The Night Watch

by Sean Stewart

  He put his right hand back in his pants to warm. With his left he pulled the second rag out of his pocket and prepared to soak it. His hand froze over the bottle.

  Carbon tetrachloride.

  That’s what he had been trying to remember. He had found a lot of carbon tetrachloride out at the International Airport when he’d been scavenging there. Another excellent solvent with a freezing point at least as low as that of methyl hydrate. Smelled like it too. The difference was, carbon tetrachloride wasn’t flammable. Not just something that burned badly, either. It had actually been used in fire extinguishers. If he was soaking his rag in carbon tetrachloride, he would die waiting for it to catch.

  His first thought was to take the bottle and walk out to one of the blue runway lights to read the label. But he was already very tired and cold, and he had no feeling at all in his feet anymore. He was definitely going to lose a toe or two. And he had just cut the top off the bottle. He couldn’t screw it back on. What were the odds he could stagger out over the icy tarmac all the way to the lights with an open bottle, read the label, and stagger back, without slipping or dropping it from his wooden hands?

  (At eighteen months Lark feared nothing on earth but dogs and people singing—who knew why? She could run like a rabbit. So when Nick stood at the head of the Bridge and put her down, her fear had come like a miracle, a blessing unlooked for. Because he had known, at some terrible level, that she was too precious to him not to be taken. He had known her sacrifice would be demanded.)

  Whoa. No time for that. Focus.

  To soak the rag now, or carry the bottle out and read the label? There were risks either way, and one took more time. He soaked the rag, tipping the bottle over so the fluid ran onto it. Then he picked the bottle up between gloved hands and shovelled it into the fire pit. The rest could pool there, in the bottom. If it turned out to be carbon tetrachloride, he’d tear some upholstery from the Piper’s seats to use as rags and go looking for another bottle.

  Barehanded—it couldn’t be helped—he wrapped the rag around the spark plug, leaving the dry end hanging loose so he would have some place to hold it. He pulled on his gloves, now stiff with cold and his frozen sweat. He stumbled up to the front of the plane.

  (It was one thing to take your child down to the Bridge, not knowing. It was a terrible risk, but a needful one, and so few were chosen. But to know your child would be called away and still to go through with it…Oh, of course, he had been wrong; Lark didn’t go to the North Side. But he had known, so he thought. And he had taken her down anyway. What sort of father did that make him? Even his own dad wouldn’t have done that. His father knocked him around on occasion, true—but he would beat the living shit out of any other man who laid a hand on his boy, no doubt.)

  Focus. Focus.

  It certainly was very cold.

  Nick reached up high, hooked his numb hands on the propeller, and pulled down hard. The rag burst into flames.

  He carried the burning rag over to his fire pit and dropped it in. The remaining methyl hydrate—or ethanol, it could even be ethanol, he thought—blazed up immediately.

  It was frightening how long it took the larger pieces of the chair to catch. If he had gotten too rushed, if he had failed to take the time to cut kindling in various thicknesses, he might have had a brisk ethanol fire for thirty seconds, followed by a cold and lingering death. Now that the fire was going, he could admit that he was in a very bad way. He was probably in some stage of frostbite in a lot of places, especially his fingers and toes. The way his thoughts were beginning to wander, he might well be in the early stages of hypothermia as well.

  The fire was a feast. Not only in its warmth, though of course that was the most important thing. But to see! To have light enough to actually read the words “Methyl Hydrate” on the twisting plastic bottle as its label bubbled and blackened. Death is cold, Nick thought, and the cold is still. To see the red fire bend and flicker, to hear it hiss and pop; to feel the shadows jumping at the edge of vision was to feel life rejoicing in that terrible, cold, lifeless place.

  He swore then that he would follow Raining back to the coast. It was too cold here. She was right, it was too damn cold on the prairies. They went whole years without snow at her house, she said. Heaven.

