Stave 9

"You're sweating, Skinner. Yet the night is cool and pleasant." Warden Hotch regarded the inmate seated opposite him with stern eyes. "I hope you aren't afraid." The guards had been dismissed and it was just him and his guest in his sober office now. Warden and jailbird, lawman and criminal. "If you're nervous, rest easy. Unlike most prisoners who step into this room you have nothing to fear."

"Ain't scared, beak." Skinner was a lean scoundrel. His hair long and stringy and he stunk of his own juices. The repeat offender had been thinned by a hungry life in Camshire's bitter streets and further shaped by the addict's appetite. The lockhouse skilly, a thin and odorless gruel, did little to fatten him, either—nor did the occasional rat or cockroach Skinner managed to catch in his filthy cell. "Maybe I jus' heard the rumors about what you do to the inmates you summon up here. How they walk crooked in the yard the next day." Skinner shuddered again and coughed.

"You sick, then?" asked the Warden. "Dungeon lung?"

"Sick of this place." Skinner habitually rubbed his palm with the other thumb, his heavy iron shackles clinking and chafing. "Sick of these walls."

"Then the stars are with you today," Hotch proclaimed, "for I have a proposition."

"Then get to your knee, hardstick," returned Skinner. "And let's see the ring."

The Warden laughed and rose from his seat. He walked to a window looking down on Gallowshade, the squalid and steaming district of Camshire that sat in Fetterstone Prison's enormous shadow. A hard rain pelted the glass, blurring the erratic skyline of crooked peaks and chimneys. The Warden's face darkened as he spoke his next refrain: "The blood of children runs in our gutters and nothing is done to stop it. Forgotten minnows plucked from life's stream too soon, helpless lambkin snatched right from under society's skirt. Strotham Yard's hands are full in this city of horrors and so the cuntlickers turn a blind eye." Hotch's fists pumped with anger. He grit his teeth and his eyes were bitter slits. "If some thirty or more younglings were to vanish from the noble houses of Sablewood, I assure you the streets would immediately be crawling with bloodhounds and searchmen armed with lamps and clubs—and a suspect in shackles before the next tide rolled in. But why bother with orphans spirited from our streets and rookeries? They only mean more mouths to feed, more future criminals on the streets. So many of the prisoners in these halls started as innocent, unloved lambs, too, until they were hardened by the world."

"Look, I don't know nothin' 'bout no gone urchins, beak," said Skinner, "And I don't appreciate the fingerin'. I may be a reputed screwster and snakesman but I isn't no damned kidsnatcher."

"I don't think you're the culprit, Skinner," said the Warden. "I want you to help me catch the filthy cunt. I've studied your file. Picked you from many candidates. You've the perfect skill set. And a deep familiarity with the killer's territory. Your military training, however brief, could be of use here as well. Hunt the child-hunter, in your own way. Or send him here, to my domain—where I can exact justice on the bastard as I see fit. In return, I will expunge your records. Set you free with your scales emptied."

"And once these ruffles are off me—" said Skinner, raising his cuffs, "—how can you be so sure I won't jus' split town?"

"Because I believe you are a good man and more importantly a smart man." Hotch turned back toward Skinner. "I believe that given the choice between a life on the run marked as a fugitive and the chance to bring justice to whoever harmed those helpless boys and girls, you will do the prudent and wise thing, the right thing. I know that you spent time in Camshire's orphanages as a boy. As did I. Either of us could have been one of these victims in a different time."

The Warden stepped forward and removed a ring of jangling keys from his belt. "This is your chance to start over fresh." He slid a key into Skinner's shackles and snapped them open. "Live a normal life. If you bring me the one responsible, I will even provide you with a modest stipend for a full year afterward. Just to sweeten the pie. Help get you back on your feet. Start things over. How's that sound?"

Skinner rubbed his wrists, enjoying the feeling of the lost metalweight. The cool air on his raw skin. And to think he had been working up the will to smash his head against his cell wall, and pull the curtain on the whole show. He took the offer.

— • —

The Warden's guards escorted Skinner along the hall leaving the office tower. The repeater savored the moist night air from the high windows as they moved along the catwalk. These portals lent a view of Fetterstone's bleak prison yards down below. A squad had been assembled there for the execution of three criminals. Skinner heard the line's commander call out the order to fire. Flinched as their bolts left the seats of their crossbows in choreographed snaps and went sharply into the hearts of the condemned. The bodies hung limp on the wooden posts and the mud drank of them.

Skinner was brought to the ground floor and put in the custody of Fetterstone's head of security himself, a tall and stonefaced officer named Rollant. A sarcophagus of a man, sworn to the Diluvian party's severe ideals and second only to Hotch in the penitentiary's hierarchy, in practice if not in mandate. Rollant's draconian policies and attitudes were responsible for a good many of the miseries visited upon Skinner and his fellow inmates over their mutual tenures at Fetterstone. Skinner shot him the stinkeye. But the chief guardsman had of course been met with far worse over his career than that and paid it no heed. Skinner was a lowly convict, beneath his notice. This unofficial outprocessing a minor chore to be done with. Nothing was said of Warden Hotch's designs to hunt down the kidsnatcher or Skinner's part in it. Perhaps Rollant was not privy to those plans. Just a man following orders.

