The Night Watch Read online

  Ace Books by Sean Stewart

  PASSION PLAY

  NOBODY’S SON

  RESURRECTION MAN

  CLOUDS END

  THE NIGHT WATCH

  THE NIGHT WATCH

  An Ace Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

  Tu Fu: The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, © 1989 by

  David Hinton. Used with permission of

  New Directions Publishing Corp.

  The Putnam Berkley World Wide Web site address is http://www.berkley.com

  Make sure to check out PB Plug, the science fiction/fantasy newsletter, at

  http://www.pbplug.com

  Copyright © 1997 by Sean Stewart

  Book design by Jill Dinneen

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  First Edition: November 1997

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stewart, Sean, 1965-

  The night watch / Sean Stewart.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-441-00445-8

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3.S794N54 1997

  813'.54—dc2l

  96-6546

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17 / Chapter 18 / Chapter 19 / Chapter 20 / Chapter 21 / Chapter 22 / Chapter 23 / Chapter 24 / Chapter 25 / Chapter 26 / Chapter 27 / Chapter 28 / Chapter 29 / Chapter 30 / Chapter 31 / Chapter 32 / Chapter 33 / Chapter 34

  Chapter

  One

  Three days ago Emily Thompson had been Southside’s heir apparent. Every soldier in the city had been hers to command. Now the guards outside her door were the only people she had seen since her arrest. They weren’t supposed to talk to her. She didn’t try to make them. The last thing she wanted was to make some innocent bear her grandfather’s anger.

  It was six in the morning, March 21, 2074. Not yet dawn. Snowflakes drifted down out of a dark sky into the lamplight beyond Emily’s window. Magic comes like this, she realized. At first it barely exists. At first you only see snow in the air; it disappears the instant it touches the ground, or your coat. You never notice the exact moment it starts to endure, a drift of white dust on a sidewalk, or along a tree branch. You go to bed with flakes still falling; when you wake up in the morning the snow is everywhere. Everything else has disappeared. Paths and roads have been erased, signs are buried or hard to read. Even the trees look different and strange. The old landmarks are covered or lost, and the world you thought you knew is gone.

  Now I understand why Grandfather took the name Winter, Emily thought.

  Magic had started falling at the end of World War II, invisible at first, then gradually more obvious. By the time Emily’s grandfather was a child, in the 1970’s, little drifts of it were building into monsters or miracles often enough to make it clear that a great change was coming. The climate of the world was shifting away from the light of reason into a dusk where dreams put on flesh and the hungers of flesh. Finally, late in the winter of 2004, the rational, scientific world was entirely covered, as lost to memory as summer is in the cold grey days of December. That year, many things that had slept through the age of reason finally woke up. Forests woke up. Buildings woke up. Gods and ghosts and demons woke up everywhere.

  When Emily’s grandfather was young, he was by far the most powerful angel in his home town of Edmonton. (Angel—that’s what they called those who felt the magic most deeply back then). Edmonton was a boiler-room of a town, nearly a million people settled on the Canadian prairie one hundred thirty miles east of the Rocky Mountains. They knew something about winter there. In 2004, it was Emily’s grandfather who had managed to salvage part of the city, pinning the newly awakened ghosts and demons on the north side of the river that ran through town. On the Southside, there was hardly a trace of magic. Nobody knew how Winter had done that, and he never spoke of it, even to Emily, who was his heir.

  That was before he had hit her and put her under house arrest, of course. That was before her inheritance had begun to melt away like a snowflake in her hand.

  She heard David Oliver’s voice in the corridor, speaking quietly to her guards. Then a soft knock. “Miss Thompson?”

  “Jailers don’t have to knock, David.”

  Major Oliver let himself in. “Good morning, Miss Thompson.” He was in his early forties and lean, not blocky with muscle like most of her soldiers. His fatigues were always wrinkled and rumpled, his face always clouded with little lines of worry and calculation. Emily thought him the best analyst in Intelligence. He and his computer familiar together made up an exquisitely sophisticated instrument for reading people.

  “Business or pleasure, Major Oliver?”

  He sat down. “I’m not here to interrogate you, Emily. If that’s what you mean by business.”

  “Thank God.” For the last two days Emily had been haunted by the vision of herself strapped to a table with an IV drip in her arm while David slowly and carefully and sadly stripped her soul bare for her grandfather to examine.

  “I came to see that you were doing…as well as could be expected,” David said. “Is there anything you need?”

  “To know whether Grandfather is going to have me killed.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess, David.”

  He gave her a small smile. “Emily, come on now. Even my guesses are classified.”

  “I don’t think he’ll have me killed. All I did was build a fire. I made a little offering, I don’t even know why. I didn’t know it was wrong.”

  “Yes you did.”

  Emily colored. “Okay, I knew he wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t know why. But it couldn’t possibly be worth killing me for. Mind you, I wouldn’t have thought he would hit me, either.” Emily studied her bruised face in the mirror over her dresser. If her grandfather had taught her one thing it was this: to see a thing for what it was. There was still a dark purple ring near the orbit of her eye, but under that, on her cheek, the bruise was turning brown. In a few days it would yellow and fade. None of the Southside soldiers she commanded would think much of such a shiner. A lot of them had been knocked around by family, too. They had lived.

