Friendly Fire

by Dale Lucas

  “The temple?” Torval asked. “What are we to do there?”

  “Security for your kinfolk,” Ondego said. “Including armed escort back to the Warrens when their shifts are done. Now get scarce, the both of you. Don’t make me tell you again.”

  Rem had done as ordered and hurried home to sleep—or tried. In truth the combined excitement of hurrying home, cursing the day of Ondego’s birth, and lamenting his poor luck in being one of the prefect’s “favorites” had gotten his blood up and made real rest close to impossible. He dozed a bit but ended up reporting for his new midday shift almost as tired as if he hadn’t slept at all.

  He found many of his fellows of the Fifth on duty when he arrived, making up a loose, meandering cordon around the work site, separating the laboring dwarves from the milling public that streamed around the square. Rem found Queydon among his comrades, and the elf posted him at the far western end of the temple complex near one of the stairways that descended into the square from that plaza balcony he’d found Torval standing at a few days earlier. Before sending him off to his post, she bade him arm himself from a selection of staves, maces, and mauls piled nearby.

  “I’ve got my sword,” Rem said.

  “Orders from Ondego,” Queydon responded. “Blunt instruments only. If there’s trouble, he wants arrests, not corpses.”

  Shrugging, Rem bent over the gathered weapons, chose a lightweight maul not unlike the one Torval always carried, then hurried off to his begin his shift.

  It occurred to Rem that Tavarix might be about. As he skirted the edge of the construction site, he idly studied the dwarves he passed, all bent to their separate labors or bustling off on orders from their team leaders. There were bearded males, whiskered females, and an ample number of young apprentices and assistants—Tav’s peers, Rem supposed—all focused, engaged and hardworking. Already a great deal of the wreckage from the fire had been cleared away, while still more was in the process of being gathered and discarded. Wherever walls still stood and the detritus had been hauled off, nests of new scaffolding rose and were being added to by the moment. Everywhere activity and industry. To be honest, Rem felt weary just watching them.

  Or was that merely sleep deprivation?

  Trudging on, Rem found Tav planted among a gaggle of young dwarven apprentices, all doing hammer-and-chisel work on great sanded blocks. As each boy and girl bent to their labor, tap-tap-tapping with mechanical regularity, their young, dust-covered faces masks of intense concentration, a pair of older master masons drifted among them. These two proctors hovered at the youngsters’ elbows or loomed over their shoulders, offering casual praise when they were impressed, giving stern correction when disappointed. Rem stood for a time, watching Tavarix and hoping he might raise his eyes from his work so that Rem could wave to him. But it never happened; the boy was too deeply engaged in his work. Satisfied that he’d found him, Rem took up his post and began a slow, steady perambulation of the area, idly wondering when Torval would arrive to join him. Though tired and cold, he tried his best to enjoy the change of routine, to soak up the sunlight, and to appreciate the riotous colors of the sunset when it finally arrived.

  As darkness fell, the workers lit torches and lamps around the work site and carried on with their labors. Teams stopped in orderly turns to quaff some ale and wolf down some coarse brown bread or nibble at a wedge of cheese before scurrying back to work again. They kept to their labors—slow, steady, uninterrupted—even as darkness engulfed the city around them and the air bit so sharply that Rem wished he could rush up to one of the torch stations that provided the workers with light and soak up the radiant heat.

  It was shortly after sundown that he was finally approached by Torval. The dwarf carried with him two tin tankards with hinged lids, each trailing steam into the bitterly cold night air.

  “And where in the sundry hells have you been?” Rem asked. “I’ve been out here alone, all afternoon long, thinking you were home in bed.”

  “Hardly,” Torval said. He handed one of the tankards to Rem and bade him drink. “Queydon just posted me at the far end, that’s all. I’ve been here just as long as you have.”

  Torval then explained that Osma had prepared the warmed spiced cider in the tankards and delivered them herself to the work site. Having something warm to drink as the night’s chill dug its fingers into him made Rem feel like a king among paupers. He wrapped his benumbed hands around the piping hot tankard, thumbed back the little lid, and took tentative sips, desperate for the warmth, but in no hurry to burn his tongue. The cider was the stuff of dreams—sweet and tart and spicy and hot enough to warm him through. It took all his self-control to keep from guzzling it all in one long draught.

