Early the next morning I woke to a mental jolt that had me rolling out of bed and fumbling for my trousers before I’d even opened my eyes. Carel was calling with all the subtlety of a whaling harpoon jammed into my skull. I yanked on my clothes as I stumbled down the stairs, then pulled on my Watch overcoat and whistled a balesteed across the Line. The other early birds on my block shrieked when the brooding horse-shaped mass of eye-straining otherness appeared in front of my door. Two horses across the way screamed and reared, upsetting their wagon and tangling their harnesses. I ignored the carter’s outraged shouts and pulled myself up onto the steed, racing along the leash Carel had hooked into my brain.
I found her in the Sepulchre, a crowd of Watch officers standing around her, held off by a balewall she’d erected around a building. I dismounted, let the steed fade, and hurried to her side. The splitting pain in my skull vanished as soon as she turned and laid eyes on me.
The arch-sentinel looked as slim and deadly as a knife in her black Vigilance overcoat. Her white hair was tied back in a no-nonsense knot, her hands were encased in black leather gloves, and her golden badge gleamed in the early morning sun. She was holding more calls than I’d ever be able to manage, a stomach-roiling glitter of bale that only another sentinel could see. It was the first time I’d seen her displaying her full talent, and I was suitably impressed.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“A patrol found him in the tavern,” she said in clipped tones. “They’ve been taken to the Ministry for debriefing. I was summoned to secure the premises. Nobody else has been inside. I want you to search the area and determine what happened. If he’s in any distress, bring him out; otherwise, stay with him until you’ve finished your analysis. Be discreet for once in your life, Lorencz.”
I nodded. No point asking who she was talking about; she’d avoided the man’s name for a reason. She shifted her balewall enough for me to pass through, then closed it behind me again as I entered the Rose and Tombstone.
Dim morning light filtered through the shuttered windows. I stood in the doorway blinking. Discerning around a strong call like Carel’s isn’t easy, but I couldn’t detect any sign that the Line had been tampered with on this side of the barrier. She’d probably already checked, anyway.
When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw Ban Jaspin sitting by the empty fireplace. I walked over to him and touched his shoulder. He looked up, his scarred face blank.
“Bastards,” I whispered, looking away from his empty expression to take in the rest of the scene. The bar had been shut up for the night: chairs were upside-down on tables, the fire banked, the glasses set on a drying rack. The place looked neat and respectable. It wasn’t The Gilded Lily, but it looked like a nice enough place for locals to knock back a few beers between errands. With a grimace, I started to work.
I bagged the glass on the table. An apothecary could check the dregs, but I could guess the results— Jaspin showed every sign of having been nixed. I felt one of the washrags by the bar. Still damp, like it might have been used to clean and dry a second glass sometime after the bar had closed. I dropped to my belly and looked for footprints, combed the place for clues. Whoever had nixed Jaspin hadn’t had the consideration to leave behind a calling card or telltale scrap of clothing.
At last I sat in a chair opposite the inspector and lit a cigar.
No good reason to nix a man and leave him out in the open unless you were sending a warning, or maybe even a challenge. And it was a pretty damn good one, I’d give the culprit that — nixing the chief investigator of the Ministry of Justice took some balls. I stood and started searching through his clothing.
There’s something ugly about touching a man who used to be a peer and is now a walking corpse. Jaspin didn’t protest as I searched his pockets and patted down his shirt and trousers. He made a few mewling sounds to protest when I hauled him to his feet during the search, but other than that he remained quiescent. I wondered how much nix it had taken to empty out his head so thoroughly, and what the culprits had been afraid it had contained.
The pile was depressing. His badge, his calling cards, his pocketknife, his stubs of pencils … all the odds and ends you’d expect a guy to keep in his pockets while he walks around town. Substitute cigars and matches for the calling cards, and it could have been the contents of my own pockets there on the table. I put it all into my pockets and walked back out, waving through the balewall until Carel saw me and cracked it open a few feet.
The crowd had gotten thicker. I saw a flash of red and white next to her and stiffened. Those weren’t sentinel-friendly colors.
Sure enough, when I walked up, I found Cardinal Palster Croix standing with his arms outspread and two bully-boy Inquisitors Militant stationed behind him. Well, one bully-boy and one bully-girl, to be exact.
The cardinal was bending Carel’s ear while she listened with an expression of polite interest. He was a tall, gangly man, all angles and sharp edges, and he towered over her but, somehow, didn’t overshadow her. The Watch officers had moved off to one side, reluctant to get drawn into the age-old clash between Vigilance and Reverence.
“’Scuse me,” I said, brushing past the cardinal and making sure ash fell on his nice red robes. I gave Carel my snappiest salute, putting on a special show for the inquisitors. “I’ve searched the area, Sentinel.”
“Thank you. Captain Arcady Lorencz is the watch sentinel on duty, Cardinal Croix. I’ve enjoyed our little chat—” her tone was weighted with irony — “but now I have to go back to work.”
“You weaken the Line every time you call bale through it, Magister Carel!”
She ignored him with aplomb.
“The victim?” she asked me, instead. I shook my head.
