The rain continued to fall as they made their way across Morova to the Red Dog tavern. The sky was a uniform iron-gray except for patches where it shaded to near-black. It looked like it would be an all-day raid. Mud sucked at Janyn's boots; they'd be a mess to clean.
The tavern was dark inside; lamps had been lit but they weren't doing much good in fighting off the shadows. Even so, the Red Dog still looked tired and cheap, the furnishings the kind that could be replaced easily if smashed in a bar brawl. A thin, balding man with a drooping purple moustache polished cups behind the bar, and in a back corner three men sat at the only occupied table. It looked promising.
"Ned Crain?"
The man in the middle looked up with apparent disinterest.
"Who's asking?"
"Someone curious about your involvement in two recent murders."
"Ah, hell, you're that hunter Brent hired."
"You know me?"
"Word gets around, y'know? After all, you're here talking to me and we've never met."
"That's one for you, then."
Crain was an interesting study in contrasts. He looked to be around forty years old, his pale blue hair starting to thin a bit. He was clean-shaven, with sharp cheekbones but a weak chin, the kind people associated with a lack of character when they were too lazy to pay attention to a person's actual qualities. He had the broad shoulders, thick arms and torso, and powerful, calloused hands of someone who made his living by manual labor, but those hands--and more tellingly, the nails--were clean of dirt, and his tunic and trousers neat and of fine quality. Perhaps he'd started out as a carter himself before turning himself into a criminal boss. He carried no visible weapons.
The men on either side of Crain were, as Brent had called them, "roughnecks." They were big and strong, and they did carry weapons, but the hunter did not find them at all intimidating. If it came to a fight he could take them both, quickly and easily, before they could even get free of their seats. Their movements and attention gave away their inexperience to the hunter. They were petty bullies, not expert killers.
They were not the kind of men who could slip into a house at night, restrain the occupant--without the use of drugs, as Tera had verified, having run what tests she could the night before--and slowly, tortuously kill him without leaving a trace.
Janyn hadn't expected them to be any better than they were, though. You didn't use a scalpel as a shield.
"Now, the girl there, who looks like she'd shatter in a strong wind, she's the magistrate?" Crain asked.
"I am," Tera said sharply, apparently no more amused by personal insults than Janyn would be.
"How cozy. The law and Dolan Brent's hired weapon here to see me, hand in glove."
"Are you trying to imply something?"
"Imply? It was Brent who told you about me, wasn't it? Who made all kinds of unsubstiantiated allegations about my business practices and suggested I could be a murderer?"
"So just what are your business practices?"
"I run an organization of local carters. It's a difficult business, dragging some trader's inventory across the desert from one town to another. Half the time there aren't any roads, so a carter has to be good at finding the way. There are bandits out there, desperate killers who would slit their mother's throat for three meseta. Then, of course, there are the biomonsters--you'd know plenty about that, hunter. Only, carters aren't hunters, trained by experts in fighting. They're just hard-working men and women who don't even own a stake in the goods they carry at the risk of their own lives."
It was a pretty speech and no doubt well-practiced, but Janyn did not find himself suddenly overcome with compassion for the plight of the carting profession.
"So where do you fit into the picture?"
"Why, I make sure that the carters I represent get paid more than a pittance. If they stayed apart, they'd be easy pickings for people like Brent or the late Victor Tyrell. They'd pay whatever they wanted, and if a carter protested there'd always be another ready to step in. I help them out of that trap. I've organized most of Morova's carters into a single group, so they can speak with one voice. That way, the traders can't play them against each other to beat down the price, and instead the carters can demand a fair wage." He gave Tera a pious look. "The hunter, of course, is paid to view me a certain way, but surely, Magistrate, you can see why I am so despised by the traders, why Brent would be glad to implicate me in murder?"
"Yet you confirm that there was a rivalry between you and the dead men?" Tera responded. Apparently she wasn't falling for Crain's blather either, for which Janyn was glad.
"I wouldn't call it a rivalry, per se. They resented me and the work my organization is doing."
"You've said some rather unpleasant things about the traders already."
"Oh, I was certainly displeased with their attempts to control the carters and underpay them, but I would hardly want them dead because of something like that. That's the reason my organization was formed, to address those concerns. Besides, without the traders, the carters don't have anything to cart. We'd just be cutting our throats."
"Were you a carter yourself?" Tera asked.
"Damn right." Crain flexed a powerful hand. "Apprenticed at fourteen and then seventeen years at it. So you see, I know what they face at home and in the wild."
"Well, there's certainly nothing wrong with a group of people looking out for their own interests at the bargaining table," Janyn allowed, pausing just long enough for a smug look to creep into place on Crain's face before continuing, "On the other hand, when you start talking about theft, extortion, assault, and murder, that's another story."
Crain's eyes sparkled with anger, but it did not spread.
"Those are nasty words to be throwing around, friend."
"It's a nasty business we're in."
"We?"
"Victor Tyrell and Ovan Prentiss had struck up a business deal together."
"Oh?"
