Morlock nodded, and suddenly the pale werewolf's mottled skin flushed dark. "I forgot-"
"Never mind it, old friend," said Morlock, and Hlupnafenglu tugged playfully on Hrutnefdhu's ear.
Apetown looked busier than Dogtown, anyway. The ground floor of many a tower was given over to workshops of craftsmen: cobblers, smiths, glass blowers, bakers, butchers, launderers.
"Hands," said Morlock aloud. He had been trying to settle in his mind the difference between Dogtown and Apetown, and he realized it all came down to hands.
Hlupnafenglu looked bemused, but Hrutnefdhu instantly understood him. "Yes, you're right. It's a more prosperous place: there's more work people can do. It may not be work that gains anyone great bite, but it's work that other people will pay to have done."
"And when the sun goes down-"
"Yes, the shutters will drop here. Dogtown is livelier then. There's singing and shows. And if you want a thug for hire, you go to Dogtown, day or night."
They walked on through the warm hazy morning.
When they left the rumble of Apetown behind them, they came to a wide-open space between the brooding hulk of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon and the staggered cliff sides of Wuruyaaria. It was paved in stones that alternated black and white in no clear pattern. It was cut off from direct sunlight, and would be until the sun rose considerably higher in the murky sky.
"Here we are," said the pale werewolf. He looked around the Shadow Market, and his face twisted with annoyance. "Not too many vendors, and some of them I know are quacks."
Morlock was looking, too. At a booth near the market entrance, a male with the torso of a young boy and the limbs and face of a young wolf was having his ears pinched by a long-nosed saturnine male with a gray gown and a conical cap adorning his day shape. A mature female, perhaps the boy's mother, was standing over them; she was fully human except for her long lupine jaws and somewhat hairy face. She was asking in Moonspeech how much the fee would be and the vendor was asking in Sunspeech how she proposed to pay.
In the next space over, a wolf-faced young man with immaculately styled hair was listening to a group of young women in the day shape sing a song in Moonspeech. If a wolf face can look dubious, he looked dubious. Morlock was no judge of songs in Moonspeech, but he thought he had heard some broken notes.
Next over was a booth full of red-ribboned scrolls and velvet-bound books. Its vendor was a male with a wolf's body, human hands and feet, and a droopy semihuman face.
"I'll just step over and have a word with Liuunurriu, there," the pale werewolf said. "He doesn't like strangers, and it wouldn't do to look too interested so …"
Morlock nodded, and he and Hlupnafenglu drifted in the other direction.
"I think I remember Apetown," said the red werewolf abstractedly, after a few moments. "I don't remember the looks, but I remember the feel. Always hurry, hurry, hurry and fetch the bones. Fetch the bones; fetch the bones."
Morlock said nothing.
"Fetch the bones," Hlupnafenglu repeated again. "Why would people want bones?"
"For marrow," Morlock suggested. "Or soup."
"Soup!" shouted the red werewolf. "There was a great vat of it in the middle of the hut! And a great fat female who kept telling me, `Fetch the bones, yuh-yuh…. Fetch the bones, yuh-yuh….' And she said my name. Only I don't remember it now."
"You may yet."
"I hated her. I don't remember her name, but I remember the hate. I don't think she was my mother. I hated the bones, too. The stinking stupid bones. That was why. That was why. There was no soup that day. No soup, sir. No soup, ma'am. Take your no-soup and swim in it!"
The more the red werewolf remembered the angrier he seemed to get. Morlock found this interesting, but not so interesting that he failed to notice someone trying to unfasten his money pouch from his belt, craftily reaching under his left arm. He grabbed the pickpocket's extended fingers with his right hand and twisted.
The pickpocket, a strikingly flat-faced young male, screamed and fell sprawling on the ground. He had been standing unbalanced, and he didn't know enough to not draw attention when he was caught. All this marked him as an inept and inexperienced thief-which was in his favor, as far as Morlock was concerned. So Morlock released his fingers without breaking them.
His reward for this was a reproachful glare from the clumsy pickpocket as he lay on the black-and-white pavement. "You broke my fingers," he wailed, rubbing his left hand furiously with his right.
"No," said Morlock. "But I can, if you insist."
"I told you, Snellingu," said a white-haired male standing nearby, wearing dark armor with the Wuruyaaria ideogram. "Pickpocket."
"Snatch-and-grab, snatch-and-grab," irritably replied another watcher (evidently Snellingu) with a long scar on his face that cut across his lips. "You see so stupid he is being. He's being no sort of pickpocket. He's grabbing someone's cash box by now if you didn't have keep staring at him. And you are expecting me paying off the bet."
"Listen, it's my job to keep an eye on the criminal element."
"That's why you keep to be visiting your father's sister on nights-withno-moon. We all are hearing about her criminal element, if you're getting my drift."
"I do not get your drift, and you still owe me breakfast."
"You have be owing me breakfast three half-months straight and bent."
"Minus today's. That's what I'm saying. Hey, don't let him get away, Chief."
"I'm not your chief," Morlock replied. "And he can go where he likes."
The young male, scrambling to his feet, glared suspiciously at Morlock.
"I like that!" said the white-haired watcher. "We come here to defend you from this dangerous criminal and you-"
"Take him and bake him," said Morlock. "But not on my evidence. The young citizen tripped and fell."
"No pickpocket!" said scar-faced Snellingu, catching on suddenly. "The citizen is saying so! And thus I am owing you jack-minus-jack and you owing me breakfast, today, tomorrow, some more days."
"This citizen smells like a never-wolf to me."
"You are smelling like a snake trying to weasel his way out of a dead-dog bet."
"That metaphor stinks worse than this guy does."
"You are stinking worse than-"
"Listen, if I buy you a meatcake will you stop with the similes? I get enough crappy rhetoric from politicians this year if I want it, which I don't."
"Two meatcakes."
"That's two breakfasts, then. I never ate more than one meatcake at a time on your pad."
"You are all the time drinking that rotten milk-drink, which I am never drinking, but I am all the time paying for-"
The squabbling peace officers wandered off across the Shadow Market.
Morlock looked at the young citizen, who had not yet moved away. His face was hollowed out with hunger; rags hung on him as if he were a scare crow made of sticks. Morlock had seen children starved to death, and this child was starving to death.
"You can't steal," Morlock said coolly. "You won't work. I suppose now comes the begging."
The young citizen tore at his hair and spat at Morlock's feet. "I work! I work! I work for three days running messages for Neiuluniu the bookie. He says come back tomorrow; I'll pay you. Come back tomorrow, Lakkasulakku; come back tomorrow, Lakkasulakku. Today I say pay me the three days or I don't run messages. So he has his boys throw me out. You think he pays me? You think he ever pays me?"
It might have been a lie, but Morlock didn't think so. Anyway, it didn't matter. He said to Hlupnafenglu, "Take the young citizen, Lakkasulakku or whatever his name is, to the outliers and get him some work. Better buy him some food on the way-have you got any coin?"
The red werewolf, his good cheer restored, looked wryly at him. "Enough. You'll be all right?"
Morlock opened his right hand and shrugged. Hlupnafenglu punched him farewell and walked off, the suspicious-looking youngster in tow.
Morlock turned and saw a crow sitting in the middle of the Shadow Market, looking at him. Morlock walked over to talk to the bird.