Making Peace, page 19
“Shield,” I asked into the empty room, forcing the words past a dry, scratchy throat, “who’s going to help me now?”
There was no answer. Outside in the street, the woman carried right on singing.
CHAPTER 26
THE WATCH OFFICER assigned to guard us was Elena Furrow, the woman I had seen in the red cape on the night of the attack. On the afternoon of the fourth day Elena brought us a surprise: she walked into our headquarters dragging one of the mercenaries.
I was surprised any of the mercenaries had survived, but Elena told us they’d been interrogating a few of the survivors since the fire. The mercenary wore the same nondescript outfit and had blood drying on his left temple, but he still managed to look defiant. He looked to be in his forties, with brown hair just starting to mix with some gray. His face had a few scars but nothing extreme. His wide jaw was clenched and he glared at us from narrowed eyes.
“We’ve learned this man is their leader,” Elena said to Captain. Three of the Watch stationed in our safehouse grabbed the defiant man by the arms and dragged him into the underground storage cellar.
Elena looked Captain in the eye. “I don’t know he’s here. It’s off the books.”
Captain’s mouth formed a thin line, and he nodded to her. Elena turned and left immediately.
The basement was an old cellar which had been converted into a combination jail and interrogation area. The steps leading down opened up into a big, empty room with a cold stone floor. The roof was supported by a couple of wooden beams. Toward the back was a door which led to several smaller rooms, covered over with metal bars to keep prisoners. The whole place was cold and damp, and sounds tended to echo.
Word got around, fast. Two minutes later Captain, Ugly, Shield, Tavel, Sen, and I were present in the cellar. The Watch finished chaining the mercenary leader to the chair and got out as fast as they could. No one spoke.
The mercenary leader fixed his gaze on Captain. Captain looked at Ugly, then gestured with his head toward the mercenary. A hissing sound, ceramic on leather, as Ugly’s knife left its sheath. His knuckles cracked as Ugly clenched the weapon in his fist and approached the mercenary leader in the chair. Without preamble, Ugly got right up in front of him and jabbed the tip of his knife right into the man’s cheek. The guy gritted his teeth as Ugly raked the blade downward, opening a slit in the mercenary’s face from cheekbone to jawbone. Ugly pulled back, then made to do it again.
The mercenary jerked his head back. “Hey! What is this? You start with questions first, you asshole.”
Ugly hit him hard across the face. They taught me not to hit a man with a closed fist unless I wanted to break my own bones, but Ugly didn’t seem to care. The chair rocked back on two legs before resettling with a thump, and the mercenary’s head lolled. He came back to himself quick enough as Ugly cut another slit in the same cheek.
“Stop! What about the questions?” the guy shrieked.
Captain snapped his fingers, and Ugly backed off.
Captain didn’t bother moving. Some men will get right up in a man’s face, be as menacing as possible. Captain’s voice did that all by itself. It had the ring of authority, and the weight of that authority came down on you full force when he wanted it to. He used that voice now, and he spoke slowly.
“You’re going to answer me, fully and completely. If I feel like you’re holding back or not being cooperative, pieces of you will be removed. Clear?”
The mercenary leader glared at Captain without answering.
After a few seconds, Captain shook his head and continued. “We have many horrible species of animals on this planet. If you don’t cooperate, we will bring in some of the local river insects. They like to nest and lay eggs in wounds. They will eat your flesh and live inside of you. You can feel them wriggling through your innards, and their feeding can go on for months. We can continue this interrogation for a very long time.”
The mercenary’s face got a lot paler, and some of the force went out of his glare. Captain pointed one finger at him. “Fully and completely. Clear?” The guy thought it over real quick, then nodded. Captain didn’t waste time. “Name?”
“Commander Sarev, Hundred Hunters division leader.”
“Hundred Hunters? Aren’t you usually out on the frontier planets?”
Sarev nodded. “Pay was good, so we came.”
“Employer?”