“Alive but nixed. Want me to bring him out?”
Carel called over a lieutenant who gave me the kind of official cloak and mask usually used to disguise the identity of witnesses traveling to and from a courtroom. I put them on Jaspin and led him out to a waiting coach, where he was secured and driven away to Blackstone Hospital. With nothing left to see, the crowd drifted away to chew over gossip and speculation.
“Magister Carel!”
Carel turned. I did, too. Croix stalked up to us, all angles and flapping robes.
“Magister Carel … all I ask is that we make an honest attempt to reach some agreement between our two organizations.”
“Your Eminence,” she said, wearily, “I find it unlikely that we will ever come to any agreement.”
“If I can’t persuade you to leave the Line intact alone, perhaps I can at least persuade you to limit your exposure to it,” Croix said earnestly. “The use of bale to conjure such frivolities as light and steeds….”
“Says the mug living off sanctum revenues,” I sneered, flicking ash at him. He took it with commendable humility. The two inquisitors behind him gave me hard looks, though, which was something. “The rest of us have to work for a living.”
“Lorencz, please.” Carel gave the cardinal a steady look. “The Reverence has failed to prove to the Vigilance’s satisfaction that there is any moral danger associated with the practice of adjuration, your eminence. Nor have you proved that the other side of the Line is synonymous with Perdition. On the other hand, the Reverence’s extremists have proven themselves to be quite demonic.”
“I assure you, the Admonishments do not operate with the approval of the Reverence.”
“And yet they still kill sentinels.”
Croix impatiently waved the problem away. Easy for him; nobody was jumping communicants in a dark alley.
“But surely you agree that exposure to the Line is dangerous to one’s health and sanity, and that the demons that cross the Line —”
“The transients.”
“— are dangerous?”
“Yes….” Carel made a face. “Which is why you need sentinels to protect you. Let me remind you, Your Eminence, that without the benefits of adjuration, the empire would not be as strong as it is now.”
“The road to Perdition —”
“If you’ll pardon me, Cardinal, I have work to do.” She turned her back on him and walked away, dignified and unflappable. I sneered at him for her and followed after.
“Are you religious, Lorencz?” she asked, a few blocks later.
“I don’t think about it much.” I gave her a sidelong glance, but her face was impassive. “I listened to a lot of sermons when I was a kid.”
“There is a great deal to recommend in the Reverence. I only wish it would move past its blanket condemnation of adjuration.”
I nodded and wished I could say something insightful, but nothing came to mind, so I stayed clammed. Religious talk was too deep for an early morning walk in the cold without breakfast or even a cup of coffee in my stomach. I get more insightful at night, after a half pint or so to lubricate my brain.
“The Reverence’s antipathy toward adjuration puts a great deal of responsibility on each of us. The Vigilance’s rules and regulations are necessary to ensure discipline and good behavior among sentinels.”
I got a bad feeling about the direction this conversation was heading. Sure enough, she turned her head and skewered me with a look.
“You enjoy flouting regulations, Lorencz. I thought that sending you to work with the Dockside Watch might straighten you up, but it doesn’t seem to have had any effect at all. For the most part, I’ve resigned myself to tolerating your minor irreverences, because nobody else in the Vigilance seems inclined to emulate you. Keeping a black sheep in the fold is occasionally useful. But you are also inclined toward showy violence, and that I will not tolerate. Last summer’s debacle was unacceptable. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sen. You made that very clear, sen.” My paycheck was still bleeding from the fines and reparations, but I knew I’d been lucky not to get kicked off the Watch or out of the Vigilance — or worse.
The arch-sentinel looked away, continuing down the street. I flicked away the stub of my smoke, shoved my hands in my pockets, and kept pace. I knew she wasn’t done yet. So far this was all old news.
“What was done to Director Jaspin will send ripples into the palace itself. I don’t know if you’re still the best sentinel to keep assigned this case.”
“I’m good enough for the sewers, but not for society?”
“You tell me, Lorencz.”
“I can crack this case.”
“It’s imperative that this be resolved as quickly and quietly as possible.”
“Usually it’s one or the other, sen. Not both.”
We’d reached the Vigilance’s gates.
“If you can’t do it —”
“I can do it.”
She hesitated a long moment, considering me.
“The entire city will be watching, Lorencz. The Vigilance, the Reverence, the palace, and the populace. You had better not embarrass me.”
I looked away, scowling. Basically the same thing Jaspin had said. I wasn’t that bad, was I?
“I won’t,” I said.
“Good. I’ll look into the case, as well.” She reached out and squeezed my arm. “Sometimes it’s useful to keep the watchers distracted by the black sheep while the bellwether moves unobserved.”
“So, to mix a metaphor, I’m your chum.”
“You’ve been spending too much time in Dockside, Lorencz.” She smiled and turned to open the gates. “Perhaps we can do something about that if you succeed.”
“I like Dockside,” I growled at her back. No use. She was as impervious to me as she was to the cardinal.
I turned my chum arse around and headed for Parkside. If I was going to be the Vigilance’s bait, I wanted a partner who was more dangerous than my enemies.