9

Block's headquarters were inside the Al-Khar, TunFaire's city prison. Handy, what with criminals being rounded up in gaggles lately. The place is huge, stark, cold, ugly, and badly in need of maintenance. It's a wonder prisoners don't escape by walking through the walls. Or by powdering the rusty bars in the infrequent windows. Ages ago some Hill family fattened up by cutting corners on construction, particularly in the choice of stone. Instead of a good Karentine limestone, available from quarries within a day's barge travel, somebody had supplied a soft snotty yellow-green stone that sucks up crud from the air, darkens, streaks, then flakes, leaving the exterior acned. The streets alongside the Al-Khar always boast a layer of detritus.

The mortar is in worse shape than the stone. Luckily, the walls are real thick.

I stopped, stunned, when I rounded a corner and saw the prison.

Scaffolding was up. Some tuckpointing was under way. Some chemical cleansing was restoring the youth of the stone.

Even clean that stone was butt-ugly.

How were they financing the face-lift? Till recently TunFaire jailed hardly anybody so no provision had been made to help maintain the seldom-used prison.

They'd had to evict squatters when Block moved in.

Captain Block not only was in, he was willing to see me. Immediately.

"You're a bureaucrat now, Block. Even if you haven't opened your eyes for fifteen years, you're supposed to be too busy to see somebody without an appointment. You'll set a precedent. You really live here? In jail?"

"I'm single. I don't need much room."

He seemed a little sad and a lot weary. He had shown fair political acumen getting the Guard created but, perhaps, didn't have the moral stamina to keep diverting frequent attempts to scuttle the rule of law.

"You look more relaxed these days." Block's quarters definitely didn't match his standing in the community. Neither did his dress. He should have been decked out like an admiral with two hundred years of service, but he just didn't care.

Block told me, "That business with the serial-killer spell that kept recasting itself made the prince love me. I'm almost untouchable. Almost. My cynical side says that's because nobody else wants the job. It certainly is thankless. But business is good. New villains jump up as fast as we harvest the old ones. They're like the dragon's teeth in that old myth. I'm endlessly amazed that so many of them survived the war."

I shrugged. I didn't know the one about the dragon's teeth.

Block is a compact, thin man with short brown hair quickly going gray. He needed a shave. He'd make a fair spy because there was nothing remarkable about him. You wouldn't notice him unless he yelled in your face. When I first met him, at a time when the law was honored more in the taking of bribes than actual enforcement, he'd had a mouth as filthy as the Goddamn Parrot's and all the manners of a starving snake.

I wasn't sure I liked the new, improved, mannered and unantagonistic, dedicated Block better than the angry old one.

I told him, "In the old days you never seemed like the dedicated type. You only did what you had to to get by."

A shadow brushed his features. "I got religion, Garrett."

"Huh?"

"I let Relway talk me into putting him on full-time. Big mistake. His conviction infects everybody around him."

"It does." Given his head Relway will exterminate the concept of crime by the end of the year. He's a man with a holy mission. He's scary.

"So what's up? Going to collect favors owed?"

"Not entirely. I want to ask about The Call. And I want to talk about Max Weider. Somebody's trying to squeeze him." I betrayed tradition and fed him all the details.

He was suspicious. "Why tell me?"

I would have been suspicious, too. In the past I'd kept him in the dark on principle.

"My partner insisted. And I owe Weider. It would be handy if somebody official was watching if something happened."

"What could happen?"

"With these rightsists? Anything."

"No shit. You heard about those people burning up on the north side?"

"I heard. I didn't pay attention. I've been busy."

"They're people with no connection to each other, drunks and no-accounts who couldn't make an enemy on a bet. But they've been burning up."

"You're pulling my leg."

"No. It's happened six times. It's got to be sorcery. Relway wants it to connect with the rights business but I don't see it. I can't see some teetotaling sorceress setting drunks on fire, either, though."

"You think it would be a woman?"

"If it was a teetotaller. You know any men dead set against spirits?"

"Only one." And I have to live with him. "So what about it? Is The Call moving into the rackets?"

"I haven't heard that. Jirek!"

The door opened. A creature limped in. He wasn't human. Not much, anyway. There was a little of everything in him but the three main ingredients appeared to be ogre, troll, and ugly. The whole was complicated by birth defects and wounds. Jirek moved sort of sideways, stiffly and bent, like his back hurt all the time.

"Jirek was injured in the ambush at Council Wells."

A veteran, then. Yet not human. Another one of those inconvenient complications I'd pointed out to Carter and Trace. Some of our biggest heroes aren't even human.

"Council Wells. One of our great victories," I observed.

"Do I detect the odor of sarcasm?"

Council Wells was supposed to have been a preliminary peace conference. The Karentine army concealed commando forces in the surrounding desert. Those patriots murdered the Venageti delegates in their sleep.

Another of those little triumphs that, when totalled, helped Karenta win the war.

"Me sarcastic? The gods forfend."

Jirek's great knobbly green mess of a face twisted and wriggled into a grotesque smile. Then he guffawed. His breath could gag a maggot. But he had a sense of humor.

Block told him, "Relway should be in his cell. Tell him I need him."

Jirek told me, "Good joke," then left.

"What was that?" I asked.

"Jirek. A unique." Which was slang for a breed who had extremely complicated antecedents. "He saved my ass a couple times in the Cantard. He was a perfect soldier. Too dumb to question authority. Just did what he was told. And was one bad boy in a fight."

"I just might change my mind about you."

"Don't brag about it. People might wonder why it took so long to rid yourself of the old, clogged one."

"And I thought I was developing a new relationship with the minions of the law."

Relway arrived. A little guy, he sort of oozed into Block's cell, no knock, like a shadow that didn't want to be noticed.

Relway is another unique, a completely improbable mixture. His interior landscape is a strange, strange land, too. He has a chip on his shoulder big enough to provide lumber for four houses. He's so far into law and order that he considers himself above any law that might restrain his efforts to crush crime. Now his auxiliaries and spies and midnight avengers are everywhere. It shouldn't be long till his name becomes one of the most feared in TunFaire.

Relway the man (using "man" generically, to indicate a sentient creature that walks on its hind legs) is almost unknown. I know him only because chance put me in the right place back when.

He nodded. "Garrett. You been keeping well?" His voice was hoarse, cracking, only half there.

"I'm fine. You pick up a cold?"

"The weather's been strange. I hear you might know something about that."

"Me? I was out there freezing my butt off with everybody else." Why relive my misadventures amongst mobs of low-grade, feuding gods?

He gave me that look all lawmen develop. It says not one word dripping from your filthy mouth is true now, nor ever has been. The power had gone to his head, though there was no denying the good being done. He had the bad guys rattled.