not certain of that?

And what did it say about the emperor's government, that the watch
might
be so ruthless?

“Rest,” Anrel told the injured watchman. “You'll be fine. You'll see.”

Then he turned and walked away, wishing he believed the lie he had just told.

9

In Which the Emperor's Watch Asserts Itself

The last of the arches connecting the walkways of the Pensioners' Quarter with the rest of the city came down while the sun was hiding behind the rooftops to the west, painting the sky above with crimson and gold. There was, as yet, no sign of the retaliation that Anrel saw as inevitable, but he had no doubt it was coming.

The watching archers had fled before the last connection fell, leaving the arches over Tranquillity and Reward and Peace deserted. A few members of the Emperor's Watch were spotted on the walkways outside the Pensioners' Quarter, observing the demolition, but they merely watched, and made no attempt to prevent the destruction of the arches. This inaction did not ease Anrel's worries.

He had written a note explaining that the wounded watchmen were in the hospital ruins, and had dispatched young Po to the watch house beside Executioner's Court to deliver it. He had no idea what effect, if any, it might have; if it served to ameliorate the coming attack in the slightest, then it was worth doing.

He had told Po not to come back that night. There was no reason for him to be involved in whatever might be coming. He made sure that others heard him give these instructions; perhaps those others would also see fit to leave the quarter and avoid disaster.

That done, he had returned home long enough to change his clothing, choosing to wear some of his best in hopes of impressing his compatriots, and then went to confer with Doz and Queen Bim and the rest of the quarter's leaders.

They accepted his warnings of a coming attack with equanimity.

“Let them come,” Bim said. “We can handle it.”

“You can't fight them forever,” Anrel said. “They'll keep coming until you're defeated. They
need
to, to assert the emperor's authority.”

“They can't defeat us,” Bim insisted. “We can just hide until they give up and go home.”

“Hide
where
?”

“Everywhere,” Bim said with a sweeping gesture that took in the entire Pensioners' Quarter. “If they find women and children cowering in their homes, what will they do to us? Most of us are innocent bystanders, so far as they know.”

Anrel stared at her.

Did she honestly think the Emperor's Watch cared about whether anyone in the quarter was guilty or innocent of any specific crimes, real or imagined? From the watch's point of view, the entire quarter had risen against them, and therefore against the emperor's own authority. Any such uprising had to be decisively put down, as quickly as possible, and anyone in the quarter was going to be treated as a rebel.

He was not sure whether women and children cowering here would be beaten, or killed, or hauled off in chains, but Anrel did not think they would be allowed to go unmolested.

He tried to explain this, but the others did not accept it.

“We have lived with the watch all our lives,” the Judge said. “They know us and tolerate us, and in exchange we keep ourselves within certain limits. Today we exceeded those limits, so they will punish us, but then everything will be as it always has been.”

“I don't think so,” Anrel said. He started to repeat what the wounded watchman had told him, but the Judge cut him off with a gesture.

“You're young,” Bim said with a shrug. “You'll learn, if you live long enough.”

“We have the streets barricaded, the gates closed, and men at every barricade and gate,” Doz said. “When they come we'll turn them back, at least at first, and we'll ask to parley. We'll offer apologies, we'll return the bread—we don't want to eat that foul stuff, after all, not unless we're starving. Maybe we'll let them arrest a few of our worst. And then it'll be over.”

“We brought down the arches!”

“We're tired of their spying,” Bim said.

“But …” Anrel groped unsuccessfully for words.

He had initially supported the idea of tearing down the arches, and had enthusiastically helped with the first one, at Duty Street, but now he realized it had been a mistake. Attacking the watch's own structures had been too blatant an act of resistance, and it would bring the empire's wrath down on them all.

He was certainly familiar with this sort of experience. He had made a habit of doing things on the spur of the moment, only to regret them later—most spectacularly, his speech from the First Emperor's statue in Naith. There were times when defiance of the empire and its sorcerers seemed a moral necessity, but these always came at a high cost, and when righteous outrage had subsided and a sense of practicality had returned, he always regretted having incurred that cost—but he knew he would do the same thing again, should the situation somehow repeat itself.

Still, there was no need to pay that bill with interest. The damage was inevitable, but it could be minimized. He had not stayed around Naith or Beynos to be hanged, and he did not want to stay in the Pensioners' Quarter, either—but he could not simply abandon these people who had made him welcome for so long.

“Can't you at least suggest that as many of us as possible should seek shelter elsewhere until the attack is over?” he asked, pleading. “The watch may not be in any mood for caution. Innocents may be hurt.”

“There are no innocents here,” Queen Bim said.

“That's what the watch believes, certainly,” the Judge said.

Doz started to say something, to protest, but before he could finish a word a distant scream distracted them all.

“What was that?” someone asked.

“I don't know.”

“The watch! It must be the watch!”

“They're attacking! To the barricades!”

With that, the debate was at an end, and Anrel found himself running toward the sounds of fighting—or rather, toward the sounds of whatever was happening.

