“For Church’s sake,” the youth pleaded, “lower your voice.”
Sheltered beneath a rain cape of violet-gray charged slickertic, the young man who had been idly observing the noisy byplay of buyer and seller licked the last sweet traces of thisk-cake honey from his fingers. Then he rose and sauntered toward the quarreling pair.
Slightly under average height, with smoothly arcing cheekbones and deeply tanned skin, he did not present a particularly eye-catching figure. A thatch of curly red hair roofed his skull, hair the color of a field of fireweed on the open tundra. It tumbled over his forehead and ears. Only the odd movement of something under the right side of his rain cape indicated anything out of the ordinary, but the object—whatever it was—was too well concealed to be identified.
“. . . and if there’s nothing better you can say,” the old woman was raving on, “then you’d better—”
“Excuse me,” a quiet voice interrupted. “I’d say thirty-five credits for that bracelet is a fair price.”
Mouth agape in puzzlement, the young husband stared, uncomprehending, at the slim youth, and wondered why a native should interfere on his behalf. The old vendor turned a furious gaze on the brazen interloper.
“I don’t know who you are, sir,” she rumbled dangerously, “but if you don’t mind your own business I’ll—” She stopped in mid-sentence, her mouth frozen in an O of shock.
“You’ll do what, old woman?” the youngster asked. “Send me to bed without supper?”
Sensing an advantage without knowing its origin, the dazed bracelet-buyer was quick to act. “Thirty-five credits is really a fair price, as he says.”
“Yes . . . I . . .” The old woman, appearing a little stunned herself, hardly seemed to hear the offer. “Thirty-five, then, and be done with it.”
“You’re certain?” The outworlder, now sure of his purchase, was anxious to ingratiate himself with the seller. Since he was a good deal bigger than the new arrival, he took a step forward. “If this boy is intimidating you, I’d be glad to . . .”
Something moved and partially emerged from cape folds. It was leathery, thin, and brightly colored. Without actually recognizing the object, the outworld tourist nonetheless had an immediate impression of serpentine lethality. His hand proffered his credit slip instead of closing into a fist.
“Here’s your money, then.”
Mesmerized by the caped figure, the old woman mechanically processed the credit slip through her cardmeter; she handed it back to the buyer without even troubling to check the reference number.
“The bracelet,” the young visitor urged impatiently.
“Hmmm? Oh, yes.” She handed it over. Flushed with pleasure at his imagined bargain, the tall tourist vanished into the milling crowd of humans and aliens.
Slowly the old woman studied the unimposing figure standing before her. Then she abruptly threw thin but still muscular arms around him and squeezed tightly. “Flinx!” she shouted exuberantly. “Flinx, boy, you’ve come home!” She shook the lanky youth out of sheer joy, for the familiar feel of him. Jostled, Pip the minidrag shifted uncomfortably on Flinx’s shoulder and attempted to tolerate the roughhousing with fine reptilian indifference.
“For a little while, Mother Mastiff,” the youth replied quietly. He grinned and nodded in the direction of the departed outworlder. “I see you’re having as much fun as ever.”
“Fun!” she snorted derisively, making an obscene gesture in the general direction of the marketplace into which her customer had disappeared. “Pathetic, most of them. They suck the enjoyment from trading. Sometimes I wonder how the Commonwealth hangs together, with cement like that.” A triangular head flanked by eyes of fire peeked out from beneath the slickertic. The old woman eyed it with evident distaste. “See you’re still dragging that creature around with you.”
Pip responded with a nasty hiss. There had never been any love lost between Mother Mastiff and the minidrag.
“Many times I think it’s Pip who drags me, Mother,” the youth argued.
“Well, no matter perversions I can’t cure you of, boy. At least you’re here.” She whacked him on the left shoulder in mock anger. “Here you are . . . you good-for-nothing, forgetful, heartless lump of immature meat! Where have you been to? It’s been over a year. A year, paragon of ingrates! Not a tridee tape, not a card, nothing!”
