Although the city of Oxonium existed on two general levels of altitude, there were many levels within the class structures of the higher and lower. From the warrens in the steep-sided canyons, calculating eyes studied the aristocratic inhabitants of the contours. From the summits, intolerant and suspicious eyes watched the human garbage festering in the runnels. The great lords employed guards and paid the infamous Kataki Watch to police the vermin below. The gangs trained their young people in all the arts of deception, theft and murder.
Here and there within the tortuous ascent the route had been cut by humans to link chambers. Some passageways were even paved and lined with masonry blocks. How long ago this work had been carried out no one really knew. Apocryphal stories abounded, of course, in the true Kregan way.
Sleed the Slick carried a broad dagger at his waist, and, like Dimpy and his curved knife, had had the sense not to use that against the praxul. If, said Dimpy to himself, if the cramph prods me with that I’ll — well, and what would he do — here underground and surrounded by aspiring members of the Hellraisers? He clenched his teeth and went on and up in a most foul mood.
Water dropped from the roof to splash into a stream alongside the footway. Far up ahead a spark of light glittered.
“Quiet,” snarled Sleed.
The spark turned into a lantern perched on a ledge. A youngster wearing a ponsho skin stood up as the party approached. His sallow face looked peaky under the hood and his eyes gleamed. Silently he motioned upwards.
Big Balla took the lead and began the climb. Rough-cut steps, ten to a flight, zigzagged back and forth from landing to landing. Dimpy counted six flights before he followed Staky through an open trapdoor to step onto a wooden floor.
A stale musty odor surrounded him; but the cellar was dry. A pile of long sausage-like sacks stood against one wall. Steps led up.
The formalities here were very similar to those Dimpy had been accustomed to with his old gang. They climbed into the back room of a store. Rolled carpets everywhere indicated the nature of the establishment. The tenseness in the recruits might have affected Dimpy had he not been so wound up and irritated by what he considered the totally unnecessary ritual test in his case. The novices, yes, let them prove their fitness to join the gang. He’d been a fully qualified gang member and chapter deldar, young as he was.
A fat Rapa with mangy feathers looked them over with his beak high. He sniffed. “You know what you have to do. Do not return until you are successful. On no account return here if you are followed.” He touched the dagger at his waist. “Remember.”
One by one the urchins left the shop to join up at a discreet distance. When it was Dimpy’s turn he felt at once the strangeness of an alien place and the familiarity of crowded streets filled with people bustling about their daily lives. The clamor of people chaffering and laughing and shouting beat at him. The clatter of hooves and the grinding of bronze rimmed wheels added a touch of unreality to a lad brought up in the dens below. The air — ah, the sweet, sweet air of Kregen!
The breeze blew cleanly, scented with baking bread and cakes and the juices of fruits, sullied only slightly by the coarser smells of commerce. The air tasted good to young Dimpy.
The Hill of Dancing Ghosts was also known as Barter Hill and whilst the folk up here might not be the great and lordly ones they were well fed and clothed and walked with confident steps. Their slaves and servants, of course, did not share these attributes.
The aspirant gang members moved into their pre-arranged groups slinking as they had been taught to merge and become invisible among the slaves, eyes downcast. Dimpy owned to a genuine feeling of pleasure that Big Balla stood at his elbow.
Splitting one from the other as they trod ways they had never seen before save in the scratched markings in the dust of their den, the novices penetrated deeper into the clustered buildings of the Hill of Barter. Other young lads with respectable clothes, the Perfume Patrol of Oxonium, dashed past. Crowds jostled everywhere. Smells floated in the warm air, varying from one street and bazaar to the next. Dimpy rescinded his original decision to get this whole farce over with as quickly as possible. He was fully aware that Sleed would be keeping a very personal and hostile eye on him, so he decided to make the cramph wait. He kept to the shady sides of the streets, head bowed in the universal servitude of the slave, eyes picking up everything that went on.
From the corner of a plaza he saw one of the gang members over the way sneak up to the rear of a self-important-looking Fristle. Lolalee was quick. Her curved knife flashed once in the lights of the suns. Then she was running fleet as a hare with the sword she had slashed from its hangings already concealed under the rags clothing her thin body. The Fristle swung about, his cat-face mean, and began yelling. By the time that happened and the crowd started to think of pursuit, Lolalee had vanished.
