The Night Watch

by Sean Stewart

  “More or less.”

  “A person with a talent for magic. Someone who could do impossible things, extraordinary things. I was one. You probably knew that, or guessed it.” His long, slow strides were sure on the icy sidewalk. “The magic had been rising since the end of World War Two. Everyone saw that we must drown in it at last. Like many angels, it was given to me to see something of the future, of what would happen after the magic washed the old world away.

  “The angels were disappearing very quickly in those years. Men I knew, of great power and influence. Women too. Some fled, some hid. Some were killed by crazy people. But most of them just…stopped being human. They let the magic take them and turn them into something else. I saw a fellow dissolve, day by day, over the summer of 1998. A friend of mine who loved the wind too deeply, and was lost in it. Was he dead? Alive? Something in between? Were the angels who left their humanity behind happier in their new avatars? I didn’t know.” Winter slowed and stopped. “But I knew they were deserters.” He looked shrewdly at Emily. “I do not call them fools, you understand. Your angel’s voice feels so right; and you know, deep down inside, that it speaks a truth deeper than right or wrong.”

  Emily looked away uncomfortably.

  listen

  Winter walked on. “But that’s a terrible kind of pride. That puts your soul ahead of your community. I was not a deserter. Not then. Not now. My angel had shown me much of what was to come. But that same angel made me vulnerable to the magic. I knew he would carry me away, to safety or damnation, long before the magic rolled over my fellows. So I cut my angel out and cast him from me.”

  A magpie flapped heavily from the wooded river valley and came to land on the branch of a bare-limbed maple just ahead of them. Greedily it eyed their foil jackets and squawked. “Pretty pretty shiny shiny,” Emily said. “Look at it size us up. If it had two friends, I believe it would try to fly off with us.”

  Her grandfather laughed. “Magpies don’t have friends. Accomplices, possibly. Friends, never. I used to be a bird watcher, you know.”

  “Hm.” Emily could remember scores of times when her grandfather had demanded her attention, pointing out sparrows or finches, chickadees, crows, cedar waxwings, titmice, pigeons and grouse and woodcock and quail; the snowy owl that stooped like an omen over the south end of the Bridge. Really, we are a principality of birds—North Side as well as South, she thought. All the famous demons of the North Side were birds: ominous Magpie, the seductive Meadowlark and philandering Woodpecker of folktales, and of course Claire’s demon mother, the white hawk goddess men called The Harrier.

  “When I was young, in the seventies and eighties, this city was ten times as populous,” Winter said. “Twice as many cars as people. We were the lords of creation then. We produced more food than we could eat. Imported delicacies from all over the world. Strawberries in January, if you wanted. The outside world made no difference to us.” He stopped again to look at Emily. “You understand? We heated our houses in winter and cooled them in summer and the seasons went away. We turned the lights on after dark and the sun ceased to matter. Inside the greater world, we had managed to create another little world, a human world. One so complete we almost forgot the other one existed. Where the seasons and the weather and the cold are in your vision of the world, we had, oh, politics. Fashion. Sports. Human things.

  “Now, precious few animals could ever live in the city. You might see a deer once a year, if you lived down by the river valley. Maybe a raccoon, or a beaver along Whitemud Creek. But that was it. But birds, now—” Winter studied the magpie. “What always fascinated me about birds was the way they lived half in and half out of things. Roosting on office buildings. Raiding people’s gardens. Straddled across two worlds, the human one and the greater one beyond. Like angels, you see?” He turned away from her. “But sooner or later, Emily, you have to choose.”

  more

  “The little boy.”

  “Hm. Yes.” Her grandfather strode on. “So I cut him out. The angel in me. I took a bottle of whiskey and my grandfather’s old shaving razor and I went down to the Bridge late one night. It was a few days after the Dream of 2004 hit us. Traffic had stopped coming from the North Side. A deep ice fog had settled over that end of the Bridge. Nothing that went over came back. The sky was so clear that particular night. Hard cold coming, I thought. That sky so clear and deep. Stars falling through it like snowflakes.