  “Gods, that’s welcome,” Rem said after a few sips. “You tell Osma she can send me an extra cup anytime.”

  Torval managed a crooked little smile. “She’s a good lass, that sister of mine. Anything to report?”

  Rem shook his head. He gestured with his tankard toward the dwarves at their labors. “Just what you see. They’ve been bent to it since I got here. I saw Tav, though.”

  Torval said nothing to that.

  Rem carried on. “Frankly,” he said, “I’m amazed they’ve accomplished so much in just a day or two. They really are hard workers, aren’t they?”

  Torval glanced at his kinfolk scurrying and swaggering among the half-built temple and its wreckage, hundreds of individuals, all engaged in distinct labors, but making progress collectively, as one. He gave a noncommittal grunt.

  Rem knew what that grunt meant. Torval was still ambivalent about this assignment—protecting his people, being forced to work with them and treat with them and respect them, even though not a one of them would do the same for him in return. Even if the dwarf did think his laboring countrymen were hard workers and skilled laborers, he probably wouldn’t deign to say so aloud. He’d spare not a word for them if that word was kind or gracious. Rem wished it could be some other way, but he knew it could not. Torval was many things—a great many of them surprising—but when he decided that he bore someone or something a grudge, that antipathy persisted … perhaps not white hot yet, but always there, pulsing in the darkness like a bed of embers just waiting to be stoked.

  Are you so different, really? Rem thought. You faked your own death and fled almost five hundred miles from the land of your birth! Could a person offer their kin any greater insult?

  Mine is a totally different circumstance! Rem reminded himself. I didn’t leave the whole human race behind.

  But Torval … These are his people. How must that feel, to hate them so? To feel so despised in return?

  “You know,” Rem said, “some people in this world are slow to change. Some institutions even slower. But that change always starts when one honorable individual stands before that group and says, ‘We cannot go on the way we have. Times change, and so we must. Let’s do it together.’”

  “What are you gabbling about?” Torval asked.

  “I’m gabbling about you, you bloody fool,” Rem shot back. “You can’t go through your whole life hating the very thing you’re a part of, whether you like it or not.”

  “So,” Torval said, “I should treat with them? And try to reason my way back into their good graces?”

  Rem shrugged. “What’ll it hurt?”

  Torval snorted. “Cack,” he said. “You’re a dreamer, lad. It’s your best quality and your worst.”

  Rem considered arguing his point further, but it seemed a useless distraction. Did he want to get into it all now? Out here? In the cold? On the job?

  So instead of pressing the issue, he merely raised his tankard. “Fine, then. I’ll say no more about it. To friends?”

  Torval tapped his tankard against Rem’s. “Friends,” the dwarf said. “Now I’d better get back to my post. Keep warm, Bonny Prince.”

  The end of the dwarves’ workday was announced a few hours later by a thunderous iron bell hung at the edge of the work site.
The steady knells reverberated across the square and seemed to go quavering into the night, as deep and dirgelike as the hourly bells rung at the great temple of Aemon.

  As the dwarven work teams reordered their workstations, secured their materials, and began amassing on the north side of the temple for their homeward march, Rem answered the call of his fellow watchwardens and happily rushed from his post to muster for the security escort. The lot of them—Rem, Torval, and all of those chosen by Ondego for the dubious honor of this special assignment—gathered along Shriver’s Street in loose formation. Once they were there, Queydon undertook a silent head count to make sure all were present and accounted for. To Rem’s great relief, Torval stood beside him in muster. It felt good to be reunited again after spending most of their shift apart. Rem hadn’t anticipated how strange it would feel to be on duty and not have his partner beside him.

  Pathetic, Rem thought. A few hours separated during a shift and already I’m missing the little bastard.

  Queydon indicated a point in their line, midway through. “Separate here,” she said. “Everyone to the right, take the south side of the street. To the left, the north. Demijon?”