“Well done,” said Big Balla, softly.
“I like her style.”
“There’s Staky over there looking — looking unhappy. The idiot’s dithering. You be careful, Dimpy.” With that, she was off.
From his knowledge of the city and this Contour, Dimpy knew the next square was the Kyro of Nath the Haggler. The platz was busy, its stalls well patronized. Dimpy rounded the corner to see Sleed running towards him holding out a sword hilt-first. Instinctively Dimpy took the weapon into his fist and Sleed, without a word, hared off.
Dimpy did not, just did not, believe what happened next.
The big, ugly and altogether unpleasant Kataki to whom Sleed spoke reacted at once. From the crowds a shrill cry shocked up.
“My sword! Thief! Thief!”
The Kataki ran lumberingly for Dimpy.
Without thinking, Dimpy threw down the sword and ran.
If you think my short sojourn in the mysterious continent of Balintol gave me an understanding of that exotic land then you are completely misinformed. The world of Kregen abounds with remarkable tales of Balintol. In the bazaars and at the corners of public buildings you can always find storytellers with their clusters of gawpers bending close. The fables of Balintol are among the perennial favorites of Kregen.
Just at the moment I was cautiously following a Rapa thief along the crowded Avenue of Lochrivarn trying not to lose him and at the same time prevent his cunning dark eyes from spotting what I was up to. Where you have classes so very far apart in wealth you have thieves, or so it seems on Kregen as on Earth. The Rapa’s accomplice, a mangy-appearing Fristle, had snatched Tiri’s purse as she’d been about to pay for a trifle in the Souk of Laces. The Rapa had received the purse with such calm aplomb that no one could possibly imagine him involved in anything remotely illegal. As for the catman, he’d used a slender blade to cut the purse strings and flicked his tail to snatch it. That tail possessed a cunning little bronze hook attachment strapped to it in place of the fashionable dagger. Oh, yes, an accomplished pair of cutpurses, these two. Also, the ancient racial animosity between Rapa and Fristle, so common when I’d first arrived on Kregen, was dying down as this double-act so eloquently proved.
The thief slipped across the avenue with a sudden dart that took him beyond a passing string of calsanys. Not wishing to upset these patient animals and suffer the noisome results I scuttled across abaft the last one’s tail, narrowly avoiding an imperious fellow astride a much-decorated zorca, and reached the far side. The dratted Rapa thief was not visible among the passing throngs.
Useless to curse, the fellow was a master of his craft. All the same, I did not feel inclined to abandon my pursuit.
Anyway, I said to myself, I needed some exercise after the last few weeks of inaction. All hell was due to break out in the country of Tolindrin, and the city of Oxonium, as the capital, was like to receive more than its share, that seemed obvious, by Vox. Carrying on at a brisk pace and looking as far ahead through the crowds as possible I could still see no sign of the thief. Barter Hill tended to be more crowded and confused than many of the Hills of Oxonium by reason of the multitude of markets traditionally setting up shop here. The noises were not unpleasantly clamorous and the smells were kept down by the Perfume Patrol. These lads went around spraying scents and disinfectants, their services paid for by a city levy on the stallholders and shopkeepers.
Among all this hullabaloo, where had the dratted fellow got himself to?
The avenue debouched onto a sizeable square, the Kyro of Nath the Haggler. The twin Suns of Scorpio slanted their emerald and ruby fires down onto the mass of humanity busy bargaining, peddling, swindling and making livings varying from fairly honest to downright villainous.
Perhaps because my senses had been heightened by detecting a couple of professional thieves at work, I noticed at once what was going on at the corner of the adjacent street.
A young lad, an apim like me, sidled with exquisite casualness alongside a portly and gesticulating fellow haggling over the purchase of a length of azure silk. The vendor, narrow of eye and hooked of nose, kept one of those eyes constantly swiveling. Both vendor and purchaser must have been well aware of the provenance of the merchandise, by Krun. All the same, hook-nose’s roving eye failed to detect the ragged lad’s activities.
