Death's Reckoning (7 page)

“Well, well, funny seeing you here, officer Cubbins,” someone said at his side. “Didn’t know you was slumming it these days. Though I reckon being an ex-convict changes things a bit.”

The man who spoke wore his long, graying hair in a ponytail, an unfashionable style for Sea Haven, and it made him stand out. And so did his assortment of earrings and other metal pierced in his weathered face, nose and bottom lip in particular. Cubbins recognized the cologne with one whiff.

“Craven Mills.”

The man smiled. His crooked teeth looked almost charming in the gesture. He made a small bow. “That’s me. Always nice to be appreciated and remembered.”

“I hoped to find you here.”

“Really now? Ah, that’s something. And to what do I owe this affection, Captain Cubbins?”

Cubbins plopped a silver piece down on the counter. Craven’s eyes bulged as he slapped a hand over it. “What’s this? You tryin’ to get us killed, you fool?!”

Mills glanced around like a cornered badger, but no one looked at them. The light was too low, but Cubbins knew better. Something was always going on. It was it to get Craven Mills’ attention.

“I need some information,” Cubbins said.

Craven lowered his voice. “You could get a helluva lot more than that with this around here. Hell! This could get a whole round of drinks for everyone here. Or a slave.” He got closer to Cubbins, and the captain had to hold his breath lest he smell the rancid odor from Craven’s mouth. “Maybe you wanna head over to the Madam’s, eh? I’m ready! Ha, ha!”

Mills grew suspicious. “Say, I never heard of an officer of the law having this kind of coin to throw around for just some wagging tongues.”

“They gave me a bonus after my wrongful arrest. Consider it a retainer. I may need you for a few weeks, Craven. And you may need money for expenses. I have more.” He reached into his doublet, but Craven stopped him.

“No, no, not here, you blasted dolt! I’ll help you. Come with me. There’s much better places to talk. C’mon.”

Cubbins followed him outside, glad for the fresh air since his head was heavy. Plus, it might dispel some of Craven’s odd cologne and halitosis combination. It didn’t help much.

They went east for two or three blocks, turned north and went up an alleyway until they reached the edge of a two story building.

“Up this way, Captain Cubbins,” Craven Mills said and pointed to the metal fire escape. “Help me up here, would ya? Give an old mariner a hand. C’mon.”

Cubbins hopped up, and with his lanky, strong arms he grabbed the metal bar and yank it down. It clattered as it hit the ground, and up they went. The older man went first, huffing and puffing before they went five steps.

“This’ll… give us some privacy… yeah.”

Cubbins followed behind. The would-be informer went a few paces forward on the roof, looked around to make sure they were alone, and turned back. “So what’s this job ya got for me? Wanna fill me in?”

Cubbins gave him a brief description of the issues at hand, sparing him details that didn’t matter. When he finished, Craven had a look of disgust on his face. His earrings jingled as he shook his head and spat on the ground behind his back.

“Dirty job that is. I remember some years back, before you were on the job, something similar happened. Nasty business.”

“I need to know what you know.”

“Nah, not much. Bet you know more than I do. People are too busy talking about them fellas from Janisberg. No, I’ll be on the look-out from now on, now that I know ya need me. I’ll get some help, with your permission of course.”

“You’ll let me know if you need more.”

“Thank you, Officer Cubbins. Hey, what’d they steal anyway from them graves? Why you on the beat tonight? That important? Some noble’s grave robbed or something?”

“I’ll be in touch, Craven.”

They separated. Mills headed back to the tavern. Cubbins walked the streets towards home. Near the docks the activity level was higher even at such a late hour. The moon and wind were punishing the walk north towards home.

Several people stood by some older warehouses, smaller versions of the newer mammoth storage buildings the guild used. The old ones were blocky, simple buildings with a great deal of wear and tear around the edges. Their middles sagged. The wood rotted from the years, decades even, of being so close to the sea.

Cubbins noticed a few officers close by the group of dock workers, sailors, and also various other ruffians that found their way to the docks from time to time. He wanted to remain incognito and turned away, some voices raised in anger.

It happened so fast, Cubbins had no time to react. He cursed himself for not moving fast enough. A scuffle broke out. Men yelled, and one of the police officers went down holding his stomach. Three men ran. The other officer shoved a man forward, and two other men stood as if rooted to the ground.

