Beyond the Blue Moon (Forest Kingdom Novels) Read online

  “All Guards, hold for an important message,” said a calm voice in the back of their heads. It used to sound just behind their eyes, but too many people found that unnerving. “All Guards, hold for an urgent message.”

  “Damn,” said Fisher as a simplistic syrupy guitar melody filled their heads. “Why do they always have to play such crappy music?”

  “I think it’s a franchise,” said Hawk. “Lowest bidder and all that. Don’t worry until you start enjoying the music.”

  “All Guards report to the main docks, in the North Side,” said the sorcerer’s voice, cutting abruptly across the guitar music. “Striking dock workers are gathering in large numbers. Probability of riots. All Guards to the docks, and prepare for action. No exceptions.”

  The communication broke off and Hawk and Fisher looked at each other. “I thought things would get out of hand in the docks eventually,” said Fisher. “Lot of angry people there.”

  “I hate riots,” said Hawk. “You never can tell what a mob will do when it gets the bit between its teeth. People in a mob will do things they’d never dream of on their own. They might even forget to be afraid of us.”

  “No one’s that stupid,” said Fisher.

  They changed their direction and strolled unhurriedly toward the Devil’s Hook and the adjoining docks.

  “Strange they didn’t call us in before,” said Hawk. “I mean, we are the closest Guards to the scene.”

  “But the docks aren’t our beat,” said Fisher. “Presumably the Guards on the spot thought they could manage, and then had their minds changed in a hurry when the crowd started turning into a mob.”

  “Always good food to be had down by the docks,” Hawk said thoughtfully. “Maybe we could pick up something tasty for dinner while we’re there. But no more crab meat; that last batch gave me a really nasty rash.”

  “I remember,” said Fisher. “Two degrees of temperature, and you thought you were dying.”

  “And no lobsters, either. They always want you to choose a live one, and then I feel too guilty to enjoy it. Besides, all those long wavy legs and antennae make me queasy. Far too much like some of the demons we fought in the long night.”

  “There’s always the sea slugs,” said Fisher, just a little maliciously. “You know, those long white things. Always lots of meat on them.”

  “I am not eating something that looks like it’s just dropped out of a whale’s bottom,” said Hawk firmly.

  “You never want to try anything new. Though admittedly, it must have been a brave or bloody hungry man who ate the first sea slug.”

  They crossed over into the Devil’s Hook, the dark and seedy heart of the North Side, where crime and general wickedness were condensed through grinding poverty and desperate need into conscienceless violence and pure evil. The dilapidated buildings in that square mile of slums were crammed close together on either side of dark narrow streets, each filthy room packed with as many people as the floor could bear. There were few street lamps, mostly just flaring torches, and the streets were thick with refuse. Beggars huddled under threadbare cloaks, one hand held mutely out for whatever fortune might provide. People hidden behind hoods strode purposefully down the dark streets, looking neither to the left nor the right, ignoring each other as they went about their private business. They still managed to give Hawk and Fisher a wide berth, though.

  The two Guards strolled through the deadly street, apparently entirely unconcerned, and calmly discussed the current situation in Haven’s main docks. The dockworkers’ guild was mad as hell, not for the first time, because the dock owners, Marcus and David De Witt, had brought in zombie scab labor to break the ongoing strike by all dock-workers. They were striking because three men had been killed, and five crippled, by a collapsing dock structure. Everyone knew the docks were in a terrible state, but repairing and making them safe would cost a lot of money, which the De Witt brothers didn’t feel like spending until they absolutely had to. They also professed no interest at all in paying compensation to the aggrieved families of the dead and injured workers. The guild threatened a strike on the families’ behalf. The DeWitts told them all to go to hell, the dockworkers went on strike, and the DeWitts brought in zombies. Lots of them.

