Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan; Marianne S. Jablon

  SIX

  Ysa Cran laughed like a pearl diver.

  She sat at a table in The Underground, a live music club on Ho Street just down the block from The Dancing Ferret. Drag ’em Down were on stage, blasting through an uptempo version of “Sucking Down the Future”. Nabber slouched beside her, boots up on one chair, head tilted back against his chair’s headrest. There was an empty beer pitcher on the table in front of them. They each had a joint of Bordertown Blue smoldering between their fingers.

  Teddy Grim returned with a new pitcher of beer. Shoving Nabber’s feet off the chair, he sat down. Ysa passed him a joint.

  “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “I always heard Berlin had a temper, but I didn’t think she’d let go so easily.”

  “She just never had the right people pushing her,” Ysa said. “That’s all. Tomorrow we’ll start spreading the word around in Riverside and the Scandal District—just like we did in Dragontown. Then no matter which way she turns, she’ll burn.”

  Nabber filled their glasses from the new pitcher.

  “So are we hitting their main digs tonight or what?” he wanted to know.

  Ysa shook her head. “Why bother? The Dragons’ll probably trash the place for us, seeing how Berlin’s been kind enough to add fuel to our rumours.” She grinned. “She took out Jackie Won, hey? I’ll bet those Dragons are just burning to rumble.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Nabber asked.

  Ysa gave Teddy Grim a knowing look. “Looks like the Nab here’s developed a real taste for torching townies.”

  “Hey, we didn’t burn anybody.”

  “So we were unlucky. We’ll just have to bar up the doors and windows when we hit their place near the Market tonight.”

  “There’s going to be bulls hanging around there,” Teddy Grim warned.

  The cityguard pretty well stayed out of Soho and the areas like it, giving them up as already lost, but Trader’s Heaven was a whole other story. Half of Bordertown’s economy depended on its Market. There were beat cops as well as plainclothes bulls constantly patrolling the Market and its immediate vicinity.

  “Hell,” Ysa said. “We’re on a roll. They’re just going to have to stay out of our way.”

  The band on stage kicked into “Rip It Out” with the heavy metallic whine of their lead guitar soaring over the deep throbbing rhythm.

  “Give ’em hell,” Ysa yelled.

  The music drowned her out, but the lead guitarist caught her eye and gave her a wink before settling into the chopping chords that underpinned the lead singer’s lyrics. Ysa turned to her companions.

  “I just love this shit,” she said, taking a long drag from her joint.

  SEVEN

  Two days now and it was just getting worse.

  Stick sat in the Museum’s Native American hall, staring at a display of Hopi kachina masks. He should never have gone to Koga’s. It hadn’t started there, but it might as well have. That’s where it had all come home for him. Seeing Koga again, in that kind of environment. Koga, the Sensei and man. Shoki, the Demon Queller.

  It brought back too many memories. Past failures, present failures. Onisu, dead and gone. But reborn in Berlin. Or maybe it was just Onisu’s madness taking root in Berlin. It didn’t make a whole lot of difference.

  It was two days since Berlin had disappeared in Dragontown, but the streets were full of rumours of her. All of Bordertown was ranked against her now. They were saying that she’d gone lobo long before anybody made a move against her. They were saying that the fire in Tintown had been the start of a justified retribution for the shit she was bringing down on the city. On her own head.

  Stick was hearing it so much, he almost believed it himself.

  She’d taken out a few Dragons that first night. Later word had it she’d wasted a pack of Wharf Rats who’d cornered her down in Riverside the following afternoon. Two of those died. Later still, she’d taken out a gang of Bloods who’d run into her out by the Old Wall.

  Stick stroked Lubin’s fur. The ferret lay still in his lap, eyes open, but not focused. Stick wondered if she was staring into the same bleak vistas he was looking into.

  Somebody’d hit the Diggers’ place by the Market a couple of nights ago. All the Diggers had left was their main House in Soho, but that was vacant now—taken over by a mixed gang of Dragons and Bloods who’d trashed the place. They were supposedly waiting for Berlin to show up, but nobody really believed she would. It was just something to do.