  She had told him stories about that house, and Wire had too: the hidden home, now near, now far, a lost and secret place in the tangled Forest’s heart. It came to Nick then, alone in the terrible cold and hunched before his little fire, that Raining was like her house, forever hidden; and it would always be like this. Even if they were to get together again, even if he won his way back across the Bridge and became Lark’s daddy and Raining finally admitted that he loved her and he always would, there would never come a time when he could hold her hand and know that they were together and it was forever. For all the long years of their lives there would be days, many of them, when she left him for the secret places of her heart, sad or angry or hopeless or alone, and he would not be able to find her. In the end the truest part of her life would be lived in a place he could not reach, lost beneath her tangled branches. Alone in her empty house.

  Well.

  First things first. He still had to get back to the Southside. But he would leave that until the morning. Nick’s explosives instructor in the Sappers always used to say, “The proximity of death always adds great singleness of purpose.” Certainly all the time Nick had been working to build his fire he had given barely a thought to the ghosts and revenants supposed to haunt the North Side. Nor could he find it in himself to worry about them now. Instead he hunched by his little fire, swearing softly as the blood inched back into his hands. By firelight they looked waxy white, very bad. Still, a little movement came back, and after a great deal of awkward struggling he was able to pull off his boots and socks. He put them on the ground and rested his bare heels on top, presenting his nerveless feet to the warm fire with a sigh of pleasure.

  A shelf of snow slid off the Piper’s tilted wing and into his fire, dousing it utterly.

  The darkness was absolute. His eyes had adjusted to the sweet red and yellow firelight. It would take a minute or two for them to make do with starshine again.

  The heat. The heat coming up from the fire had worked its way into the snow on the Piper’s wing. He should have thought of that. He should have thought to clear the snow off the wing.

  He scrabbled in the fire pit, grabbing sticks out of the snow. He found two bigger pieces still embering. The smaller ones had been doused, but these two still showed orange lines. He blew on the orange parts, first one stick, then the other, like a child licking two ice cream cones. After the first ember died, he concentrated entirely on the second. There was a fissured orange coal, perhaps half as long as his thumb. It was a fiery orange when he blew on it, with wire-thin seams of hotter yellow. When he stopped breathing on it, the seams dulled immediately, and the rest of the coal turned blood red, with black spider-leg cracks.

  The smell of burned flesh came to him, and he realized he must have grabbed some blackened sticks that were still very hot. It was impossible to tell how bad the burns on his hands might be.

  He had nothing to make a fire out of now. That was the crux of the problem. However long he kept this coal alive, the rest of his kindling was buried in snow. It might be useless already. The first thing he needed to do was to dig it out and shake all the snow off and hope there were still some dry parts left. Or he could find another chair.

  He was shaking very hard.

  The seats in the plane would be made of fire retardant foam. He just remembered that.

  He was certainly in very bad trouble now.

  He would have to go back to the counter. With luck, he could do it in one trip. Get another bottle of methyl hydrate and find either a chair or some more rags or something. The fire pit was fine, he could just empty it out and use it again. He would have to make sure he got all the snow out. And he would have to brush off the wing.

  He had n
ever had the shakes quite so badly. He’d run a fever over 40°C once when he was eleven, and then he’d had the shakes pretty badly, but he thought this was worse.

  The stick fell from his hand. It was very hard to hold, between the shaking and the lack of feeling in his hands, and he had dropped it. Not that it mattered, really: the thing to do now was to get the methyl hydrate. He wished he wasn’t shaking so much, though.

  Where was Magpie?

  It occurred to him that he could remember taking off his boots and socks, but he couldn’t remember putting them on again. He was probably crouching in the snow in his bare feet.

  He would pretty much have to lose some toes now. Still, he didn’t have to paint with them. Men could walk on crutches. All he had to do was get back to the counter. One quick trip to get another bottle of methyl hydrate and he would be set. He stood up to get the methyl hydrate. It was very difficult, because his balance was thrown off by not being able to feel his feet, and because he was shaking so much. Still, he was standing now. The rest would be easier.