Without hesitation: “Hegemon Marack, First House.”
Ugly cracked his knuckles again. Tavel bared his teeth. But Captain just shook his head. “Ugly, take one of his eyes.”
Sarev panicked as Ugly approached. He shook his head, but Ugly grabbed hold of his sliced jaw and dug the fingers of his other hand into Sarev’s eye socket. There was a squelch and Sarev screamed out loud, thrashing his entire body against the chains holding him in place.
I looked away and stared into the darkness of the cellar. As I did, Maren’s face came to me, an image of her as she lay gasping and dying with arrows pincushioning her body. I remembered Cora serving me her special soup, Cora talking with me. And I saw her lying dead in the street. No, I told myself, I am going to watch this whole thing. I forced my eyes back to Sarev and Ugly.
The torture went on for a while. Meaty fingers made a squishing sound as they dug around inside Sarev’s eye socket, Ugly taking his time. Sarev howled like a beast, but couldn’t stop those relentless fingers. After what seemed like forever, Ugly stepped back. Blood oozed down the side of Sarev’s face as his quivering eyelid tried to close over the empty socket. His scream turned to gagging and he vomited down the front of himself.
Captain looked calm and collected. He’d been watching the whole time without comment, and didn’t react now. He waited for Sarev’s puking to die down to hard breathing and whimpering before he spoke. “Too easy. Too fast. On a job like this, you’re paid for silence. And a division commander isn’t going to break that so easily. You’ve only got one eye left, so you can’t afford even one more lie. Now, who hired you?”
Sarev tried to blink his eye. The empty lids made a wet slapping sound on his cheek. He hung his head, hiding the ruin from view. “Second House. Andre Covina.”
Captain waited, then sighed. “I said fully and completely, Sarev. Ugly, take his other—“
Sarev jerked his head up. Goo spurted from the splattered eye. “Andre Covina! I swear by the Hunter Saint, it was Andre! He brought us here!”
Captain held up a hand, stopping Ugly’s advance. “Explain.”
Sarev licked his lips as he looked back and forth between the two men. “Andre brought us up here. Said work needed doing. We got here, right, and he says it’s an inside job of sorts. ‘Go offer service to the Hegemon on such and such a day,’ he says. Pays us up front to pretend we were traveling through, right? ‘Not a word,’ he says. So we does like he says, and lo and behold just like that we’re employed. Turns out someone’s been interfering in the Hegemon’s business interests, right? Needs some revenge, he says. Thinks he knows who it is. So we does like we were paid to do. Double paid, that is.” Sarev licked his lips again. His remaining eye flicked back and forth.
Captain looked grim. He and Ugly shared a look. I noticed Shield standing in the shadows, her hands clenched into fists. Her whole body was shaking. Captain looked back at Sarev. “The attack on our headquarters?”
Sarev looked scared, like he knew this wasn’t a topic likely to help him keep his remaining bits in place. “Look, that wasn’t planned in advance, orders came down. Hegemon says he wants revenge for a bad deal. Raving about paying through the nose, wants a message sent.”
Tavel spat and kicked open the door on his way out. Sen went after him.
Captain made a motion for Sarev to continue, which he did. “We’d been paid in advance, couldn’t say no. We wouldn’ta done it if we knew the laws here, right? Hey, it’s a bad business. I get it. Most of my boys bought it last night, too. Division is just about gone, you know? Blood for blood, it’s been. I say the deal’s done. Send me and what’s left of my boys on and we’ll be gone for good, right? Whatta ya say?”
Shield snapped. I saw it happen, it was the “blood for blood” bit that finally broke her good nature. She rushed forward, pulling a knife from her belt. Ugly barely caught her in time, his hand grabbing hold of her wrist inches from Sarev’s chest. She struggled, trying to finish the blow, to shove the blade into Sarev’s heart. She growled like an animal. I remembered her terrible grief in the street, the sounds she had made then. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
“Shield,” Ugly said in his commanding voice. She turned and snarled at him, the ugliest expression I’d ever seen on her face, then went back to trying to force her blade into Sarev’s chest. She got her other hand up and tried to overcome Ugly’s strength, but his arm may as well have been carved from stone. The smell of urine hit me, and Sarev looked like he was trying to crawl out of his skin to get away from the blade. He wriggled like a snake, his chains clattering against the chair.