  “There were Powers pressing on me all the time in those days. That was the nature of the magic, you see. To run into any little crack you might have and then freeze there, like frost splitting a sidewalk.” They came to the end of Saskatchewan Drive, passed through the gate, and stepped over the train tracks beyond. In another minute they were at the head of the High Level Bridge, just where the road started its long slide down from 109th Street to the bridge proper.

  Winter pointed at a snowbank only steps away from where Emily’s angel had shown her the snowy cross. “I did it right there. Drank four-fifths of the whiskey by way of anesthetic, and used another few shots on the razor. It was just after moonrise when I stripped off my coat and shirt. It was early in March, this same time of year. Between the fear and the magic and the cold, the skin on my chest and back was so puckered with goose bumps you could have sanded wood with it. Then I laid my belly open with the razor, and dragged my angel out.”

  listen

  “He didn’t want to come, but I was bleeding like a stuck pig, so I yanked him out by the foot and then pinned him under one leg. There was a lot of magic in this, of course. That was the time it was. And I was young then, and counted strong, even among the angels of my day. I splashed the rest of the whiskey on the cut, screaming and swearing between my teeth, and then I packed the wound with snow. The cold was more terrible than you can imagine.”

  The man hunched and shivering, his blood pouring onto the moonlit snow. His angel made flesh as a little boy, trapped under his leg.

  balance

  “You took him over the Bridge,” Emily said. Her grandfather did not speak. “That was the Deal you made with the North Side to leave the Southside alone. You cut out your angel and sacrificed him to the dark Powers across the river.”

  “I chose to cast my magic from me, so that people—decent, ordinary people—might live, and not be drowned under the magic’s tide. I made a sacrifice.”

  “And all the other children that we take down to the Bridge, they are part of the Deal, too.”

  Winter shrugged. “You can’t understand what the world was like. Would still be like, if not for that bargain. The magic can be beautiful, Emily, and it can be true. But it is also mad, as mad as fire. It has no rules.”

  Emily said, “Has there ever been a child really called over to the North Side?”

  “Twelve.”

  calmer—“Oh my God”—calmer “I thought it was just a ritual,” Emily said. “Twelve little kids. That’s a lot.” One for each of Christ’s disciples. “That’s too many.”

  “The greatest good for the greatest number. The arithmetic isn’t difficult.” Winter waved back at Southside: eighty thousand souls. “It’s the angels who are called, Emily. The ones with a touch of magic in them, the ones who would end up on the North Side anyway, sooner or later. They have a role to play there, or so I choose to believe. They too serve our community.”

  Called, Emily thought. As if those children walked across the Bridge and were gathered up into the arms of someone waiting there. Southside’s changelings, returned to their proper homes. What a lie. She felt hot with shame for her own ignorance. How many, many people there were who must have known the families of those missing children. And she had known nothing. She should have known. She should have been able to tell.

  She imagined the children walking across the Bridge into the cold and no one waiting and the children lost, crying for their parents, and dying there. And their bodies, together at the north end of the Bridge. Twelve of them. And her life built on their bone
s.

  Winter said, “You know I carry every one of them.”

  “I know.”

  Her grandfather studied her face. “I would fear for your heart if you were not appalled. It is an appalling price. A terrible price. But the lowest price I could pay.”

  balance

  balance

  “I wonder if that’s what Herod said when he ordered the slaughter of the innocents.”

  “Don’t give me that pious crap, Emily. This is too important. Don’t you see, girlchick? It was my little boy you made the offering to. My angel. You’ve gone and spliced the connection that I cut, all those years ago. You little fool.” Winter grimaced. “I felt it the moment it happened. Long before I got down to the pyre beneath the Bridge. In one instant, everything I had made had been undone. Those twelve children, wasted. I could feel my angel again. Not inside me, not yet. But I could feel him stir, and start coming for me like a hound on a trail. He won’t rest until we’re together again. So I believe. And the Deal will be undone, and the Powers of the North Side will come sweeping over the Bridge, and the fate we were spared seventy years ago in the Dream will take us after all.

