Will the following personnel please remain behind

All in, the bell tolled for a half hour before it finally stopped. By that point we'd already been at the castle a good ten minutes or so, which with the two pints I’d guzzled too quickly was enough time for the sound to lodge in my consciousness as a semipermanent background installation. When it suddenly stopped it took me probably another fifteen minutes to lose the peculiar conviction that I had gone deaf.

We’d been among the first wave of fourth ward watch personnel to arrive, but there was nothing for us to do, and nobody was announcing anything yet about what this was. Lieutenant Blanks had come out and announced that everyone was to wait in the lobby for further instructions, so Curry and I stood there amid the throng of assorted watch staff, some of whom were on such opposite shift schedules from us that I barely even knew their names.

“Curry,” whispered one of the constables who usually worked an overnight post in the front castle lobby. She was a dwarf, I guessed maybe two years older than us, and I was embarrassed not to know her name. “Have you heard anything about what’s going on?” she asked, looking up at us when we both turned to her.

Curry shook his head. “Bersk, have you been properly introduced to Deegan?” he asked, correctly anticipating my failure to place her.

“I’ve seen you around,” I said, offering her my hand. “Nice to finally chat to you.” We shook.

“I don’t think there’s been one of these city-wides since I was a teenager,” she said, with an air of suppressed excitement. “When the captain comes out to say what’s happened, I’m relying on you to be my eyes, all right, big guy?” She grinned at him.

“Count on it,” Curry said.

I couldn’t work out if it was just the strange, long day we’d had, or the pints, or something else, but an anxious pit had begun to form in my stomach. There was no valid reason for this, so far as I could see. As Curry pointed out earlier, the last time the city declared a watch emergency, the catalyst had been a political **** in the First. Which was bad, but not anything that ought to have me so on edge. Whatever this was, it couldn’t be of material importance to us.

“What do you think, Bersk?” Curry asked, and I realized I hadn’t been listening at all. He and Deegan looked expectantly at me.

Before I could reply, I spotted Detective Lamb trailing some constable through the front door and begin making his way along the edge of the lobby toward the administrative offices. I hesitated only a moment before deciding he was decent enough to probably not be pissed at me for taking liberties. Maybe we could learn something, or be helpful somehow. “Sorry, just a second,” I said to them, and began pushing my way through the crowd.

Plenty of people in the gathered crowd were taller than me, and despite Lamb’s height and bulk I had trouble keeping him in my sight, losing him for a few seconds here and there. It took me probably two minutes just to cross to where he’d been, though by that point I couldn’t find him anywhere. I stood staring around, since I’d been so certain of his place in the room based on where last I’d seen him, and had kept a close enough eye on the tall door that led to the back offices that I was certain it hadn’t opened. After a moment I turned a slow circle, trying to work out where he had gone.

“Did you see Inspector Nilssen-Lambert?” I asked two constables standing whispering near the door. If he’d come this way, they must have. “Or Inspector Ladd?” I added, though she hadn’t been with him.

They both shook their heads. The next three people I asked hadn’t run into him either, and finally I decided it was making me look odd to persist with this fruitless line of inquiry, and made my way back to Curry. Deegan was gone.

“What was that all about?” Curry wanted to know.

“I saw Lamb over there and thought he might know something.”

“Well, did he?” Curry asked, after instead of elaborating I stood there in perplexed silence, still mulling over how I’d managed to lose him.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t find him when I got there.”

Curry, whose height advantage was considerably favorable to mine, and comparable to Lamb's, scanned the crowd. “He’s kind of hard to miss,” he said finally. “I don’t think he’s here.”

I frowned.

“What’s the matter?”

I had no idea how to answer. “I don’t know. I just have… a strange feeling,” I said after a moment. “Not the good kind. Maybe it’s nothing. It’s probably nothing.”

Curry seemed about to reply, when a hush fell over the waiting crowd of guard staff.

I could barely see, and I wanted to ask Curry what was going on, except the huge room was so quiet now that I was certain my voice would carry to every corner. I looked up at him, trying to read any clue I could in his expression.

“Coyle,” he whispered out the side of his mouth, and I blinked in surprise. The chief constable guarder mostly dealt with the city lords and council, and rarely addressed watch staff himself in person. Functionally Captain Hui was the highest internal officer anyone ordinarily dealt with. She made important announcements, and Blankenship dealt with everyday matters concerning guard personnel. I’d expected one of them, and from the expressions I saw around us, everyone else had too.

“Thank you all for gathering here at such short notice,” Chief Coyle said, his voice carrying easily despite the large, open space. “Around seven tonight there was a violent incident involving two fourth ward officers. At this time, few details are known, and rather than speculate the City and the Watch have made a joint decision not to release further information more broadly at this time. Expect a more detailed announcement by morning. At this time we are asking for a minimum of two hundred volunteers from across the wards, to participate in a paid special duty assignment tonight. Those volunteers will be apprised on a need-to-know basis. All other officers will be dismissed to normal scheduled activities, except a handful to be named momentarily by Captain Hui. The current emergency curfew will remain in effect until morning, at which time the city will evaluate whether it should be extended and whether additional volunteers will be needed.”