  The DeWitts had also been using their private guards to crack down on the workers smuggling goods out of the docks, thus cutting into the dockworkers’ long-established money-raising ventures. Half the drugs in Haven came in through the docks, and the dockers always made sure they got their cut. It was one of the few good reasons for being a docker. Nothing was ever simple in Haven.

  Hawk and Fisher knew all this. The Devil’s Hook and the docks might not be their beat, but it was their nearest neighbor. So they made it their business to keep an eye on things. Because you never knew when neighbors might come visiting. If the dockworkers’ troubles spilled over into the North Side, Hawk and Fisher wanted to be prepared.

  There had been a bill before the city council to force the dock owners to provide safe working conditions, but the bill’s proposer, Councilor William Blackstone, had been murdered, and his bill died with him. So far, no one else had proved brave or ambitious enough to challenge the very wealthy and very well-connected DeWitt brothers. Hawk and Fisher had been Councilor Blackstone’s bodyguards. They’d failed to keep him alive.

  They passed deeper into the Devil’s Hook. People were crowding the gloomy streets now, despite the early hour. The kind of businesses that operated in the worst slums of Haven never closed. You could find or buy anything, including the pleasures that might not have a polite name, but certainly had a price. On the slightly more respectable front, there were sweatshops everywhere; whole families crowded into a single room, working twelve-or fourteen-hour days, every day, creating goods for a few pence that would sell for a few ducats in the finer parts of the city. Everyone in the family worked, from the grandparents down to the smallest children. Some were born, lived their short lives, and died in those grimy single rooms, never leaving the only world they knew. Company representatives took care of their few needs, at fixed prices, and discouraged anything that might interrupt the family’s work. Everyday business in the Devil’s Hook.

  There were hotels that rented rooms by the half hour, and simple doss houses, ranging from flea-infested mattresses laid side by side on a communal floor, to the darkened rooms where a penny brought you the right to sleep standing up in a queue, with ropes under your arms to support you. They really crammed them in such establishments, and no one objected, because at least the warmth of crammed-together bodies was better than the cold of the streets. And everywhere, the beggars; lining the streets like so much discarded furniture, or so many broken and thrown-aside toys. They held out bowls if they had them, or hands if they didn’t, showing off their various deformities to their best advantage. Some were birth defects, or the result of disease or war, but others had deliberately disfigured themselves, or their children, through cunning artifices or cheap back-street surgery, to tug more efficiently at the heartstrings of those who passed, on their way to the docks. Like everything else in the Devil’s Hook, begging was a harshly competitive business.

  Every beggar had to have a license. As always, the city took its cut.

  There were no animals in the Devil’s Hook. If it moved, and was smaller than them, the occupants ate it. Sometimes they even cooked it first. When times got really bad, in the depths of the harshest winters, when the bitter cold kept paying customers off the narrow streets, the occupants had been known to eat each other. People with any sense avoided the Hook in winter, and sometimes barricades were erected across the entranceways to keep the occupants in.

  It was rumored that the Devil’s Hook was where plague rats went to die, because they felt at home there.

  The general smell was appalling, but Hawk and Fisher didn’t flinch. They were used to it. But when they’d finished their shift, they knew they’d have to fumigate their clothes and beat them with a stick to get rid of the smell, and
whatever tiny wildlife they’d picked up along the way. They stuck to the middle of the street, and were careful where they put their feet. Hawk looked around him with more than usual attention.

  “In a city full of disgusting spectacles, this has to be the most appalling. Every time I come in here, I think it can’t get any worse, and every time it is. When people die here and go to hell, they must feel right at home. Is this what we’re fighting to protect, Fisher? Is that what we put our lives on the lines to support?”

  “We support the law,” said Fisher.

  “What about justice?”

