I stepped into the citadel of the Sisters of Doom, TunFaire's only all-human, all-female street gang.
There were five girls there, the oldest sneaking up on eighteen. Four of the five shared the urchin's hairdresser and tailor. Maya wore real clothing and was better groomed, but not much. She was eighteen going on forty, war chief of a gang claiming two hundred "soldiers." She was so emotionally sliced up you never knew which way she would jump.
Most of the Sisters were emotional casualties. They'd all suffered severe abuse, and a murmur of defiance had driven them into the Doom's never-never land. That hung, precariously and eternally, at right angles to reality, between childhood as it should have been and the adulthood of the untormented. They'd never recover from their wounds. Most of the girls would die of them. But the Doom gave them a fortress into which they could retreat and from which they could strike back, which left them better off than the tortured thousands who went through the hell without support.
Maya had suffered more than most. I met her when she was nine, when her stepfather offered to share her if I'd buy him some wine. I'd declined to the crackle of his breaking bones.
She was a lot better now. She was normal most of the time. She could talk to me. Sometimes she came to the house to cadge a meal. She liked Dean. Old Dean was every girl's ideal uncle.
"Well, Garrett? What the hell you want?" She had an audience. "Let's see the color of your money."
I tossed her a coin. "Faith offering," I told her. "I want to swap information."
"Come ahead. I'll tell you to go to hell when you get on my nerves."
If she took a fit, I could go out looking like chopped meat. Those girls could be vicious. Castration was a favorite sport.
"You know the Vampires? Run by an albino darko called Snowball and a crazy bleeder named Doc? North End."
"I've heard of them. They're all crazy, not just Doc. I don't know them. Word is, Doc and Snowball are getting ambitious, trying to rent muscle and recruit soldiers from other gangs."
"Somebody might take exception."
"I know. Snowball and Doc are too old for the street but not old enough to know they can't trespass."
It's a classic cycle. And sometimes the young ones pull it off. About once a century.
Today's kingpin was a street kid. But that organization recruited him from a gang and promoted him from within.
"The Doom have any relationship with the Vampires?" The girls prefer being called the Doom. They think it has a nicer ring than the Sisters or the Sisterhood.
"All take and no give, Garrett. I don't like that."
"If you're running with the Vampires I don't have anything to give you."
She gave me the fish eye.
"Snowball and Doc tried, to take me out," I said.
"What the hell were you doing in the North End?"
"I wasn't, sweetie. I was on Warhawks' turf. War-hawks have a treaty with the Vampires?"
"No need. No contact. Same with the Doom." She shifted. "You're sneaking up on something, Garrett. Get to the point."
"There are a couple guys watching my house. I'd guess chukos. Probably Vampires, considering last night."
She thought about that. "A genuine hit? You're sure?"
"I'm sure, Maya."
"Your place is on Travelers' ground." "You're starting to get it. Trouble is, I don't have any friends with the Travelers since Mick and Slick got caught in the sweep."
The relationships between the races have become terribly complex, them being all mixed together but each owning its own princes and chiefs and quirky root cultures. TunFaire is a human city. Human law prevails in all civil matters. A plethora of treaties have established that entering a city voluntarily constitutes acceptance of the prevailing law. In TunFaire a crime in human law remains a crime when committed by anyone else, even when the behavior is acceptable among the perpetrator's people.
Treaties deny Karenta the power to conscript persons of nonhuman blood, nonhuman being defined as anybody of quarter blood or more who wants to revoke his human rights and privileges forever. Lately, though, the press gangs had been grabbing anybody who couldn't produce a parent or grandparent on the spot. That's what happened to the captains of the Travelers, though they were breeds.
Maya said, "So you want a couple of chukos off your back."
"No. I want you to know they're there. If they bother me I'll just knock their heads together."
She looked at me hard.
Maya has a byzantine mind. Whatever she does she has a motive behind her surface motive. She isn't yet wise enough to know that not everyone thinks that way.
"There're a couple of farmer types staying at the Blue Bottle, using the names Smith and Smith. If somebody was to run a Murphy on them and it was to turn out that they had documents, I'd be interested in buying them." That was spur of the moment but would satisfy Maya's need for a hidden motive.
It couldn't be that I just wanted to see how she was doing. That would mean somebody cared. She couldn't handle that.
I paused at the door. "Dean says he's whomping up something special for supper. And a lot of it." Then I got out.
I hit the street and stopped to count my limbs. They were all there, but they were shaky. Maybe they have more sense than my head does. They know every time I go in there I run the chance of becoming fish bait.
11
Dean was waiting to open the door. He looked rattled. "What happened?"
"That man Crask came."
Oh. Crask was a professional killer. "What did he want? What did he say?"
"He didn't say anything. He doesn't have to."
He doesn't. Crask radiates menace like a skunk radiates a bad smell.
"He brought this."
Dean gave me a piece of heavy paper folded into an envelope. It was a quarter-inch thick. I bounced it on my hand. "Something metal. Draw me a pitcher." As he headed for the kitchen I told him, "Maya might turn up tonight. See that she eats something and slip her a bar of soap. Don't let her steal anything you're going to miss."
I went into the office, sat, placed Crask's envelope on the desk, my name facing me, and left it alone until Dean brought that golden draft from the fountain of youth. He poured me a mug. I drained it.
He poured again and said, "You're going to get more than you bargained for if you keep trying to do something for those kids."
"They need a friend in the grown-up world, Dean. They need to see there's somebody decent out there, that the world isn't all shadow-eat-shadow and the prizes go to the guys who're the hardest and nastiest."
He faked surprise. "It isn't that way?"
"Not yet. Not completely. A few of us are trying to fight a rearguard action by doing a good deed here and there."
He gave me one of his rare sincere smiles and headed for the kitchen. Maya would eat better than Jill and I if she bothered to show.
Dean approved of my efforts. He just wanted to remind me that my most likely reward would be a broken head and a broken heart.
I wasn't going to get into heaven or hell letting Crask's present lie there. I broke the kingpin's wax seal.
Someone had wrapped two pieces of card stock tied together with string. I cut the string. Inside I found a tuft of colorless hair and four coins. The coins were glued to one card. One coin was gold, one was copper, and two were silver. They were of identical size, about half an inch in diameter, and looked alike except for the metal. Three were shiny new. One of the silver pieces was so worn its designs were barely perceptible. All four were temple coinage.
Old style characters, a language not Karentine, a date not Royal, apparent religious symbology, lack of the King's bust on the obverse, were all giveaways. Crown coinage always shows the King and brags on him. Commercial coinage shouts the wonders of the coiner's goods or services.