  Gravely, carefully, with great patience, he reached into the cockpit of the Piper and took out the bundle of cloth John Walker had entrusted to him. That was an honor, wasn’t it? How many men had met John Walker and lived to tell the tale? Let alone been given something to keep for him.

  He spread the coat out on the floor beside the fire pit, then sat down slowly, careful not to lose his balance. He didn’t want to hit his head on the wing and have the snow slide down on him. He could see again, a little. The coat was a strange, shiny black. Bright black, if there was such a thing. He sat cross-legged. The shiny black material slid and whispered under his cold skin.

  The boots he set next to the waistcoat, for when his feet were warmer.

  Because really, thinking it over, he’d had more than enough time to make it back to the helicopter. But he hadn’t tried. Instead he had turned to them and said, “Go!” It was a very curious thing.

  He had stopped shaking, which was a great relief, and he thought he might be feeling a little warmer.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  Far away, across the mountains in Chinatown, it was loud in the night. Above the hissing rain, women shouted news from balcony to balcony, cymbals clashed to ward off spirits, hens squawked and cats quarrelled and men yelled. From time to time rifle shots popped and cracked from behind the barricades the men of the Hong Hsing Athletic Club had put up on every street that faced Downtown. The rain had begun again. Thin and relentless the raindrops came, making cherry blossoms bob and shake. Puddles spread and joined, stretching across streets empty of all save soldiers. The Southsider barracks, now mostly black, still smoked and steamed.

  Water Spider strode down the tiled halls of Government House giving orders to the two aides who trotted after him. “One rifle at every barricade. If you can’t find rifles, use bows. If you can’t find bows, make slingshots. Under no circumstances should we engage in direct combat unless the barbarians come over the barricades. We can’t afford any casualties now while our own people are still waking up. I need every soldier alert and uninjured.”

  He turned to the second aide. “Have any barbarians made it past the barricades?”

  “Twice, Excellency. Two large monsters sprang over the Keefer Street barrier and ran through the streets until scared off by firecrackers. A stronger attack came down Carrall Street. Hong Wu believes they had a railgun scavenged from one of the Southsider perimeter pickets. They cut through the barricade and the five men defending it in seconds. We had just placed a rifleman in an apartment overhead, according to your earlier instructions. He shot the monster with the railgun. The other monsters broke then, with two retreating, and three charging the rifleman. Reinforcements found him dead, along with two monsters. There was no sign of the third monster. We must assume it is still within our boundaries.”

  “And the barricade?”

  “A team is rebuilding it as we speak. Hong Wu took the liberty of assigning three rifles to this point until the barrier has been rebuilt.”

  “Good man.”

  Water Spider had made it back to Government House at 11:35 Friday night. In the two hours since then, runners had been coming and going in a steady stream, each bowing quickly and then pouring out his burden of information, until Water Spider felt like a water wheel, ceaselessly turning, scooping up casualty reports, readiness assessments, and countless enemy sightings. All inaccurate, no doubt.

  At least he didn’t have to worry about troop placements. He had so few soldiers, assigning them was easy.

  Water Spider stopped before the great black doors of the conference chamber. “Send Hong Wu my commendations. In the East Wing you will find the Ministry for Wellness charm-makers hard at work. Take the amulets they give you and deliver them. Some will need to be posted on roadways and over doors. Government House has already been protected. Others will be for personal use by the Hong Hsing Athletic Club. Still others are to be swallowed by the sick, the possessed, or the very unlucky. Use them with discretion. Make sure to take one each yourselves: you are my eyes and ears.”

  “Yes, Your Ex—”

  “Go!” he said, brushing off their bows. “Run! There will be time for courtesy later.” Their footsteps raced away as he turned and swept through the conference chamber doors.

  Heads snapped up around the table. “What’s going on?” Huang Ti complained. The puffy-eyed Honorable Minister for Interior Affairs sat blinking in a gold robe belted hastily over silk pajamas.

