Friendly Fire

by Dale Lucas

  He checked with Emacca and Blotstaff, the two watchwardens guarding the prisoners. They seemed to have things under control. He joined the line holding back the locals then, and promised himself that he would not engage with anyone personally, nor speak a single word to explain or defend the wardwatch’s actions. To be honest, he was surprised by the size and relative ferocity of the crowd. It was well past midnight, and most of these folk probably had a hard day’s labor ahead from sunrise to sunset. Didn’t any of them need sleep? Did no one have more pressing personal business to attend to? He saw a number of ale tankards and cups in the hands of those gathered, so he guessed a great many must have drifted out of the nearby grogshops in answer to the noise. Big operations of this sort always drew a few drunkards and troublemakers, bored with their own lives and eager to see a fight unfold, some blood spilt. But to Rem’s chagrin, the drunken gawkers did not constitute the majority of the crowd—only one small part of it. No, the bulk of those gathered seemed to be truly sober workaday folk—men and women all shouting and shaking their fists and cursing horribly at the watchwardens who kept urging them back, back, to give them room lest they, too, end up in irons.

  Injustice! they cried.

  “Tyranny!” someone brayed.

  Some bastard deep in the crowd started a chant.

  “Let them go! Let them go! Let them go!”

  Gods and monsters, devils and angels, Rem thought. That’s all we need now: a bloody mob!

  The crowd’s fury subsided, for only a moment, falling into sudden, stunned silence. Rem turned to see what had their attention and saw the steward, Valaric, and another dozen of his men led out of the guildhall in chains and gathered together with the other prisoners. That’s what did it, apparently: the sight of that one man—tall, proud, strong, a pillar of this community and a paragon of its best intentions—shamed in front of his peers. A moment after the crowd had fallen silent, it began to murmur. Soon the murmurs rose once again toward a horrified, furious roar.

  “Set him free!” a woman screamed. “Not Valaric!”

  “Let’s rush ’em!” someone else barked, and Rem felt his whole body tense. Rush them? Was the speaker mad? If this crowd surged on their little band, there was no telling what sort of violence might erupt. The watchwardens were trained to defend themselves, after all, and every one, to the last, was armed.

  “Right! They can’t arrest us all!” someone else shouted.

  A strange, shrill whistle split the night. It was high, strident, almost painful. Only a moment after it began did Rem suddenly realize it was not an actual sound in his ears at all, but a strange psychic tone, shrieking right through his consciousness.

  And, apparently, the consciousness of everyone else present. He and his fellow watchwardens felt it, but the civilians seemed to be getting the worst of it. A great many of them were on their knees now, shouting, begging for it to stop, teeth gnashing and eyes squeezed shut against the strange sound that was not in their ears, but in their heads.

  Mind still aching, Rem searched the street and finally realized where the bizarre mental whistle was coming from.

  It was Queydon. The elf stood calm, severe, staring at the crowd now reeling under the weight of her psychic attack.

  Then, without warning, it stopped. The watchwardens blinked and stood tall again at their posts. The onlookers slowly regained their feet and studied the world around them, not sure what had just befallen them or where it had come from.

  “Listen to me!” Queydon shouted now, her voice carrying far into the night. To Rem’s astonishment, the crowd fell silent. They listened.

  “These men,” Queydon continued, “are lawfully charged with the crimes of murder, conspiracy to murder, and conspiracy to foment civil unrest.”

  The crowd booed. Queydon wisely waited to continue, letting them boo themselves back into silence again.

  “They will be held, questioned, and tried. Some may be innocent, others guilty, but none will suffer if they have nothing to hide, and nothing to atone for.”

  Liar, a few in the crowd shouted.

  “Elven bitch,” Rem heard.

  “Believe what you wish,” Queydon answered. “But these men are headed for the watchkeep. Who would like to join them?”

