Red Iron Nights (6 page)

There was talk of bounties. The monsters tended to be attracted by the Hill, where the rich and powerful live. They favor high places. The upper classes and thunder-lizards both. If the latter had had the sense to stick to the slums, there would have been no dangerous talk.

9

The only warning was Dean’s smirk, filled with so much childish malice I knew something was going on.

Garrett!

Oh-oh. I’d forgotten I’d left him with those evangelists.

I considered taking a powder. But, hell, it was my house. A man is king in his own castle. I stepped into the Dead Man’s room. “Yeah?”

Sit down.

I sat, warily. He was too calm.

Have you contemplated the state of your immortal soul?

I believe I screeched. Next thing I knew, I was headed down the hall staring back at his closed door with bugged eyes. Somewhere a cat meowed. This couldn’t be happening to me. It wasn’t real. I was going crazy. If this kept up, I’d be out there howling at the sky alongside Barking Dog.

It got worse. I ducked into the kitchen for a beer, found Dean at the table having tea with the religion women. One had a kitten in her lap. Dean seemed spellbound by the ropes of sand the other was spinning. The cat woman said, “Won’t you join us, Mr. Garrett? We were just sharing the wonderful news with Dean. Won’t you share the joy with us too?”

Joy? She was as joyous as the piles. She didn’t know the meaning of the word. The fraud. She was smiling, but that was a domino. Everything behind it was holier-than-thou sour. She would remain constipated as long as she suffered the suspicion that somebody, somewhere, was having a good time. “Sorry. Some other time. I’m just going to grab a biscuit and run.” I knew her kind. A Barking Dog with a bath, only her fantasy contained a harsh, metallic flavor of violence. Barking Dog was determined to expose imaginary devils. She wanted to scourge them with fire and sword. Yet she was painfully formal and polite. If I stopped moving for a second, she would pin me and soon drive me over the edge. She wouldn’t let go till I’d gotten so damned rude I’d be embarrassed for a month.

I grabbed my biscuit and fled to my office. I asked Eleanor, “You haven’t gone gaga on me too, have you?”

She gave me her best enigmatic look.

I settled behind my desk. Things were falling apart around me. I had to take charge before chaos conquered all. I had to get this storm-tossed ship back on a steady keel.

It was my own damn fault, trying to pull a fast one on the Dead Man.

10

I groaned. I’d just gotten comfortable, and now somebody was pounding on the front door. Nobody ever comes around except to see me. Nobody ever wants to see me unless they want me to work. Nobody ever wants me to work except when I’ve just gotten comfortable. Then my attitude improved. Maybe it was more evangelists. I could turn the new bunch loose on the pack already infesting the place. They could go to the theological mattresses right here. I could have a ringside seat while they fought it out, toe to illogical toe.

See. I’m an optimist. Whoever said I always look on the dark side? I did? Right. Well, when you do that, your life fills with pleasant surprises, and seldom are you disappointed.

Answering the door provided one of the disappointments.

I did peep through the peephole first. I did know I wouldn’t be happy once I opened up. But I didn’t have much choice.

His name was Westman Block. He was the law. Such as the law is in TunFaire. He was a captain of that same Watch that couldn’t catch anyone more dangerous than Barking Dog Amato. I knew him slightly, which was too well. He knew me. We didn’t like each other. But I respected him more than I did most Watchmen. When he took a bribe, he stayed bought. He wasn’t
too
greedy.

I opened up. “Captain. I nearly didn’t recognize you out of uniform.” Polite. I can manage it sometimes. I glanced around. He was alone. Amazing. His bunch run in crowds. That’s one of their survival skills.

“Can we talk?” He was a small, thin character with short brown hair graying around the edges. There was nothing remarkable about him except that he seemed worried. And he was almost polite. He’d never been polite to me before. I was suspicious immediately.

A healthy dose of paranoia never hurts when you deal with the Westman Blocks.

“I have company, Captain.”

“Let’s walk, then. And don’t call me Captain, please. I don’t want anyone guessing who I am.” Damn, he was working hard. Usually he talked like a longshoreman.