  And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, now there was word of a new drug hitting the streets. Shake. Twice the flash pearl was and you didn’t have to mainline it. Stick remembered the container he’d found on Nicky’s body. Had to be the same shit. Everything tied together, but he was damned if he could make the connections. All he knew was Berlin was over the edge and he was going to have to track her down.

  He looked up as Manda came into the room and beside him.

  “When did you get in?” she asked.

  Stick shrugged. “An hour or so ago.”

  “Still no luck, I guess.”

  That depended, Stick thought, on how much he really wanted to find Berlin.

  “No luck,” he agreed.

  “It’s just getting worse, isn’t it?”

  Stick thought of a dark night, of the silver flash of a katana as the blade swung home, of cradling Onisu in his arms. He hadn’t been able to cry then. Koga, kneeling on the other side of his wife’s body, had wept for both of them.

  “I’ve got to talk to her,” he said. “Maybe it’s not too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  Stick looked bleakly at Manda, then passed Lubin over to her.

  “I don’t want the past to be repeated,” he said. “Because this time I’ll have to do it myself.”

  “Stick, what’re you talking about?”

  He nodded at Lubin. “Take care of her for me, will you?”

  “Sure, but….”

  He was walking away before she could finish, leaving only the echo of his footsteps in the empty hall. Manda looked at the kachina masks lining the walls and shivered.

  * * *

  There was one place Stick hadn’t looked. He drove out there now, the big Harley eating up the blocks. It was out past Tintown. The rubbled lots were empty—had been since the fire. The tin shanties still stood, dotting the lots here and there. There were some canvas tents. In other places sheets of corrugated iron had been pulled over roofless basements for more permanent shelters. But none of the hobos were around.

  Stick drove on, out to the old freight yards.

  Before the Change came, and Elfland came creeping over the city making it a Borderland, this had been the heart of the city’s transportation. But the trains stopped running, the decades took their toll, and the heart of the city’s railway network had been turned into a dump. Now, after years of neglect, you could no longer see the rails for the refuse. Only the old freight cars still stood, scattered here and there like beached whales in a sea of garbage.

  Rats made their home here—the animal kind that Lubin was trained to hunt in an earlier age, not the kids from Soho. There were other residents as well. Die-hard hobos had carved camps deep inside the dump. Some of the bos took over the odd freight car that was still mostly in one piece, scavenging carpets and furniture and you name it to turn them into regular homes. But the area got its name from a third inhabitant—the real rulers of the dump.

  The place was called Dogtown now.

  Stick pulled up at the edge of the dump and killed the Harley. Pocketing his spell-box, he stayed astride the big bike, patiently waiting. He knew the procedure. If you weren’t dumping trash, you waited.

  They came bounding out from the heaps of garbage, huge mastiffs and rat-earred little Border collies. German shepherds and Dobermans. But mostly they were mongrels, tough lean dogs with the blood of a hundred lines running in their veins.

  They circled the bike and Stick didn’t move a muscle
, didn’t speak a word. One or the other and they’d be all over him. He just waited, breathing through his mouth so that the stink of the dump wouldn’t make him gag. None of the dogs came too close, but it wasn’t because they were afraid of him. They knew the procedure too. They were waiting, just as he was.

  It might have been a half hour later that Stick caught movement out of the corner of his eye. The figure that finally shuffled through the circle of dogs was an old bo. His skin was browned like leather from the sun, his hair as fine and white as spiderwebs floating down to his shoulders. His clothes were so patched it was hard to tell what the original material had been. His feet were bare, the soles tougher than any workboot. He had a bag over his shoulder that rattled as he moved. When he got near to Stick, he just stood there staring at him.

  “I just want to talk to her,” Stick said. “That’s all.”

  “Talk to who?”

