Friendly Fire

by Dale Lucas

  Valaric shook his head. “That I don’t know, Prefect, I swear. The men say—”

  “The men spoke of a monster,” Rem broke in. “Even the dwarves attested to it.”

  “I wasn’t there,” Valaric said. “Not when Foelker died, not tonight. I told you, though we all decided on the sortie into the Warrens, it was also decided that some of us should sit it out, establish alibis. But if I knew who was responsible for this—”

  “He’d already be dead?” Hirk finished.

  Valaric shook his head. “No. If I knew who was responsible for killing my men, I’d have already gone to them—face-to-face—and begged for an end to this. I would’ve offered my own throat if it might’ve kept my brothers safe.”

  Rem studied their prisoner. The stonemason was a big man—strong, roughly handsome, imposing in stature, regal in bearing, despite his rough hands and his working-class Yenaran accent. He seemed to speak truly, without any guile or duplicitous charm. It was sad in a way—a man like that could’ve made a good watchwarden in another life. He had the charisma, the presence, that special uncanny quality that made others instinctively respect and follow him. But here he was, a stonemason who had lost work to fierce competitors, fallen victim to his own desperation and bitterness, now having led himself and his followers down a path they could not retreat from. And what still puzzled Rem was this: how little Valaric seemed the sort to do what he’d done—to even countenance such actions in others. Time and again during his confession, the mason had made it clear that he blamed himself, and no one else, for the choices made, the lives lost, the damage done. Even in admitting his guilt, he was a man to respect, a man of quality.

  But none of that had been enough to stop him from going down that path to begin with, had it?

  Where there’s need, there’s no decency, Torval had said when they’d chased after the thief who’d taken Dorma’s house idol. No, Rem supposed there was not. Nor, it seemed, could understanding or compassion grow in a garden whose soil was poisoned with wounded pride and the sense that someone other—someone less than—had taken something inherently deserved by oneself.

  And now Valaric would probably die for his pride, for his sense of entitlement. Ondego had already made that clear to Rem in the moments before they’d entered the interrogation room. A confession, the prefect assured him, would mean the man’s death, because that was the prescribed punishment for conspiracy, incitement to violence, desecration of holy ground, and participation in murder. The question, now that Valaric’s confession was complete, was only this: How many of his men would join him?

  “Take him out,” Ondego said then.

  Rem looked to the prefect. “Pardon, sir?”

  Ondego nodded at Valaric. “Take him out—back to his cell. Bring us another.”

  Valaric raised his eyes. “My brothers aren’t to blame in this. I’m their leader—punish me. But let the rest of them go.”

  “As much as I respect that offer,” Ondego said, “I’m afraid that’s not to be. You’re not a watch captain or an officer in a military company—you’re a bloody stonemason. I don’t care how much your men respect you or honor your leadership; they’re still free men who made their own choices. You’re guilty, it’s true—but so are they. No one gets to wriggle out of this by saying they were just following orders.”

  That seemed to pain the stonemason deeply. “But I confessed—”

  “And it’s most appreciated,” Ondego said, sounding, to Rem anyway, truly appreciative. “You’ve saved us a great deal of trouble. But now we need to figure out who else in your merry little band has blood on their hands. In simple factual terms, it can’t be all of them. I’d prefer to isolate the truly guilty and see only them pay the highest penalties, while the rest get off with lesser sentences. But if all of you keep falling on your swords and claiming sole responsibility … well, we’ll just end up with a nice bloody execution rally in Zabayus’s Square, won’t we? Could take all day to see the lot of you hanged or top-chopped.”

  Ondego’s tone was entirely too casual, considering what portentous words he was offering. Rem knew instantly that this was a gambit. He wanted Valaric to start naming names, to point out which of the men had been at the fore of the violence and which had been just followers and hangers-on, to incriminate a few in an effort to spare the rest from the noose or the blade.

  Valaric, however, didn’t seem willing to play that game. “You want me to offer up my men—my friends—for torture and death now? By name? I was their leader, I am the one that should be punished!”

