Book 06 - Red Iron Nights by Glen Cook

and trash scavenged before the ratmen could
collect it. Or they cram in a hundred to the building meant for
five or ten two hundred years ago, when the structure had windows
and doors and flooring that hadn’t yet been torn up to burn
for heat during the winter. They lived in doorways and on the
street, some so poor they didn’t have a grass mat for a
mattress. They lived amidst unimaginable filth. The ratmen
wouldn’t go in there without protection. The soldiers
wouldn’t go in less than company-strong—if at all. Too
many soldiers had come out of there and wouldn’t go back even
to visit.
    The Bustee is the bottom. You can’t roll downhill any
farther. You roll that far, chances are you’ll never climb
back. Not till the dead wagons come.
    Only the deathmen are safe in the Bustee. Each day they come
with their wagons, wearing their long gray robes with the veils
that conceal their faces, to collect the dead from the streets and
alleys. They chant, “Bring out your dead! Bring out your
dead!” as they work. They won’t leave the streets to
collect. They load their wagons and make their deliveries to the
city crematoriums. They work from dawn to dusk, but every day they
get a little farther behind.
    Death in the Bustee is as ugly as life.
    In the Bustee there is no commodity cheaper than life.
    In the Bustee there is only one commodity of any value at all.
Young men. Hard young men who have survived the streets. These
fellows are the only real beneficiaries of the Cantard war. They
enlist as soon as they’re able and use their bonuses to get
whoever they can out of hell. Then, despite their hard and
undisciplined youths, they work hard at being good soldiers. If
they’re good soldiers they can make enough to keep their
families out. They go down to the Cantard and die like flies to
keep their families out.
    That such love should flourish, let alone survive, in the Bustee
is ever an amazement to me. Frankly, I don’t understand how
it does. In the more affluent slums, youth seems to victimize those
closest to it first.
    Another world, the Bustee. They do things differently there.
    Block stopped walking. I halted. He seemed to be having trouble
getting his bearings. I looked around nervously. We looked too
prosperous. But the streets were deserted.
    Maybe it was the rain. But I doubted that. There was something
in the air.
    “This way,” Block said. I followed, ever more alert.
We saw no one till I spotted a pair of obvious Watchmen, though out
of uniform, peeking from a narrow passageway between two buildings
that might have been important back at the dawn of time. They were
as big as they get in the Bustee. The men faded back into the
passageway.
    My nerves worsened. I was supposed to go back in there with a
guy loved me the way Block did? But he didn’t dislike me that
much. Not enough to bring me down here for that kind of fun.
    I stepped into the passage—and almost tripped over an old
man. He couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds. He
was a skeleton with skin on it. He had just enough strength to
shake. The deathmen would collect him before long.
    “All the way back,” Block said.
    I didn’t want to go. But I went. And wished I
hadn’t.
    I like to think I developed a solid set of emotional calluses in
the Marines, but that’s only because my imagination
can’t encompass horrors worse than those I saw and survived
in the war. I keep thinking there’s no devil’s work
that can surprise me anymore.
    I keep on being wrong.
    There was a little open area where porters had made deliveries
in a bygone age. Several Watchmen were there. They had torches to
break the gloom. They looked like they hoped the rain would drown
the torches.
    I didn’t blame them.
    The girl had been about twenty. She was naked. She was dead.
None of that was remarkable. It happens.
    But not the way this had happened.
    Somebody had tied her hand and foot, then hung her from a beam,
head down. Then they had cut her throat