The Night Watch

by Sean Stewart

  A bullet hummed past and glass fountained from a nearby window. “Shit!” Claire cried.

  The monsters roared, and started after them.

  Water Spider refused to die. Not here. Not yet. “Follow me,” he yelled. He ducked into an alley he knew, and raced for the heart of Chinatown.

  Chapter

  Eight

  Back on the Southside it was almost one in the morning. Twenty-one hundred years ago, Emily thought, an angel had come to the Theotokos with tidings that would change the world. Had Mary been glad at that moment? Or had she bowed and trembled and wished some other woman had been chosen? For the first time Emily thought how terrible it could be to feel your own life lost, swept away into a great river of destiny you never chose.

  A handful of talkers lingered in the Visitors Pavilion, ignoring the enlisted men who were cleaning up after the banquet. Emily was outside with Li Mei (and two unobtrusive guards) contemplating the frozen surface of Mayfair Lake when the angel’s voice came suddenly inside her, like a hammer falling on a piano wire.

  alas!

  Emily gasped.

  —What is it? her familiar demanded.

  —Nothing. I don’t know. Something bad.

  —Your heart just practically stopped. Now it’s racing.

  —Shut up and let me think!

  soon

  Li Mei didn’t seem to have noticed anything. Bundled in a borrowed foil parka, she stood at the edge of the lake.

  Filled with her angel’s premonition of disaster, Emily jumped up from the bench where she had been sitting and began to pace. Her guards stiffened. She glared at them. “It’s too cold to sit still. I’m not going anywhere.”

  The cold was creeping across the front of Emily’s thighs at the bottom edge of her coat, where her frozen pant legs touched her skin. Her familiar screened her self-profile on her contacts. Classic high-arousal pattern: elevated heart rate and respiration, pupils dilated, galvanic skin response up.

  listen

  Emily stopped. An instant later a message came spitting across her eyes, top priority, direct to her and Winter. When it was over she sat blindly on the bench and crossed herself. “Oh. Christ have mercy. Claire.”

  One of her guards stepped forward. “Something wrong, Miss Thompson?”

  now!

  Emily looked up at Li Mei. “A priority interrupt radio message has just come for your mother from Government House. Our AI has instructions to descramble and translate any incoming messages. The monsters from Downtown have attacked.”

  “What! How bad is it? Have the barbarians penetrated beyond Carrall Street, or have they been contained? Does the message come from Water Spider?”

  Emily’s angel and her familiar spoke in concert.

  now!

  —Now! This is your chance to work Li Mei for a quick passage out of town.

  Emily knew they were right. It would be the most natural thing in the world for Chinatown’s delegates to return to their airplane and race back over the mountains. The right words, the right glances and actions, and Emily could be on that flight, safe from Winter, with the angel in her breast untouched.

  Now. Now was the moment. Now.

  She stared stupidly out at the frozen lake. “Those things you call barbarians must have better tech than we thought. They took out our barracks. Found a seam somehow. Shot in incendiaries.” One hundred of her people burned alive.

  “Survivors?”

  “Four. Maybe five. Exact numbers currently unknown.”

  The guards looked at one another, white-faced. Emily’s familiar informed her that one of them had a brother in the destroyed cohort. Had once had a brother.

  Emily sat on the concrete bench and stared at the lake. Claire had taught her to skate here when she was five years old. She remembered stepping out onto the ice, tiny old lady steps, ankles flopping over, mittened hands out. And two years later, learning to skate backwards, Claire weaving from side to side, her strong hands around Emily’s skinny hips, Emily screaming with terror and delight, the two of them wiping out in a fluffy snowbank not far from this very spot, a tangle of limbs and skates and hair, and they had laughed themselves sick. Powdery snow exploding around them like cold white fire.

  “Christ was made flesh to suffer,” Emily said. “Oh God. God, I’m cold.”

  Li Mei turned to their guards. “You! Run at once to the Visitors Pavilion! Find Li Bing and tell her that your garrison has been destroyed in a barbarian attack.”