“I am sorry, Mother Mastiff,” he confessed, putting his arm around her bony shoulders. She shrugged angrily, but not hard enough to dislodge his arm. “It wasn’t that I didn’t think of you. But I was far from modern communications.”
“Ah, in trouble again?” She shook her head. “Is that the way I raised you?” He started to reply, but she cut him off hastily. “Never mind that now. Where were you? Come, tell me back at the shop.”
They started down the street. Aromatic scents and the cries of Drallar’s inner marketplace filled the air around them. “Come, boy, tell me, where were you, that you couldn’t let me know if your worthless carcass was still intact?”
Flinx considered his response carefully. He had good reasons for wanting to keep his whereabouts of the past year secret. What Mother Mastiff didn’t know she could never reveal.
“I took a job, sort of,” he finally explained.
She gaped at him. “You . . . a job?”
“I’m not lying,” he argued uncomfortably, unable to meet those disbelieving eyes. “I set my own hours and work pretty much as I want to.”
“Now I just might, just might believe you. What kind of job?”
Again he glanced away evasively. “I can’t say exactly. I’m sort of a teacher, a private tutor.”
“A teacher,” she echoed, evidently impressed. “A private tutor, eh?” She let out a snicker. “What is it you teach? Pickpocketing, breaking and entering, or general theft?”
“Now what would I know about such things?” he countered in astonishment. “Is that how you brought me up?” They both chuckled. “No, I’m kind of a general-purpose instructor in basics.”
“I see” was all she said this time, so he was spared the difficulty of explaining what kind of basics he taught, and to whom. Especially to whom; it was not time for Mother Mastiff or anyone else to know about the Ulru-Ujurrians, the race he had adopted and which had adopted him. The race that could turn this corner of creation inside out.
“Never mind me,” he insisted, staring at her. “Here I take money and set you up in one of the fanciest shop districts of Drallar, with top-flight stock, and how do I find you? Like this!” He indicated her ragged clothes, torn skirt and overblouse, the ugly muffin of a hat perched precariously on long, straggly hair. “Out in the street in the rain and damp, clad in scraps.”
Now it was Mother Mastiff’s turn to glance away. They turned up a cobblestone street and entered a less frenetic section of the city.
“I got itchy nervous, boy, sitting in that fancy store all day. I missed the streets, the contacts, the noise—”
“The arguments and shouting,” Flinx finished for her.
“And the gossip,” she went on. “Especially the gossip.” She eyed him defiantly. “At my age it’s one of the few disreputable delights I haven’t grown too old for.”
Flinx indicated the street ahead. “So that’s why we’re not headed for the shop?”
“No, not that stuffy snuffbox, not on a beautiful day like today.” Flinx studied the gray, overcast sky, blinked at the ever-present mist, but said nothing. Actually, it was a rather nice day for Drallar. It wasn’t raining. He had been home for two weeks and had yet to see the sun.
“Let’s go to Dramuse’s stall. I’ll treat you to lunch.”
Flinx expressed surprise. “You buy someone else lunch? Still, after the profit you made on that bracelet . . .”
“Pfagh! I could have gotten that callow stripling up to fifty credits easy. Knew it the second he set eyes on that bracelet. Then you had to come along.”
“One of these days, Mother, you’ll go too far
with some knowledgeable offworlder and he’ll turn you in to the King’s police. I broke in because he seemed like a decent man on his mating flight, and I didn’t want to see him cheated too badly.”
“Shows what you know,” she snapped back. “He wasn’t as ignorant as he made you think. You weren’t there to see his eyes light up when I mentioned the street my shop is on and told him that’s where it was stolen from. He knew what he was about, all right. Did you see him shout for the police? No, he was cuddling his hot property like any decent good citizen. Here.” She stopped and gestured beyond a gate to tables covered with brightly dyed canopies.