  She would live.

  “I just hate the worrying, David. It’s such a waste of energy. In three days we have this envoy coming from Chinatown and you and I should be working on that. I try to focus on it but I can’t. I keep imagining one of those guards will take me outside and make me kneel in the snow and shoot me in the back of the head. It breaks my concentration.”

  “I think Winter is coming to see you this morning,” David said.

  “Ah. So that’s why you’re here. Advance warning. Why you, though? Why not Claire? Why hasn’t she been here?”

  “Your governess has been reassigned,” Major Oliver said. He paused. “Winter is a hard man, Emily. He’s had to be. But he is fair. I really believe that.”

  “We all do,” Emily said.

  Quiet as David was, her room felt infinitely more empty when he had gone.

  Come on, girlchick, Emily thought. Enough brooding. Enough feeling sorry for yourself.

  Still dawn had not come. Emily ordered the lights off in her room and lit seven devotional candles and placed them on her votary. Burning, they gave off a bittersweet smell of incense. Their seven flames she saw doubled in her mirror and redoubled in her dar
k window. She prayed: forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. She prayed to Christ, who had redeemed the world with his own blood, and to Blessed Mary, the Theotokos, the Mother of God. She prayed for strength, and then, more honestly, for deliverance.

  When she was done she sat straddling a chair, looking out her window. It was still snowing. You could not tell it was almost dawn. You could not tell that day would ever break again. The snow fell and fell, sliding forever into the floodlights from the surrounding blackness. Emily moved her chair closer to the window and watched it come; the million flakes of snow birthing from that black night, sliding white and lost and windborne, like souls from that outer dark.

  It was her angel’s fault she was in this fix.

  Emily thought she had a touch of her grandfather’s gift. There was a voice inside her that was not her own. It knew things she did not know. She trusted it completely and wished she didn’t. She was a very practical young woman and didn’t like the thought of having something magical inside her. An angel was dangerous and unpredictable, the sort of thing that got you into trouble.

  Which in fact it had. It was her angel who led her to the High Level Bridge, the only bridge still standing that connected the Southside to the North. If Emily’s governess had been there, she would have held her back. “Destiny doesn’t exalt people,” Claire would have said. “It just uses them.” Claire was only half human, the child of a mortal man and the white hawk demon called The Harrier. She knew a thing or two about destiny. She would have known better than to let Emily follow her angel’s voice. But Emily was twenty, a big girl now, and her governess wasn’t always around to keep her out of trouble.

  Emily’s angel had led her to a little hollow under the Bridge, where the roadway first lifted itself clear of the river valley. There, under a lace of iron girders, Emily found a cross drawn in the snow, its edges blurred with drift. Bird tracks were everywhere around it, scratched in the snow like the letters of a language Emily could not read. Beside the cross a little sacrificial fire had been laid but left unlit: a crude pile of dried bark and pine needles, twigs and other tinder.

  Southsiders burned ritual fires for their dead, and Emily knew at once this was meant to be a funerary pyre. She hunkered down in the snow and looked more closely. Resting on top of the kindling she saw a bone button and an old brown bootlace that filled her with inexplicable dread. She backed away, turned, and ran gasping in the freezing air all the way to the Tory Building. When she walked into the family’s private apartments she saw Winter’s boots beside hers on the mat. The right one was missing its lace. One button was gone from her grandfather’s old greatcoat.

  Emily searched the town records. Four children had died that winter: one crib death, one harvest accident outside the city proper, one from pneumonia, one from abuse. Nothing to connect any of them to the Bridge. But from the day Emily saw the snowy cross, a dead boy came to haunt her dreams, a cast-off child, shivering with cold.

  There was a certain thing Winter had commanded to be done with each child born on the Southside. When the child could walk well, some time between eighteen months and two years of age, it was taken to the top of the High Level Bridge and released, to see whether it would be “called over” to the North Side. Emily had never heard of a child choosing to run from its parents and dash across the Bridge. She had always assumed this was a purely ritual exercise, like circumcising infant boys, or singing the interminable Pascha mass, or reciting the Akathista to the glory of the Theotokos, the Blessed Mary, on the last Friday of Lent. Now, though, she wondered if once upon a time there had been a child, a little boy, who had been called down the long path onto the Bridge and across the river.

  She denied the angel in her for days, then weeks. But every night the little dead boy came into her dreams and at last she broke down, hardly knowing what she did, and stole out to the Bridge with a pile of Winter’s cast-off clothes to make a funerary pyre. To exorcise that shivering ghost.

  Winter caught her doing it. That was when he hit her.

  It was nine in the morning when her grandfather finally came to see her. Emily was sitting on the edge of her bed, nursing a cup of hot chicory. Winter stood in the doorway to her room. His eyes were the old grey of weathered wood, of December skies. He gave her the dignity of keeping his distance. Grim and careful and accountable, he required himself to study her bruised face. “May I come in?” he said. She nodded, heart hammering.

  lighter, said her angel’s secret voice.

