Book 03 - Cold Copper Tears by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online

gang.
    There were five girls there, the oldest sneaking up on eighteen.
Four of the five shared the urchin’s hairdresser and tailor.
Maya wore real clothing and was better groomed, but not much. She
was eighteen going on forty, warchief of a gang claiming two
hundred “soldiers.” She was so emotionally sliced up
you never knew which way she would jump.
    Most of the Sisters were emotional casualties. They’d all
suffered severe abuse, and a murmur of defiance had driven them
into the Doom’s never-never land. That hung, precariously and
eternally, at right angles to reality, between childhood as it
should have been and the adulthood of the untormented. They’d
never recover from their wounds. Most of the girls would die of
them. But the Doom gave them a fortress into which they could
retreat and from which they could strike back, which left them
better off than the tortured thousands who went through the hell
without support.
    Maya had suffered more than most. I met her when she was nine,
when her stepfather offered to share her if I’d buy him some
wine. I’d declined to the crackle of his breaking bones.
    She was a lot better now. She was normal most of the time. She
could talk to me. Sometimes she came to the house to cadge a meal.
She liked Dean. Old Dean was every girl’s ideal uncle.
    “Well, Garrett? What the hell you want?” She had an
audience. “Let’s see the color of your
money.”
    I tossed her a coin. “Faith offering,” I told her.
“I want to swap information.”
    “Come ahead. I’ll tell you to go to hell when you
get on my nerves.”
    If she took a fit, I could go out looking like chopped meat.
Those girls could be vicious. Castration was a favorite sport.
    “You know the Vampires? Run by an albino darko called
Snowball and a crazy bleeder named Doc? North End.”
    “I’ve heard of them. They’re all crazy, not
just Doc. I don’t know them. Word is, Doc and Snowball are
getting ambitious, trying to rent muscle and recruit soldiers from
other gangs.”
    “Somebody might take exception.”
    “I know. Snowball and Doc are too old for the street but
not old enough to know they can’t trespass.”
    It’s a classic cycle. And sometimes the young ones pull it
off. About once a century.
    Today’s kingpin was a street kid. But that organization
recruited him from a gang and promoted him from within.
    “The Doom have any relationship with the Vampires?”
The girls prefer being called the Doom. They think it has a nicer
ring than the Sisters or the Sisterhood.
    “All take and no give, Garrett. I don’t like
that.”
    “If you’re running with the Vampires I don’t
have anything to give you.”
    She gave me the fish eye.
    “Snowball and Doc tried to take me out,” I
said.
    “What the hell were you doing in the North End?”
    “I wasn’t, sweetie. I was on Warhawks’ turf.
Warhawks have a treaty with the Vampires?”
    “No need. No contact. Same with the Doom.” She
shifted. “You’re sneaking up on something, Garrett. Get
to the point.”
    “There are a couple guys watching my house. I’d
guess chukos. Probably Vampires, considering last night.”
    She thought about that. “A genuine hit? You’re
sure?”
    “I’m sure, Maya.”
    “Your place is on Travelers’ ground.”
    “You’re starting to get it. Trouble is, I don’t
have any friends with the Travelers since Mick and Slick got caught
in the sweep.”
    The relationships between the races have become terribly
complex, them being all mixed together but each owning its own
princes and chiefs and quirky root cultures. TunFaire is a human
city. Human law prevails in all civil matters. A plethora of
treaties have established that entering a city voluntarily
constitutes acceptance of the prevailing law. In TunFaire a crime
in human law remains a crime when committed by anyone else, even
when the behavior is acceptable among the perpetrator’s
people.
    Treaties deny Karenta the power to conscript persons of