They had entered the last of the concentric rings that formed Drallar’s marketplace. This outermost ring consisted entirely of restaurants and food stalls. They ranged from tiny one-being operations with primitive wood-fired stoves to expensive closed-in establishments in which delicacies imported from the farthest corners of the Commonwealth were served on utensils of faceted veridian. Here the air currents stalled, weaving languorous zephyrs of overpowering potency.
They entered a restaurant that used neither wood nor veridian plates and was somewhere between the opulent and the barely digestible in terms of menu. After taking seats, they ordered food from a creature who looked like a griffin with tentacles instead of legs. Then Mother Mastiff exchanged her gentle accusations for more serious talk.
“Now, boy, I know you went off to look for your natural parents.” It was a sign of her strength that she could voice the subject without stumbling. “You’ve been gone for over a year. You must have learned something.”
Flinx leaned back and was silent for a moment. Pip wiggled out from beneath the cape folds, and Flinx scratched the flying snake under its chin. “As far as I know,” he finally responded tersely, “they’re both long dead.” Pip shifted uneasily, suddenly sensitive to his master’s somber mood. “My mother . . . at least I know who she was. A Lynx, a concubine. I also found a half sister and when I found her, I ended up having to kill her.”
Food arrived, spicy and steaming. They ate quietly for a while. Despite the heavy spices, the food tasted flat to both of them.
“Mother dead, half sister dead,” Mother Mastiff grunted. “No other relatives?” Flinx shook his head curtly. “What about your natural father?”
“Couldn’t find a thing about him worth following up.”
Mother Mastiff wrestled with some private demon, and finally murmured, “You’ve run far and long, boy. But there’s still a possibility.”
He glanced sharply at her. “Where?”
“Here. Yes, even here.”
“Why,” he said quietly, “didn’t you ever tell me?”
Mother Mastiff shrugged once. “I saw no reason to mention it. It’s an obscure chance, boy, a waste of time, an absurd thought.”
“I’ve spent a year pursuing absurdities,” he reminded her. “Give, Mother.”
“When I bought you in the market,” she began easily, as if discussing any ordinary transaction, “it was a perfectly ordinary sale. Still don’t know what possessed me to waste good money.”
Flinx stifled a grin. “Neither do I. I don’t follow you though.”
“Find the dealer who sold you, Flinx. Perhaps he or she is still in business. There’s always the chance the firm kept decent records. I wasn’t too concerned with your pedigree. Might be there’s some additional information in their records that wasn’t provided with the bill of sale. Not likely, now. But all I was interested in was whether or not you were diseased. You looked it, but you weren’t.” She sipped from a mug. “Sometimes those slavers don’t give out all the information they get. They’ve got their reasons.”
“But how can I trace the firm that sold me?”
“City records,” she snuffled, wiping liquid from her chin. “There would have been a tax on the business. Try the King’s tax records for the year I bought you. Waste of time, though.”
“I’ve plenty of time now,” he said cryptically. “I’ll try it and gladly.” He reached out across the table and patted a cheek with the look and feel of tired suede. “But for the rest of the day, let’s be mother and son.”
She slapped the caressing hand away and fussed at him . . . but softly.
Chapter Two
The following day dawned well. The morning rain was light, and the cloud cover actually showed some signs of clearing. Flinx was spared the shocking sight of sunlight in Drallar when the clouds thickened after he started toward the vast, rambling expanse of official buildings. They clustered like worker ants around the spines of their queen, whose body was the King’s palace.
Damp, cool weather invigorated Flinx. Moist air felt familiar in his lungs; it was the air of the only home he had ever known. Or could remember, he corrected himself.
He stopped to chat with two side-street vendors, people he had known since childhood. Yet at first neither of them recognized him. Had he changed so much in one year? Was he so different at seventeen from what he had been at sixteen? True, he had gone through a great deal in that year. But when he looked in the mirror it was no stranger he saw. No fresh lines marred his smooth brown skin, no great tragedy welled out of cocoa eyes. Yet to others he was somehow not the same.