  A frustrated murmur ran through the crowd. A few men and women cried out in defiance, but, Rem noted, none of those crying out ever stepped forward or showed themselves. After a good long while, it was clear that Queydon’s gambit had worked: no one seemed eager to charge the watchwardens or cause trouble any longer.

  “Go home,” she said finally. “Go back to your ales, your dice, and your beds. Let us deal with these men now, and trust that they’ll be judged fairly.”

  “Fairly, my arse!” someone screamed, then an object came arcing out of the crowd toward Queydon. Rem took a step toward the sergeant, not sure what that missile might be, but expecting it was nothing good.

  It hit Queydon’s cuirass and winter coat. Just a ball of mud. It left a smudge and little more. To the elf’s credit, she did not move. She did not even blink. But, a moment later, it was followed by more handfuls of mud and excrement from the streets. Queydon barely made an effort to duck or avoid the sudden barrage, she only raised a single arm to protect her face, then signaled to the other watchwardens present. Time to go. Rem himself threw up his arms and retreated a few steps, caught in the crossfire.

  “Get them up and marching,” Queydon commanded.

  She was obeyed. The prisoners were brought to their feet and pressed into a tight column. As mud and refuse continued to be lobbed by the crowd, Queydon hurried to the front of the impromptu marching line and led the way. Rem fell in at the rear.

  The crowd jostled, yelled, screamed. Mud still flew, some of it quite solid, half-frozen by the winter cold. Rem felt a great relief when they’d finally made it around a corner and out of sight of the angry mob by the guildhall.

  The men they’d arrested were guilty of myriad sins—among them conspiracy and murder—but the hysteria they’d sown struck Rem as perhaps the most poisonous of them, the most potentially long lasting and destructive. They had provoked the world to madness, stirred its latent enmities and paranoid suspicions, and those maladies now threatened to spread like a wildfire through the city streets.

  Rem only hoped that if those fires caught, there was some tide, some waiting storm, capable of putting them out …

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Torval had known that Ondego would not want him taking part in the arrests. Such a thing had never happened before, but Torval—despite his reputation as a brawler and his noted lack of social graces—was not stupid. He knew how it would look if even a single dwarf were in a party that raided the guildhall, rounded up the stonemasons of the Sixth, then dragged them into the watchkeep. And so he had removed himself. He wagered that would free Ondego of the need to be delicate or to spare his feelings. More importantly, he realized that the Fifth Ward was about to explode. When that happened he wanted his family all together, in one place, possibly even hidden away in another ward, with friendly souls and stout walls between them and the coming chaos. Since Torval could not take part in the arrests or interrogations, assuring his own family’s safety became his most pressing priority.

  So Torval had slipped out of the watchkeep and rushed into the night. He took the straightest path possible from the watchkeep down to the riverfront, then pounded up the outer stairs to their rooms and burst in without knocking. Osma and Ammi sat by the fire mending torn shirts. The two of them leapt to their bare feet the moment Torval slammed through the door, Ammi uttering a little scream before clapping her hand over her mouth.

  “Torval, have you gone softheaded?” Osma scolded as she threw down her sewing. “You scared us half to death—”

  “Where are the boys?” Torval demanded.

  “Lokki’s asleep,” Ammi said, still shaking a little.

  “And Tavarix?”

  “He’s not here,” Osma said, look
ing at him as if he’d suddenly gone senile. “You know he’s at the citadel, with his fosterers—”

  “No,” Torval huffed and pounded through the apartment to the closed doorway that marked the boys’ bedroom. Therein Lokki lay asleep, completely oblivious to what was happening in the world around him. Tav was nowhere to be found, his bed unslept in. “No no no!” Torval cursed, closing the door with all the delicacy he could muster.

  “Father, what’s happening?” Ammi asked, the first glint of tears in her lovely blue eyes. “You’re frightening me.”

  “Exactly,” said Osma, exasperated. “What’s all this stomping about and—”

  “There’s trouble coming,” Torval said to his sister. “A terrible one. We’re likely to be caught in the middle of it.”

