Deadly Night Read online

  And this particular Citadel housed not only the Ageless but their Archon. Edris. Supreme ruler of the empire. She had ruled this land and this city for centuries, so long that none of the human citizens of Accanter could remember any other ruler.

  Thea shivered lightly even though the afternoon was warm, reminded, as she always was, of the power and authority of the Ageless. She dragged her attention away from the Citadel and kept walking, one hand straying to her pocket and her badge. There was enough to do down here among the common folk of the city. The politics of the ruling elite were not her concern, thankfully.

  CHAPTER TWO

  She reached her destination in ample time, pausing before she went in to put her badge on. The folded-over piece of metal was warm from being in her pocket, slotting neatly on to the space at her lapel, the bronze surface smooth and new. There was nothing etched onto its surface. There did not need to be. Everyone in the city of Accanter knew what the badge meant. Watchmen and women wore plain metal badges. Officers wore bronze badges. She had not had this badge for long and it still weighed more than it should. The visible symbol of the authority that she now carried.

  The Watch Station was a squat, ugly building constructed of timber and red brick, tucked to one side of a street of once-elegant houses. It was cold inside, as the Station Sergeant did not believe in heating the building except on the coldest days, and quiet in the early afternoon.

  The Watchman at the front desk, in a dark uniform similar to hers, barely glanced at her as she came in. She still said hello before moving on. She was always scrupulously polite to everyone around her. Being polite and unremarkable had kept her safe for many years. The Watchman did not bother replying. She had not expected him to. The Watchmen in this station did not like her much.

  It was a childish campaign of silence and exclusion. This station had put one of its own forward for the promotion that Thea had been awarded a bare few weeks before. It would take a while for that bitterness to subside, if it ever did.

  She had met the Watchman in question only once, at the written examination all candidates for promotion had to take. He had turned up late and smelling of beer, then fallen asleep with his head on the desk, the snores disturbing her and the handful of other candidates also taking the exam. She had been told, by one of the Watchmen at her old Watch Station, that the drunk man was the only one who had not passed the exam. All the other candidates had been promoted to positions around the city.

  Thea had hoped to be assigned to one of the other Watch Stations. One of the ones she had spent time in before her promotion. New recruits were rotated around a few different Watch Stations in their first year before receiving their first posting. It had been an eye-opening experience, seeing the different parts of the city, but Thea had found common ground with many of the Watchmen and women and Watch Officers that she had met. All of them doing a job, trying to keep the citizens of the city safe.

  Instead of going back to familiar territory, she had been posted here. To Brightfield’s Watch Station. An area she had not been to before.

  The assignments had been made by the Watch Captain. None of the newly promoted officers had a say in where they were posted.

  That did not matter. The older members of the Watch, who seemed to make up most of the staff at the Brightfield Watch Station, still believed that promotion should be little more than a tap on the shoulder. They did not agree with the new Watch Captain’s orders that officers should take an exam, and know the laws that they were supposed to enforce.

  So Thea remained polite and did her job. In some ways it suited her perfectly well that everyone at the station resented her. It meant that they did not ask her any questions she did not want to answer.

  The ground floor of the building was mostly taken up with a single, large room, with a few wooden desks and stools scattered around. The surfaces of the desks were scarred from years of use, stained with beer and tea, the stools mis-matched and always seemed deliberately placed to trip Thea up when she tried to walk through the room.

  There were only another two Watchmen in the room, settled at a desk in the far corner, talking to one of the tradesmen that Thea recognised from the local area. There was a piece of paper and pencil on the table between them. Doubtless they would tell the Station Sergeant that they were taking a statement from the tradesman. However, they each had a pitcher of beer in front of them, and were talking in low voices. Some gossip being shared.

  The door to the Station Sergeant’s office, in one corner of the room, was open. He was not in.

  Thea made her way across to the equipment rack on a side wall and took one of the small crossbows and quiver of paint-tipped bolts, signing the weapon out on the chalkboard next to the rack. She was the only one who regularly signed her equipment out, or in. The rack was mostly empty, but only two other Watchmen had bothered to enter their names on the board.

  “March.”

  The Sergeant had come into the room. He was staring at her as if she had offended him. It was a common expression where she was concerned. He was a burly man, with a face that flushed easily and wiry, grey hair that stuck out in odd directions, particularly after a long lunch.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked her.

  “You asked me to cover the swing shift, sir,” she answered, stowing the crossbow and quiver in the loops on her uniform.

  The swing shift was the least popular shift, and she had been asked to work it most days since she had joined this Watch Station. It took up a large part of the evening, and there was no extra pay for the late hour. Night shifts, with their extra pay, were always popular. Thea suspected she would never be asked to work a night shift. The Sergeant would always prefer to give the extra coin to someone else. She might be working the swing shift for the entire time she was at this Watch Station. It would not be so bad, if it meant she could have lunch with her mother most days. Without their unwelcome guests.