  Stick put a hand in his pocket—moving very slowly when one of the mastiffs took a few stiff steps towards him—and withdrew a tin of chewing tobacco. He tossed the tin over.

  “Berlin,” Stick said. “I just want to talk to her, Pazzo.”

  The bo studied the tin for a moment, then slipped it into his bag. Without a word, he turned and started off on a faint trail that led through the garbage. Stick took a few quick shallow breaths, then started after the old man. The dogs flowed in a wave all around them, never quite touching Stick, but so close he could feel the heat of their bodies.

  Pazzo led them on a long meandering route through Dogtown, stopping sometimes to add something to his bag, muttering to himself, but never looking straight at Stick. The dogs seemed to count every shallow breath Stick took. The reek was overpowering. The air was thick with it, thick with flies too. He saw rats on the tops of some of the heaps, but they burrowed into the garbage at the sight of the dogs, moving so quick Stick wasn’t even sure he’d seen them half the time.

  It took awhile, but finally they entered a narrow ravine between two towering mountains of refuse and Stick blinked at what he saw. He’d never been this deep into Dogtown before, never dreamed this existed.

  Encircling a glade like a circle of wagons in an old B-western were a number of freight cars, dwarfed by the steep towers of garbage all around them. Inside the circle, grass and bushes grew, flowering vines crawled up the freight cars. Somehow, the air was clean. The dogs went racing ahead, leaving Stick and Pazzo to follow at the old bo’s pace. Stick heard the sound of guitar music. As they came around the bulk of the nearest freight car, he saw Berlin sitting by a fire with a number of hobos.

  Brandy Jack was there and Joe Doh-dee-oh. One of them had probably fetched Berlin’s guitar for her, but he couldn’t guess which one. She finished the tune she was playing, a slow rendition of “Dogtown Blues”. Stick wondered if she’d known he was coming and was playing that tune for him. He’d always liked it. She’d probably written it and just never admitted it to him.

  Pazzo kept on going and the other bos drifted away from the fire as Stick approached. He leaned against a big iron barrel and looked down at Berlin. She looked back, her eyes giving nothing away. Stick held her gaze for a long time before he settled on a log across the fire from her.

  “So what’s doing, Berlin? You declaring war on the city?”

  “Nice to see you too, Stick.”

  “Come on, Berlin. What the fuck’s going on?”

  “City’s declared war on me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Oh? And what would you call it?”

  “I think you’ve stepped across the line.”

  She doodled a few riffs on her guitar, not looking at what she was doing, not looking at anything. When her gaze finally focused on him, her violet eyes burned with an inner flicker.

  “Somehow I didn’t think you’d fall for all the shit that’s been spread around, Stick. You’ve disappointed me.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to think? You’ve been running wild, throwing your weight around…. Christ, you never even talked to me about it.”

  “What’s to say? I read you now, Stick—loud and clear.”

  “Talk to me, Berlin. What’s going down?”

  “You blind?”

  Angry words swarmed in Stick’s throat, but he looked away, staring into the fire until they’d been burned off.

  “So maybe I’m blind,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  “Someone’s working a frame on me—it started with the Diggers, but it looks like I’m all that’s left.”

  “Who’s working the frame?”

  “Don’t know. All I know is it’s coming straight across the Border, looking for my ass.”

  Stick sighed. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I didn’t say it would.”

  “And it doesn’t explain your taking on half the gangs in the city. You have a responsibility, Berlin. And you’re abusing it.”

  “Fuck you, Stick. I’m staying alive—that’s all. We’re not all like you—willing to get gutshot rather than ripping out their hearts when they try to cut you down.”

  “You’re—”

  “And besides—we don’t all have little halfie healers hanging around, ready to fix us up if we do get gutshot.”

  “Manda’s not my—”

  “Come off it, Stick. Face the facts. I’m not you. I can’t be you. I don’t want to be you. Nothing personal, understand, but I got my own ways of handling things. You want to get down to nitty-gritties? How many people have you killed?”