“It’s raining out there.”

“Can’t put anything past you, can they? No wonder you have that reputation.”

See? Just not my day. I pulled the door shut without bothering to holler to Dean. What did I have to worry about? I had a heavenly host on guard. “Why don’t we scare up a beer, then? I feel the need.” For about a keg, taken in one big gulp.

“Be quicker if we just walk.” His little blue eyes were chips of ice. He didn’t like me but he was working hard not to offend me. He wanted something bad. I noted that he’d acquired a little mustache like Morley’s. Must be something going around.

“All right. I’m a civic-minded kind of guy. But maybe you could drop me one little hint?”

“You figured it already, Garrett, I know you. I need a favor I hate to ask for. A big favor. I got a problem. Whether I like it or not, you’re probably the only guy I know of can solve it.”

I think that was a compliment. “Really?” I swelled with newfound power. It almost matched the growth of my paranoia. I’m the kind of guy gets really nervous when my enemies start making nice on me.

“Yeah.” He grumbled something that must have been in a foreign language, because no gentleman would use words like the words I thought I heard. Watch officers are all gentlemen. Just ask them. They’ll clue you in good while they pick your pocket.

“What?”

“I’d better just show you. It isn’t far.”

I touched myself here and there, making sure I was still carrying.

After a block, during which he muttered to himself, Block said, “We got a power struggle shaping up up top, Garrett.”

“What else is new?” We haven’t had a big shake-up or a king bite the dust for a couple years but, overall, we change rulers more often than Barking Dog changes clothes.

“There’s a reform faction forming.”

“I see.” Bad news for his bunch. “Grim.”

“You see what I mean?”

“Yeah.” I’d heard grumblings myself. But those were there all the time. Down here in the real world we don’t take them seriously. All part of politics. Nobody
really
wants change. Too many people have too much to lose.

“Glad you do. Because we got something come up that gots to be tooken care of. Fast. We got the word. Else it’s going to be our balls in a vise.” See? He even talked like a gentleman.

“Where do I come in?”

“I hate to admit it, but there ain’t none of us knows what to do.” Damn! He
was
in trouble. He
was
scared. They must have showed him a vise heated red hot, with ground glass in its jaws. “I put in some time thinking. You was the only answer. You know what to do and you’re straight enough to do it. If I can get you to.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear. Keeping my mouth shut kept my options open. Marvelous, the restraint I showed in my old age.

“You help us out with this, Garrett, you won’t be sorry. We’ll see you’re taken care of fee-wise. And you’ll be covered with the Watch from here on in.”

Well, now. That would be useful. I’ve had my troubles with the Watch. One time they laid siege to my house. It took some doing to work that one out.

“Right. So what is it?” I had a creepy feeling.

Didn’t take a genius to figure it would be something big and nasty.

“I better just show you,” he insisted.

Despite his fine-sounding offer I was liking this less and less.

11

We walked only a mile but that mile took us over the edge of the world into another reality, into the antechamber of hell, the Bustee. Now I understood why he was out of uniform.

TunFaire boasts peoples of almost every intelligent race. Mostly they clump like with like in closed neighborhoods. Likewise with humans not of the ethnic majority. Breeds fall into the cracks, live in between, catch as catch can, often welcome nowhere. Two-thirds of the city is ghetto slum. Poverty is the norm.

But the Bustee is to those slums as the slums are to the Hill. People there live in tents made of rags or in shanties put together from sticks and mud and trash scavenged before the ratmen could collect it. Or they cram in a hundred to the building meant for five or ten two hundred years ago, when the structure had windows and doors and flooring that hadn’t yet been torn up to burn for heat during the winter. They lived in doorways and on the street, some so poor they didn’t have a grass mat for a mattress. They lived amidst unimaginable filth. The ratmen wouldn’t go in there without protection. The soldiers wouldn’t go in less than company-strong—if at all. Too many soldiers had come out of there and wouldn’t go back even to visit.