Ugly put his other hand on Shield’s shoulder. “Emily,” I heard him whisper. She went quiet and stopped making that growling sound, but she still struggled against his hand.
“You can’t bring them back, Emily,” Ugly whispered. Her whole body jerked at his words. “Killing this piece of filth won’t bring them back. And it won’t make you feel any better, not really.”
Tense silence reigned for a few seconds. Shield slowly lowered her free hand, but I could still see the hand holding the knife straining against Ugly’s grip, aimed at Sarev’s heart. She was crying. Her chest heaved with gasping sobs.
“This isn’t you, honey. It’s not,” said Ugly. “This isn’t what Cora would want. I’ve been down this road, and it gives you nothing. It turns you into a monster.”
Ugly’s words seemed to be having an impact on her. The fight went out of Shield, and she hung her head, sobbing. Ugly’s next words surprised me, though.
“I can’t make this decision for you,” Ugly said. “I can only tell you what I’ve done, and how dark it was.” He peered under her hair, which had come loose and covered her face. “We’ve got a young girl to raise now, you and I, and a whole cell to look after. We can’t live like this, do these things. Life is precious, no matter what. You told me that. You told me a lot of things. So show me who you are. Show Cora. Make your own choice.” And he let her wrist go.
My breath froze in my throat as Shield stood there with her knife poised over Sarev’s chest. Sarev had gone utterly still, a helpless rabbit at the mercy of a predator. She stood there for what felt like minutes, shaking. Now and then she’d raise her hand for a strike, only to lower it again. At last, she took a step back and hurled the knife into the farthest corner. She slapped Sarev as hard as she could across the face, then turned and ran from the room. Ugly went after her.
We turned Sarev back over to the Watch, and they removed him to their local jail for trial and sentencing. None of us wanted to be in the same building with Sarev, not while he was alive.
That night, Captain called us all into his makeshift office. Really, this was just the back of the warehouse, with crates piled around to create the illusion of a room. The crates were covered over with tarps, and dust rose in clouds when one of us moved. The darkness crept in against the light of the candles sitting on a barrel in the center of the space, where Captain and Ugly stood. The rest of us sat perched on wooden boxes and listened intently as Captain spoke.
“So that’s where we’re at,” Captain said, finishing his summary. “We’ve got a witness implicating the leaders of both the First and Second Houses. The First House has been actively attacking the Second House, and the Second House sent the mercenaries to bait the First House into attacking. Now we need to decide what to do.”
“Don’t you decide that?” I asked. “You are the First, after all.”
Captain shook his head. “A cell operates together. We need at least a majority decision before we move against a House, or a House leader. We need to decide what we’re going to do, and in what order.” He turned to Ugly. “Thoughts?”
Ugly leaned against a crate with his arms crossed, one hand stroking the hairs on his chin. “Vapor is still down. That leaves us weak against the First House, considering the Hegemon’s pet nano-mage. We also have to assume The Hegemon has the full weight of the City Watch protecting him. He pissed them off with those executions but he’s still their boss. It’s a coin toss to figure out who they’d support if we attacked the First House. The Watch may or may not support our attempt to unseat him and dissolve the House, especially with the instability already present in the city. Mostly, though, it’s that nano-mage who concerns me. Going against him without a nano-mage of our own could be suicide.”
Sen spoke up. “I agree with that. Vapor wasn’t sure even she could take him on, but at least distracting him during the engagement would help.” Sen paused, then turned to Captain. “I also don’t know if we have enough evidence to go against the Second House to dissolve it. We’ve got one witness making a statement against one leader. I don’t feel comfortable exposing every worker employed by the Second House to that level of danger just for one person.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “What level of danger?”