  The Hook fell away suddenly, like a vampire presented with raw garlic, as the slums gave way to the docks, and the foul stench of too many people packed into one place was pushed back by the sharp, clean smells of the docks, and the open sea. Gulls keened overhead, getting an early start on the day. The dock buildings formed a wide semicircle surrounding the bay, which was currently crammed full of ships from a dozen countries and city-states further up the coast. Flags of all colors and designs flapped proudly in the gusting breeze, and the tall soaring masts made a kind of forest against the slowly lightening sky. Hawk was briefly struck by a kind of homesickness, though it had been many years since he had last walked in the Forest Kingdom. He brushed his feeling firmly aside and studied the situation with a soldier’s eye.

  A vast crowd of protesting dockers had formed at one end of the dock, facing off against a thin line of gaudily clad private guards bolstered by the handful of city Guards who normally patrolled the area. The crowd of striking dockers numbered in the hundreds, backed up by their wives and families, and the prevailing mood was not good. Tempers had been pushed to breaking point by the introduction of mass zombie scab labor, and the strikers were spoiling for a confrontation. A few placards were being waved here and there, for the few who could read their simple messages, but mostly the dockers and their families put their feelings across by mass chanting. Simple slogans, crude insults against the DeWitts, declarations of defiance, all of them in voices ugly with rage and resentment and growing desperation. Savings were fast running out, bellies were empty, and the strikers were determined that if they had to back down and return to work, someone was going to pay first. There was also the unspoken fear that the zombies might replace them entirely. The thunderous roar of the massed chanting drowned out all the other sounds in the docks. Hawk couldn’t help noticing that every man and woman in the crowd was armed with something, from the steel hooks and claws and hammers of their trade, to clubs and lengths of chain and broken glass, and every man and woman looked more than ready to use them.

  Hawk counted twenty private guards, each with a drawn sword, but there was no telling if they’d have the guts to hold their ground and use those swords if the crowd tipped over into a mob and surged forward. They were more used to bullying individual workers, or ganging up on the occasional smuggling ring. Hawk had already decided that if there was going to be a fight, he was going to make damn sure the private guards were between him and the dockers. That way they wouldn’t be able to turn and run.

  All along the harborside, zombies were hard at work, moving slowly and silently back and forth from the ships, unloading their cargo and transferring it to the waiting transports. They carried heavy weights seemingly with ease, and they never stopped to rest. There were hundreds of them, going about their business with no sense of confusion, and Hawk had to admit he was impressed. He’d never seen so many corpses in one place before. Creating a zombie from a dead body was a simple if unpleasant business, but very expensive. Not many sorcerers specialized in necromancy, given the kind of deals they had to make for power and knowledge in that field, and they charged accordingly. Certainly, controlling so many dead bodies simultaneously had to involve a lot of power. In fact, if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, Hawk would have said it was impossible. The DeWitts must have imported a new necromancer, and a real heavy hitter at that. Hawk frowned. If someone that powerful had come to town, he should have known about it before now.

  Zombie scab labor wasn’t a new idea. Various businesses in Haven had tried replacing recalcitrant living workers with more compliant dead men in the past, but the expense and difficulty in controlling the corpses had always made the idea impractical. Besides no one liked having zombies around. They were just too upsetting.

  The DeWitts had used smaller zombie forces in the past, to force striking dockers back to work, but the strikers usually took them out fairly quickly, by guerrilla tactics involving stealth and salt and a lot of running. This was the first time an entire work force had been replaced by zombies, so the strikers and their families were out in force. They knew they were fighting for their livelihoods, with nothing but the workhouses and the cold streets in their future if they failed. Desperate times breed desperate people, and Hawk knew no one fights more fiercely than a man who believes he has nothing left to lose.

  Hawk and Fisher hung back in the shadows for a while, studying the situation. The mood was ugly, and just their appearance might be enough to spark something. Everyone knew that Hawk and Fisher were only called in after all thoughts of diplomacy had been abandoned. The dockers’ chanting was now degenerating into name-calling as the strikers goaded the outnumbered private guards. The crowd wasn’t quite ready to commit itself to action yet, but the threat of sudden violence hung heavily on the air like a brewing storm, dark and ugly and unpredictable.

