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man shit and dead and diseased, the two biggest chambers with their huge arched supports – old watermarks striped the walls beneath more recent stains of blood and sweat, some of them mine – were used as training grounds, while the third housed Taggart’s armoury. All three, grouped around Garrick’s rooms, pretty much divided the compound into two sections. On one side were the raws, thirty or so recruits who had their own mess hall and their own quarters: two long, narrow, cot-lined chambers, where they shared wet dreams and stale air. When they weren’t working as sentries, or running Garrick’s errands, they spent their time learning the ropes and waited to take our places. They never had to wait too long.
    On the other side was the Watch proper. We were only ever twenty strong – easier to keep track of us that way and more than enough to get the job done – and we each had our own cramped quarters, any light provided by a wall lamp that was nothing more than a bit of Sea sponge stuck into a container of camel fat. Every now and then, if there was any spare, they’d fill them with keroseneor a small measure of old oil, which glowed brighter but smoked blacker than the fat, the fumes giving everyone a headache. Furniture was sparse: a cot, a chair and table, a couple of waste pots that were placed outside the door each morning for collection by the raws, and a tiny cupboard. But the rooms afforded us some privacy at least. As far as extra privileges went, there weren’t many; the food wasn’t any better but there was more of it, plus we earned the full one-vat wage, had use of the whorehouse, and were given unrestricted access to the Citadel when we weren’t elsewhere. It was rare for a raw to be given permission to leave the compound for anything other than a closely supervised dose of dust and sun; if they were, it was unlikely to be for a good reason.
    I spent a day in my quarters writing up my last assignment before reading through the next. Our reports were important, almost as important as the jobs themselves, ensuring we accounted accurately for every kill. There were plenty of stories of Watchmen who’d tried to cheat their way to freedom, taking tags they shouldn’t in a bid to hasten their scores. As far as I knew, none of them had made it out. As tedious as it was, recording all the whos, whys, wheres and hows of a job kept everything legitimate as well as keeping us alive. Because if, by some miracle, Garrick missed any discrepancies, you could be sure the Tower wouldn’t. And no explanation meant no tag of our own.
    Despite its size, the folder detailing my next job didn’t contain much in the way of surprises. Even so, I read it a few times, trying to see what had the Council so worried, but coming up blank. Whatever their reason, as far as I could tell the job appeared no different to any other, and certainly not serious enough to warrant two Watchmen. One thing you could rely on was a Diss’s predictability. Taggart had once told me that the only thing in our favour was their reluctance – or maybe their inability – to band together. If they did that, he said, we wouldn’t stand a chance. So why didn’t they? I’d asked, and he’d given one of his hard little shrugs.‘Coz those settlements make it too hard for ’em, lad. Distance is their enemy, and our fuckin’ saving grace.’
    And maybe he was right about that. The Citadel sat pretty much in the middle of the high plain of the peninsula, big enough but still overfull. The three settlements served a multitude of purposes but their main reason for flourishing was because people were always being encouraged to move out of the centre and lessen the strain. And for most it was a good week’s walk from any one of them back to the Citadel, twice as far again from one settlement to another. The first had been established early on, up in the northwest