  “I am one hundred and thirteen years old, Emily. The Deal has held time back from me—but it has been so many years with the frost running through that crack in my middle. And then to feel suddenly that a stupid girl had wasted all my work…” He reached out to touch her bruised cheek. “Well.”

  “I’ll live.”

  He looked at her. “You too are an angel, Emily. In your own way. And being an angel, you have come, as my heir must, to this terrible secret. That is right and proper. You are the blood of my blood, and you are the one who will keep the city when I am gone.”

  closer

  balance

  Water dripped and trickled around them, creeping always downward in its blind search for the river valley.

  no

  no

  “Do you see, Emily? The Deal has passed to you. You have grown into your power now, and also into your responsibility. This time it is you who must”—no!—“cut the angel from yourself. It will be easier for you than it was for me. I’ll make sure of that.” He took her hand and she flinched. “A delegation is coming from Vancouver this week to discuss the deployment of our troops there. Your first major policy initiative. You should be proud. We will entertain them for the Feast of the Annunciation,” Winter said. “After that business is finished, you and I will do what must be done for the good of the Southside.”

  no

  “You made a deal with the devil, Grandfather. I won’t let you cut me open to keep the bargain.”

  “What do you suggest I do, Emily? Deliberately sacrifice a real human child? The North Side might accept that. Would you really take a little boy or girl from one of your people to save the ghost that lives in you? Did I bring you up to be such a coward?”

  Emily’s eyes stung. “You don’t believe that.”

  “I know the pain is great,” Winter said. “I know the loss is hard. But this is a needful thing, Emily. And I am not asking your permission.”

  Chapter

  Two

  Emily’s banished governess, Claire, was in Vancouver. To be precise, she was standing in the gym of the Hong Hsing Athletic Club in Chinatown. The captain in charge of Southside’s mercenary troops had chosen her, as the person with by far the least combat training in his company, to demonstrate the value of his soldiers to Water Spider, Chinatown’s Honorable Minister for Borders. Jen, Water Spider’s bodyguard, would spar with her. Jen was not afraid. Fear was not one of his problems. Then again, neither was stupidity. He was not inclined to underestimate Claire.

  It took about ten seconds for the white devil to fake Jen out, distract him with an agonizing pop to the pressure point in his elbow, and then smash him with a snap-kick to the head. He couldn’t remember the time between the kick to his head and finding himself gasping with his face pressed into the mat. Judging from the way his whole body was ringing, he hadn’t just fallen after the kick. Probably she had slammed him down with a hip throw. Shoulder throw, maybe.

  Fuck.

  There were three great Powers in Chinatown: Double Monkey, that sneakiest of gods, the Lady in the Garden, and the Dragon. The Dragon was a ferocious Power and the Hong Hsing Athletic Club was the heart of his turf. Jen could feel the eyes of all the Dragon’s bully boys on him. They were lounging against the gym walls, well back from the Southsiders, watching him get the shit pounded out of him by a skinny white lady.

  Fuck.

  So this was the least dangerous Snow, eh? Not even a soldier. Only as much combat training as they deemed necessary for a little light bodyguard work. Jen blinked the sweat out of his eyes and turned his head just enough to look at her. She stood waiting on the mat. Gangly. A little uncomfortable, even. Not at home in a gym.

  Buddha’s balls.

  The watching Snows clapped and whistled. “Oh, baby, that’s gotta hurt!” “She shoots, she scores!” “Way to go, Grandma!” “Count one for the governess!”

  “Good work, Claire.” Jen heard the Southsider captain clap lazily. Clap. Clap. Clap. Big-nose bastard.

  Jen touched his face where she had kicked him. “It will be embarrassing, this foot-shaped bruise. Size eight,” he said. “Maybe nine.”

  The Snows laughed. “Nine,” Claire said.

  Jen’s opponent held out her hand to help him up. She was much older than the enlisted men. Middle to late thirties, Jen guessed; not much younger than his mother. Tall and ropy. Small breasts that sagged under her shirt. Her skin was cold to the touch and white. Not white like the other Southsiders were white, but white; the color of thick frost on a window. Her eyes were the color of melting ice cubes and her hair was white as dice. Her pants and tank top were also white. Unlucky.