By then the captain was there. He saw the man grappling with his officer holding a bloody knife. Cubbins slugged him in the jaw. Hard. His knees buckled, and he fell backwards unconscious. The officer’s forward momentum carried him over on top of him, and they fell in a clump.

Cubbins turned his attention to his fallen officer. Collin Hawkins was young, pale, and dying. They sat him up and held his shoulders as men stood around them muttering in shock.

“What was that?”

“What happened?”

“… cut him, he did! Cut ‘im deep!”

“Never seen it….”

Hawkins looked at Cubbins. Surprise and then comfort clouded his pallid features. “Captain,” he said, and blood dribbled over his lips.

“Quiet, Officer Hawkins. Save your energy. Help’s coming.”

There was no guilt for lying. Not to a dead man. The man had taken a stab to his lungs, Cubbins could tell by the way he breathed, and the amount of blood on the lengthy dagger. He glanced over at the other officer. He turned the assailant over and put the unconscious man in shackles.

Another man set for the gallows. Another death.

Collin Hawkins died in his arms a minute or two later. The light faded from his eyes as his body went limp. Cubbins closed his eyes. There was blood on his fingers and down his chest. It could have been anyone’s blood on any other night.

Chapter Six

The wooden stands of the subterranean arena creaked and groaned from the constant stomping of hundreds of feet. People cheered for their favorites when they won, shouted at them when they lost. Bloodcurdling screams of rage from the bowels of their hate filled the cavernous hall.

Some of them were drunk, and while most wanted to be, they had bought their tickets with all the coin they could scrounge together. Some would have good nights, most would lose out to the house as they always did. Yet it never stopped most from trying.

Very few among them were immune to the chaos. Most of them, stunned and exhausted by the toil from their backbreaking work, stood in dumbfounded silence. They were like beggars who had lost their senses or lunatics at an asylum. The others, bolstered by an occasional win, would shove and cajole these numb spectators.

One among those not cheering was coherent in both stance and thought. He was suspended from it all. Giorgio, once a proud member of the Thieves Guild, stood stiff but stern. His thin arms wrapped about his bony shoulders as if freezing even though the ambient temperature was stifling. His clothes were dirty and covered in grime from the streets. His cold, dead eyes glared and soaked in the noise, the violence, and the blood. Giorgio stood alone off to the side, in the middle of the maelstrom that were his senses. Two men fought to the death in the final match of the night.

Other matches were fought to mercy or until one was unable to fight. Their arena was a square cage, large enough to fill the circular floor and leave space along the outside, digging into the sand.

Most spectators had given up their spots on the bleachers and were up against the fence. They screamed and shook the cage with mad lust. It was heavy enough to take the brute of their force but it wouldn’t be too far to believe that at some point it would break apart and scatter the inhabitants to smithereens.

The security men for the arena were overwhelmed by the crowd’s visceral manner. Even members of the crowd, less violent men and women, were shocked by the vehemence, but they did nothing but ride the wave into the shore of death and destruction.

Dirty fingers gripped the cage and shook hard. The flesh dug dip and cut on the steel frame, bleeding down hands and along forearms, but it didn’t stop the troubling, terrible shaking.

Giorgio watched it all, taking it in. The scene played out before him as if it were a play. The participants were sweaty and covered in dozens of small wounds and blood covered their bodies. They grappled at the corner of the cage. One man banged the other against the steel frame. The crowd threw rotten fruits and vegetables, tankards, empty or full of stale ale.

The cage bars halted most of the larger projectiles, banging off the steel and bouncing back into the closer spectators, but a lot made it through to either strike the fighters or land amongst the ever growing pile of junk at their feet.

A man close to Giorgio was much louder than the rest. He stood apart from the crowd, yelling as loud as a man could yell until his voice was hoarse, and his veins stood out on his forehead. He stood a few levels down on the abandoned bleachers from Giorgio, and his words grew more obnoxious and vitriolic by the second.

“Cock sucking swine! Sons of whores! You-you, you fight, ya yellow bellied, gut sticker! Fight!”

