“Off to make an arrest,” one of them said. It was the foreman, Torin. A tall man, his shaven bullet-head couched in the hump of muscle at his back, his skin a rich dark-brown mapped with paler blotches. He had followed the Aedile into exile from Ys and, after Sergeant Rhodean, was the most senior of his servants. “Don’t be thinking we’ll saddle up your horse, young master,” he told Yama. “We’ve strict instructions that you’re to stay here.”
“I suppose you are not allowed to tell me who they are going to arrest. Well, it does not matter. I know it is Dr. Dismas.”
“The master was up all night,” Torin said, “talking with the soldiers. Roused the cook hours ago to make him early breakfast. There might be a bit of a battle.”
“Who told you that?”
Torin gave Yama an insolent smile. His teeth were of white bone. “Why it’s plain to see. There’s that ship still waiting offshore. It might try a rescue.”
The party of sailors. What had they been looking for?
Yama said, “Surely it is on our side.”
“There’s some that reckon it’s for Dr. Dismas,” Torin said. “That’s how he came back to town, after all. There’ll be blood shed before the end of it. Cook has his boys making bandages, and if you’re looking for something to do you should join them.”
Yama ran again, this time to the kitchens. He snatched a sugar roll from a batch fresh from the baking oven, then climbed the back stairs two steps at a time, taking big bites from the warm roll. He waited behind a pillar while the old man who had charge of the Aedile’s bedchamber locked the door and pottered off, crumpled towels over one arm, then used his knife to pick the lock, a modern mechanical thing as big as his head. It was easy to snap back the lock’s wards one by one and to silence the machines which set up a chorus of protest at his entrance, although it took a whole minute to convince an alembic that his presence would not upset its delicate settings.
Quickly, Yama searched for the papers Dr. Dismas had brought, but they were not amongst the litter on the Aedile’s desk, nor were they in the sandalwood traveling chest, with its deck of sliding drawers. Perhaps the papers were in the room in the watchtower—but that had an old lock, and Yama had never managed to persuade it to let him pass.
He closed the chest and sat back on his heels. This part of the house was quiet. Narrow beams of early sunlight slanted through the tall, narrow windows, illuminating a patch of the richly patterned carpet, a book splayed upside-down on the little table beside the Aedile’s reading chair. Zakiel would be waiting for him in the library, but there were more important things afoot. Yama went back out through the kitchen, cut across the herb garden and, after calming one of the watchdogs, ran down the steep slope of the breastwork and struck off through the ruins toward the city.
Dr. Dismas’s tower stood just outside the city wall. It was tall and slender, and had once been used to manufacture shot.
Molten blackstone had been poured through a screen at the top of the tower, and the droplets, rounding into perfect spheres as they fell, had plummeted into an annealing bath of water at the base. The builders of the tower had sought to advertise its function by adding slit windows and a parapet with a crenellated balustrade in imitation of the watchtower of a castellan, and after the foundry had been razed, the tower had indeed been briefly used as a lookout post. But then the new city wall had been built with the tower outside it, and the tower had fallen into disuse, its stones slowly pried apart by the tendrils of its ivy cloak, the platform where molten stone had been poured to make shot for the guns of soldiers and hunters becoming the haunt of owls and bats.
Dr. Dismas had moved into the tower shortly after taking up his apothecary’s post. Once it had been cleaned out and joiners had fitted new stairs and three circular floors within it and raised a tall slender spire above the crenellated balustrade, Dr. Dismas, had closed its door to the public, preferring to rent a room overlooking the waterfront as his office. There were rumors that he performed all kinds of black arts in the tower, from necromancy to the surgical creation of chimeras and other monsters. It was said that he owned a homunculus he himself had fathered by despoiling a young girl taken from the fisherfolk. The homunculus was kept in a tank of saline water, and could prophesy the future. Everyone in Aeolis would swear to the truth of this, although no one, of course, had actually seen it.
The soldiers had already begun the siege by the time Yama reached the tower, and a crowd had gathered at a respectful distance to watch the fun. Sergeant Rhodean stood at the door at the foot of the tower, his helmet tucked under one arm as he bawled out the warrant. The Aedile sat straight-backed under the canopy of the palanquin, which was grounded amongst the soldiers and a unit of the town’s militia, out of range of shot or quarrel. The militiamen were a motley crew in mismatched bits of armor, armed mostly with homemade blunderbusses and rifles but drawn up in two neat ranks as if determined to put on a good show. The soldiers’ horses tossed their heads, made nervous by the crowd and the steady hiss of the steam wagon’s boiler.
Yama clambered to the top of a stretch of ruined wall near the back of the crowd. It was almost entirely composed of men; wives were not allowed to leave the harems. They stood shoulder to shoulder, gray- and brown-skinned, corpulent and four square on short, muscular legs, bare-chested in breechclouts or kilts. They stank of sweat and fish and stale river water, and nudged each other and jostled for a better view. There was a jocular sense of occasion, as if this were some piece of theater staged by a traveling mountebank. It was about time the magician got what he deserved, they told each other, and agreed that the Aedile would have a hard time of it winkling him from his nest.
Hawkers were selling sherbet and sweetmeats, fried cakes of riverweed and watermelon slices. A knot of whores of a dozen different bloodlines, clad in abbreviated, brightly colored nylon chitons, their faces painted dead-white under fantastical conical wigs, watched from a little rise at the back of the crowd, passing a slim telescope to and fro. Their panderer, no doubt hoping for brisk business when the show was over, moved amongst the crowd, cracking jokes and handing out clove-flavored cigarettes. Yama looked for the whore he had lain with the night before Telmon had left for the war, but could not see her, and blushingly looked away when the panderer caught his eye and winked at him.
Sergeant Rhodean bawled out the warrant again, and when there was no reply set his helmet on his scarred, shaven head and limped back to where the Aedile and the other soldiers waited. He leaned on the skirt of the Aedile’s palanquin and there was a brief conference.
“Burn him out!” someone in the crowd shouted, and there was a general murmur of agreement.
The steam wagon jetted black smoke and lumbered forward; soldiers dismounted and walked along the edge of the crowd, selecting volunteers from its ranks. Sergeant Rhodean spoke to the bravos and handed out coins; under his supervision they lifted the ram from the loadbed of the steam wagon and, flanked by soldiers, carried it toward the tower. The soldiers held their round shields above their heads, but nothing stirred in the tower until the bravos applied the ram to its door.
The ram was the trunk of a young pine bound with a spiral of steel, slung in a cradle of leather straps with handholds for eight men and crowned with a steel cap shaped like a caprice, with sturdy, coiled horns. The crowd shouted encouragement as the bravos swung it in steadily increasing arcs.