There was a pause here, during which Curry and I exchanged a long look. That many volunteers meant there was probably a manhunt on, though whether that might be for a victim or an assailant was entirely unclear. He nodded his agreement to my raised brows. It had been a long day, said his expression, but volunteering to help was the right thing.

“If additional assistance should be required from general personnel as tonight’s special duty gets underway—and it may be—” the chief went on, “this will be communicated by your commanding officers. For now, we wish you to be mindful of your surroundings at all times. We also ask that at this time you do not speak to the Scrivener, or representatives from other publications. Any such inquiries should be referred to my office. Thank you. Captain?”

There was another pause, and then the captain announced, “Will the following personnel please remain behind: Guard Constables Bersk and Curry, Sergeant Constable Baggett. Officers who wish to volunteer for special duty tonight, please report to Sergeant Iverson in the castleyard for instructions. All other personnel—you are dismissed until start of your next assigned shift.”

An immediate buzz began when Hui stopped speaking, but Curry and I just stood there staring dumbly at each other. I was still a little fuzzy from my two pints, and this shock on top of the day’s strangeness gave me the impulse to grab his hand for reassurance, except now that so many people were whispering and looking at us as they filed out, that seemed like a stupid thing to do. “Who’s Baggett?” I asked him, because it was the only thing I could think of to say right now.

Curry shook his head. “I don’t know any Baggett.”

“Do you think one of the city council got attacked, or something? Kidnapped?” I whispered. “That stuff the chief said about being mindful of surroundings—is that just normal stuff they always say? But what could they want with us?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said, tilting his head to indicate he thought the crowd had dispersed enough for us to make our way over to where our commanding officers waited. I felt the eyes of the remaining half roomful of our fellow guards on us, all the way to the opposite side of the emptying room.

“Constables,” the chief guarder said in polite acknowledgment when we got there, since Hui and Blanks were off to one side conducting a whispered conversation that made me even more nervous for some reason.

“Sir,” Curry and I said back, in near unison. Not only had we never spoken to the chief—to my knowledge he had never even laid eyes on us before. The chief made no move to say anything else, and neither did we.

I watched a long-limbed elfish man saunter up to join us. By the time he reached our group I decided he wasn’t actually sauntering at all, and it was just that his impossibly lanky body lent him an unavoidably casual affect. Baggett made no move to speak past acknowledging the chief’s greeting, and we all lapsed into an uncomfortable quiet spell during which the chief guarder wrote in a small notebook, I surreptitiously studied Baggett, and Baggett surreptitiously studied me and Curry. He was a bit older than us, I decided, but only a few years, and the fact that we’d been summoned alongside this person we’d never even heard of, who wasn’t from the fourth, was puzzling.

Curry, for his part, surreptitiously studied Blanks and the captain until they broke their conversation, nodding, and turned back to us. “Good, you’re all here,” she said when she saw us and Baggett standing there. “Let’s go.”

The door opened behind her and Inspector Chakrabarti of the Serious Crimes Division stuck her head out.

“Is Delp here yet?” the chief asked.

“Yeah. And I went myself and fetched Batty. Fair warning, between us he’s in a pretty bad way.”

The chief nodded. “Yeah.”

Curry and I traded our approximately one-thousandth confused look of the day: Inspector Delp had retired from SCD over a year ago now. Inspector Battenfeld was in a “pretty bad way.” What did any of that mean?

“Come on,” the captain said, and motioned us to follow the chief. Baggett waved his hand for us to proceed ahead of him, giving me the uncomfortable impression that this was less a courtesy, and more that he just wanted a better vantage point to observe me and Curry without having to cop to it. Hui and Blankenship brought up the rear.

I looked at Chakrabarti’s back as she strode purposefully in front of us all, and wondered, would we ever occupy such impossibly high status that it felt comfortable mentioning a colleague by nickname and tossing off a casual “yeah” in answer to a direct question from the chief guarder?

Our commanding officers, and Chakrabarti, all seemed to know exactly what this was about. This made their palpable grimness all the more worrying. Baggett, I decided, knew no more than we did—he had simply read the room and was taking his cue from everyone else’s somber tone. I might even have concluded that Curry and I were in some trouble, except that I couldn’t think of a single thing we had done wrong. I could sense his mind churning through the exact same questions next to me.

No one spoke during the three or four minute walk to the serious crimes office, during which my sense of unexplainable foreboding mounted precipitously. When we got there, Chakrabarti said curtly, “I guess that’s everyone,” which made me look around the room in still greater bafflement, because everyone at the Fourth knew that right now SCD had four detectives, and only she and Battenfeld were here, along with Delp, who wasn’t even with the watch anymore.

“Given the situation, I’ve sent word to arrange the indefinite loan of Inspector Mouse from the Third and Inspector Eslinger from the Fifth,” the chief guarder said, “but I think we had better end this miserable suspense now without waiting for them.”

Hui and the others nodded.

There was a long pause.

“Right,” the chief said after a moment. “Between seven and eight tonight, Inspectors Ladd and Nilssen-Lambert were fatally attacked.”