They shuffled Skinner down utilitarian back halls. The sounds of the clanging bars and shouting inmates grew faint as they left the cell blocks and entered the prison's rear complex. A pair of guards passed on their way to begin their shifts of dodging shit and piss and come and worse. They warily eyed Skinner as they went by. Rollant and his hardsticks escorted Skinner along a string of unmarked doors and then stopped at one. The lock was undone and they went inside. Oil lamps ensconced in the walls gave fickle light. A second door on the opposite wall, larger and reinforced. There was dried blood on the walls and floor, hinting at past nefarious purposes this room had been put to. A lone table stood in the center, a dark mass on its surface. Skinner recognized the lump as his old trickbag and clothing. The things he bore when the Diluvians snatched him red-handed in a house burglary and locked him away years before.

"Check that it's all there," said Rollant. Skinner went through his effects. A few coppers, a knife, a ring stolen from a drunken merchant, a smattering of other inconsequential things. The pathetic sum of his life as it was before he'd been locked away. Frozen in time like the glacial knights whom the old bed stories claimed would rise in a future thaw to awaken as drunk as they had been when trapped in the ice centuries before by a trickster mage only to resume their ceaseless singing and fighting that had so annoyed the sorcerer. Rollant handed Skinner a small pouch of coin. "For any expenses. You are to report to a Gutter sinhouse, near the Hookyards. Enter an establishment called 'The Last Leg' and ask for 'Church.' Release him."

Rollant's men unlocked and unbarred the room's second door and heaved it open. A blast of cold wet air filled the stale room. Skinner felt at once galvanized and weakened by the sensation. The guards roughly took the convict by the arms and unceremoniously dumped him into the rainslicked streets behind the prison. The riveted door slammed shut. And that was that. Skinner was free.

He gathered himself and got his bearings. Cobblestones, barred and shuttered windows, spiked metal gates. The neighborhood of Gallowshade was quiet and solemn, a crypt for the still-living. Only the lunar dared try their luck here in the prison's stark shadow. The row houses just outside the penitentiary's outer walls were as grim and erect as a firing squad. Fitting, for this was where many of Fetterstone's guards and executioners kept their homes.

Remembering the directions Rollant had given him, Skinner began the long and soggy walk that would take him there. Along the way he absently continued to trace the palm of his left hand with his opposite thumb. This was the scar of an old wound he had drawn himself years ago when he realized he had not what it took to be a true Reaper and dropped out of his training. That had been Skinner's one chance at an honest life before he let hope fade and slipped back into his old ways of smite and crime. That scar on his hand marked the day he had lost any dreams of redemption, whatever that meant. But it was possible the Warden's offer would change things. After all the blows life had dealt Varga Skinner, here was a new chance.

— • —

Hands ran over the course of Tusk's body and dug at his skin with sharpened nails. A dull and aching consciousness greeted him. He felt a bright and sweaty pain in his right arm. The ranger was on his back, cold uneven stone on his bare skin. The room was dim. Strange crystals in the corners hummed with a low and maddening drone. Stains in the floors and walls from the fluids that had been bled from the bodies of those poor souls who'd previously been confined in that awful hole. The scent of death lingered like a formless ghost.

There was someone at his side. A woman. Tusk squinted and focused until her features began to emerge. A hobgoblin female, her arms sleeves of runery. Her deep black eyes were focused on her work. More sharp agony gripped Tusk's arm. His mind fought through the haze of the venom and whatever else his keepers may have poisoned him with. In shock Tusk realized this waster woman was tattooing him with runes to match her own. His mouth found no words but his mind screamed. Who knew to what purpose this calligrapher's handiwork would serve. To inflict pain on him without end? To bind his body and make it a slave? To force him to speak? And why did they not just kill him? Tecneli claimed they had the power to ply secrets from dead souls. Perhaps it was a lie, though Tusk had heard such things were done by the ancients. Perhaps they kept Tusk alive simply for the sake of study. To learn how best to extract suffering from their captives. Unable to stand being permanently stained by sorcery, the animalist struggled against his bonds. The thick barbed cords only tightened further as if the bindings were maliciously alive. The sandwoman noticed her prisoner's attempts and reached a taloned hand down to his genitals. Took his testicles into her fingers and cruelly crushed them, her nails digging into flesh. Tusk groaned in misery and stilled himself and finally the witch relented.

The Reaper suffered the remaining scarifications without protest. When the woman's bowl ran dry of ink she cut her arm and drained her own black plasma into the receptacle. The witch was using her very blood to ink Tusk's new runes. She had a strange beauty to her. Deep black eyes set against fair skin. Not yet distorted by the curse of the wastes.

Tusk mustered up a thin voice and used what he had learned of the hobgoblin dialects. "How am I live?" He thought of Risper. "Is other die? Is friend die?"

The blood runist appeared startled that her prisoner knew her tongue. But she did not answer him.

"Please," Tusk begged. "Help. I no enemy. I friend."

The woman's hand went back down to Tusk's tender balls. He stiffened. "No! No... I stop."

Satisfied, the blood sorceress went back to her work and heard no more protestations from the Reaper. When she was done she cut one last biting wound in his arm that was deeper than the rest and let him bleed out into the bowl. From this she drank. Tusk was overcome by the pain and the poison and the long journey and the loss of blood which the sorceress guzzled down. Some other mystical nausea brought on by the ritual took root and the ranger fell back into a sweet and merciful torpor free from pain.

— • —