  “A storm?” Ammi asked.

  It took considerable effort, but Torval struggled toward it. He had to calm down, to explain to Ammi and Osma so that they’d understand. If he had to go after Tavarix, they’d be left alone here with Lokki. He normally hated to tell them about his nightly business—the filth, the hard and hollowed souls, the blood and bruises, the close calls with death and dismemberment, the casual cruelty of strangers, the idle tragedy of everyday life as seen by those who cleaned up the messes and saw the malefactors punished. Those were fell things, evil things, that he wanted to keep away from his family, to protect them from. But here, now, he realized there could be no secrets kept. He had to tell them the truth—some version of it, anyway.

  And so Torval told them—though he kept busy as he did so, gathering up the personal arsenal he’d amassed over his years as a watchwarden: not only his favorite maul, but also a pair of broad-bladed dwarven daggers confiscated off a dwarven assassin for hire some years earlier, as well as a short sword bought during a watchkeep auction that had struck him as remarkably comfortable in his thick hands, heavy but well balanced. These he added to the red-brown banded leather cuirass and mail shirt that he already wore, supplemented by a pair of battered, mildly rusted rerebraces and tarnished greaves. He discarded the hand ax that he’d claimed from the watchkeep armory—too clumsy—but held on to the two supplemental daggers that he’d taken to wearing in his boots.

  A blunt instrument, one long blade, four short ones. If that didn’t keep him alive, nothing would.

  As Torval gathered his implements he told Osma and Ammi everything, in the shortest, simplest fashion possible. The contracts, the feuds, the violence … and now the possible escalation of it from a private vendetta to a citywide persecution.

  “What can you do, then?” Osma asked. “Your place is here, with us—”

  “No,” Torval said. “Not yet. I’ve got to go get Tav and drag him back here.”

  “Drag him …?”

  Torval lost his patience. Their questions were too many. “I went to the ethnarch and his court! I told them to hand him over! They said they’d do so after his shift, but his shift should be long done by now! That means they’ve broken their word, and if I’m to protect him, I now have to go fetch him! Don’t you understand?”

  His sister and his daughter stared at him. Clearly Ammi was disturbed by everything he’d explained to them; he could see the struggle on her face, in her trembling hands, in her quivering shoulders. She was scared because she did not entirely understand. But Osma … Torval saw in her eyes that she understood all too well.

  He saw, too, that his sister understood what he had not said: that he went now to fetch his son from those dwarves he’d entrusted the boy to; that he anticipated they’d try to hold Tavarix, perhaps as a bargaining chip, perhaps just out of spite; and that if they defied him in any way, he’d be willing and ready to kill them all to tear the boy from their grasp.

  Or he would die trying.

  He was right back to where he’d started, fighting with his own folk, daring their acrimony and reprisal for the sake of those he loved.

  Torval knew he’d lingered too long. He had to go. He looked to Ammi and forced himself to put on the bravest, kindest face he could. As he did so, he opened his arms and she fell into them.

  “Don’t fret, lass,” he said softly. “Just be good and stay inside. Go into the bedroom and watch over Lokki. Don’t leave him alone or let him fear. That’s your job—that’s what I need from you while I’m gone. Can you do that?”

  Ammi nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was a good girl—strong and determined, just like her mother. If Torval gave her instructions and made it clear he was counting on her, she’d likely die before disappointing him or dishonoring herself. Torval kissed his daughter on the forehead and urged her off. Ammi responded with a gentle kiss on his rough cheeks, then hurried into the bedroom where Lokki was sleeping.

  Torval offered his sister a last sorrowful look. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her about the signs he’d read at the crime sites—that stonemason’s talk of walking mounds of earth and bones, the flat, unrecognizable footprints, the statement from those dwarven house guards that a Kothrum was loose in the streets. But what good would that do? He’d only frighten her more. Instead Torval simply made for the door, offering not a word. He heard Osma following close behind.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “There’s nothing,” he said, opening the door and letting in the cold night air.