  “I killed them naturally, not—”

  “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Dead’s dead, Stick. I’m not out hunting—people are hunting me. They come for me, they’ve got to know I’m not going to stand back and let them take me down without giving it my best shot. Now maybe you think handfighting a couple of punks in an alley’s okay, or shooting them down like you did Fineagh Steel awhile back, but we’ve all got to play the cards we’re dealt. The hand I’ve been dealt—it’s just not that simple.”

  “I don’t know you anymore.”

  “Maybe you never did, Stick.”

  “If you don’t stop this, I’m going to have to come after you.”

  For one moment Berlin’s eyes softened. “I’m not Onisu,” she said, her voice gentle. “You’ve got to stop fitting me into her life.”

  “Don’t bring her into this.”

  “I’m not—you are. You think I’m stepping over the line, but what you’re really afraid of is something you never dealt with a long time ago, Stick. I’m Berlin—okay? I’m not a Stick clone, I’m not an Onisu clone. I’m just me. And for some reason, a lot of people want to hurt me.”

  Stick stood up. “Come back with me,” he said. “We’ll deal with them together.”

  “What’re we going to do? Go to an uptown court? Get serious, Stick. This’s got to be dealt with on the streets—where it began. I’ve got find the suckers who started this and stop it with them. That’s the only way it’s going to end. I’ve got to have them in my hand and show the gangs that I’m not what they’re hearing I am.”

  “I’m going,” Stick said. “Either come with me—”

  “It’s all black and white, right? I’m either with you or against you?”

  “—or I’ve got to come back to get you. I’ll give you till midnight.”

  Berlin shook her head. “I’m not coming with you, Stick. Not now, not later. And I won’t be here when you come back.”

  “I’ll find you.”

  “I know you will.”

  She watched him go. Her fingers found a slow blues riff, but for once she was fumbling the notes. If Stick had turned then, he would have seen her eyes flooding with tears. But he never looked back.

  Manda heard Stick come in and went looking for him. She found him on the rooftop, sitting on his knees in a seiza position with a sheathed katana on the ground within easy reach of his right hand.

  “Stick?” she said softly.

&nb
sp; When he made no reply, she walked around in front of him and knelt down so that she could look into his face.

  “Did you find her?”

  His face was as still as the kachina masks downstairs.

  “You’re scaring me, Stick.”

  His gaze slowly focused on her.

  “I found her,” he said softly. “I just wish to Christ I hadn’t.”

  Manda looked down at the sword in its sheath of lacquered wood. A chill catpawed up her spine. “What are you saying, Stick? Did… did you kill her?”

  He shook his head.

  “But I will,” he said. His voice was just a faint whisper now. “God help me, I will.”

  EIGHT

  The pain went through her heart like a razor.

  Berlin sat hunched over her guitar, hugging its body against her as she fought to hold back a flood of tears. The fire crackled and spat in front of her. Out past the freight cars she heard a dog howl.

  “Dogs got his smell—they can get him for you.”

  She looked up through a blurry veil to find Pazzo crouched down beside her, anger clouding his eyes. She shook her head numbly.

  “It’s not his fault,” she said. “He’s trapped—we all are. This is just something we should have looked to a long time ago. See, he never dealt with it, Pazzo. He just hid it—locked it away and never dealt with it. But you can’t do that. You’ve always got to deal with it—if you don’t do it when it happens, when maybe you’ve got some choice, then it’s going to decide it’s own time to bust loose.”

  Pazzo didn’t really know what she was talking about. “He shouldn’t’ve made you cry.”

  “He’s a hard man—that’s how he kept going. He just got hard and stayed that way. I think it’s the kid he’s got staying with him—I think she opened a crack or two in his armour and now it’s all falling out. Falling apart.”

  Pazzo shrugged. Digging about in one patched pocket, he came up with a clean handkerchief that he gave it to her.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ve got another visitor.”

  Berlin tried to find a smile. “I’m just a real Miss Popularity today, aren’t I?”