Now the Banks was enclosed by its own catapult-cord of something much bigger and newer-looking. Low, anonymous sheds with shallow-pitched roofs and bland grey walls of cement blocks lined fresh roadways paved with something flat and uniform that wasn’t mud or cobbles. There were chimneys, but the word seemed too antique; they were tall, slim metal pipes, and they didn’t leak the old-fashioned curls of blue smoke, but their tops were stained black and the air above them shimmered and hazed with a blue-grey mist that spoke of hot, chemical processes.
There was an elusive acrid tang in the air. He stopped and sniffed at it, as if daring it to show itself fully. Then he laughed.
‘Progress? The fuck you say.’ He laughed again, and added another ‘fuck’ for good measure. Then he reset the bundle at his waist and walked past the new stuff, towards the old stuff that had been new before. Progress, indeed. Pollution, as well as starvation.
The Back Banks seemed much the same, if older and more broken. Clay brick walls which (click) had been straight and fresh when he last came this way were now irregular, and it seemed to him that the ways were quieter. Less people, or less movement, or both.
Interesting.
His feet took him to the same old place without intervention from his memory. The same sign still creaked on the same iron chains, an oil-painted image commemorating the last time anyone had tried to declare any sort of monarchy over the coarse self-governing people of the coastline.
The Gutted Prince. The name always made him smile. The sign less so – but, give it that, it was hard to forget.
Inside, the single room smelled mostly of the same smoke and liquids, with a hint of something else he didn’t recognize. There was no bar, just a wide table in the middle of the room, covered with bottles and barrels and bundles of leaves and stacks of the little pressurized metal canisters that contained whatever vapour was in fashion.
Last time (click) the canisters had been in the minority. Now they occupied over half the table. Add drug dependency to the standard problems. Interesting. And, more interesting, the place was half empty.
It was time to sample. He thumped the table. ‘Shop!’
And turned round, and found himself looking into a half-familiar face – wrinkle-tanned, with wide-set grey eyes. He squinted. ‘(click) Lanceste?’
The face widened into a laugh. ‘You’re Passthrough, yeah?’
He nodded. ‘Among other things.’
‘I thought so. I’ve heard of you.’ The laugh stopped. ‘I’m Lancreasty. Lanceste was my grandfather, and he left you a message – pay your bill or fuck off.’
He nodded again, pulled the bundle off his shoulder and looked round for a flat surface. There was only the table. He shrugged. ‘Do you mind?’ And pushed the heap of canisters to one side.
‘Hey! Don’t do that.’ Lancreasty made to straighten the pile but found a hand against his chest. Brace, and push, and the man was staggering backwards, two, three, four barely controlled steps until the rail of a long wooden bench met the small of his back. He went over, head first.
The man who was presently Passthrough shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure I told your grandpa he should move that thing.’ As he spoke he was placing the bundle on the table.
Lancreasty had made it back on to his feet. He took one, but only one, step forward. ‘I’ll call the Straights …’
‘Sure you will. They’ll be along in a while.’ Two leather thongs were undone, and the outer flap fell open. He took hold of it and flicked.
The bundle unrolled across the table.
He reached along the row, sorting and discarding. ‘Ah, sorry. No money. That’s awkward. But I have got one of these.’ He selected one of the small, dull metal things, pulled back sharply on a lever (another sort of click) and held it out.
The stack of razor-edged discs at the end of the thing glinted. The room went quiet.
He smiled at Lancreasty. ‘Know what it is?’
The man nodded, without taking his eyes off the thing.
‘Well done. Any time you decide you don’t need your eyes, you let me know and I’ll bring it back. Now, I want—’ He paused. He had been going to try several things, because it had been a long time, but now didn’t seem like the best moment to get wasted. ‘I want a brew. What have you got?’
Still without taking his eyes off the cocked Springer, Lancreasty reached towards the table and patted along it until his hand met a barrel. He snagged a glass, held it under the spigot, filled it and held it out. The surface of the muddy liquid trembled slightly.
Even drained at speed, as a substitute for everything he had been going to do instead, it tasted thin and flat. Slamming the glass down on the table and seeing the flinch in the barkeep’s eye went some way towards making up for it. But only some.
He narrowed his eyes and leaned towards Lancreasty. ‘So, tell me something. If the Straights are still going, are the Measures as well?’
Lancreasty didn’t answer, but his eyes widened a bit. The Straights were merely a semi-private militia, but the Measures were the enforcement arm of an organized crime syndicate; one of their income streams was providing a quality assurance service for the Town Fathers. If you were caught out by the Measures, they impounded your business and cut off one of your hands. It worked.
‘Because if they are, I think they’ll be interested to hear you’re watering the brew. Want me to tell them?’
The man shook his head.
‘Okay. Sounds like a deal to me. No Straights, no Measures. And do me a favour?’
An eager nod.
‘Don’t leave any stupid messages for your grandchildren.’
Still keeping the Springer cocked and visible, he rolled up the bundle with one hand, fiddled the thongs back into a knot and swung it over his shoulder.
