The Pharoah Contract

No lights showed from the tower; the Watchers kept their balconies dark, so that their night vision would remain acute. He dropped back down into the mists, to consider the situation. He had no great desire to remain on the cliff; monstrous predators might be gathering in the darkness below, climbing the cliff, hungry. On the other hand, he didn’t want to find a patrol of demonkillers waiting for him at the top of the Worldwall, either, though that would be the lesser of the two evils. So he took several deep breaths from the rebreather, tugged it loose, and cast it away. Then he surged from the murk and slithered up the cliffside and then the Worldwall, moving over the dark stone as rapidly as a frightened lizard.

He reached the top of the Worldwall without incident, and was congratulating himself on having made a clean entry as he pulled himself over the parapet. But as he unstrapped the climbing hooks from his feet, he heard a quick shuffle behind him. He whirled, to see a tall thin man in the livery of the Watchers rushing at him with a nasty-looking trident. As the man opened his mouth to shriek a warning to the other Watchers, Ruiz swayed aside from the man’s thrust and in the same motion struck out with the one set of climbing hooks he had removed. The hooks sank into the man’s throat, just above the collarbone, and the shout turned into an unpleasant bubbling sound. Ruiz caught the trident before it could clatter on the stone. The unfortunate Watcher toppled off the Worldwall and fell silently into Hell.

Ruiz crouched under the parapet, hoping the alarm had not been raised.

A few minutes passed, and all remained quiet. While he waited, Ruiz had leisure to regret the killing of the Watcher, who was only doing his job — preventing the Hell monsters from raiding the edges of the plateau and making sure that the Hell gods stayed below. Ruiz felt a deep melancholy, a sensation he suffered whenever his work caused him to hurt an innocent person. He wondered, at such times, why he continued to do what he did, and at the moment he could think of no answer that pleased him. Did the Watcher have a family? Would they be waiting for him to come home from his stint on the Worldwall? An unhappy little drama played out in Ruiz’s mind. He saw wide-eyed children watching at the window of a hut; he saw an apprehensive woman, pretending unconcern for the children’s sake. He saw weeping and bitter regret — all, all, his fault.

After a while he forced himself to put those thoughts away. He slipped down the steps cut into the inner wall and stole away into the Pharaohan night.

By daylight Ruiz was trudging along a dusty road, which struck straight as a string through a great planting of catapple trees. As the sun rose, peasants came from small huts set back under the wiry branches and began to tend the trees, which were hung with buckets and piping arranged to collect the thin sap. The peasants, thickset round-faced men and women burned almost black by the Pharaohan sun, watched Ruiz with narrow suspicious eyes and would not speak to him, even when he leaned on the stone wall that rose at either side of the road and waved at them. He recalled that except on rare and profoundly celebratory occasions, the peasantry could not afford the pleasure drugs the snake oil peddlers distributed and, naturally enough, resented the idle grasshopper existence of the snake oil men.

He shrugged and went on, until he came to an open area in which men wearing leg irons toiled to remove the stumps of dead trees from the dry powdery soil. Several overseers in white-and-red-checked kilts stood about, occasionally touching the more laggardly prisoners with short limber whips.

Ruiz paused again and beckoned to one of the overseers, a tall cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and the jagged blue tattoos of a second-class coercer. The overseer stared at him, expressionless, for a long moment, then ambled to the wall and stood slapping the butt of his whip into his palm. He said nothing.

Ruiz smiled and ducked his head obsequiously. “Noble coercer, might I trouble you for a drink of water?”

The overseer studied him, then spoke abruptly. “Show me your plaque,” he ordered.

Ruiz nodded submissively and fumbled out a small slab of glossy porcelain into which a forged seal had been pressed, and on which a line of graceful cursive characters had been brushed in black slip. All Pharaohans who traveled beyond their home nomarchy were required to carry the plaques, which described their identity and permitted activities. “Here, here… all’s in order.”

The overseer snatched the plaque, examined it closely. After a moment he grunted and returned it. “Can you pay? No charity here; a measure will cost you a full copper nint.”