  “I did? Yes. I did. Well, you’d best get on,” he said, and kept walking towards his office.

  “Yes, sir.” Thea made her way back across the room, through the maze of tables and stools, and out onto the street again.

  The Sergeant had made it clear that he did not want her in his station. He would have far preferred his own man was promoted. After a few weeks of his open dislike, Thea was already wondering when she could reasonably apply for a transfer to another station. She had taken the promotion exam under the prompting of her previous Sergeant, and because she had always been interested in the more complicated investigations assigned to the Watch Officers. In the few weeks at her new station, she had not found any of her work particularly interesting or complicated. Not yet, anyway. It was early days. And she was here for now., with a job to do.

  She did not mind being outdoors. She had never worked or lived in this area, and being on patrol helped her become familiar with the streets, including the maze of narrow alleyways between the warehouses and factory buildings that crowded into the space between the houses and the wide river.

  The whole area had been a great lord’s country estate at one point. Many years before. Before the factories. Before the city had grown from a few small farms and villages into the sprawl of buildings and people that it now was. There were various stories about how and why the great lord had lost his estate, and had it overrun with commerce. A popular theory was that he had somehow personally angered Edris. The local residents didn’t know precisely what had happened, although they liked to speculate. It might be true, for all Thea knew. The Ageless as a whole, and Archon Edris in particular, were not known for their mercy.

  Whatever the reason, Brightfield was one of the busiest commercial areas of the city. It had plenty of petty crimes to keep Thea and the other officers in the Watch Station busy.

  ~

  It was close to evening, and she was idly wondering whether she would find anyone she knew at one of the local taverns. Stopping by for a short break and to exchange news was perfectly acceptable w
hile she was on duty, as long as it didn’t take too long.

  Even as she turned, about to head in the tavern’s direction, a cry for help nearby stopped her, followed by the shrill whistle from a member of the Watch. She returned the whistle and headed towards the sound at a steady run, finding herself at one of the main marketplaces. A woman was on the ground, bleeding from a head wound, a Watchman near her, holding a cloth to her head to staunch the blood.

  “Someone stole her purse,” the Watchman said. He was one of the younger members of her station. She had only met him once, and couldn’t remember his name. “Went that way. Dark skin, dark hair, bright red tunic.”

  A red tunic should stand out in this crowd.

  Thea lifted her brows. “Another one?” she asked the Watchman. There had been a spate of wealthy idiots snatching purses, or other small items, for fun over the past few weeks.

  “I think so, officer,” the Watchman answered, grimacing. They were used to petty theft in the area. But this was becoming annoying for all of them.

  “What is the purse like?” Thea asked the woman.

  “Purple fabric,” the woman answered, voice high and thin. “Will you find it for me?”

  “I will do my best, ma’am,” Thea promised. “This way?” She pointed.

  “Yes, officer,” the Watchman confirmed.

  “See that the lady is looked after,” Thea told him, and headed off in pursuit of the purse-snatcher.

  She did not have far to look. He was lingering at the next corner, watching the scene he had left behind, a grin on his face. The red tunic stood out, even in the shadows.

  A young idiot who had thought it would be fun to steal an older woman’s purse, Thea thought, striding towards him.

  “Stay where you are,” she ordered as she approached. It was the kind of firm tone that was taught to new recruits, supposed to impress ordinary citizens with the Watch’s authority. In Thea’s experience, it rarely worked. Still, it was always worth trying for those few cases where it did work, and matters could end peacefully.

  “Why, officer, what is wrong?” the man asked, dangling the purse from between his fingers.

  “You stole that purse,” she answered.

  “Did not,” he said, and laughed softly, tossing the purse from one hand to the other.

  The idiot was going to run. She could see it, from the way he shifted his feet, drew in a breath, lifted his chin, and glared back at her. He was about the same height as she was, and clearly not used to staring women directly in the eyes, as he kept trying to look down his nose at her.

  Before she could say anything to stop him, he threw the stolen purse at her. Aiming for her head. But the purse was heavy, and his aim was poor. She grabbed it out of the air with one hand.

  “Stand there,” she told him, voice as flat and hard as she could make it.

  “You can’t catch me,” he said, grinning, white teeth brilliant against his cool brown skin. It seemed to be a joke to him. And then he turned and ran.

  She shoved the fabric purse into the small leather pouch at her waist. He was too far away for her to reach with the rope ties looped at her belt, so she drew her crossbow, aiming at his back. He was an easy target in this crowd. No one else was rich enough to afford the bright red tunic that he wore.

  The crowd parted to let him through. They had seen this before. And no citizen wanted to be accidentally tagged by the Watch.

  The bolt flew off the crossbow and landed between the running man’s shoulder blades with a slap she could hear across the short distance, vivid yellow paint marking him as wanted by the Watch. He still didn’t stop.