Then he turned round, and grinned at the watchful eyes of half a dozen customers. ‘See you in a couple of generations, then,’ he said, and walked towards the door.
As he crossed the threshold a hand caught his sleeve. He looked into an unshaven face with a pair of yellow eyes sunk deep into dark pits. ‘Yes?’
‘He waters the brandy too …’ The words were slurred.
‘The hell you say?’ He sniffed carefully. The smell was unmistakable. ‘But you still drink it, right? Seems to me it’s not him that’s the fool. You might want to think about that.’
The man sagged.
Outside, he paused. The sun felt welcome on his shoulders. He took a deep breath, emptied it in a single gust, and took another to flush out the sour air of the room from his lungs. Then he laughed. ‘You drink too much, anyway,’ he told himself. ‘Still addicted to something. Whatever. Onwards.’
Onwards took him through streets that sloped mostly down and got narrower as they went. The acrid smell had gone, replaced by older scents – tar and timber and the smoke of non-complex things burning, and fish and things to do with fish, and cheap, poisonously adulterated weed and, increasingly, too many people. Even though the sun wasn’t hot or high yet, children sat in pools of shadow as if they weren’t going anywhere else that day. Some prodded listlessly at broken objects that shouldn’t have been toys. Some scratched patterns in the dust, making a soft shush-shush noise like sleepy insects. Some did nothing.
He stopped at a crossroads, under an overhang where the corner of the street had taken a bite out of the ground floor of a leaning building. Someone had mended the wound with square concrete blocks that crumbled a bit under his fingers. He didn’t remember any of this.
‘You poor old fucking place,’ he said out loud. ‘What happened to you?’
Then he froze.
There had been a noise – the quiet tap of metal against metal, somewhere to the left and behind him.
And another, this time to the right.
And no other noises. The children were sitting rigid, their heads down.
Patterns again. Left, and right. At least two, then, and they had cocked their weapons. Whichever
way he went, they would assume, he must cross one line of fire and run along another.
Was this what he had been waiting for? Another death? Keff had taken its time.
It was a long time since he had seen Keff, now he thought of it.
Well, then. A mental shrug, and another guess.
Left it was.
He braced one hand against the blocks behind him and shoved, hard, kicking himself out from under the corner of the building and skidding hard round to the left, his feet scrabbling up dust.
The man in the Measure guard’s uniform already had his musket at his shoulder, but it was still pointing at where the oncoming body had been when it broke cover.
There was a whistling bang and a cloud of grey smoke.
Gunpowder smell. Something touched his shoulder, no harder than a flicked finger, and then he was diving through the smoke.
He slammed into the body behind it and they rolled together. One hand found the musket, wrenched it away, hurled it. Then he was up and running again. Somehow the Springer was still in his other hand but the children were still there too; seen from his slowed-down chase world they were little statues near the ground, and the Springer fired wide. It was no use yet.
There was a shout, and another bang somewhere behind him. He felt something hit his hip, low down on the right, like being kicked, and then he was round a corner and panting in the recess of a doorway.
He had been hit. The place on his hip felt hot and numb, but a sharp pain knifed outwards from it, down his leg, and his foot didn’t feel right. Nerve damage, then, and maybe a lodged musket ball. By comparison his shoulder just hurt a bit.
Both wounds were bleeding. That might turn out to be his biggest problem later, but it wasn’t now, and he wasn’t dead yet. This was almost fun.
Patterns, patterns … what pattern would he be making right now, if he was either of them? Always assuming they weren’t pattern-blind themselves.
Yes. That.
He listened, hard. The street was quiet, with the watchful lack of noise made by a whole bunch of people trying to be silent. It was an excellent background for …
There it was. To the right. A very quiet footstep, close. And another, closer. One man, then, moving carefully. You know I’m here somewhere, friend, but you just don’t know where.
One more footstep should do it.
It landed. He took a deep breath, raised the Springer into a position which should put it in the face of anyone creeping along the wall, and spun out of the recess, his arm ready to fire at—
The woman?
He went rigid, mid-turn, lost his balance and stuck out an arm to steady himself against the wall.
She was tall and thin, and her clothes were definitely not the uniform of either the Straights or the Measures. She looked relaxed; amused, even.
He managed to get himself together enough to ask, ‘Who are you?’
She smiled. ‘Someone you weren’t looking for. But since I’m what you’ve found, shall we get on with it?’
He shook his head, and the movement made his shoulder hurt. ‘On with what?’ Belatedly, he raised the Springer.
She frowned, and shook her head. ‘Don’t do that.’
And suddenly the Springer was red hot. He yelped and dropped it. Then he glared at her. ‘How the fuck did you do that?’
‘Long story.’ She grinned. ‘So, yes. Getting on with it.’ And before he could react, her foot pulled back a little and then blurred forward.
The first kick caught his knee. The second, as he collapsed forwards, his stomach. He was barely aware of the third, except that the impact flicked his head round and back.
A constellation of coloured lights, and then nothing more.
Handshake, Left Hand Stewardship – Independent Penitentiary Co.
SKARBO HAD KEPT careful count of the days since his arrest. There had been twenty-nine of them.
Fights were common.