  “Please,” Emily said. “My own company bores me. I agree with myself too much.”

  “That’s a good problem to have.” Her grandfather sat down.

  “Where’s Claire?” Emily asked.

  “Reassigned.”

  “That isn’t fair to her. What I did wasn’t her fault.”

  “Fair is none of my concern,” Winter said.

  wait

  wait

  “Where did you send her?”

  “She has joined our squad of peacekeepers in Chinatown,” Winter said.

  Emily started. Chinatown was a section of the city of Vancouver, five hundred miles away, over the Rocky Mountains. “You really did want her out of the way.”

  “Claire’s loyalties are to you, Emily. Not to Southside.”

  “Not to you, you mean.”

  lighter

  “Claire is less sentimental than you,” Winter said. “She will take her fall from grace in stride.”

  “True. Any disaster tends to gratify her rather gloomy view of life.” Emily almost smiled. “But she still won’t like being that far away. You forget she loves me.”

  Winter said, “Not for an instant.”

  A moment’s pause.

  Winter was sad, and weary, Emily thought, but not hardened; there was not the steel behind his eyes she would have expected if he meant to have her killed. She could have cried with gratitude and relief.

  It was entirely Emily’s fault that Claire had any place to go to in Vancouver. Travelling large distances overland was still impractical; the world was too full of monsters and bandits and pocket gods and Powers. But the Southside had been in regular radio contact with people in Vancouver for almost ten years. Apparently there were several islands of humanity remaining where the Greater Vancouver Regional District had been; perhaps eighty thousand souls left of the two million who had lived there before the Dream of 2004. Half of these people were in Chinatown.

  Five years ago, having put several airplanes in good working condition, Chinatown had sent a delegation to the Southside. One of its members, Raining Chiu, had even fallen in love and married a Southsider, remaining behind when the rest of her people returned to Vancouver. Eventually Raining and her husband had split up and she had returned to Chinatown with their daughter, but from conversations with her before she left, Emily had gathered that Chinatown was increasingly besieged. Growing friction between several factions had led to gang wars. Reports of demons, spirits, restless ghosts, and nightmares were increasing. Worst of all, monsters that once had been content to prowl Vancouver’s Downtown had begun to spill out, pressing harder and harder against Chinatown’s borders, just as a thousand years before the Mongols had pushed against the borders of old China itself.

  For many years Southsiders had been hiring themselves out as soldiers, which not only sent a supply of needed trade goods back, but also reduced the number of mouths to feed from the meager produce of the short prairie summer. Emily had suggested to the Mandarins of Chinatown that a squad of Southside’s best would be a perfect solution to their problems. They were more than a match for the horrors from Vancouver’s Downtown, and because they were unaligned with any Chinatown faction, gang, or Power, they would make excellent policemen and tax collectors. The Mandarins had been slow to buy into Emily’s idea, but after an ugly incident when three roving monsters from Downtown had slaughtered two whole families before they could be stopped, the Mandarinate agreed. On February 19, exactly a month
before Emily’s arrest, one hundred Southside soldiers arrived in Vancouver by transport plane and set up a barracks on the outskirts of Chinatown. Now Chinatown was sending a new delegation to discuss their deployment. This was the meeting David Oliver and Emily had been preparing for before her arrest.

  Sending Claire to join a garrison that would not have existed without his granddaughter’s efforts was an irony Emily was pretty sure Winter had intended.

  Winter leaned back in his chair, crossing one booted foot across his knee, old eyes narrowing. Crow’s-feet like streambeds on the gaunt prairies of his face. Emily had never understood what an honor his attention was. He was a man to whom friendship came easily, but respect came hard. How arrogant she had been, to take his respect for granted.

  “Grandfather, how bad was the thing I did?”

  “I don’t know.” He reached out to her, his skin tough and his touch gentle on her bruised cheek, like the brush of wheat stalks bending in the wind. “You burned an offering for a little dead boy, didn’t you?”

  “How did you know!”

  “Because I killed him,” Winter said.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Finish that cup of chicory,” her grandfather said. “Let’s go outside.”

  Emerging from the Tory Building, Emily and Winter walked along Saskatchewan Drive, past the university campus and the fine river valley homes where their important advisors and landholders lived. Winter dismissed his personal bodyguard. From long familiarity, Emily could pick out the perimeter pickets watching their progress: the man on Tory’s sentinel platform; the woman ambling a block ahead of them; the occasional soldier on routine patrol, informed by Security via multiplex transmission that Southside’s chieftain was taking the heir apparent for a stroll through the neighborhood.

  It was a sunny March day in the season Emily always thought of as Melt. The temperature had climbed a few degrees above freezing. Ice glistened wetly on the sidewalk.

  listen

  Winter’s hood was down. He drank in the mild air and the sunshine. “Do you know what an angel is? Not the religious kind you’re so keen on, but what they used to be, back before 2004?”