Tavel answered me, his voice a low growl. “When a House gets dissolved, all of its assets go up for grabs. That means its properties and wealth, but also its people. Slavers move in and take as many people as they can get ahold of. Sometimes people get advance warning and hide, or another House may take pity on them and hire them at lower wages.” There was a wooden crunch as he punched the crate he was sitting on. “Dissolving a House means its weakest members may get picked up as merchandise. We do this and we’re announcing open season on the women and children of the House.”
“What are our options besides dissolving the House?” I asked the group. They looked thoughtful but no one had a suggestion. I turned to Shield. “What do you think?”
She gazed back at me dispassionately, hunched over with her elbows resting in her lap. Her hair was disheveled again, the bun not quite pinned up right. Dark circles ringed her eyes. She shrugged at me.
“You don’t care what happens to the children?”
At that, her eyes burned with a little of their old life, and she glared at me. “Of course I care.”
“So, say something to help them. What’s your alternative?”
She stopped glaring at me and turned inward again, her eyes losing their lights. Her delicate shoulders lifted in a shrug, then collapsed, and her glazed eyes fell toward the floor. I’d lost her again. Suppressing a sigh, I turned to Ugly only to see his eyes were on Shield with a concern I hadn’t thought to ever see on his face.
“Other options?” I prompted Ugly. His eyes flicked to me.
“Are we all satisfied the witness testimony is accurate enough to act upon?” Ugly asked.
Sen shifted in his seat. “You think that guy was lying, after you plucked out his eye?”
Ugly shrugged one massive shoulder. The leather harness strapping his blades to his chest creaked with the movement. “I’m saying that he claims he was working for the First House, hired to do so by the Second House. That’s an awful lot of mixing. We need to consider the possibility that he’s here to throw doubt on the Second House. Or that he’s even working for a third House. We just don’t know enough to kill hundreds or thousands of people by exposing them like this.”
“Sounds like you all think we need more information to make this decision,” Captain said, smiling grimly.
I shifted in my seat, dust billowing up from the movement. “So why didn’t you just say that in the first place?”
“A good leader doesn’t just tell his people what to think. He teaches them how to think so they can make better decisions on their own without him micromanaging them. So someday he can sit in his office with his feet up and take naps, and still take all the credit.” He looked between Ugly and Sen. “How do you propose we get this additional information?”
Ugly cracked his knuckles, looking thoughtful. “Only Andre Covina was implicated by the witness,” Ugly said. “As leader of the Second House he spreads that guilt, but we could make a more isolated case and bring him in. His wife Sarenna could be in on it.” He thought about that. “Yeah, she probably is. She was sweet as pie every time we met. But the leader of a House isn’t going to marry someone without a brain in her head.”
“But the witness only implicated Andre,” Sen chimed in.
Tavel punched his crate again. “So we bring him in for questioning. We make an arrest and drag him here, make him tell us what we want to know.”
Ugly frowned at that. “It’s not a small thing to torture the leader of a House, even with evidence against him. He could take that to the Council of Three and have our cell eradicated for assaulting a member of a House without evidence.” We all went quiet at that for a few moments, until Sen spoke up.
“I agree we pull him for questioning. Maybe not torture,” Sen looked apologetically at Tavel, who narrowed his eyes, “but definitely for questioning. I don’t think we should arrest him outright with such little evidence. The Council of Three probably won’t grant a warrant for his arrest without something to go on, but maybe we can get Andre to slip up and say something stupid.”
“And if he won’t come when we ask nicely?” Tavel asked.
Sen shrugged. “Maybe the rival Houses on the Council will grant a warrant if Andre refuses to cooperate. They’ll smell blood and use it to their advantage.”
Tavel smirked. “You think the Council will grant us one quickly, before Andre can cover up evidence?”
