“A friend oov mine from Friesing’s World,” said the mahogany woman, “he mentioned a stoory from Oold ’Saken aboot a Twisting Stoon. I wonder if that’s the same oobject.”
Anne asked how the story went, but the woman didn’t know. “It was joost in passing. I think he said it was a scepter, maybe.”
“The scepter of King Stonewall?” Anne named the prehuman king that Johnny Mgurk had mentioned.
The other woman shook her head. “He never sayd.”
“What difference,” grumbled January, still intent on his own grievances. “It’s all fantasy anyway.”
And yet the stone had moved and turned and twisted. That much was no fantasy.
Evening had gotten on and the streets outside the Bar had dissolved into patterns of darkness broken only intermittently by streetlamps or the cyclopean headlights of auto-rickshaws shuttling between the Bar, the Hostel, and other, less comfortably named places.
The Corner of Jehovah was a ramshackle collection of buildings sprawled behind the Bar and permeated by a circulatory system of narrow and twisted alleys. It was here that the First Ships had landed and ecofast dwellings had been built for each of the crew on half-acre lots. There had been a river running through it at the time; but it was an underground sewer now, and acted the part. The original crew housing had been modified over the generations with additions and extensions and sublets as the population grew. Each addition was more slapdash than its predecessor, and it seemed as if a building were a growing thing anxious to maximize the area into which it would one day collapse. It was said that every building in the Corner was in the process of going up or coming down, and the only way to tell which was by the degree of entropy in the construction materials piled beside it. The Corner was a warren now, a topological network of unknown connectivity. The original lots were buried beneath the jumble. Boards and runways coupled rooftops; tunnels linked basements—and not always the ones expected. Occasional flyovers leaped across street or gulli from the mid-story of one building to a mid-story of another. To enter one edifice in the Corner was to enter all.
Not that entering was a good idea.
From the rooftops, the lights of Port Jehovah and of the capital itself seemed a distant galaxy. The man who called himself the Fudir danced along the skyway of planks and rickety bridges with a squirrel’s cunning, tracking the figures stumbling through the moonlit alleys below. “Big dikh,” he muttered to himself, “but the man’s my key.”
Sweeney the Red had stopped at the alleyway’s entrance and, pushing his charge deeper into the narrow street, turned to face the way they had come.
“Murkh,” the watching man said. “Fool. That’s Amir Naith’s Gulli. A dead end.” And it would be a dead end, too, he saw. The red giant pulled a long knife from his belt. “I wonder if that was the least conspicuous man they could have sent.”
Or had he been sent with his conspicuousness in mind? There were layers here.
The Fudir scurried to the corner of the meat-dukān that overlooked the intersection, and from it he studied their back-trail. Yes. There was the third man, minus now his colorful shirt and flashy jewelry, moving easily from shadow to shadow past the shuttered shops and kiosks that lined Menstrit. This late in the evening, there was little traffic, only an occasional auto-rickshaw to momentarily spot-light the hunt. At each cross street and gulli, the pursuer paused and looked briefly into the deeper shadows of the narrow lanes.
The watcher considered the red-haired giant. “If you don’t want him to know which gulli you’ve gone down,” he whispered, “don’t stand in the mouth of it like a hotel doorman.”
The pursuer came finally to Amir Naith’s Gulli. He and the giant made eye contact, and the giant gestured into the alleyway with a toss of his head.
“So, it’s like that,” the Fudir decided as Sweeney stepped aside. “I hope you were well paid for the treachery.”
The fine-featured man turned a little as he passed Sweeney, and the redhead jerked three times and slumped to the ground.
“And paid quickly, too,” the watcher muttered, not without some satisfaction. Sweeney had been a fool to expect any other coin. The Fudir pulled a whistle from his cloak and gave three short blasts. Then, throwing his hood up, he clambered down a ladder affixed to the side of Stefan Matsumoto’s pawn-dukān. As he descended he began to sing.
Hunter and prey had frozen alike at the sound of the whistle. Now, seeing a drunk stagger out of the dim end of the alley, the latter retreated into a darkened archway, while the former resumed his stalk. Dropping the song, the Fudir closed with him, one clawlike hand outstretched. “Bhik, bhik,” he pleaded. “A few coppers, tide me over?”
“Off with you,” the man snarled. “I’ve a debt to pay.” Then he took a closer look. “What, your inheritance hasn’t come yet?” He laughed.
The Fudir affected to notice the teaser in the man’s fist. “Ayee!” he cried. “Cor! Thief! You bad man. No gelt b’long me. Very poor, me. Very poor. No shoot, please!”
There are several ways to deal with an armed man. One is to drop heavy objects on him from a great height. Another is to disarm him, and there is more than one way to be disarming.
“I’ve no interest in you, you filthy beggar.” The man reached out with his left to brush the Fudir aside, and in doing so, he lowered his teaser.
As fast as a black mamba striking, the Fudir seized the assassin’s right wrist and gave it a sudden turn. The man howled and the teaser dropped from nerveless fingers, to be kicked quickly into the shadows. There, a smaller shadow detached itself, swooped upon the gun, and ran toward the gulli-mouth.
“You broke my arm!” the assassin shouted and hauled back to punch the Fudir with his left.
A brick splashed into the mud beside him. Looking up, he saw along the rooftops on either side, silhouetted by the city-lit skies, men and women standing in unnerving silence, brandishing bricks and other objects. His gaze sought the gulli-mouth. Too far. However fast he ran, he could never escape the gulli before that deadly rain of brickbat struck. He’d chance a teaser or even a needle gun, he’d laugh at a pellet gun; but stoning was another matter.
“Not nice, call names,” the Fudir said mildly, drawing the assassin’s now-uncertain attention back to him. “No filthy, me,” the Fudir said. “No gandā. This place no b’long you-fella. You go now. Jehovah police come. Punish sinners. Swift retribution. You budmash fella. You kill man. We see. We tell him, police-fella. Lucky I no break arm, you. Only numb. Go! Jāo-jāo!”
Another brick splashed into the mud to punctuate the command.
“Who are you people? What is this place?”
The Fudir laughed. “This ‘die Ecke,’ the Corner of Jehovah. No one lives here but Terrans or by Terran permission. Go, now, while you yet live.”
Perhaps it was the sudden shift into Standard Gaelactic that finally broke the man’s nerve. He stared at the Fudir a moment longer, then bolted, splashing through the dank puddles and kicking empty cans and bottles and the foul detritus of rotting food from the stinking raddī-piles. Fudir watched his flight, contented. The Jehovah rectors used no sirens. They would be waiting at the mouth of Amir Naith’s Gulli with the body of Sweeney the Red and the gun that Harimanan the street urchin had delivered up to them. The Fudir did not like loose ends.
He turned and, strolling casually toward the back end of the gulli, called sweetly in a singsong voice, “Oh, Little Hugh! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”