  Ondego looked to everyone else in the room—Rem last. He seemed truly taken aback. Rem recognized this act as well. It was one of the prefect’s favorites. “Am I talking to myself? Am I speaking Quaimish?”

  Valaric’s gaze grew dark, his anger rising. “Don’t insult me, Prefect. It’s beneath you.”

  Ondego scowled at him now. “Then don’t aggrandize yourself,” he spat, sounding suddenly furious. He bent down over the table, face inches from Valaric’s. “I know in your own mind you’re an old imperial general, leading his men on all sorts of bloody adventures through the wilds of the west, telling yourself that you command and they jump, that you’re special somehow, while they are, by and large, unique only in the severity of their love and loyalty for you. But I’m here to tell you, boy: it just ain’t so. You’re a bunch of stonecutters in a trade guild. What power you have over those men was given to you by them, in a fair and open vote. You’re not an emperor or a general or a real leader of anything; you’re just the biggest man in the gang, and they only follow you because doing so lined their pockets and made them feel good.”

  Valaric shot to his feet, knocking over the chair he’d been sitting in. At his full height he was at least a handbreadth taller than Ondego. He glared at the prefect across the table. Ondego glared back—completely unintimidated by Valaric’s height or muscular frame. Rem wagered Ondego had probably killed larger and meaner men with table cutlery.

  “This all started,” Valaric said slowly, “because one of our own died. Grendan, just a boy, beaten within an inch of his life and left in a gutter in the Warrens to choke on his own blood until that life finally left him. When some of his friends found him, he was still there—barely—but it was too late. I sponsored that boy’s guild membership, Prefect. He was my apprentice, my charge.”

  Ondego was unimpressed. “I assume he was in the Warrens because he was part of your little demonstration?”

  “Aye,” Valaric shot back. “Loyal. Obedient. He trusted us and maybe we failed him—but did Grendan deserve that end? I say no, and there was no way, after I’d presented his body to his mother and heard her cries, that I could ever let those who’d murdered him escape justice.”

  “Because honor demanded it?” Ondego asked, sounding so dismissive that even Rem felt the sting of the words.

  “You’re a petty little dictator,” Valaric said, seeing that his appeal had fallen on deaf ears. “What do you know of honor?”

  “I know you might have had it once,” Ondego said, “but your desire to take all the guilt for this upon yourself isn’t honorable; it’s the mark of an arrogant, overproud fool. If you can’t finger the bloodied ones among you, then you can all hang. Every gods-damned man in your company, from the pensioners to the fresh-faced apprentices. And with none of you left behind to pay your guild dues or distribute the surplus, what happens to your widowed wives, your orphaned children? They suffer, they starve, they turn to crime and prostitution—all because you lot were too proud to mark the truly guilty among you and try to save the rest.”

  Valaric’s internal struggle was apparent to Rem, and it hurt some deep, hidden part of him. Watching this proud man forced to make such a choice, to betray a few of his guild brothers or condemn them all, truly made Rem’s heart ache. But even amid his sympathy, Rem knew that Ondego was right: it was foolish to assume that those men bore no guilt in what they’d undertaken, and more foolish still to condemn them a
ll when only a few were truly guilty of the worst crimes they’d perpetrated. The choice before Valaric was an impossible one—justice or honor—but because he struck Rem as a good man, an honest man, a man unwilling to sow suffering where he could assuage it, Rem hoped that he would, in the end, make the right choice.

  It was just a question of how long it would take him to come around to it.

  The silence in the room persisted. It was long, awkward, sharp edged. Finally, Ondego waved one hand toward the door. “Get him out of here,” he said.

  Rem laid a hand on Valaric’s shoulder. “Come on, then,” he said, jerking his head toward the door of the interrogation room. “Back to the dungeons.”

  Valaric looked at Rem, seeming to truly notice and study him for the first time. “What’s your part in all this, boy? I can hear in your speech you’re not even from here.”

  Rem made sure that he met Valaric’s gaze, that his own never wavered. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not from here. But now that I’ve made this my home, I’ll be damned if I let a bunch of hateful tradesmen tear it down around me.”