With a movement fluid and fast the rascal cut the leathers of the purchaser’s sword. So engrossed in the enjoyable business, the portly one failed to notice at once. The short sword vanished into the ragged robes swathing the boy and he turned to run.
He must have seen the Kataki at the same time I did.
Katakis are bad news at the best of times. For this sword snatcher, now was a very bad time, a very very bad time. The Whiptail did not wear uniform but a simple dark shamlak and I surmised if he was not a member of the City Watch up here to buy he could be a hired thug employed to protect a local business. He’d just love to grip his fist into the lad’s frayed collar and flick him a few times — hard — with the flat of the dagger strapped to his tail.
A second young lad, slightly smaller but just as ragged as the first, rounded the corner. The youngster with the stolen sword moved swiftly. Crossing to the newcomer he whipped out the sword and thrust it forward, hilt first. The sword was taken in that instinctive way anyone will grab at an unsharpened object poked at them. As I watched, by now fascinated at these goings on, the lads parted. The boy with the sword stood there looking at the blade in what I could clearly see was stupefaction, surprising though that seemed to me in the circumstances. The thief ran across to the Kataki guard.
At that juncture the rotund purchaser of dubious azure silk woke up to the fact that his sword no longer weighed down his belt. Immediately he set up a-braying.
“My sword! Thief! Thief!”
I shook my head. This was just life as it was lived in Oxonium in Tolindrin in the continent of Balintol on the planet Kregen four hundred light years from the world of my birth and no business of mine.
The sword thief jabbered briefly and excitedly to the Kataki.
He pointed.
The lad holding the sword stood there for two heartbeats with that accusing finger pointing at him. Then he threw down the sword and started running as the Whiptail lumbered for him.
The real sword snatcher stood still and even at this distance the look of satisfaction on his swarthy face repelled me. After the theft he could have dodged off with absolute security with no one the wiser until the shout of “Thief!” went up. Instead, he had deliberately framed the second youth and dropped him right in it up to the ears.
As the boy raced swiftly in my direction finding clear spaces among the crowds with eel like grace, sometimes hidden from view by bartering figures, the look on his face was quite different from what one would expect. By Vox, yes! There was no fear there, no hunted look of terror. His expression was one of such fury as to scare off a leem. He raged with anger as he leaped along pursued by the Kataki guard.
The cry of ‘Stop Thief!’ rang as loudly and as many times in the souks and markets of Oxonium as of any other bustling commercial city of Kregen. Chaffering people looked around smartly, hands flying to purses. Fists gripped sword and dagger hilts.
The athleticism of the victim of this obscure plot to have him arrested proved instructive. He hurdled stalls, ducked under awnings, swerved like a veritable racing zorca around knots of folk all staring whichways. Those fables of Balintol recurred to me in the famous story which opens with just such a young lad flying through a crowded marketplace clutching a chicken by the legs, his warning colors flaming before his inward eye. I admired this young rapscallion’s dash and still that dark expression of fury drew his face into a compressed knot.
A man wearing a green shamlak whisked out his rapier. The fellow’s spiky ears stuck up almost to the crown of his head. An Ift, he regarded himself as sharp and knowing enough to strike shrewd bargains in this bustling city market as of living comfortably in the forests of his home, that was perfectly clear. His rapier slashed.
The tip sliced down the lad’s thigh as he swerved a fraction too late.
He did not cry out.
“You blintz!” yelled the Ift. He waved the rapier with its point bloodied. But he did not run in pursuit.
Dark redness stained down the boy’s thigh. The scratch, light though it was, tumbled him off balance and he staggered helplessly into a wheeled stall. This immediately upended and sprayed everything with ripe vegetables. A little Och woman threw up her apron in dismay.
When I next caught sight of the fugitive he had a patch of blood on his forehead and he limped. Yet, still he eluded them all.
The Ift’s act had been a trifle over the top, I fancied. Some of these highbrow forest folk can be a mite spiteful. The youngster’s tribulations were not yet over. Trying to maintain his pace he skidded askew a wet patch and where normally he would have recovered with natural grace and gone haring on, now the two wounds troubled him enough to make him lose his balance. He skidded and toppled full length into a calsany mess strewing the ground. The effort he made to spring up instantly told on him. He disappeared from my view past a line of stalls. I let out a little sigh.