  The first guard nodded to his fellow. “I’ll stay here. You run like hell.” The second guard bolted.

  Emily started to say, “But—”

  quiet

  listen

  She tried to think.

  —It’s a trap. Li Bing won’t be at the Visitors Pavilion. She is always in bed by midnight. Who could know her routine better than her daughter? Li Mei is up to something.

  —But she just got rid of one of the guards for me.

  —What if she has some hidden motive? the familiar argued. She may want to get you to Chinatown for her own purposes. Had you thought of that?

  —Then we shall use one another, Emily answered, thinking furiously.

  now

  She had to get rid of the other guard.

  Emily inhaled sharply. The cold air stung her nostrils. “There are things you will need from your chalet,” she said, holding Li Mei’s eyes.

  Li Mei nodded. “Of course.” She began walking quickly back to her cabin. Emily and the guard came after her. Ice-crusted snow crunched beneath their hurrying feet.

  —Temperature?

  —Minus fifteen Celsius and dropping. You should have worn warmer boots.

  “Where are your bags?” Emily asked Li Mei.

  “In the back bedroom.” They crested a low hill. The path led down to three guest cabins. Li Mei was quartered in the middle one.

  “Chalet, open.” Emily said clearly as they came to the door. It obliged. “You—Raymond, isn’t it?—run and grab the envoy’s bags. We’ll collect whatever is needed from the front room.” The soldier nodded and loped through the living room to the sleeping quarters.

  Emily held up a hand to stop Li Mei from entering. “Chalet,” she said. “Seal. Emily Thompson: my authority.” Locks hissed and clicked.

  —Confirmed, her familiar said. Boy, are you in trouble.

  “All right,” Emily said. “That should keep him for a while. Do you need to speak with Li Bing before we go?”

  “You can seal these buildings from the outside?” Li Mei stared accusingly at her. “These aren’t guest accommodations. They are prisons.”

  Emily shrugged. “Two for the price of one.”

  The sound of hammering and cursing came very faintly from inside Li Mei’s chalet. The soundproofing was excellent. “And you can do this? On your own authority?”

  My soul shall magnify the Lord. “Lady,” Emily said, “I own this town. Well, Grandfather owns it, but I have a big piece of the action.”

  By two in the morning Li Mei and Emily were flying for Vancouver in Li Bing’s plane. Li Mei said the trip would take about an hour and a half. It was dark in the cockpit of the Phoenix. The old manual controls were still in place, although it had been years since anyone except the plane’s own AI had piloted it. Readouts glowed a ghostly blue on the wide dash: airspeed, altitude, tachometer, fuel levels. Li Mei had asked the plane to take them home at top speed. Now more than ever they would need the Southside reinforcements. And if she was required to sacrifice her career to ensure Emily would not oppose reinforcements—well, as her mother would say, life asks unfair things of us sometimes.

  Inside the cabin, the passenger seats faced each other over a long low table of polished blackwood, ornately carved and heavy with lacquer. An old-fashioned tachometer, warped and broken, hung swaying from the ceiling. It was a lucky charm taken from a much older Phoenix destroyed in a crash eighty years earlier, from which the great-grandfather of the present owner had been able to walk
away with only a sprained ankle.

  “How brave they must have been, the people who flew in planes that did not fly themselves.” Li Mei bent over to study the instruments in the cockpit. “I always wanted to try it.”

  “You? I wouldn’t have guessed,” Emily said.

  “I am my mother’s daughter,” Li Mei said. “I am required to be brave, but forbidden to be foolhardy.”

  Outside, stars glimmered in the cold prairie sky. A few high clouds streamed below them, wind-tangled like the hair of a Sung beauty in an ancient poem. The Phoenix vibrated, her powerful engines sounding muffled and distant, as if they hovered motionless in the dark sky, while the spinning world thundered far below, clouds and fields and soon the onrushing mountains.

  “By now your mother and Winter will be meeting,” Emily said. “By now he must know I’ve gone.”

  “He will be angry?”

  “Oh yes. This is the end for Grandfather and me.”

  “Families don’t end,” Li Mei said.