  The robust watchwarden stepped out of his place in line. “Sergeant?”

  “You will accompany me, at the fore. Rhys and Sliviwit?”

  The two watchwardens stepped forward.

  “You shall bring up the rear,” the elf said. “To the rest of you,” Queydon said, speaking in her normal silky monotone, making no attempt to raise her voice but somehow, miraculously, being heard by all of them, “your columns will defend the dwarven ranks. Space yourselves appropriately and make sure none of our charges wander outside the cordon we make. Understood?”

  The dwarven masons were gathered in a long, loose column now. Rem did not take the time to count them, but he guessed there had to be almost a hundred, some hauling big leather bags or wooden crates full of tools, the senior members of the guild wearing leather aprons. Tav and the young apprentices—perhaps two dozen of them—were embedded behind the halfway mark of the column, with a large number of senior masons leading them and a smaller number trailing behind. Slowly but surely a balding, white-bearded dwarf steward moved down the line, checking the faces of his charges as he said their names, taking roll from memory. When he reached the front of the column and was satisfied, he turned to Queydon and hooked his thumbs in his apron belt.

  “All accounted for,” the old dwarf mason said. “Carry on, good watchwarden.”

  Queydon gave a curt nod and raised her fists to indicate that the watchwardens should form up. Rem, Torval, and the rest fell into their lines on either side of the dwarven column. To Rem’s relief he and Torval were some distance forward from the group Tavarix was part of. Perhaps, Rem reasoned, Torval could better concentrate on their work if he knew his son was safe, yet was not marching right beside him. Their formation finally set, Queydon turned swiftly on her heels and set off at a steady march, Demijon trudging along at her side. The dwarven column trailed behind her, paced by its watchwarden escorts.

  Torval strode about ten paces ahead of Rem, his eyes forward. As they left the open square, the streets and houses, taverns and tenements along Shriver’s Street seemed to huddle in around them, leering and looming as the snaking column passed. From forward in the line, a dwarf began to sing. It was clearly a working song, given its steady rhythm and its call-and-response lyrical pattern, but Rem had no clue what it was all about, for it was all sung in the native language of the Hallirwelk. But no matter. The cadence was the thing, and after a block or so, it asserted itself over his step. Thereafter, almost unconsciously, Rem found himself stepping in time with the dwarven laborers, sometimes even humming the melody when the mood suited him.

  As they traveled, passersby on the street were alternately charmed and perturbed by the sight and the sound of them. Some would stop and clap or stomp along, smiling broadly before carrying on about their business. Others hung out of their apartment windows or haunted low doorways, cursing the dwarves as they paraded by, urging them to shut their bloody mouths and take their short little legs back to the place that had borne them. More than once Rem heard a call of pickmonkey or tonker. It was a credit to the marching dwarves that, so far as Rem could see, they never once broke ranks or tried to engage with all those taunting strangers.

  Rem noted that Torval kept his own pace ahead, occasionally glancing at his countrymen, scowling at them, even—usually at those moments when their song was most exuberant.

  Rem turned to walk backward for a moment, curious and eager to check on Tav, farther back in the line. He could not see him—just the loose press of smaller dwarven bodies where all the apprentices were gathered. Only a little satisfied, Rem turned forward again and resumed his steady gait.

  Ahead the column bent, heading eastward on a more direct path toward the Warrens. As their train snaked around that bend, Rem noted something out of the ordinary. All of a sudden there were no passersby. This section of the ward—made up of narrower lanes than that which came before, hemmed in closely on either side by taller, seedier buildings—seemed entirely deserted, quite unusual for this part of the ward. Rem picked out lamplight in every third or fourth window, espied moving shadows, even heard voices, some raised in argument, some laughing over a suppertime joke—but no one seemed to be out on the street, or even drawn by curiosity or the noise of their passage.

  For some reason that made Rem uneasy. Could a usually busy boulevard such as this really be wholly empty, even after dark on a winter’s night? Where were the drunks haunting tavern doorways? Where were the stoop-shouldered men and women shuffling home from a long day’s work?

