Aftermath- - Thieves World 10 (5 page)

"Cade, that is what he did for a living."

"I know that." Cade leaned over the table. "But these pots were built to hide things."

"What sort of things?"

"Who knows?" Cade shrugged. "Weapons, money, messages, even drugs, whatever it was doesn't matter now. What matters is that he did it

for the PFLS. He was not just paying them; he was one of them."

"I don't believe it."

"Believe it." Cade leaned back, staring at her. "I've discovered a whole underground organization, very well coordinated, slipping all sorts of things through the different control zones of the town. Terrel was part of

it, and it's because of that he was killed."

"Why?"

"I'm still not entirely sure. Could have been a lot of reasons—one of the other factions found out, one of his own people betrayed him, perhaps even the PFLS themselves were the killers."

"But why? If he was helping them, why would they kill him?"

"Lots of reasons: a shipment got lost, an internal upheaval." His voice was bitter. "Sarah, this town was a mess, insane. No one knew who was in charge of what. The control areas changed daily, hourly. Somehow, someone decided Terrel had broken a rule, and they made him pay." Sarah's face was pale and her lips trembled, but she could think of nothing to say.

"Well." he continued, "there are a few things we can infer." He waited but she was still silent. "Okay, they didn't torture him for information."

"How do you know?"

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"Because he was killed here, while you were sleeping. Yet you and the children never woke. Why? Magic—possibly. A sleeping draught—less likely. No one, anywhere, heard a sound the whole time Terrel was dying. I think magic, a spell to contain any sound he or his torturers made." He

shook his head. "A lot of effort. Why not just kidnap him, take him somewhere else, interrogate him there? But, no, they did it here, therefore it had to be for one of two reasons: to set an example, or to exact revenge. Probably revenge."

"I don't understand."

"If he was killed as an example, well, there were other ways they could have done it, less hazardous ways, and more obvious ones. Besides, as I said, lots of people were doing what Terrel did. He wasn't a big enough fish to go to such lengths for. No, it has to be vengeance." Cade ground his teeth together, the skin of his face pulled tight, making his scars stand

out in high relief. "They broke every bone in his body, Sarah. Think about it. That's not a normal torture, and as far as I can discover no one

else has been killed this way. He was killed that way because ... because someone knew."

"About what happened, his hands," she said.

Cade looked surprised. So Terrel had told her. "Yes." He said no more. The two sat, lost in their memories. She recalled a warm night, a storm coming in, her new husband sitting on the bed telling her the tale of his

deformity in a monotone. He, his mother, and Cade had come to Downwind; forced there because, with the death of their father there was no money, and there was no family to help them. Terrel's mother found what work she could, buying Terrel a slate, working hard to find the chalk. It had made it all livable for him, given him a hope for another way of life.

Then one day, four years after they had moved, a gang jumped him, breaking the slate, the chalk, and the fingers that loved to draw; maiming

him for life, so he could never be the artist he dreamed about . . . But Cade had other memories. "Sarah." She looked up at him, now with a tear in her eye. "Terrel told you what happened. Do you know the rest?"

"The rest?"

So, Cade thought, he never knew. Well, that's something, I guess. Cade had never told anyone before, kept it to himself. Now he could not hold it

in, though he could see no purpose in his honesty.

His voice was harsh. "He came home that night, his lip cut where he'd bitten it through, trying to hold back his cries. His hands—if he had come home sooner, maybe we could have set them. I don't know. They were ruined." He looked away from her. "He was in such pain.

"Mother—" He sighed. "Mother tried to heal those hands. Every night she held him, crying on the bent fingers, as if her tears could really

take the pain away." He could still see them. Lying on the cot, the ragged

cloth that divided their one-room shack tattered and frayed, not hiding the scene from his young eyes. She had rocked Terrel to sleep every night.

He slept with her because of the nightmares, about the sound of the snap of bones that just wouldn't go away.