His chosen fighter was losing. The loser had a nasty cut above one eye that interfered with his vision, and his opponent used it to his advantage. He took quick steps towards that side, hoping to catch him with a solid blow. The man’s defenses were weak and inconsistent. The cut man kept his left arm up to block, but that left his torso open, and his right arm was unable to mount an effective attack.

The more injured man tried to keep the fight close by grabbing the other and grappling with him near the edge of the cage. But the other man was smart enough to break away and continue to exploit the left side. It was a game of slip and feint the injured man was losing.

He gave up the close quarters match and circled around the opposite direction. Every so often, he reached up to wipe the blood from his eyes, but it streamed down anyway. The blood covered his face as if he were wearing a carnival mask on that side of his face.

The other man chased him, and for some seconds neither could land a blow. The crowd screamed its frustration, yelling for more action, more violence, more blood. The operators of the arena, men wearing special chest guards, padded leather aprons, and helmets, acted fast. One of them climbed to the side of the arena wall and pulled a rope connected to the top of the cage.

A cache of weapons clattered down into the cage area. Swords, knives, maces, hammers, all manner of killing tools landed in a tumbling heap. The two arena fighters broke apart and watched them fall. When the barrage ended, they scrambled for whatever they could snatch up. By pure chance, the bloody faced man stumbled over a truncheon made of iron and rolled away from his opponent. He came up swinging with wild strokes but hit nothing but air.

The desperate move bought time and space, and his opponent was wise enough to back off, eyeing the weapons at his feet. The half blind truncheon wielder tripped and fell backwards. The unarmed assailant saw his chance and jumped forward, tackling him to the ground. They rolled around in the dirt, smashing into empty cups and other weapons, scratching and clawing while the crowd roared approval.

An instant later it was over.

Bloody mask rose battered and bruised. His torso was slick with blood that was not only his. The other man laid on his back staring into space. A knife protruded from his sternum. The crowd went wild.

Giorgio was still. The dull thud of his heart awakened from the vast amount of stimuli. It pumped not fresh blood but the raw vitality of the outside energy. His newfound power siphoned it from the violence and hate. Their energy, their passion, their sheer bloodlust, all of it filtered into the shattered husk of his form, and he felt alive once more.

The power flooded his veins and invigorated his soul, casting aside fear and doubt. Over the course of the next several days, Giorgio became a sponge to the activity in the arena. He spent time near the fighter’s handlers, men who capitalized off the death and suffering of others. Their life force was vile and meaningless; it tasted foul to the ghoul the former thief had become.

Night after night the same loud mouthed braggart from the first night was there. The uncouth slob wore dirty clothes, had greasy hair, a scraggy beard. He was obese and stank. Everything Giorgio wasn’t.

Most people avoided him when they could and with good reason. His obnoxious behavior annoyed even the most ardent fan. He got into an altercation almost every night. Security looked down on any fighting outside the arena and shut it down fast. The aftermath was a simple ejection from the arena. This tended to elicit cheers from witnesses. But they never banned him from the fights. Every night they let him back in, only to start the cycle again.

Giorgio kept his eye on him. The man’s aura was sickening, so shallow and vain, so chauvinistic and narcissistic, yet so captivating. This man deserved what was coming, and Giorgio studied him, wanting to know him in an intimate way.

So conceited and out of touch with reality, he never noticed his silent stalker, not even when Giorgio followed him to a rundown boarding house, a decrepit building on the southeast side of town. It was near an old cemetery.

The building was a shared structure. It had the loose affiliation of a shanty town as some people called it. It was two stories tall with a flat roof. On the roof was a collection of tents and haphazard lean-tos to keep off the inclement weather.

The awakening ghoul stayed on the other side of the street, watching the man crawl up the stairs. He could see him through a breach in the stone wall, crumbled masonry lying about in a pile on either side of the street, and the man stood on the edge of the roof, to relieve himself.

The man wobbled back and forth on his feet, blind drunk. Giorgio thought he might pitch off the edge and fall to his death, robbing him of his personal kill. But then the fool finished and stumbled to a clump of blankets. He fell to his knees before unconsciousness claimed him.

Giorgio waited, listening to the sounds of the night, the chirping of crickets, the breeze rustling leaves. So calm and so peaceful.

