City in Chains by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2025-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

When Guisa Sachry started for a kiosk to buy a morning news sheet, a constable pointed at him with a white-gloved hand and blew a shrill blast on a brass whistle. “Get back inside, you stupid son of a whore!” the uniformed man shouted. “Don’t you know there’s a curfew on?”

“No, I myself did not know that,” Guisa replied with dignity. “At whose order?”

“At the order of the Chleuh commandant for all of Quimper, General Stulp himself,” the constable replied. “So get your fat, flabby arse back behind closed doors where it belongs, or I’ll make you sorry.”

“No need to be crude about it, I’m sure,” Guisa said, but he retreated.

When he walked back into the flat, Vonney said, “You don’t have the sheet. Did you forget what you went out for?”

“Don’t you start,” Guisa snarled. She looked at him in surprise—he hadn’t snapped back at her like that since she found out about Xya Fulgine. He went on, “A nasty vulgarian of a constable ordered me home. He said there’s a citywide curfew on.”

“Oh,” Vonney said in a different tone. “Maybe we should activate the crystal, then, and find out why. There’ve been plenty of worse attacks on Lutesse where they didn’t do anything like that.”

“True.” Guisa went over to the crystal and murmured the charm. He didn’t listen to it all that often. It told even more lies than the news sheets, which was really saying something. Well, people like Erol Paki didn’t get invited to Chleuh gatherings for telling what was truly going on in Quimper. And why do you get invited to those gatherings? Guisa asked himself. As usual, he fought shy of answering his own question.

A pompous-looking man appeared in the crystal. He spoke pompously, too: “All inhabitants of Lutesse are required to obey the curfew ordered by the occupants’ commandant in Quimper, General Berhard Stulp. Those flouting this order are liable to summary punishment, and no mercy will be shown. Furthermore, Count Vurk, King Kangen’s minister to Quimper, assures the populace that the attempted landings in the north are foredoomed to failure, and that the barbarous invaders assuredly will be thrown back into the sea. I repeat⁠—”

Guisa didn’t listen to him saying the same thing over again. He turned away from the crystal. Before he could find anything to say, Vonney beat him to it: “So it’s happened at last.”

His head bobbed up and down, seemingly of its own accord; he didn’t think he’d told it to do that. “It has,” he said. “Now we see if they can make it stick.”

“What do you think?” his wife asked.

“I . . . just don’t know.” Guisa didn’t usually say anything like that, but he wasn’t usually so confused, either. “The Chleuh can’t be taken by surprise. They’ve been getting ready for this for a couple of years now. But the Hontermen and Anadans wouldn’t have crossed the Narrow Sea if they didn’t think they could push on from the beaches.”

Vonney nodded in the same distracted way Guisa had a moment earlier.

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