Storm Season

He still might be hiding, she tried to tell herself; might have gone to earth and determined to stay there; or it was bad and he was still ru

Or dead. Like the murdered hawkmasks. Like one who had been nailed to a pole by the bridge.

She turned and strode for the door, almost colliding with the human mountain that suddenly filled it.

"Drink," Tygoth suggested.

"No."

He lifted his stick. "You come here to steal-"

"Looking for someone." Her mind leapt this way and that. "Vis. Boarder of yours."

"Asleep."

She dodged past and ran, down the alley, the only lighted alley in the Downwind, that got the light of the ever-lit lantern at Mama Becho's door.

"Vis," she called softly, rapping at the door. Her hands clenched against the wood. "Vis, wake up, get out here. Now." She heard Tygoth coming, shambling along after her, rapping the wall with his stick. "Vis, for the gods' sake, wake up." There was movement from inside. "It's Moria," she said. The rapping was closer. "Let me in."

The door opened, a rattling of the latch. She faced a daggerpoint, a half dressed man wild-eyed and suspecting murder. She showed her empty hands.

"Trouble?" Tygoth said behind her. "No trouble," Vis said, and reached out and caught her by the wrist in a crushing grip, pulling her inside, into the dark. He closed the door.

They brought Mor-am through the dark muffled in a foul-smelling, greasy cloak; gagged and with a bandage over his eyes and his hands so long tied behind his back that they had gone beyond acute pain to a general numb hurt that involved his chest and arms as well. He would have run but they had had his knees and ankles tied too, and now he was doing well to walk at all, with his knees and ankles beyond any sensation of balance, just stabbing pain. They jerked him along in the open air, and he remembered the hawkmask they had nailed to the pole near the bridge; but they had not yet hurt him, not really, and he was paralysed with hope, that this was all some irritation of the men he worked for; or fear, that they were his own brothers and sisters, who had found out about his treason; or, or, or-His mind was in tatters. They were near the bridge now. He heard the moving of the water far away at his left, heard the mutter of thunder, that confounded itself with the sounds about him. The image flashed to him of a sodden body crucified against a pole, in the early morning rain.

"Just put more men on it," the Stepson said, never stirring from where he sat, in the too great warmth of the room. The naivete of the operation appalled him. But there were necessities and places too little apt for his kind. "If you can do it without sounding the alarm through every alley in the Downwind." Something had gone wrong. The abruptness of the vanishing, uncharacteristic of the informer, smelted of interventions. "This had better not go amiss," his companion said meaningfully to the man who sat and sweated across the table. "It was far too productive. And you've botched the other avenue tonight, haven't you? That contact more than failed. It went totally sour. We don't like incompetence."

"I haven't seen him," Mradhon Vis said, in the dark, in the narrow room. The woman- Moria-had a knife; he was sure of that, sure where she was too, by her breathing. He kept where he was, having all the territory measured, thinking, in one discrete side of his mind, that he dealt with a fool or they thought he was one, a solitary woman coming at him like this.

But a vision of dark robes flashed through the dark of his vision, with cold, with the scent of musk; she was solitary, female, and he held in his hand the knife he slept with, safer than women.

"Why didn't you go to your own?" he sneered at her. "Or is this the testing? I don't like games, bitch."

"They've cut us off." The voice quavered and steadied. He heard her move at him and brought the knife up. It met her body and she stopped, dead still, hard breathing. "You took our pay." It was a hiss through clenched teeth. "Do something to earn it. Help me find him."

"Smells, woman. It smells all the way."

"He's into something. He's dealing in something. Krrf. Gods know what." The voice cracked. "Vis. Come with me. Now. After this- I'll swear to you you'll get money. You'll be in. I've got contacts I'll swear for you. Get my brother. He's dropped through a crack somewhere. Just come with me. Riverside. We've got to find him."

"How much."

"Name it. I'll get it."

A woman who was faithful. To something. He stared at the dark, doubting all of it, standing in the den Mama Becho owned and listening to the promise of gold to get him out of it.

"Back off," he said, shoving her away, not wanting her knife in him, and he reckoned it was drawn. "I'll get my shirt. Don't make any moves. Just tell me where you reckon to look for this lost lamb."

"Riverside." She caught her breath, a moving of cloth in the dark. "That's where they turn up-the hawkmasks they murder."

He stopped, his shirt half on. He cursed himself, thought of the gold and made his mind up to it. "You'll pay for this one."

Mor-am kicked. They jerked him off his feet and carried him, battering him against some narrow passage as he struggled, with the reek of wet stone and human filth and suddenly warm and windless air. They set him on his feet again and jerked the blindfold off. The room came clear in a haze of lamplight, a cot, a ragged small man sitting on it crosslegged amid a horde of others, the human refuse of the Downwind standing and squatting about the room. Beggars. He felt hard fingers working at the knot at the back of his skull, freeing him of the gag: he choked and tried to spit out the dirty wad and the same hard fingers pried it from his mouth, but his hands they had no intention to release. They only let him stand on his own, and his knees wanted to give under him.

"Hawkmask," the man said from the bed, "my name is Moruth. Have you heard it?"

No, he said, but his tongue stuck to his mouth and muffled it. He shook his head.

"Right now," Moruth said quietly, an unpleasant voice with the accent of Sanctuary's Maze and not the Downwind, "right now you'd be thinking that you shouldn't know that name, that taking that blindfold off means you're already a dead man and we don't care.what you see. Might be. That might be. Turn around."

He stood still. His mind refused to work.

"Turn 'round."

Hands jerked him about, facing the closed door. A mask was pi

"You want to live," Moruth said. "You're thinking now you'd really like to live, and that this is an awful place to die." Moruth chuckled, a dry and ugly sound. "It is. Sit down-sit down, hawkmask."

He looked, reflexively. There was nowhere. A crutch hooked his ankle and jerked. He hit the dirt floor on his side and rolled, fighting to get his knees under him.

"Let me tell you a story," Moruth said softly, "hawkmask. Let me tell you what this Jubal did. Remember? Kill a few beggars, he said, and put the informer-sign on them, so's the riffraff knows what it is to cross Jubal the slaver, ain't it so?" The accent drifted to Downwind's nasal twang. "Ain't that what he did? And he killed us, killed boys and girls that never done no hurt to him-to impress them as might want to squeal on his business. It weren't enough he offs his own, no, no, he cut the throats of mine, hawkmask. You know something about that."