‘Please, try your damnedest.’
Aranfal whistled, a strange shriek of a sound. The door to the cell opened immediately, and a burly Watcher entered, pushing a woman before him. She was relatively young, perhaps in her mid thirties. She had the same olive skin as Gibbet, but she was plumper. Her head was shaved down to the stubble; on her forehead was a tattoo of an eye, wide and staring.
‘This is a friend of yours, is it not?’ Aranfal asked.
Gibbet nodded. He grinned at the woman. Still he smiles.
‘Her name is Hood, as strange a name as your own.’
‘Oh, Watcher, I am far stranger than old Gibbet,’ said Hood.
Gibbet and Hood laughed in unison.
‘Your laughter upsets me,’ Aranfal whispered. ‘Doubters should not be allowed to laugh.’
He nodded at the other Watcher, who grunted as he threw Hood to the floor.
‘You should not have laughed,’ Aranfal said again.
The other Watcher raised his leg and stamped on Hood’s chest.
‘Do not laugh at us again,’ Aranfal whispered.
The beating that Hood received at the fists and boots of the Watcher was as savage as any Aranfal had witnessed. The woman’s bones cracked like kindling, and her face quickly dissolved into a bloodied pulp, the tattoo now impossible to discern. Aranfal turned away in disgust. He did not care for brutality, especially when his true target was the man, not the woman. But it was as Brightling had always said. A person will endure much suffering, but they will not stand for so much as a misplaced hair on a loved one’s head. This woman had no hair, but the meaning was the same. It had worked for him more times than he cared to remember. Some subjects, like old Seablast, did not even need to witness the torment of their loved ones, to fall apart. It was almost always a sure route to success.
Except this time, it wasn’t.
The woman did not cry out. She did not resist the blows as they rained down on her. She smiled. Through it all, she was grinning.
And Gibbet laughed.
Something is very wrong.
Aranfal leaned over Gibbet. ‘You laugh, still you laugh. But know that this treatment’ – he pointed at Hood upon the floor – ‘is just the tiniest taste of what I can do. I am not an impatient man. I can make things far worse, over a much longer period of time. Do you follow my meaning?’
But Gibbet kept laughing. He laughed as he looked into Aranfal’s eyes. He laughed as he looked at his companion. He laughed as he stood, and he laughed as he cast his chains aside, as if they were formed of butter. He laughed as he picked up Aranfal’s mask, and he laughed as he put it on.
‘No,’ was all Aranfal managed to say.
‘Yes,’ said the man, removing the mask and tossing it to the ground. ‘These things remind me too much of their maker.’ He pointed to Hood, and Aranfal glanced in the woman’s direction. She was on her feet, her wounds healed, her tattoo staring out, once again pristine. In her right hand she held the severed head of the brutish Watcher; his torso was beneath her left boot.
‘Now,’ Gibbet said to Aranfal. ‘Whatever will we do with you?’
‘You are now the oldest of all our leaders,’ said Darrah, leaning back in her chair and staring at the ceiling, eyes wide, as if the thought had just this second occurred to her. ‘And by some way, too. How does that feel? It must be bloody awful.’
Annara Rangle, Tactician of the West, placed her book face down on the table. She removed her eyeglasses and lowered her head, fixing Darrah with a stare. It was a look her father had perfected: cold eyes, on the edge between anger and restraint. Not a look you wanted to see, from him. But she couldn’t do it. She never could. Not to Darrah, anyway.
The Tactician burst into laughter. Her sparrow chest rattled and one of her remaining curls of grey hair bounced about.
‘Although, on second thoughts,’ Darrah said, ‘those are not the giggles of an old lady. Stop them, please; they are an affront to my ears.’ She clasped her hands over the offended organs.
Rangle pouted her dry lips and slapped a hand across her mouth. ‘Mng mm shorry.’
‘You will be sorry,’ Darrah said, lifting a fist, and Rangle laughed again.
How many assistants spoke to their Tactician in this way? She had often wondered. And so she asked.
‘How many assistants speak to their Tacticians in this way?’ She assumed once again her father’s mask of disapproval.
Darrah raised a finger.
‘Not many.’ She stood, and walked to her Tactician, who remained seated. The assistant reached down with her finger, and stroked Rangle’s cheek, just once, lightly. ‘But we are more than that, aren’t we?’
Rangle brushed the hand away. ‘Not here,’ she whispered, staring up into the darkened rafters.
Darrah laughed, and took the chair beside the Tactician, burying herself in one of the many texts that lay before them.
Rangle glanced around the room. I should heed my own words more often, here. It would not do for the Watchers to know too much about my weaknesses. Especially this one. She squeezed Darrah’s knee; the gesture was met with a pout.
The Tactician laughed. She turned to her surroundings, looking again for eyes in the shadows. But there was no one there, or not that she could see. Of course, that didn’t mean they weren’t observing her and making notes. Brightling’s servants would pride themselves on being unobtrusive. That was their job, after all.
But it was worth it. This place was the only thing that brought joy to her life, apart from Darrah. The Watchers’ Library was a glory of the world, though the world did not know it. It was a vast space, cluttered with shelves and dust, free of any attempt at organisation or categorization, so totally unlike the plain and insipid collections of the College. And the books here could not be found in the College. These were texts and parchments that the Watchers monitored and controlled, on behalf of the Operator himself. They peered into the dark cracks of the Overland, into parts of history that were hidden from the people as a whole: overly ambitious Tacticians stalked the pages, with aims of tricking the Machinery; reigns of terror and disaster were detailed, their histories too painful to be remembered; and there were other things, too, which made no sense, or at least not at first. Things from before the Machinery itself.
Thank the Machinery for Tactician Brightling. If she hadn’t let me use this place, I think I would be dead.
‘We should go to Watchfold soon, Tactician. The Administrators will be getting anxious.’
Rangle sighed. ‘They are already anxious, Darrah. They have been hounding me.’
‘They need your wisdom, my lady.’
‘They need my stamp of approval for their little projects. That’s all they need.’
Darrah had served Rangle for fifteen years now, though it felt like longer. She had changed little in that time: a round face, plump, turning to fat, but lively and warm; a stout, powerful little body, with arms like axe handles; black hair that she cut herself into savage spikes; skin of a light brown, like Rangle’s own. She was from the Middle West, like the Tactician, and had wandered one day into Watchfold, demanding a job. She had come a long way, she had said. Watchfold could not even be classed as the true West, she had said. It was like calling Redbarrel the North, or the Far Below the South; they