  Cursing under her breath, Thea stowed her crossbow and went after him. She didn’t mind running. She quite liked it, actually. But it was still daylight, and she had to be careful to stay at a pace that a human could manage, to not draw too much attention and questions that she did not want to answer.

  At least, no more attention than a uniformed officer of the Watch running through the streets would normally attract. For the people of this area, mostly law-abiding craftsmen, it was entertainment for the late afternoon. And would doubtless be talked about over their dinner tables that evening.

  She did not bother shouting, or using the whistle at her belt to call for help. She knew these people. They would not stand in the thief’s way, or in her way, but they wouldn’t help either. And she was still in her station’s area. She could not rely on the Watchmen here to help. Not even to catch a thief.

  So she ran after the thief, who was faster than she had expected, leaving Brightfield, crossing into the next district, until the shimmer of the Citadel’s perimeter appeared in front of them. The man raced through the flimsy light as if he was winning a race, and stopped a few paces back, turning.

  She drew to a halt a few paces away from the perimeter and pressed her lips together to hold in a curse. She had become all-too-familiar with the perimeter over the past few weeks.

  Even as she stopped, several paces from the boundary, a quartet of the Archon’s soldiers appeared on the other side of the curtain. Like most of the soldiers assigned to routine patrols in the city, the quartet were human, with the compact and muscled build of a more northern climate.

  In case anyone had missed the shimmering light in the air, threaded through with the Archon’s symbol, there was also a thick, white line painted on the road surface and another depiction of the Archon’s symbol. A human figure with the wide, outstretched wings of the Ageless.

  The boundary between the city and the Citadel.

  “I don’t suppose you would hand him over?” she asked the soldiers, catching her breath. Running slowly somehow required more effort than going at full pace.

  “You have no authority here,” one of the soldiers answered her.

  “Yeah. Might as well go home, bitch,” the thief taunted.

  “Very brave, aren’t you? To hit an old woman and steal her money,” Thea answered. “You’re tagged now. Don’t come back here.”

  “You tagged a citizen of the Citadel?” another soldier asked.

  “He committed a crime in Brightfield,” she answered. The thief was facing her so she couldn’t see the yellow paint. It would not come out with simple washing. He would need to visit a mage to get the paint out of his clothes, and off his skin. And as every single mage, whether the city or Citadel, would know the mark had come from the Watch, the thief would need to pay handsomely to be clean again.

  It gave her a moment of sour satisfaction, even though she suspected he had the means to pay.

  The soldiers were not going to help. They never did. They guarded the perimeter against the city. The badge she wore meant nothing across that line.

  And the thieves the Watch had chased in the past few weeks knew it. Young, wealthy men who seemed to have nothing better to do than to bait the Watch. A few of the Watchmen had stopped giving chase. The two times one of the thieves had been caught within the city, they had been bailed out within an hour, free to leave and head back to their lives. The fines that had been paid would help fund repairs to the Watch Stations. They were no deterrent for the thieves, though.

  This thief was safe from the Watch’s justice. There was nothing more she could do. The knowledge set her teeth on edge. At least she had the woman’s purse, and could only hope that the thief had left it intact.

  She turned on her heel and walked away, an itch between her shoulder blades. The thief was just young enough and arrogant enough to try something stupid.

  She sensed rather than felt something coming towards her, and side-stepped as quickly as she could, at a speed few humans could match. Instinct and training took over, her mother’s mantra ringing through her ears. Survive first. Deal with the consequences later.

  A stone landed on the road surface where she had been a moment before.

  “You missed,” she called over her shoulder, and kept going. She was lucky the thief had such poor aim. If he had been even half as competent as the soldiers
at the perimeter, the stone aimed at her unprotected head could have knocked her out.

  The weight of the purse at her belt reminded her that she had property to return, a statement to take from the victim and a report to write, to add to the others she had written over the past few weeks. Not that it would do any good.

  And it was only halfway through her shift.

  It was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The woman had been delighted to have her purse returned, and although she was grateful to Thea, she was more interested in courting the attentions of the young Watchman who had stayed with her, holding on to his arm as if it was the only thing keeping her upright.

  Thea bit her lip to hide a smile, and left the Watchman to escort the woman home, wondering how long it would be before he escaped from her attention.

  With that settled, Thea headed back to the station, amusement giving way to frustration. She would file a report about the purse-snatcher, because that was her job, even though she knew that no action would be taken. The woman had her purse back. And the thief had fled across the Citadel perimeter, where the Watch had no authority. The Ageless and the Archon’s soldiers held authority there. They could deliver the thief back to the Watch, if they chose. It was unlikely, and Thea knew that the Sergeant would not press the matter. Instead, the Sergeant would mark the matter closed. He liked closed cases, even when Thea found the outcome unsatisfactory.