"I had nothing, we had nothing to give him," Then Cade turned to her, his eyes so fierce she looked away. "But then, I knew, I had one gift

. . . Sarah, I had vengeance." His voice shook as he relived that time. He told her how he had found the rope in an alley full of mud and refuse,

how he had pulled the brick from one of the few real buildings in Downwind. How he tied the brick to the rope and then waited.

"For three nights I waited,"—he stood up, his muscles taut with the memory—"until they went to sleep. Then I took my rope and brick, and one by one I found those who had done it." His eyes were wild. "I found them." He sighed. "I caught them and I smashed them with the brick." His hand pounded the air. "I smashed them over and^over and over." He took a deep breath, then stood still.

"I found them. I didn't kill them. I found them and afterwards they never drew either." He sat down, not looking at her. "Terrel was thirteen. I was eleven . . ." The room was quiet. Sarah stared at Cade, but he would not look at her. She realized he was embarrassed. He had told her something that he hadn't had to, at least not that way. He had showed her his secret. In it

she knew was the real Cade, the answer to all his riddles, but she could not see it. All she could think of was Cade. He had only been about Toth's age . . .

"Sarah—" Now his voice was soft, and he hadn't used that tone with her before. "Whoever killed him knew; knew what had happened to him; knew of his fears."

"He still had nightmares," she answered.

"I thought so. They knew, Sarah, and I don't know how. But I do know the answer is in Downwind. And it's there I have to go . . ." Cade stood at the end of the decrepit bridge. Across its rotting length lay his goal—Downwind.

The smell from the slow-moving White Foal River was noxious, full of refuse and dead things. Cade ignored it. After all, it should smell like home to him.

He wore old riding leathers with a weather-stained cloak thrown over them. He carried his sword openly, though several other weapons were 32 AFTERMATH

concealed about his body. He looked like a down-and-out mercenary, between jobs, but one who knew his business well. Tough enough looking that the dregs of Downwind would leave him alone, obscure enough not to draw attention, except from those who noticed the warbraid and knew what it meant.

The answer was here in Downwind. At first Cade thought he would have to find Zip, the leader of PFLS, and now apparently one of the military officers of Sanctuary. Cade didn't want to deal with the powers of Sanctuary if he could help it. There were several he'd rather not have

to tangle with if possible. Take that madwoman Chenaya, building an army of gladiators. He smiled at the thought. Gladiators! Gladiators made poor soldiers, and were hardly equipped for the streets of Sanctuary. Everybody was insane here . . . It seemed Zip had made several mistakes, and the PFLS had fractured into at least three recognizable factions. The hard-core stayed loyal to their charismatic leader, but some of the less patriotic and more powerminded had gone their own way. Cade followed the trail that led to money, and in a town like Sanctuary there were three quick ways of making money; prostitution, drugs, and slavery. The whorehouses were well controlled here. They were an important part of Sanctuary's economy. And the slavery, well it seemed Jubal used to control that, probably

still did, but there were rumors on the streets of a new organization. But whoever they were, they weren't in business yet when Terrel was caught, so the answer was drugs. That's where the faint trail became as clear as a paved road. Whatever Terrel had run first, he had ended up running drugs, something Cade doubted his brother had been too pleased about. That didn't fit into his image of a revolution. But the goals of the

revolution had been revised, and the new rules were made here, in Downwind. The many gangs of Downwind had become more entrenched in the last few years, less like youth gangs and more like organized crime families. The largest, next to the beggar king's, was a gang called the Sharp

Side. A gang that ran a good portion of Downwind, a gang that controlled Cade's old turf and it seemed, much more. A gang that had originally been part of the PFLS, but had re-formed in the last months, re-formed to take control of some of the contacts once run by Zip. A gang that now ran a third of the drug trade in Sanctuary. So. It had all been there, easy to read, once you saw the pattern. Now Cade had to find the Sharp Side, and find out who had given the orders. Why they'd given them. And then he'd make them pay.

Casually he strolled across the bridge, giving no outward sign of the fast beating of his heart, his disgust and agony, his despair.