The Bustee is the bottom. You can’t roll downhill any farther. You roll that far, chances are you’ll never climb back. Not till the dead wagons come.

Only the deathmen are safe in the Bustee. Each day they come with their wagons, wearing their long gray robes with the veils that conceal their faces, to collect the dead from the streets and alleys. They chant, “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” as they work. They won’t leave the streets to collect. They load their wagons and make their deliveries to the city crematoriums. They work from dawn to dusk, but every day they get a little farther behind.

Death in the Bustee is as ugly as life.

In the Bustee there is no commodity cheaper than life.

In the Bustee there is only one commodity of any value at all. Young men. Hard young men who have survived the streets. These fellows are the only real beneficiaries of the Cantard war. They enlist as soon as they’re able and use their bonuses to get whoever they can out of hell. Then, despite their hard and undisciplined youths, they work hard at being good soldiers. If they’re good soldiers they can make enough to keep their families out. They go down to the Cantard and die like flies to keep their families out.

That such love should flourish, let alone survive, in the Bustee is ever an amazement to me. Frankly, I don’t understand how it does. In the more affluent slums, youth seems to victimize those closest to it first.

Another world, the Bustee. They do things differently there.

Block stopped walking. I halted. He seemed to be having trouble getting his bearings. I looked around nervously. We looked too prosperous. But the streets were deserted.

Maybe it was the rain. But I doubted that. There was something in the air.

“This way,” Block said. I followed, ever more alert. We saw no one till I spotted a pair of obvious Watchmen, though out of uniform, peeking from a narrow passageway between two buildings that might have been important back at the dawn of time. They were as big as they get in the Bustee. The men faded back into the passageway.

My nerves worsened. I was supposed to go back in there with a guy loved me the way Block did? But he didn’t dislike me that much. Not enough to bring me down here for that kind of fun.

I stepped into the passage—and almost tripped over an old man. He couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds. He was a skeleton with skin on it. He had just enough strength to shake. The deathmen would collect him before long.

“All the way back,” Block said.

I didn’t want to go. But I went. And wished I hadn’t.

I like to think I developed a solid set of emotional calluses in the Marines, but that’s only because my imagination can’t encompass horrors worse than those I saw and survived in the war. I keep thinking there’s no devil’s work that can surprise me anymore.

I keep on being wrong.

There was a little open area where porters had made deliveries in a bygone age. Several Watchmen were there. They had torches to break the gloom. They looked like they hoped the rain would drown the torches.

I didn’t blame them.

The girl had been about twenty. She was naked. She was dead. None of that was remarkable. It happens.

But not the way this had happened.

Somebody had tied her hand and foot, then hung her from a beam, head down. Then they had cut her throat and bled her and gutted her like a game animal. There was no blood around, though the human body is filled with an amazing amount. I muttered, “They caught the blood and took it away.” My meals for the month wanted to desert me.

Block nodded. He was having his troubles too. So were his boys. And they were angry besides. Hell, I was angry, but my anger hadn’t had time to ripen.

No telling why she’d been gutted. Maybe for some of her organs. Her insides had been dumped on the ground but were gone now, carried off by dogs. They had been at the body too, some, but hadn’t done much damage. Their squabbling had brought about the discovery of the corpse.

Block told me, “This is the fifth one, Garrett. All of them like this.”

“All in the Bustee?”

“This’s the first one down here. That we know of.”

Yeah. This could happen here every day . . . I looked at her again. No. Even in the Bustee there are limits to the sickness they’ll tolerate. They don’t kill for sport or ritual, they kill for passion or because killing will, directly or indirectly, put food in their mouths. This girl had been killed by somebody insane.

I said, “She came from outside.” She was too healthy, too pretty.

“None have been Bustee women, Garrett. They’ve turned up all over town.”

“I haven’t heard about anything like this.” I hadn’t been out listening, though.

“We been trying to keep it quiet, but word’s starting to get around. Which is why we’re about to go in the vise. The powers that be want this lunatic and they want him sudden.”