  “Water Spider! So glad you could come,” said Johnny Ma. The Honorable Minister for the South took a joint from between his lips and grinned. “It wouldn’t be the same war without you.” Unlike Huang Ti, Johnny was fully dressed and wide awake. He looked as if he had just strolled out of a casino, which he probably had. “You do love a good crisis, don’t you? It puts such a lordly purpose in your stride.”

  There were eight chairs around the conference table, one for each minister in the Government. Each was made of intricately carved blackwood, leopard-footed, with low arms and high backs, edged with beasts and birds and flowers, and gleaming darkly with sable coats of lacquer. Inlaid in the back of each chair was a different mother-of-pearl totem: a lizard, a monkey, a chrysanthemum, a wall, a purse, a ship, a pair of scales, and a lidded eye; but the Emperor’s great red dragon chair at the head of the table was empty.

  Water Spider, the Honorable Minister for Borders, dropped into the seat with the stylized wall. He looked at Johnny Ma. “I could use a smoke, if you have one to spare.”

  Johnny grinned and took out a gold-plated cigarette case. His portfolio as Minister for the South was to monitor the doings of the Double Monkey, the merchants’ patron of the south side of Chinatown, a Power incarnating equal parts wealth and duplicity. Johnny shook out a joint and held it to a mother-of-pearl lighter. “Have you not told me many times that these are but the affectations of a foppish youth?”

  Water Spider took the joint from him. “That was then. Now they are a vice of middle age.”

  On Water Spider’s right, Grace Shih, the Honorable Minister for Wellness, chuckled. Her tiny hunched back was too short to obscure the pair of scales inlaid on her chair. Her old fingers rested briefly on his wrist, dry and light as twists of grass. “It is the great wisdom of age to know what you want, is it not?”

  A cup of tea.

  No time for that, Water Spider told himself. No time for mysteries. He took a drag on the joint. It was vile.

  The Lidded Eye, also known as the Honorable Minister in Charge of Ministers, coughed meaningfully and began to call the roll. Present were Water Spider, the Minister for Borders; Johnny Ma, Minister for the South; Grace Shih, Minister for Wellness; Huang Ti, the Purse, or Minister for the Interior, and of course the Lidded Eye herself, the Honorable Minister in Charge of Ministers.

  Absent were the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Minister for the East, whose job was to monitor the doings of the Dragon, and the Minister
for the West, who studied the Lady in the Garden. Water Spider thought it a bad omen that the ministers responsible for watching two of Chinatown’s three Powers were missing.

  The Lidded Eye rolled up her scroll and looked down the table to where Water Spider sat. “Begin.”

  Water Spider rose, bowing first to the empty chair and then to his colleagues. “The barbarians have destroyed the mercenary garrison at B.C. Place Stadium.” Swiftly he outlined the tactical situation for his fellow ministers. Like Chinatown, Vancouver’s downtown office district was one area that had not been overrun by the Forest in 2004. A Power of glass and steel had taken the people trapped there, twisting their bodies and minds. But now that Power had faded, or so said Chinatown’s diviners. Leaderless, these altered men had begun to spill out from Downtown. Water Spider detailed what was known about the destruction of the Southsider barracks and what steps he had taken to defend Chinatown since. As he came to the end of his report, a heavy silence fell.

  “But the monsters have not invaded our territory?” Huang Ti said.

  “Not yet. Not in force. At last report, the barricades were still holding.”

  “But how did the Snows come to be defeated?” Huang Ti pressed. “You told us we were paying for the best troops on the continent.”

  “I must accept some responsibility for this defeat,” Water Spider said slowly. “Because the monsters from Downtown had attacked in so graceless a fashion, using homemade clubs and other crude weapons, the Southside commander and I foolishly assumed they had no truly superior technology. Now I must believe that we were wrong. They found a way to deliver incendiaries into the Southsiders’ fortified barracks. Perhaps a rocket was used, or some device with a remote control.”