Cade stood at the end of the decrepit bridge. Across its rotting length lay his goal-Downwind.
The smell from the slow-moving White Foal River was noxious, full of refuse and dead things. Cade ignored it. After all, it should smell like home to him.
He wore old riding leathers with a weather-stained cloak thrown over them. He carried his sword openly, though several other weapons were concealed about his body. He looked like a down-and-out mercenary, between jobs, but one who knew his business well. Tough enough looking that the dregs of Downwind would leave him alone, obscure enough not to draw attention, except from those who noticed the warbraid and knew what it meant.
The answer was here in Downwind. At first Cade thought he would have to find Zip, the leader of PFLS, and now apparently one of the military officers of Sanctuary. Cade didn't want to deal with the powers of Sanctuary if he could help it. There were several he'd rather not have to tangle with if possible. Take that madwoman Chenaya, building an army of gladiators. He smiled at the thought. Gladiators! Gladiators made poor soldiers, and were hardly equipped for the streets of Sanctu- ary. Everybody was insane here ...
It seemed Zip had made several mistakes, and the PFLS had fractured into at least three recognizable factions. The hard-core stayed loyal to their charismatic leader, but some of the less patriotic and more power- minded had gone their own way. Cade followed the trail that led to money, and in a town like Sanctuary there were three quick ways of making money; prostitution, drugs, and slavery. The whorehouses were well controlled here. They were an important part of Sanctuary's econ- omy. And the slavery, well it seemed Jubal used to control that, probably still did, but there were rumors on the streets of a new organization.
But whoever they were, they weren't in business yet when Terrel was caught, so the answer was drugs. That's where the faint trail became as clear as a paved road. Whatever Terrel had run first, he had ended up running drugs, something Cade doubted his brother had been too pleased about. That didn't fit into his image of a revolution. But the goals of the revolution had been revised, and the new rules were made here, in Down- wind.
The many gangs of Downwind had become more entrenched in the last few years, less like youth gangs and more like organized crime fami- lies. The largest, next to the beggar king's, was a gang called the Sharp Side. A gang that ran a good portion of Downwind, a gang that con- trolled Cade's old turf and it seemed, much more. A gang that had originally been part of the PFLS, but had re-formed in the last months, re-formed to take control of some of the contacts once run by Zip. A gang that now ran a third of the drug trade in Sanctuary.
So. It had all been there, easy to read, once you saw the pattern. Now Cade had to find the Sharp Side, and find out who had given the orders. Why they'd given them. And then he'd make them pay.
Casually he strolled across the bridge, giving no outward sign of the fast beating of his heart, his disgust and agony, his despair.
Slowly he headed toward his old house, his inmost self creating an ineffective shield against the world that passed before his eyes. Down- wind was pain, for its inhabitants and for any with the eyes to see. All about him, as he wound his way through the filth-strewn streets, the nightmare was acted out. The adults were empty husks of aimless mo- tion, the children dirty and mean. The toddlers plodded about, un- watched, their distended stomachs seeming to lead them about in their desperate search for anything remotely edible.
But that wasn't the worst. There were the carcasses of shacks, like decomposing animals, in which the inhabitants played out their desperate lives. The little girls, and boys, offering their bodies for a piece of bread. And of course the blood. Everywhere apparent, drying on the walls, spilling fresh from ragged wounds, and behind the eyes of every poor bastard who walked the empty streets. Every one of them seemed to carry an ugly scar, a reminder of some time when a blade met their flesh ... or a thrown rock ... or a fist.
He shuddered. Worse? What was worse? The term was meaningless. The blood? The hunger? No, the disease ... the corruption in every- one's veins. Scales and shingles covering thin limbs. Eyes oozing mucus, coughs racking whole frames. Their slow descent toward uncaring death.
That was it, of course, the heart and soul of Downwind. Death. Com- ing at them from so many angles, attacking them, and they had no chance to defend themselves. Like his mother: the hard work she'd en- dured, the food she'd denied herself so that her children could have one more mouthful. What was it that finally killed her? Was it one of the many diseases ravaging her? Was it the fear? No, she was past that in the end. Past desperation. Past hope ...
For her, as for so many, it had been the humiliation. The constant unending shame of being trapped, of having failed. The self-hatred for all those things she'd had to do just to survive. Cade still remembered the first night she had sold herself to a man. How she had bathed afterward in a decrepit washtub borrowed from a more fortunate neighbor. How he had stumbled upon her naked. The water red with her blood as she scrubbed and scrubbed, her skin floating like bits of dried leaves in the soft pink water.
He sobbed once at that memory, but he didn't cry. He had only cried twice in his lifetime. The first time when poor Terrel came home with his broken fingers, the pieces of his slate clamped between two swollen and useless hands. The second time ...
His mother had been thirty-one when she died. She had looked much Older. He could remember it so well. Her once thick black hair was gray Sod thin, the skin wrinkled with grime caught in the folds, her eyes dull and empty as they had never been in life. He remembered the hollow thump as her hardened corpse was tumbled into the shallow pauper's grave. He heard the sound all the time, every day-thump-thump-thump -as he waded through hell, his hands red with the blood of those he set free, to one fate or another.
It was agony to remember it all. His sensitive nose twitched at the familiar hateful smells. The harsh odor of human waste warming in the sun, the tang of sweat and urine, the thick reek of corruption. The sights, the smells, even the sounds. They built up about him, surrounding him like a vast sea of mud.
He moved through Downwind like a great black shark, swimming through the slime and seaweed of an ocean floor. About him were the remains of a thousand dark meals, bits of flesh and bone, floating in the silt-filled waters. Occasionally he bumped into a half-eaten corpse. And all around him were the unvoiced cries of the damned.
Finally he came to the end of his nightmare, to where it all began. He stood before a broken wall, four feet high. It outlined the remains of a building, the mud bricks cracked and decaying in the sun. This had been his home, so long ago. The home he still dreamed about at night, in the dark, alone. This pathetic shell was all that was left of the passion and terror of his childhood.
He walked through what had once been the doorway, though there had never been a door, just a ragged piece of blanket. Standing in the middle of the room he was surprised to see how small it was. The house had been a single room, a shack. But it had seemed larger somehow.
There had been no windows; the heat of the summer had been a living thing, latching on to him, drawing his strength out in a shuddering gasp. The winters were cold. He remembered choking from the smoke that never seemed to find its way out of the hole cut in the canvas roof. What monster conceived this? What had man ever done to earn such a pay- ment? How could there be any being alive that enjoyed such perverse cruelty! Was there no one he could make pay for this? Nothing, no one he could attack? Must this sickening non-life be reenacted for eternity?
"Hey mister, you all right?" a voice intruded, calling him back. Cade was surprised to find that his two hands were held high above his head, making futile grasping motions in the air ... searching for a neck to grasp? Or begging for relief from pain? He couldn't understand what his actions meant. He didn't care, not anymore. He dropped his arms to his sides and turned to face the speaker.