  “Love can.”

  Li Mei shrugged. “But not family. You are the shadow cast by your ancestors. No matter how hard you run, you cannot escape them.”

  Emily smiled thinly. “If you’re trying to cheer me up, it’s not working.”

  “Do you regret running away?”

  “Yes,” Emily said. “But it had to be done.”

  “Good,” Li Mei said. She ran her fingers through her short black hair. “Smuggling you out and risking the wrath of your grandfather will certainly mean the end of my career. I would be unhappy to think it had been for nothing.”

  “Surely they will understand that you had no choice. I wasn’t bluffing. I would have pulled our troops out of Chinatown if you hadn’t helped me escape. It makes no sense to punish you—”

  “My mother’s ambitions for me have died tonight,” Li Mei said. She rose and walked to the galley. “Shall I get some tea?”

  She returned with a teapot and two cups on a lacquered tray. A wingless whiskered dragon in blue enamel curled around the pot; his mouth was the spout. Li Mei poured ceremoniously, first for Emily and then for herself. The cups were eggshell thin, and hot from the tea inside. Emily had to hold hers with great delicacy, near the top.

  Li Mei savored the aroma. “For three centuries you whites drank this rotten, you know.”

  “What?”

  “It is true. The first Europeans, coming to China, saw how greatly the populace depended on tea. Determined to introduce the drug back home and make their fortunes, they shipped a great cargo of leaves. Unfortunately, sea water got to them in the hold on the long voyage back to Europe, and not far from Bristol the captain discovered that the leaves had all gone rotten. ‘Spread them out on the deck to dry’ said that quick-thinking man. ‘No-one here has ever tasted tea. How will they know the difference?’ As a result, Europeans became addicted to a tea you called black—and we called rotten.”

  Emily sipped her tea. It was hot and green-smelling, with a lighter, more herbal taste than the charred-stick flavor of hot chicory. “Is that a true story?”

  Li Mei shrugged. Her shawl-cut burgundy jacket made her shoulders look large compared to her slight chest. “Water Spider told it to me. He knows a great deal about tea.”

  Great shadows climbed over the horizon as the Rockies thrust up to meet them. The plane flew low into the first pass. Dark stone rose around them.

  Li Mei contemplated her embroidered cuffs. “Now that my life of public service has come to this surprising end, I think I shall make dresses. Or design them, rather. I find needlework very dull.”

  Emily shook her head. “To waste your talents is a sin. Design dresses, Li Mei? I could never do that.”

  “True,” Li Mei observed. “But I have taste.” Emily looked up, offended. “I am no longer a diplomat,” Li Mei said. “I need not worry about your sensitivities. I could even note that there are places in the world where the needs of every formal occasion are not met by a freshly pressed set of fatigues.”

  Emily Thompson colored. “This is your version of being hysterical, isn’t it?”

  “In fact,” Li Mei went on, “I could remark that Southside architecture is without a doubt the ugliest I have ever seen.” She stretched out one leg, admiring her black calf-high boot, its gold buckles gleaming. “I might mention that women in combat boots do not add to the grace of a social gathering, and that the beet, the odious beet, is a vile, repugnant vegetable that no compassionate peasant would inflict upon his pigs! That—”

  “Shut up!”

  For the first time, Li Mei allowed herself a small smile. “No.” She smoothed her skirt and took another sip of tea. “You have liberated me, Emily Thompson. I am in your debt.”

  Emily scowled. “Don’t mention it.”

  The night roared softly around them, heavy with mountains.

  “More tea for the Empress of the Southside?”

  “Is there chicory?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll have tea. And I will never be Southside’s ‘Empress.’ Not after tonight.”

  “Don’t be coy,” Li Mei said, pouring. “It is beneath you. You most certainly will rule Southside, or die trying. Once you were to inherit it; now you will have to fight for it. That is the only difference.”

  “I will not kill my own people to get Winter’s chair,” Emily said steadily.

  “Of course you will,” Li Mei said. She raised her cup. “To the gods,” she said.

  “My governess was a devil’s child.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Claire. My governess. Do you remember her?”