  “I really don’t like these odds,” Fisher said quietly. “Even if every Guard in the city turns up, right down to the lowliest probationary Constable, we’re still going to be outnumbered.”

  “The strikers haven’t actually broken any laws yet,” said Hawk. “A lot of this is just letting off steam. Gives them the feeling they’re doing something. They must know that the Guard is on its way, and that if they start something, a lot of them are going to get hurt, maybe even killed. They’re not trained fighters, like us. It could be that a large enough Guard presence will take some of the wind out of their sails, calm them down.”

  Fisher snorted. “You don’t believe that any more than I do. These people are spoiling for a fight. It’s all they’ve got left.”

  Hawk made a disgusted noise. “If we were really interested in justice, we’d be down there fighting beside them.”

  “Don’t get soft on me, Hawk. If that crowd becomes a mob, they won’t care who they hurt. They certainly won’t think twice about trying to kill you or me.”

  “I know,” said Hawk. “Let’s report in to the DeWitts. See what they want us to do. Maybe we can persuade them to be reasonable.”

  Fisher raised an eyebrow. “Bets?”

  One by one the city Guard assembled in the great cobblestoned yard outside the DeWitt brothers’ business headquarters; an impressive three-story building in dark stone that overlooked the docks like a feudal lord’s castle. Inside, the hundreds of clerks and customs officers and other paper-shufflers were keeping their heads well down, and trying to persuade themselves that nothing of what was going on outside was any of their business. They didn’t even have the gumption to look out the windows at the gathering army of Guards.

  Looking around, it seemed to Hawk that more than half of the entire city Guard was there, from Captains to Constables, but even so, they didn’t come close to filling the yard. Lamps in elegant frames added to the dim morning light, but still there were shadows everywhere, and a cold wind was blowing in from the sea. They would all have been a lot more comfortable inside the DeWitts’ building, but of course there was no way such very important people as Marcus and David DeWitt would ever allow mere Guards inside their premises. They might need the Guard, but they sure weren’t going to socialize with them.

  Hawk sighed, and pulled his cloak tightly about him. Orders had come down from above that the DeWitts were to have full cooperation from every Guard, no excuses and no exceptions, and the Guards should follow the DeWitts’ instructions in all things. The DeWitts were connected. So crime was allo
wed to run rampant in the rest of Haven while the dock owners used the Guard as their own private bully boys. Hawk growled something under his breath, and Fisher looked at him uneasily. She just knew he was going to say something impolite and entirely regrettable to the DeWitts, when they finally deigned to put in an appearance, and she and Hawk were in enough trouble already with the powers that be. She seriously considered knocking Hawk down and sitting on him, while there was still time, but he’d only sulk later. Fisher settled for locating the nearest exit, just in case they had to leave in a hurry.

  There was a self-important banging noise from above, as the doors on the balcony overlooking the yard finally flew open, and Marcus and David DeWitt strode imperiously out to stare down their noses at the assembled Guard. They were both in their early fifties, well-fleshed, with the easy elegance and arrogance that comes from being born into lots and lots of money. Their carefully backbrushed and pommaded black hair made their fat, pale faces appear washed-out, cold, and impassive as masks. There was a quiet, understated sense of menace in their unwavering self-possession, as though no one and nothing in the world could ever disturb their privileged world.

  David was the elder by a year, but otherwise there wasn’t much difference between them. They dressed well but soberly, their only jewelry a collection of thick golden rings on their fleshy fingers. David had a cigar, Marcus a glass of champagne. The DeWitt brothers looked down on the Guards in their yard, assembled at their command, and they couldn’t even be bothered to look disdainful. They looked more bored than anything, as though forced by duty to carry out some petty but necessary protocol.

  “You are here to protect the docks against any threat,” said David flatly. “Most definitely including the strikers. You are hereby authorized to use any means necessary to ensure the safety of the ships, their cargoes, and the harborside buildings. You first task is to disperse the mob at our doors, and send them packing.”