  A dread rose in Rem. He turned to look behind them. Staring back, he noted that the end of the train and the two watchwardens bringing up the rear guard had just turned the shallow corner that marked their exit from Shriver’s Street onto whatever narrow lane they now traversed. Looking forward and back, Rem could see the whole train stretched out along the length of the street in a long, straight line.

  Off to Rem’s right there came a great, thumping clamor. As he searched the gloomy little lane for some sign of the noise’s source, he caught shadows moving on a rooftop off to his right. Then the missiles rained down: a storm of blunt, heavy objects falling upon the watchwardens and dwarves beneath those shadows on the far side of the street.

  Someone cried out. A dwarf fell out of the line, groaning. Others shouted or screamed. The column halted, its aft end crashing into its fore and creating a swirling, unmoving mass of bodies in the middle of the crowded street. As the dwarves and watchwardens scurried for cover and tried to retreat, Rem realized what it was that rained down on them from that rooftop.

  Stones. Bricks. Broken masonry. Anything heavy, jagged, and sharp. They seemed to come tumbling down by the bucketful, not thrown but simply dumped. With almost every round of attack, someone would grunt and topple into the cold mud. The dwarves who had no room to retreat simply fell to their knees and covered their hairy heads, cursing as the stones rained down and pummeled them.

  “Ambush!” Demijon shouted from the front of the line.

  Then Rem felt an intruder in his mind, a strange, alien presence—Queydon—eschewing subtlety entirely in favor of instant, unfettered communication. A single word—

  Everywhere.

  Then—

  Coming.

  Rem looked to Torval. His partner, ten paces away, was already yanking his maul from his belt and turning outward to face their oncoming foes. Torval threw a glance back at Rem.

  “Stop gawping, boy!” he shouted. “They’re coming!”

  Rem got a good grip on his borrowed maul and scanned the darkness between buildings, every shadowed doorway and alley.

  “Where are they?” he shouted.

  Then more rumbling from above. Before Rem could react, he heard Torval’s heavy boots pounding the mud. A second later the dwarf collided with him and they went sprawling in the col
d, churned mud of the street. In the next instant, stones and bricks rained down from above, just a breath behind where they’d landed. Instinctively the two curled up and covered their heads, in no hurry to be brained by falling rock.

  Their ambushers had both sides of the street. Basic combat strategy suggested that after you’d pummeled your opponent with long-range missile attacks and gotten them squatting in their trenches, you should follow up with—

  Queydon’s words bloomed in Rem’s brain, a searing scream that made him wince.

  Contact, vanguard.

  Torval scurried to his feet, searching the gloomy world around them for some sign of where the attack would come from. Rem followed suit, eyes darting everywhere, breath starting to catch in his throat.

  A chorus of war cries—high and savage—split the quiet night. From where he lay on the ground, Rem saw the whole line of dwarves and wardwatch escorts at the fore of the column buckle and slide backward. Steel rang off steel. Wood thumped flesh. Somewhere a bone cracked like a pine knot exploding in a fire.

  Voices, shouting, and cursing. Iron and steel clanging like handbells. Many of the dwarves in the line were regrouping after their initial panic, snatching up whatever tool was at hand—a hammer, a chisel, a supping knife—and readying themselves to meet their attackers.

  Rem, terrified that their edge of the column would have to withstand its own enemy onslaught at any moment, frantically turned and searched the dwarven line for some sign of Tavarix. He had to make sure the boy was safe in all this chaos—

  “North side of the street!” Torval suddenly shouted. “Coming fast!”

  Rem spun in answer. Out of a number of alleyways before and beside them, men charged to meet them. They all wore masks of roughly of the same design: simple, almost featureless, only the chin of the attacker left uncovered and exposed, all seemingly made of bleached leather. They wielded hammers, mauls, maces, bludgeons, truncheons, even twirling chains and wooden staves or clubs—but thankfully, not a blade or battle-ax among them. But those were all the impressions Rem could glean. In the next instant their attackers were upon them, barreling right into the flank of the column with ferocity and abandon.