  Valaric fell silent and let Rem lead him from the room. After Rem and Valaric stepped into the hall and set off down the right-hand passage, toward the dungeons, Rem noted that Ondego and Hirk set off in the opposite direction, back toward the administrative chambers upstairs. Queydon followed Rem and his prisoner at a distance—a little backup, just in case.

  The dungeons were quite full. Though they hadn’t managed to nab all the stonemasons, they’d still arrested a great many of them—thirty or forty in all. Rem made straight for the cell that Valaric had come from—a cramped cell, set apart from the main cages, with no one else waiting inside. He assumed this was Ondego’s doing—to keep the leader isolated and alone, to keep his men at a distance, wondering just what Valaric had told the authorities, or what deals he might have struck. Likewise, that solitude would give Valaric time to sit and think, deeply, about how his choices might affect his men.

  “There they are,” one of the locked-up masons said from the far side of the room. “Bloody coin-gobblers! Hired hands of the welk!”

  A chorus of jeers and curses followed. Rem tried to keep his eyes down as he unlocked Valaric’s cell and shoved him back into it. As he shut the door again and locked it, he threw a glance back toward Queydon. The elf shook her head: Don’t listen to them. Just lock that door and let’s get out of here.

  “Yenara’s not a city for mankind any longer!” another of the stonemasons shouted. “It’s a city for the hired help and the rich who buy them! Workingmen? Free men? Bah! Who cares for them?”

  The bars of the cages rattled. The men shouted, spat, cursed. A chant rose among them, gradual, but soon adopted all round.

  Turncoats. Turncoats. Turncoats.

  Rem kept his eyes down. Had it really come to this? Did these men, guilty of murder and terror and conspiracy, really think they were innocent, while the watchwardens who tried to maintain order and keep the whole city from being burnt down were guilty? Hate and fear could do terrible things to a human heart, Rem thought as he moved to rejoin Queydon. Worst of all: those twin demons—hate and fear—tended to blind human eyes and cloud the human mind. There was no truth in the world that could survive the frenzy of perceived threats or obligatory vengeance. What a sad, sorry lot they were as a species …

  Though were the others—the elves, the dwarves, the orcs—really any better?

  Queydon led the way out of the dungeons, shutting the door behind them with a metallic squeal, drowning out, at last, the screaming and rebukes from the locked-up stonemasons. As the sound of their threats and hatred subsided to a dull roar, Rem and Queydon began a slow trudge down the long, dark corridor that would lead them to the stairway.

  “Are we wrong?” Rem asked. Queydon—elvish aloofness and propensity for surprise appearances aside—was a good person, a thoughtful person. Rem admired her. Her opinion mattered to him.

  “We do our jobs, we fulfill our roles,” Queydon said. “What more is there?”

  “And what of the dwarves?” Rem asked. “They share blame in this, as well, don’t they? Whatever it is they’ve set loose on these men, whatever murdered those few—”

  “They shall be dealt with,” Queydon said, and for the first time Rem thought he heard real emotion in her voice, though he couldn’t be sure.

  “But how?” Rem countered. “The old treaties protect them, don’t they?”

  “Treaties protect those who honor them,” Queydon said calmly. “If we can prove they’ve broken their word—that they sought personal justice instead of deferring to city authorities, that they disturbed civil order by deploying their own private police force—then we can make them subject to our justice. Or, at the very least, expel the guilty parties and restore order.”

  “But how often does that happen?” Rem asked, still remembering the outcome of the last major crime they’d solved: a human-trafficking ring run by a vile elf with a deep black hole where his heart should have been. The elven authorities had taken him away, never to be seen again. Somehow Rem doubted he’d met with any true justice at their hands.

  Queydon stopped. The force of her ageless gaze made Rem stop as well. She looked at him like an older sister or a kindly aunt—a little pitying, a little patronizing, doing her best to help a witless youngster navigate the bitter forest that was life. All at once Rem felt ashamed. He shouldn’t have carried on like that—it was beneath him. He was no bairn in the woods. He should know that this was the way of the world, bitter though it might be.

