We Leave Together, стр. 7

“Thing is, I don’t want to walk about clubbing kids. Do you?”

“Better to club than hook them dead into the sewers,” said the night sergeant.

“That’s right. It’s better to try something first.” said Calipari, “First, I want to set a mouse trap and catch all we can, and ship ’em out to sea for the king.”

Geek snorted. “You know someplace they all go and you not telling us?”

Calipari looked at the other sergeant once, hard. The other sergeant coughed and looked at his hands.

Calipari continued. “The gang’s wearing crowns, right? These kids’re dumb as pigeons. I figure we got ourselves a king making crowns, hiding somewhere. Who’s running the show? Who’s making the crowns? We catch one of them, sit ’em down and talk, and maybe there’s a center one and set mousetraps where we land, and we impress every one that shows their faces into the king’s navy instead of prison until the gang’s back breaks. I’m calling a hold on the clubs until we can find the maker. Any kid you catch with a crown, drag him in and he leaves that day for the navy.”

Moaning, all around. The night sergeant shook his head. “Nicola, I wish you had talked to me on this first. That’s a lot of work for boys on walkabout. No purse cutters, no smugglers, no breaking up the fights? Just kids with crowns and shuffling them off to the king’s navy?”

“Now,” said Calipari, “I don’t doubt that the might of the king’s men in the Pens District can come down like Elishta’s howling demons on those little mudskippers, bat in hand. But, if we club these boys out of the district, they’re just going to get clubbed out again and again until they fall in bad somewhere else. Then, these brats grow sour until they’re old enough to hang.” The sergeant paused here. He took a deep breath, like he was waiting for someone to say something. Nobody said anything. Calipari darted his eyes around the room. “Maybe, instead, we do a little looking around first,” he said. “Maybe we turn these kids’ lives into something better than doomed for hanging.”

Jaime nodded with the rest of the boys. He popped his bat in his hands. He looked like he was listening a little too close, like he disagreed but he wasn’t saying anything. He had a mean squint in his eyes.

The night sergeant grimaced. “You got it, Nic,” he said, “but one week’s all I’m willing to give on this. I already had my boys looking for kids to club out.”

“You find any?” said Nicola.

The night sergeant shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “Ask the boys. Boys?”

Mumbles and denials from the tired night crew. They hadn’t been looking and the night sergeant had said this to cover himself about something was going on in his district that he didn’t know about. Jona was dead certain of that, and so am I.

Sergeant Calipari nodded at the king’s men. “That’s all, boys. Night crew’s dismissed and day crew better be out and about. You got your assignment. Get the new songs from your birdies on these little kings. Until then, no neglecting the usuals. Any cutters or foreign thieves about, roll ’em on up my way like any walkabout.”

The corporals all gave their best military yessir, but these men were no phalanx. They had the slouch like a street gang. They had the mussed up uniforms like a street gang.

Like dogs, not wolves, these men were more scavenger than hunter, sniffing through trash heaps for easy kills.

Dogs are scavengers, not hunters. They root in filth for roots and larva and bits of rotting meat.

These men, they would walkabout, but the king’s navy would have few young recruits.

***

The hazy dread was too much to bear. Jona couldn’t help but feel followed. He hadn’t been told to kill anyone in a while, and he was glad, but he couldn’t help but feel like he was being followed. Nicola was buying, and Jona wasn’t drinking. The boys were gone drunk, tired and falling asleep at the table. Jona never slept. The demon stain in his blood kept him always awake, always thinking about being watched.

Jona looked over his shoulder at shadows. No one was there.

Live a life like this, in fear. Surrender to it. Become a slave to the shadows.

Demons abide such misery in the bonds of Elishta, below the ground. Children of men do not live in fear, but must fight back. It was the human in him that snapped.

The long night, when the bar gets quiet, and there is no dancing and the bells have stopped ringing and almost everyone is going home, the daylight crew had gathered what was left of their weekly pay to settle in for a long, hard, angry drink. Jona was more sober than the rest. He touched Calipari’s arm and leaned in close. When we started talking, Nicola felt himself sobering quickly.

“Nicola, I don’t know about you,” said Jona, “but I’m sick of the pink weed running these streets that ought to be the king’s and used to be my father’s land. I’m sick of the hold they have. I’m sick of wondering who is what and where and knowing it’s there, in front of my face, and not a thing to do about it. We ought to stop it. We ought to drive back to the source and roll all the bastards without a trial.”

“There’s battles we don’t got the manpower to win,” he said. “Leastways looking the other way now and then, we can take a little coin for ourselves and our families.”

“We’re trying to mousetrap children who skim off the top of the real trouble, we ought to be chasing down the pinks where they are.”

“You go after that, you’ll probably get a coffin in the water, and a bunch of your brothers-in-arms floating beside you.”

“We got real trouble and we’re not doing anything.”

“We’re containing it, Corporal. We’re keeping it separated