Orso felt that familiar sinking as he peeked over the prow. He could see Casamir’s Wall ahead, through the furnace murk. Boats and barges, backed up in a queue, horses idle on the towpath. Were there men up near the black opening of the tunnel that led out of the city? Dark-uniformed men on both sides of the water and crawling over the frontmost boat?

The handler was already pulling up his horse, one of the boatmen jumping to the bank with a rope and looping it around a strapping post, leaning back hard to bring them to a creaking stop.

“What’s to do?” called Tunny at an old coal-smudged fellow in the barge ahead.

“They’re searching every boat out o’ the city.”

“For what?”

“Damned if I know.” The man spat over the side into the water. “Bloody Anglanders, they’re worse’n the bloody Burners were.”

“And a lot more organised.” Tunny hopped from the barge onto the towpath, holding out his hand to help Orso across. “Time to go.”

“Really? You don’t think I could pass for common river folk?”

Tunny and Hildi both stared at him. The boatmen seemed to be looking, too, and men on other barges, and their eyes did not look so friendly as they had. Orso wondered what reward someone might expect, for turning him in.

“No,” he conceded, clambering from the boat. “I suppose not.”

For once he was grateful for the vapours as they strode away from the canal, footfalls muffled in the murk.

Tunny was shaking his head. “Brock’s tightening his grip on the city.”

“There were two dozen Anglanders at every gate before you got away,” said Hildi, glancing back over her shoulder and upping the pace. “There’ll be more now.”

Orso pulled that smelly tarp up to make a deeper hood. “I may have started planning my retirement a touch too soon.”

It Was Bad

Sun just up as Broad made his last preparations. Straightened the plates on the rack. Kind of plates Liddy had always admired. Shifted the flowers about in the vase. Only things he knew about flowers were that they show up in spring and May liked ’em. Then he took off his lenses, and wiped them, and put them back on, and stood there, frowning.

After the best part of a year without his family—and a black year, too, drowning in blood a little more every day—you’d think a man would be desperate to see the people he loved, would wait for that knock on the door with the biggest smile his cheeks could hold.

But Broad stood silent as the condemned waiting for the trudge to the scaffold, and smiled about as much, too. There’d been a time when he feared nothing. Now he was scared all the time. He hardly knew what of. Himself, maybe.

Damn, he wanted a drink. Just a nip. Just a mouthful. Something to take the hard edges off the world. To blur the memories of the things done. But he’d promised no trouble. For him, every bottle had trouble at the bottom.