It did not actually sound like fighting. There was no grunting, no shouting, no clash of steel; instead there were screams, many of them, from men as well as women and children, and the roar of shattering stone and tumbling brick, the sharp sound of breaking glass, the crackle of flame.

The sky overhead was still blue and pink and gold, but the streets were in shadow—until Anrel turned the corner onto Duty Street. Duty Street was awash in flame, the lurid orange glow a harsh contrast to the peaceful colors of the sunset. The smell of smoke, of burning wood and burning flesh, swept over him.

At first Anrel could not make out what was happening; the smoke and flame hid much of the scene, and there were people running in both directions, toward the fighting or away from it, getting in his way and blocking his view. Smoke stung his eyes, and the screams and shouts made any attempt at asking questions pointless. At last, though, he pushed through a line of fleeing men and got a good look.

The Duty Street barricade had been set ablaze and smashed apart, the fiery wreckage scattered in every direction, but it was not the men of the Emperor's Watch who had destroyed it, it was not the men of the Emperor's Watch who were now advancing slowly up Duty Street. Instead there were three looming figures, each at least fifteen feet tall, making their way into the Pensioners' Quarter over a layer of flaming debris.

They were not human. They each had two arms, two legs, and a head, but that was the extent of the resemblance. These were creatures made of fire and darkness, darkness so complete that where there were no flames they looked not so much like solid, living beings as like holes in the universe, places where the substance had been ripped from reality itself, revealing utter emptiness beneath. They had no faces at all.

“Demons,” Anrel said.

He had never seen a demon before, but he had no doubt about what he saw now. He had read descriptions when he was a student—until last year's rumors about the empress and her hirelings no one had ever reported a demon in Walasia, but there were stories from the Cousins, from some of the distant lands the Ermetians traded with, and from some of the outermost reaches of the Quandish archipelagoes. There were not so much stories as mere rumors of demons, and even worse things, in the mysterious eastern lands beyond the Cousins, such as the legendary Noroda, but those could not be trusted even as much as the tales told by Quandish and Ermetian sailors.

There could be no doubt demons did exist, but not in the civilized nations. It was common knowledge that certain of the mad magicians of the Cousins had learned to summon, or perhaps create, these beings of incarnate chaos, of walking destruction, and that these magicians had on occasion sent demons to lay waste their foes in the constant internecine wars those unhappy little countries east of the empire fought among themselves. Even when the empire had involved itself in the Cousins, though, no one had ever unleashed demons on the Walasians. The Quandish and the Ermetians considered such a thing to be black magic that would carry far too much risk by its very nature, and the lords and magicians of the Cousins rightly feared the empire's response should they ever employ such horrors.

Yet here were three of these abominations in the streets of Lume, spreading fire and devastation.

This could not be anything the Emperor's Watch had done; they had no magicians of their own, and the Lords Magistrate, who provided them with sorcery when required, could not have summoned demons.
No
Walasian sorcerer could summon demons—it was forbidden by the ancient covenants that Anrel had studied before failing the trials that would have made him a sorcerer. Sorcerers could conjure lesser monsters, yes—his own parents had presumably been attempting something like that when their spell went wrong and killed them both—but not demons. That was a form of black magic Walasian sorcerers did not allow themselves.

But if Walasia's own sorcerers were not responsible, then how had these three come here?

Was the empire under attack? Had the emperor's army invaded some little land in the Cousins that chose this method to retaliate? The demons could not have come here all the way from the Cousins, word would have arrived well before they got this far and there would have been panic. Furthermore, the city walls were heavily warded; demons could not have broken through them without causing tremendous uproar, and there had been no such disturbance.

No, they must have been summoned here in Lume—but by enemy spies, perhaps? Not by the court's agents?

But why would enemies from the Cousins attack the Pensioners' Quarter, and not the emperor's palace?

They would not. The idea was absurd. The only people with any interest in attacking the Pensioners' Quarter were the emperor's own government.

The Emperor's Watch had no magic that could summon demons—but the emperor's court did. Everyone knew that the Empress Annineia had brought necromancers from the Cousins to serve as her personal bodyguards. Anrel had not wanted to believe the rumors that they had summoned demons, but surely, they had summoned these. That had to be the explanation. Nothing else was possible.

But could the emperor have permitted this atrocity in his own city? Wasn't
he
bound by the covenants?

No, Anrel realized, he wasn't. Walasian
sorcerers
were bound by the covenants; their true names were recorded on the Great List, and that list was the mechanism whereby any breach was punished.

But the emperor was no sorcerer. The Cousin necromancers weren't Walasian; neither were they bound by Quandish or Ermetian law. They were free to use whatever magic they chose.

And it appeared they had chosen demonology. That thought made Anrel feel cold and sick, but he could see no other possible explanation.

Right now, though, the demons' origins were irrelevant. The important thing was to
stop
them. Physical weapons could not harm demons, Anrel knew that; physical barriers would be ineffective as well, though they might slow the creatures. The right wards could turn demons away, at least temporarily, but Anrel's feeble knowledge of witchcraft and sorcery did not include any means of setting wards of sufficient power. He could ward off a blow, or a pickpocket, but a demon? No.