  Jen’s mouth was full of blood.

  Be fire. Be fire.

  He hopped back onto his feet, ignoring her offer of help. His scarlet shirt and pants fluttered like licks of flame. “Not bad. For a girl.”

  Claire reached out and tapped him, ever so lightly, on his bruised jaw. “Woman.”

  He was standing now. Better. But he was still empty inside, hollow as a reed, the impact of the blow still humming in his bones. On a chain around his neck he wore a lucky charm, the leg bone of his grandfather’s cat. He touched it and took in a deep breath, pulling the air down to dan tien, to fan the fire there. His center became heavier, filling with chi. Warm energy broke freshly from the coals in dan tien, creeping out to his limbs. His limp fingers curled imperceptibly as he let the chi build in his palms. He was no longer so empty inside. The buzzing faded.

  Jen ignored the fucking Hong Hsing Athletic Club thugs and looked back to his master, standing on the sidelines. Water Spider’s hair, just touched with dignified grey, was immaculately bound and pinned; his lean face was calm as a mountain lake. Why shouldn’t it be?—it wasn’t him the Snow was pounding into cat shit. Jen’s master returned his glance, and gave a measured nod.

  Jen swallowed his own blood and grinned at Claire. “Again? Double or nothing?”

  The Southside captain nodded to Claire. She assumed a fighting stance, carrying most of her weight on her back leg, her front leg empty, toe just touching the ground. Ready with a kick, should the opportunity to use her superior reach reveal itself. “You are a good fighter,” Jen said. “Very good. But ugly. There is no elegance in your stance. No detail.”

  “True—but I don’t have a footprint on my face.”

  “Not yet.” Jen darted in, two quick shuffle steps, just to watch her move. He had his nimbleness back now. Wary as a bird. They circled, rocking and watching. Be fire, he told himself. Bend like flame. Break and split, burn and creep. Hands and feet quick, quick as a cat. Quick as little fish.

  She tracked him, words and numbers streaming down her melting-ice eyes. Fucking Snows and their computer familiars and heads-up display contact lenses.

  She would crush him, of course, this g
overness who wasn’t even a soldier. A blind man could see that. Water Spider could see it too. Clearly that wasn’t the point. Jen wished he knew what the point was. He swallowed a little more blood, and pushed on his front teeth with his tongue. He didn’t think any of them were loose.

  No doubt Water Spider had his reasons.

  They rocked and circled. Jen wondered if the better fighters would have hit him so hard. Probably not. More control. Fuck. Claire’s white calves and arms were shockingly defined. “Wouldn’t want to take you to bed.” He shook his head, considering. “Hurt myself.” The Snows laughed behind Claire’s back.

  “I’d save you the trouble,” she said.

  She towered over him, tall as a crane. He was a small fighter, short and blocky and explosive. He fought the Wing Chun style, lots of speed and power, lots of short force, lots of joint locks and throws. Infighting. But this Claire was a white devil: balance like a snow leopard, limbs like whip-steel. Words and numbers and shapes hissed in tiny lines of pale blue fire across her eyes.

  “You have a very cold luck around you. You know that? Brr. Your friends here: just a bunch of big muscle round-eyes. But you! Cold luck. Cold cold luck.” Jen clicked his tongue against his teeth. “And so white! All Snows are white, but you! Did someone bleach you as a baby?”

  Claire smiled. It was a singularly warmthless smile. “I got my looks from my mother,” she said. Her foot jumped out like a jackhammer.

  Jen dodged and feinted. “You used to be the princess’s bodyguard.”

  “Governess. And Emily is no princess. How did you know that?”

  Jen smirked. “I wonder how you failed, to lose your place of honor and get sent out here?”

  She slapped his leading hand away. Her left leg flashed out in a fast kick. It was only meant to be a feint, but Jen barely jumped back in time. He dropped to the floor and sprang in to sweep her feet out from under her—but she was already in the air, not just jumping above his sweep-kick, but driving with her other foot for his chest. He threw up an arm to block. She took the force of his block as a momentum gate, spun, and drove a back-knuckle strike into his solar plexus.