The weapon of choice was a nailblade: sharpened toenails set into a length of anything available. The toenails of elderly bipeds were prized for their toughness. Prisoners received an allowance of dried leaves that produced an acerbic infusion if left in the water ration for a day. It made the water merely bitter and tongue-drying, according to those who had tongues. It also hardened nails, if they were left to soak in it until they matched its off-greeny-brown colour. Skarbo thought the nails and the brew smelled similar to begin with.
The toenails of deceased, and sometimes not yet deceased, bipeds were not in short supply. Attrition was encouraged, as an alternative to both release and feeding. Gorrif had been right about the tendency to monetize: The prison was private, taking one global payment when each inmate entered – and that was it, unless and until they paid off their own charges. It wasn’t a business model that incentivized the management to keep prisoners alive for too long.
Skarbo tried to stay clear of the fighting. It wasn’t too hard. His form set him apart. Someone had swiped him experimentally with a nailblade a few hours after he had arrived. It had glanced off, leaving a faint scratch. Too much like the material of his shell, he supposed. After that the others mostly left him alone, but it was a watchful avoidance. One that could end at any moment.
Now he was wedged into a corner while the two males tried to kill each other. He wished he knew where the beaconer was. He hadn’t seen it since the arrest.
‘Ten on the Cutter!’
‘Twenty!’
The tall male called the Cutter looked poised, relaxed. He was better muscled and better nourished than the other, and the long nailblade sat easily in the palm of his hand. Skarbo would have bet on him, too.
Except that he didn’t bet. And besides, the other man …
Well, there was something …
Skarbo wasn’t used to assessing mammals. He had been no good at it when he had been one himself, and the memories, for what they were worth, had all faded. But the short male made something in his subconscious twitch. He was breathing hard, but it didn’t look like the breathlessness of exertion. A thread of saliva swayed down from one corner of his mouth, and he wiped it away on a filthy sleeve. The movement dragged his lips down and, just for a moment, Skarbo saw a yellow tooth that was too long to be called a tooth.
So, fangs, then …
The tall one made a quick feint forwards, and then danced to the side as the short man lunged. The watchers growled appreciatively. The tall man laughed. It looked like a game.
The prison had once been divided into cells by a grid of fields, but fields cost money to run and maintain. Now it was a single, huge, open floor, perhaps a kilometre long and half as wide. People slept where they could, if they could, but never for long; the ones who survived were those who skimmed the upper surface of sleep. Deeper could be lethal.
The floor looked open, but wasn’t. It was divided into patches – areas with fluid boundaries that changed according to the results of turf wars, bribery or even marriage. He had had to have the concept of marriage explained to him three times before he got it.
The patches didn’t reach to the edge. A strip all the way round them was empty, bounded by people on the inside and, in concentric bands on the outside, a warn field, a burn field and the wall proper. He had clipped the warn field once, only partly by accident, and the shock had knocked him off his feet. The burn field, if one had the strength to get to it, did what the name suggested.
The perimeter strip formed a circuit just over three kilometres long.
Skarbo had found out about the patches by accident. You couldn’t see them – but he had been walking his usual circuit when he strayed a few paces inwards and suddenly found someone in front of him.
‘Fuck off, beetle.’
Skarbo had looked at the squat figure. He guessed female, but wasn’t sure. He was sure about the smell. Even in here it stood out.
‘I’m not a beetle,’ he said.
‘Sure you aren’t.’ A broken-toothed grin. ‘How about roach? So, fuck off, roac
h.’ A slight pause. ‘For your own good.’
‘Yeah. This is our patch.’ Another voice. ‘Stray in here again and she’ll tear your legs off. What’s left of ’em.’
‘Should do it anyway.’ Yet another voice.
And suddenly there were several people forming a tight arc in front of him.
He took a step back, and ran out of room. So they were behind him, too.
‘I didn’t know,’ he said, and heard helplessness in his own voice.
A tall male stepped forward from the group in front of him. ‘Need teaching, roach? Bet we can teach you plenty.’
Laughter.
A voice behind him said, ‘Looks like his legs’d come off pretty easy. What do you say? Take the lot, or leave him with just one?’
The tall male spat. ‘The lot. And then turn him over. Maybe there’d be something soft to scoop out.’ He licked his lips.
The group closed in. Hands seized him.
‘Hey!’ The voice came from behind the group. They hesitated, and then Skarbo saw their faces harden.
‘Hey! Shitmeat! Leave the roach alone.’
The group paused. The tall man’s face flickered, and he half turned to speak over his shoulder. ‘Fuck off,’ he said.
‘Yeah, maybe. But not until you grow up.’ The squat female who had originally confronted him shoved her way through.
The man she had called Shitmeat spat again. ‘On his side now, are you?’
She shook her head. ‘No way. But I founded this patch, remember? And I don’t want to be slipping over in a mess of insect guts either. I said leave the roach alone.’
‘And I said fuck off.’
The woman shifted her position just a bit. ‘Really?’
The rest of the group stood back. Shitmeat grinned. Then he threw himself towards her, hands outstretched, fingers clawing towards her face.
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