Storm Season

"Of course." Mor-am tried not to shake. "Wouldn't you want revenge?"

"Others have. You knew they would."

"But you want them brought out of the Downwind. And I do that for you." He clenched his jaw, a grimace against the chattering of his teeth. "So maybe we get to the big names. I give you those-I deliver them to you just like the little ones. But that's another kind of price."

"Like your life, scum?"

"You know I'm useful. You'll find I can be more useful than you think. Not cash. A way out." His teeth did chatter, spoiling his pose. "For me and one other."

"Oh, I don't doubt you'll be cooperating. You know if the word gets out on the streets how we got our hands on your friends-you know how long you'd last."

"So I'm loyal," Mor-am said.

"As a dog." The man thrust his hand back at him. "Here. Tomorrow moonrise."

"I'll get him." Mor-am subdued the shivering and sucked in a breath. "We negotiate the others."

"Get out of here."

He went, slow steps at first, and quicker, still with a tendency to shiver, still with a looseness in his knees.

* * *

But the man climbed the stairs of a building near that alley and made his own report.

"The slave is gone," one said, who in his silk and linen hardly belonged in the Shambles, but neither did the quarters, that were comfortable and well-lit behind careful shutters and sealing of the cracks. Two of the men were Stepsons, who smelted of oil and light sweat and horses, whose eyes were alike and cold; three had the look of something else, a functionary kind of coldness. "Into the Downwind. I think we can conclude the answer is no. We have to extend our measures. Someone knows. We take the hawkmasks alive and eventually we find the slaver."

"We should pull the slave in," another said. "No," said the first. "Too disruptive. If convenient... we take him."

"This woman is inconvenient."

"We hardly need more inconvenience than we've had. No. We keep it quiet. We destroy no leads. We want this matter taken out-down to the roots. And that means Jubal himself."

"I don't think," said the man from the street, "that our informer can be relied on that far. That's the one who ought to be pulled in, kept a little closer ... encouraged to talk."

"And if he won't? No. We still need him."

"A post. Security. Get him into our steady employ and we'll learn where all his soft spots are. He'll soften up fast. Just twist the screws now and then and he'll do everything he has to."

"If you make a mistake with him-"

"No mistake. I know this little snake." A chair grated. One of the Stepsons had put his foot on the rung, folded his arms with elaborate disdain for the proceedings. "There are quicker ways," the Stepson said. No one said anything to that. No one debated, but slid the discussion aside from it, arguing only the particulars and a slave who had finally run.

The bridge was always the worst part, coming or going. It narrowed possibilities. There was one way and only one way, afoot, to come into the Downwind, and Mor-am took it, sweating, feeling his heart pounding, with a little edge of black around his vision that might be terror or something in the krrf that he had bought, that tu

Then he saw the man following-he was sure that he was following, a walker who had also paused on the bridge a little ways down from him and delayed about some pretended business.

Sweat broke out afresh on him. He must not seem to see. He pushed himself away from the rail and started walking again, trying to keep his steps even. The shanties of Downwind lurched in his view under the moon, closer and closer, like the crazy pilings of the fishing-dock beside it and the sway and flare of someone's lantern near the water below. He found himself walking faster than he had intended, terror taking over.

Others used the bridge. People came and went, a straggle of them passing him in the dark, passing his pursuer and still he kept his steady pace. But one of them had veered into his path and sent his hand twitching after his knife, coming rapidly toward him.

Moria. His heart turned over as he recognized his sister face to face with him. "Walk past me," he hissed at her in desperation. "There's someone on my track."

"I'll get him."

"No. Just see who it is and keep walking."

They parted, expert mimery: importunate whore and disgusted stroller. He found his breath too short, his heartbeat pounding in his ears, trying to keep his wits about him and to concoct lies Moria would believe, all the while terrified for what might be happening behind him. There might be others. Moria might be walking into ambush set for him. He dared not turn to see. He reached the end of the bridge, kept walking, walking, walking, toward the shelter of the alleys. It was all right then, he kept telling himself; Moria could take care of herself, would recross the river and find her own way home. He was in the alleys, in his element again, of beggars crouched by the walls and mud squelching underfoot.

Then one of the beggars before him unfolded upward out of the habitual wall braced crouch, and from behind an arm encircled him, bringing a sharp point against his throat.

"Well," a dry voice cackled, "hawkmask, we got you, doesn't we?"

Moria did not run. Gut feeling cried out for it, but she kept her pace, in the waning hours of the night, with thunder rumbling in the south and flashing lightning in a threatening wall of cloud. It was well after moonset. Mor-am had not gotten home.

And there was a vast silence in the Downwind. It was not nature, which boomed and rumbled and advised that the streets and alleys of Downwind would be aswim. The street-dwellers were up seeking whatever scrap of precious board or canvas that could be pilfered, carrying their clutter of shelter-pieces with them like the crabs down by seamouth, making traffic of their own-It was none of these things; but it was subtle change, like the old man who always had the door across from their alley-door not being there, like no hawkmask watcher where he ought to be, in the alley across the way; or again, in the alley second from their own. They were gone. Eichan might have pulled them when their lair became unsafe.

But Mor-am had been followed on the bridge, and that follower had not led her back to Mor-am, when she had turned round again after passing him. Panic ran hot and cold through her veins, and guilt and self-blame and outright terror. She had become alone, like that, in the space of time it took to walk the bridge and turn round again; and find that the follower did not lead her to Mor-am, or to anything; he himself had hesitated this way and that and finally recrossed the bridge.

Mor-am would be at home, she had thought; and he was not.

She kept walking now, casual in the mutter of thunder, the before-storm movements of the street people, moving because if something had gone wrong, nowhere was really safe.

They hunted hawkmasks nowadays; and Eichan had cast them adrift.

There was one last place to go and she went to it, toward Mama Becho's.

The door still spilled light into the dark, where a few patrons sprawled, drunk and unheeding of the storm. Moria strode into it in a gust of wind, but the bodies sprawled inside in sleep were amorphous, heaped, drunken. There was no sign of Mor-am. A further, darker panic welled up in her, her last hope gone.