"Think of it as a local consortium. Salesman and supplier together, combining their economic forces. I may not be much of a number-cruncher, but that doesn't sound like it would be good for you. They could hire carters in Kadary--or hire guards to protect shipments using locals that didn't knuckle under to you. Powerful men don't like being blackmailed, Crain. They'd have happily spent two meseta to save paying you one as a point of pride, and working together they'd have had the meseta to spend. If those two had lived, you'd have to go back to a real job instead of soaking up membership fees from carters and bribes from merchants and traders."
The two roughnecks started to get up, sparked as much by Janyn's sneering tone as by what he'd said. Janyn was ready to counter the first strike when Crain cut the impending brawl off short.
"Easy does it now, boys," he drawled lazily. "Wouldn't want to give the esteemed representative of the law the wrong impression. Don't want to go acting like a cheap thug just because Brent's hired lackey calls you one."
The drawl and the gentle mockery were designed, in a way, to put Janyn and Tera at ease, to present Crain as the reasonable businessman, faintly amused at his rival's absurd attempts to incriminate him. It was a pose that fooled no one, not even himself. Black hatred was in his eyes, the kind of smoldering anger that gnawed at a man's guts until he was ready to kill, or do worse than kill.
Crain's words said one thing, but his eyes said something else: that he was the kind of man who could order a rival tortured to death.
"You can't deny that it's true, though," Tera said, picking up the thread of the interview. "You had very good reason to want Tyrell and Prentiss dead."
This time the two goons made no move. Tera was the law, and men like that didn't attack the law without specific orders to do so.
"I didn't kill them. I was right here for most of both nights, with the bartender and plenty of customers to vouch for me. After I left here, well, the barmaid can vouch for me." Crain wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Tera looked from one of Crain's thugs to the other.
"There are such things as hired killers."
"Yes, there are." Crain, in turn, nodded in Janyn's direction. "Brent's got one now. Interesting, isn't it? And if what he says about Tyrell and Prentiss getting in bed together is true, then what do you think Brent might think about his biggest rival and his biggest buyer forging a pact like that?"
Janyn came to his decision intuitively, without thinking it over consciously. Tera was sincere, he felt, but an unknown quality especially given her religious zealotry, and Sergeant Paul...well, he was a small-town guard captain.
A rope, creaking softly as a body twisted in the dry, desert wind.
"You mean, Crain, that my client might have come to someone like you?" he sneered. "Cheap garbage like these two are a dozen to the meseta, of course, but I'm sure you know some real men who could be trusted not to cut their own throats on their knives."
That did it. The two thugs had been on edge already, and Janyn's insults tipped them over. They leapt at him, or tried to. One never even got out of his seat before Janyn snapped his knuckles into his windpipe, leaving the thug choking for breath. The second man tried to bull-rush the hunter so Janyn merely swung him past and into the tavern wall.
"I'd press assault charges, only that would be adding insult to injury," he said. "I guess maybe you're in the clear after all, Crain, if this pathetic excuse for humanity is what you have to offer. Come on, Tera; let's go talk to someone who matters."
He spun on his heel and headed for the door, hoping that the magistrate would follow him. She did. What's more, she didn't even speak up until they were outside in the rain again.
"What was that for?" she asked. "Why did you deliberately provoke a fight?"
He turned and looked back at her, wondering whether or not to trust her. Could he? Janyn wasn't sure.
So he did.
"I'm wagering on the only sure thing in human behavior. Violent, prideful stupidity."
It was curious, watching the raindrops run down across the black moon tattoo on her face; some part of his brain kept expecting the water to wash it away and was constantly surprised when it did not. Strange, he thought, how the mind played tricks like that.
"Sergeant Paul seems better than the average run of small-town guards," he confessed, "but I don't trust him. I can't trust him. And I've got a client to protect. If Paul goes off half-cocked and decides to hang someone without proof, I want to make sure he hangs someone who, even if they aren't necessarily the killer, at least deserves hanging."
"You're provoking Crain into a personal feud. Something that shows he's ruthless and violent, and that he responds to personal problems with bloodshed."
The rain drummed against his arms and shoulders.
"Exactly."
"That's dangerous--if you genuinely believe he could be responsible for the murders."
"I do. He's vicious and unprincipled enough. He talks a good game about the rights of workers and maybe there's even good points to be made along those lines, but it isn't what he's doing. He's got some intelligence, but no conscience at all. He's a cruel, unprincipled killer who'll do whatever he has to to get what he wants for himself, be it money, respect, or power."
"He didn't commit these crimes, though."
Janyn blinked.
"You're sure? Just like that?"
"He might have ordered them. He has the anger in him to do that, the hatred for his enemies and rivals. He didn't do it himself, though."
"Ah, okay. I agree with you. His control cracks too quickly, and the murder has extraordinary control over himself or herself. No one who commits a crime that...perfect, that precise, acts in the grip of emotion."
"Crain's not like that. His emotions spill over quickly and easily."
"So is Brent."
"I haven't met him yet."
"You should. You'd see what I mean at once. He's terrified of this situation, and it's making him angry, almost unstable."
She looked up at him, her expression enigmatic, her eyes the same shade as the twisting clouds above.
"Why is he terrified?" she asked softly.
The rain was cold on Janyn's face.
"Does he fear what you fear? The destruction of an innocent life at the hands of the law? Or does he fear a just punishment?"
He didn't have an answer for her.