He could sense the warm bodies in the building, felt the pulse of their hearts, smelled their stink. These were his people though he’d been lucky enough to escape their woeful life with an honest trade. The Thieves Guild had given him a skill set that others coveted, given him a different way to live. The thieves had worked for their necessities.

Now it was gone. The merchants took it from him, dismantled the thieves’ way of life. They were the true power in the city. He reached inside his cloak and thumbed the merchants’ guild insignia Cutter gave him to influence the dock masters. They’d listened to him, used him, and threw him away when the canon fired. All his hate, all the rage siphoned from the arena bubbled up within.

The entrance of the building smelled as bad as it looked. Feces and urine spread in equal measure along the walls. The stink didn’t bother him in the least. People, no more than motionless lumps with ratty blankets covering them, lay on the floor.

They snored and shifted as he stepped over them then. He walked up the lone stairway, a wooden, crooked makeshift construction that couldn’t have been a part of the original design. It hugged the shattered wall. Someone had written some indecipherable scrawl on one section in an unrecognizable language.

The roof was colder than it appeared. A tar like substance that felt like pebbles and viscera mixed in equal measure spread in loose patches about the surface. Tents flaps snapped in rhythm to the wind. The clouds were thin, allowing moonlight to illuminate the scene. It was gorgeous. The scattered masonry, the slumped bodies, the glistening light, all that entropy combined to stir his ghoulish heart. This was the point of life: to end.

A groan alerted him, and Giorgio tensed, but the man was asleep. Perhaps a nightmare stirred him. Perhaps some physical condition caused him pain during sleep. Part of Giorgio’s remaining humanity went out to these people. They hadn’t been lucky enough to be born with quick fingers and light feet.

Doubt filled his mind on the job at hand. The hate, rage, and hunger abated for a moment. This man was vile. The world would be a better place without his continued existence, but there was better prey. Men more worthy of his time and coming death, men who deserved it more, to be sucked dry and left hollow.

He almost turned, but the man cried out in his sleep from across the roof. It was too much. The anticipation over the last few days, the connection to his beating soul, the desire to have that energy, wicked though it was, overwhelmed his willpower. The man had accosted women, lied, cheated for money, yet he lived in these squalid conditions even though he could afford better. None of it made sense.

This waste of humanity should suffer for his apathy. Enough was enough. Giorgio walked over to him. The slob’s feet were exposed under the ragged blanket. His untended nails looked scratchy and diseased. His face was more horrid up close, with pock marks scattered all over greasy skin.

Giorgio put him out of his and everyone’s misery.

* * * * *

Cubbins never cared much for stakeouts. A captain wasn’t required to do much, but in this situation, it was better to be as close to things as possible.

On his way up the rank ladder, Cubbins had made it a mission to go on as many extra shifts as possible. No one had been jealous; no one had accused him of being a boot sniffer because of his strong presence. His confidence radiated from his being, and everyone else wanted him around. He was the kind of man that made other men feel safe.

His own confidence was earned. His self-esteem was solid and unassailable. At least until Castellan had paid him off; then everything changed.

Cubbins peered at the southern gate of the Rosewood Cemetery and wondered why this recent surge in inexplicable grave robbing bothered him so much. There were plenty of capable men to post. It was good work for younger officers. It gave them a chance to get out on the streets and use their heads and eyes instead of their arms cleaning up bar room brawls.

That arm, though, under his bed. The thought lingered in the night.

“See anything, sir?”

The captain shook his head. The other officer sighed and rolled a kink out of his neck. “Me neither, captain. Maybe we picked the wrong place. Could be any of ‘em.”

Cubbins’ only answer was silence. They stood by a window on the second floor of the building opposite the graveyard while another group of men set up on the northwest side of the cemetery, diagonal from Cubbins. The captain also had a few officers posing as drifters, walking about in a drunken swagger or standing on corners begging.

“Same damn thing as last night.” The man sounded bored, and Cubbins didn’t blame him.

But this was the job. It felt pointless at times. They had sat here last night until an hour before dawn and seen nothing. There were two other teams at the other five cemeteries in town. After almost a week, they still had nothing. It was getting tedious, but it was the job; they had to keep at it.

One of the men on the streets reported in. He dressed in rags and wore his hair ragged and beard unkempt. His face was dirty.