  “It happens when it must,” Queydon said quietly, “and seldom ever else. I do not know what will come of all this, Remeck—but if you think about it, you will realize that it’s not even our concern. Our job is to find the wrongdoers and arrest them. It is someone else’s job to judge and punish them.”

  “It’s just so bloody vile,” Rem spat. “All this hate.”

  “We hate what we fear,” Queydon said, “and we fear that which challenges our supremacy, our privilege. Neither humans nor dwarves hold a monopoly on that iniquity.”

  “How do you carry it all?” Rem asked. “The weight of it? With such … calmness?”

  Queydon shrugged a little, then looked—to Rem at least—deeply saddened. “Practice,” she said, then carried on down the hall.

  Just as Rem took his first steps to catch up with the elf, he heard bootheels pounding down the stairs at the far end of the corridor. Rem quickened his pace to draw up beside Queydon and reached her just as Hirk appeared from the stairway and strode toward them. The big man’s face was a mask of panic. Rem, far more used to seeing the deputy prefect implacable and nonplussed, found that look on his normally stony, stubbly face more than a little unnerving.

  “Both of you,” Hirk said, “upstairs, now. We need all hands.”

  “What is it?” Queydon asked.

  Hirk shook his head. “Just hurry.” He turned and pounded back down the hall. Queydon looked to Rem and gave a curt little nod, and the two broke into a run.

  Upstairs, the administrative chamber was in chaos. Watchwardens ran to and fro, many amassing at the front, near the short passage that led to the main foyer and the front entrance. A few more hustled in and out of the armory off the back corridor, shuttling with them armloads of armor, weaponry, and shields. Already a great number of their fellows were slipping into steel plate cuirasses, gauntlets, greaves, and helmets, donning mail shirts when no plate presented itself, choosing from the coterie of weapons hastily assembled: swords at their sides, shields on their arms, polearms or spears in their grips.

  Rem stared. What in the sundry hells was happening?

  “Hirk?” Ondego roared from the entryway. Seeing his second and Queydon approaching, he waved them forward hurriedly. When Rem moved to follow, Ondego raised a hand to stop him and gestured toward the contents of the armory, now strewn around the administrative chamber.

  “Suit up!” he said. “That’s a
n order!”

  Rem needed little suiting up, in truth. He’d been wearing a mishmash of armor gleaned from the watchkeep armories to work ever since that ambush on the dwarven laborers. He already wore a breastplate of banded mail, a chain mail shirt beneath, and his sword ready at his side. Confused and frightened, Rem hurried toward Hildebran. The brawny man was trying on a series of helms in search of one big enough for his large skull.

  “What’s happening?” Rem asked. “What are we suiting up for?”

  Hildebran gestured toward the outer wall of the chamber. “Friends of the stonemasons, massing outside.”

  “Friends of …? That’s preposterous! Do they think they can besiege the watchkeep? How many of them are there?”

  Hildebran studied Rem for a moment, half-bemused. “Don’t believe me, copper-top? Go, see for yourself.”

  Rem turned from the Kosterman and hurried to the outer wall. There were three windows there—high, narrow, with lead mullions and thick glass. Normally they were opened to allow night breezes to sweep through the administrative room and keep it from growing stuffy. Presently they were all closed tight. Rem chose the center window and pressed his face against it.

  The glass warped the scene outside, but his field of vision was clear enough. The square before the watchkeep was crowded with jostling bodies—men, women, even a few children and youths. The crowd was enormous and filling every available space on the watchkeep side of Sygar’s Square. Some of those outside carried torches that lit the gathered throng with a malevolent golden light that made all their faces look nightmarish and twisted through the warping effect of the glass itself. They shouted, chanted, shook their fists, and exhorted the watchkeep and its occupants to some end that Rem could not understand or discern—though he guessed what it might be.

  How many of them are there? Rem had asked Hildebran, doubting and incredulous. How many allies could the stonemasons of the Sixth Chapter truly have in the Fifth Ward?