Enforcers
The Enforcers are the patrols of the Gilded Cage. They walk its streets, watch its squares, and correct whatever breaks the rules. They do not kill. They reset.
Appearance
An Enforcer stands a head taller than the Gilded, in full armour of polished slate and gold plate, closed at the face with a smooth, featureless visor. The armour has no ornament beyond the marks of its watch. Each carries a short baton of pale metal that hums faintly and, when used, gives off a pulse that a watcher feels in the teeth more than sees. They walk in pairs or fours, in perfect step, at a pace that never changes, and their footsteps on the clean stone are the loudest regular sound in the city. They do not speak to visitors except to state the rule being broken.
Habitat and Range
They patrol the streets and public squares of the Gilded Cage, on fixed routes at fixed hours, and stand at its gates. Tireless Clockwork Guards serve with them, and in the squares stand the Rule-Breakers, former inhabitants turned into statues as warnings.
Behaviour and Temperament
They ensure compliance. An Enforcer meets a broken rule without anger and without delay: it states the rule, and if the breaking does not stop, it resets the one who broke it. They cannot be bribed, persuaded, or provoked, and they do not pursue anyone beyond what the rule requires.
Abilities
A pulse from an Enforcer’s baton resets a violator: the limbs stiffen, the motion stops, and the mind is set back on its line, often without memory of the deviance. For the worst offences the Cage has the Golden Touch, which turns the violator into a statue of gold.
Uses and Dangers
They keep the Cage free of crime and war, and visitors who keep its rules have nothing to fear from them. Their danger is that a visitor who does not know the rules breaks them without meaning to.
Lore and Belief
Travellers' tales of the Enforcers have given some lords' halls on Caeldon a word for a bailiff who cannot be bribed, which is said to be the rarest kind. Travellers say the way out of the Cage is the Exit Protocol, followed exactly, and that an Enforcer will escort anyone who keeps it to the gate, and not one step further.
Thieves who reach the Cage’s vaults and are caught are not killed but reset, and the thieves' dens of every river town mock "as is proper", the only words left to a master thief who came home from the Cage able only to walk, bow, and say them.