Possibly the crashing kaleidoscope that was Drallar simply made people forget. Resolutely he shut out the shouts and excitement of the city, strode past intriguing stalls and sights while ignoring the implorings of hawkers and merchants. No more time to waste on such childish diversions, he instructed himself. He had responsibilities now. As the leader of an entire race in the Great Game he must put aside infantile interests.
Ah, but the child in him was still strong, and it was a hard thing to do, this growing up . . .
Like a granite ocean the myriad walls of Old Drallar crashed in frozen waves against the sprawling bastion of bureaucracy which was the administrative center of Drallar and of the entire planet Moth. Modern structures piled haphazardly into medieval ones. Beyond towered the King’s palace, spires and minarets and domes forming a complex resembling a gigantic diatom. Like much of the city, the building looked as if it had been designed by a computer programmed with the Arabian Nights instead of up-to-date technologies.
Flinx was crossing the outermost ring of stalls when two striking figures passed in front of him—a man and woman, both slightly taller than Flinx but otherwise physically unimpressive. What was striking about them was the reaction they provoked in others. People took pains to avoid the couple, even to avoid looking in their direction. But they did so carefully, to be certain of not giving offense.
The couple were Qwarm.
Barely tolerated by the Commonwealth government, the Qwarm were a widely dispersed clan of professional enforcers, whose services ranged from collecting overdue debts to assassination. Despite being shunned socially, the clan had prospered with the growth of the Commonwealth. Since the beginning of time, there had always been a market for the services they chose to provide.
Flinx knew that the two walking past him were related in some fashion to every other Qwarm in the Commonwealth. Both wore skin-tight jet-black jumpsuits ending in black ankle boots. Those boots, he knew, contained many things besides feet. A decorative cape of black and rust-red streamers fluttered from each collar to the waist, like the tail of an alien bird.
Having heard of the Qwarm but never having had the opportunity to see one, Flinx paused at a small booth. Pretending to inspect a copper-crysacolla pitcher, he surreptitiously eyed the two retreating strangers.
Standing behind them now, he could no longer see their faces, but he knew that the bodies inside the jumpsuits would be as hairless as their heads were beneath the black skullcaps. Red foil designs marked each cap, the only decorative touch aside from the streamers on their clothing. Various pouches and containers hung from each black belt—pouches and containers which held a great many varieties of death, Flinx knew. If he remembered correctly, each belt would be joined in front by a buckle cut from a single orange-
red vanadium crystal, which would be inlaid with a gold skull-and-crossbones. Their uniform was sufficient to identify them.
The crowd parted for them without panic. To run might be to give offense. No one desired to give offense to a Qwarm.
Flinx took a step away from the booth—and froze. Unbidden, as it often was, his talent had unexpectedly given him an image. The image was of incipient murder. He hadn’t sought the information. The most frustrating feature of his peculiar abilities was that they often functioned most effectively when he had no need of them.
Instantly he knew that the man and woman were a husband-wife team and that their quarry was very near. He tried for a picture of the quarry and, as he half expected, saw nothing.
Even more bewildering were the waves of curiosity and confusion that emanated from the Qwarm couple. Flinx had heard that the Qwarm were never puzzled about anything, least of all anything related to their work. Someone was nearby whom they had to murder, and this puzzled them. Strange. What could so puzzle a pair of professional killers?
Flinx cast about for an explanation and found only a mental blank. He was human and only human once more. So he found himself torn between common sense and his damnably intense curiosity. If only that powerful sensation of uncertainty from the couple hadn’t leaped into his mind. Nothing should puzzle a Qwarm so. Nothing! Cause concern, yes, because murder was still illegal and if caught they could be tried and punished by the authorities.
But confusion? Impossible!
Suddenly Flinx found himself walking not toward the receding solidity of the administration center but back into the depths of the sprawling, chaotic marketplace. The black-clad pair were easy to follow. They were utterly devoid of suspicion. Qwarm stalked others; no one followed a Qwarm.