Slowly he headed toward his old house, his inmost self creating an ineffective shield against the world that passed before his eyes. Downwind was pain, for its inhabitants and for any with the eyes to see. All about him, as he wound his way through the filth-strewn streets, the nightmare was acted out. The adults were empty husks of aimless motion, the children dirty and mean. The toddlers plodded about, unwatched, their distended stomachs seeming to lead them about in their desperate search for anything remotely edible.

But that wasn't the worst. There were the carcasses of shacks, like decomposing animals, in which the inhabitants played out their desperate lives. The little girls, and boys, offering their bodies for a piece of bread.

And of course the blood. Everywhere apparent, drying on the walls, spilling fresh from ragged wounds, and behind the eyes of every poor bastard who walked the empty streets. Every one of them seemed to carry an ugly scar, a reminder of some time when a blade met their flesh

... or a thrown rock ... or a fist.

He shuddered. Worse? What was worse? The term was meaningless. The blood? The hunger? No, the disease ... the corruption in everyone's veins. Scales and shingles covering thin limbs. Eyes oozing mucus, coughs racking whole frames. Their slow descent toward uncaring death. That was it, of course, the heart and soul of Downwind. Death. Coming at them from so many angles, attacking them, and they had no chance to defend themselves. Like his mother: the hard work she'd endured, the food she'd denied herself so that her children could have one more mouthful. What was it that finally killed her? Was it one of the many diseases ravaging her? Was it the fear? No, she was past that in the

end. Past desperation. Past hope . . .

For her, as for so many, it had been the humiliation. The constant unending shame of being trapped, of having failed. The self-hatred for all

those things she'd had to do just to survive. Cade still remembered the first night she had sold herself to a man. How she had bathed afterward in a decrepit washtub borrowed from a more fortunate neighbor. How he had stumbled upon her naked. The water red with her blood as she scrubbed and scrubbed, her skin floating like bits of dried leaves in the

soft pink water.

He sobbed once at that memory, but he didn't cry. He had only cried twice in his lifetime. The first time when poor Terrel came home with his

broken fingers, the pieces of his slate clamped between two swollen and useless hands. The second time . . .

His mother had been thirty-one when she died. She had looked much Older. He could remember it so well. Her once thick black hair was gray Sod thin, the skin wrinkled with grime caught in the folds, her eyes dull

34 AFTERMATH

and empty as they had never been in life. He remembered the hollow thump as her hardened corpse was tumbled into the shallow pauper's grave. He heard the sound all the time, every day—thump-thump-thump

—as he waded through hell, his hands red with the blood of those he set free, to one fate or another.

It was agony to remember it all. His sensitive nose twitched at the familiar hateful smells. The harsh odor of human waste warming in the sun, the tang of sweat and urine, the thick reek of corruption. The sights,

the smells, even the sounds. They built up about him, surrounding him like a vast sea of mud.

He moved through Downwind like a great black shark, swimming through the slime and seaweed of an ocean floor. About him were the remains of a thousand dark meals, bits of flesh and bone, floating in the

silt-filled waters. Occasionally he bumped into a half-eaten corpse. And all around him were the unvoiced cries of the damned.

Finally he came to the end of his nightmare, to where it all began. He stood before a broken wall, four feet high. It outlined the remains of a building, the mud bricks cracked and decaying in the sun. This had been his home, so long ago. The home he still dreamed about at night, in the dark, alone. This pathetic shell was all that was left of the passion and

terror of his childhood.

He walked through what had once been the doorway, though there had never been a door, just a ragged piece of blanket. Standing in the middle of the room he was surprised to see how small it was. The house had been a single room, a shack. But it had seemed larger somehow. There had been no windows; the heat of the summer had been a living thing, latching on to him, drawing his strength out in a shuddering gasp.

The winters were cold. He remembered choking from the smoke that never seemed to find its way out of the hole cut in the canvas roof. What

monster conceived this? What had man ever done to earn such a payment? How could there be any being alive that enjoyed such perverse cruelty! Was there no one he could make pay for this? Nothing, no one he could attack? Must this sickening non-life be reenacted for eternity?