  Osma laid hands on him, yanked him back in through the door, and slammed it shut. She was strong when she wanted to be—stronger than even Torval had realized. Her rough handling left him more than a little stunned.

  “You spared the children,” she said quietly. “There’s no need to spare me, Brother. We’ve both got the same scars on us. If I’m to protect these wee ones, I need to know what I’m protecting them from.”

  Torval swallowed. His throat felt lined with scree from a mountain rock slide. Still, if his sister begged a direct answer, he could not keep anything from her, could he?

  “My main fear is the chaos to come—what the tall folk of this city will do when they see those stonemasons in chains. The anger bred in such moments is vile enough … but if they find dwarves in the streets, outside the enclave …”

  He let that thought linger, and he saw clearly, by Osma’s falling face and glinting eyes, that she understood.

  “But there’s more,” he said, this time barely above a hoarse whisper. “Some of these men—these stonemasons—have died by unknown hands. I saw strange tracks around a murder site just last night. Saw a man’s skull crushed like an egg. Tonight there were more, right inside the borders of the dwarven quarter—a brawl between these angry men and a squad of the ethnarch’s house guard. Something plowed into the middle of that fray, killed a handful of those men without hesitation, then left again. The house guards, they said … they said …”

  “Spit it out,” Osma urged.

  “One of them said it was a Kothrum,” Torval finally said, not believing the word was actually passing his lips. He looked to his sister, hoping she believed him. “Just like in the old stories.”

  Osma clearly did believe him. She looked as frightened and sickened as he felt. “That can’t be. That magic’s ancient, forbidden. Who would … Who could …?”

  “Maybe they’re wrong,” Torval said. “Maybe it’s just a single dwarf—or a knot of them—out for blood. But if those witnesses weren’t lying … if our folk truly unleashed one of those things in this city …”

  “Oh, Torval,” Osma muttered. “Pillars of the Blessed … it won’t stop. Not until everyone its master marked is dead and buried.”

  “And worse,” Torval said, “if the people of this city see what terrible, bloody magic our folk are capable of … what one of them unleashed …”

  Osma clapped a hand over her mouth, as though trying to trap the despairing words now in danger of flying out. Her brown eyes shifted to her brother. She removed her hovering hand.

  “Go get Tavarix, Brother,” she said. “Bring him home safely. That’s all you should do. That’s all you can do.”
<
br />   “That’s what I will do,” Torval said, opening the door to finally take his leave. He didn’t add the thought that followed close on that statement’s heels, for he knew it would give Osma no comfort.

  That and more. Tav comes first … but if our people have unleashed a demon from the Forge Eternal to wreak vengeance upon their enemies, then only a dwarf can cut that beast down and send it back to the fires it was born from …

  Torval kissed his sister’s hand.

  “Keep them safe,” he said, then fled into the cold night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “That’s it,” Valaric said, eyes still downcast, hands fidgeting on the worn wooden table before him. “That’s the whole story.”

  Rem looked to the others in the interrogation room: Ondego, Hirk, Queydon. Clearly, Valaric’s account of his guild’s villainous activities had rocked them all. They’d had their suspicions before now, but hearing it all laid out … that was a different matter altogether.

  “Where’s your deputy now?” Rem asked. “I noticed he wasn’t among those we hauled in here.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Valaric said. “I’ve no love left for the man, so if I knew where to find him, I’d happily tell you. He wasn’t in the party that ambushed those dwarves in the quarter tonight, so I can’t even say when he left the guildhall, or where he might have gone.”

  “There’s one bit we’re still fuzzy on,” Ondego said, crossing his arms over his chest. He stood on the opposite side of the table from Valaric. Rem had never seen the prefect bother to take a seat during an interrogation—he much preferred to stand, to look down at his prisoner and intimidate him. “Just who is it that killed your deputy’s brother? Or the men who died in that alleyway ambush tonight, for that matter? The reports we’re getting are bizarre, to say the least.”