  “The one with the skin defect?”

  “It’s not a defect. Her mother was a devil we call The Harrier. Claire calls her a goddess. I don’t argue the distinction with her anymore. The Harrier, as is her wont from time to time, mated with a mortal man. Taking his seed, she rubbed it into a ball of snow between her palms. From this she fashioned a snowchild, with abandoned wiper blades for limbs and ball bearings for eyes. Then she left it on Winter’s step to thaw.”

  “Go on.”

  “My grandfather knows better than to thwart the Powers of this world,” Emily said bitterly, thinking of the twelve children sacrificed to the North Side. “He took the snowchild in and cared for it. When it had completely thawed, he found he had a baby girl. That was Claire. Most people shunned her. She grew up tough, and everything she had came from his hands alone. That was something Winter thought he could use. So he made her my governess.”

  “Ah. She was in the barracks tonight, wasn’t she?”

  “Stationed there. I don’t know. Maybe she was one of the survivors.”

  “The gods look after their own,” Li Mei said.

  “Devils,” Emily corrected automatically. “I hope so.”

  A smile flickered on Li Mei’s face at this surprising theological position. She changed the subject. “You said the monsters Downtown had been beaten back?”

  “For a little while. I’ve been out of radio reach since we took off, but the last reports seemed to indicate that the monsters were held in check. One message singles out some men for special commendation, men from a…club? Does that make sense?”

  “The Hong Hsing Athletic Club?”

  “That’s it.”

  Li Mei’s thin eyes thinned some more. “Curious.”

  Emily looked at her. “What?”

  Li Mei raised her hands, palms out. “Probably it is nothing. But we have not seen anything like these firebombs from the Downtown barbarians before. Suddenly, here one is. Only one, mind you, unless you have reports that more have rained down on Government House or elsewhere in Chinatown.”

  “No reports to that effect.” Emily was watching Li Mei intently. “Go on.”

  “The members of the Hong Hsing Athletic Club are soldiers too, in the service of the Dragon, the most warlike of Chinatown’s Powers. How lucky enough of them were awake and armed and close enough to Chinatown’s borders t
o throw back this unexpected attack!”

  “You think there was a setup,” Emily breathed. “You think someone in Chinatown knew this was going to happen.”

  “I would not say so much, so simply.” Li Mei reached for the makeup case in the pocket of her jacket and slipped out a lipstick. She ran it quickly over her thin lips. “I would say that Chinatown has been…very lucky tonight.”

  Emily grunted. The Phoenix banked and began to climb, swinging wide and high around a massive peak. Emily touched the crucifix that hung around her neck. “It’s not the worst way for one of us to die. Burning.” She looked at Li Mei. “It’s very cold, on the North Side.”

  They passed through the rushing darkness, heading west, while mountains like empires fell and rose beneath them.

  Chapter

  Nine

  Back on the Southside, Wire woke with bad luck crawling on her skin. She rubbed her face and the back of her neck, then raised her head to look at the clock-face glowing faintly on the wall of her room. Almost two in the morning.

  There it was, the sound that had awakened her. A muffled pounding. Someone trying to get into the chalet.

  Wire rolled out of bed. She grabbed her banquet dress off the floor and dragged it up over her hips, tug, yank, the usual struggle to get her arms through the straps, and then the behind-the-back scrabble with the zipper. The pounding and yelling was clearer now. The sound of Lark’s sleepy voice in the next room filled Wire with dread. She stumbled barefoot into the living room just as the chalet was speaking. Shh! it hissed. I have guests in here trying to sleep!

  More swearing and pounding.

  I am terribly sorry about this, the chalet said.

  Raining peered groggily from her room. “Not at all. Open, please.”

  “Goddamn door!” Nick burst in, bringing the freezing Southside air with him. “Rain, thank God. You have to get out of here. Don’t waste time packing. Get Lark in her coat and get to my truck. Wire too.” They stared at him stupidly. “It’s Winter,” Nick said. “He’s killed Li Bing. Within minutes our cities will be at war.”