The morning after the negotiations collapsed, the guards came at second bell.
Two of them. City watch — not garrison, not Crucible private, but the municipal enforcement division that reported to the Grand Ordinator's administrative apparatus and wore the Iron Sovereign's crest on their left shoulders because the city watch predated the Crucible's institutional expansion by forty years and nobody had ever changed the insignia. Young. The one in front couldn't be older than twenty-five. He walked with the rigid posture of a man who'd been given an order he understood was lawful and was performing it correctly and did not understand why correctness felt like this.
Rix saw them from across the canal bridge.
