one more draft…

“Exquisitely thrilling as this riveting banter isn’t,” Manadan prissed, “might we please hurry it along?”

“Nevermind, Jimsa,” Gupti apologized, shrugging through the grate. “It was a bad joke. Can we get our weapons?”

Jimsa eyed him suspiciously for a moment, then seemed to give up and slid back behind the crate.

“Jimsa?”

“Eh.”

Manadan took a breath, but Gupti held his hand out to wait.

“Come on, Jimsa. We need our weapons. We’re late for duty.”

“So.”

“So, we’ve got to get moving. The captain is already angry at us for being late.”

“And whose fault was that, again?” Manadan’s stage whisper, full of snidely false curiosity, covered Jimsa’s response.

“What did you say, Jimsa?”

Jimsa mad a rough barking noise “Jes’ like I sprek. Body don’t care.” His pale arm flopped above the crate and waved dismissively. “Gan whicha.”

Gupti glared at Manadan, but kept his voice quiet.

“Jimsa, please. I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

“Nuh-ah.”

Manadan opened his mouth again, his eyebrows tight with frustration, but Gupti covered it with his hand. Leaning in close, he whispered very quickly and very firmly. “Go wait upstairs!” Then he turned the little man around like a doll and pushed him slightly less than gently back down the corridor.

Manadan did not reply, and he only paused slightly, before moving off the way they’d come, Gupti returned his attention to the grate and the reticent armorer.

“Yes I am listening, Jimsa. Please, just give us our weapons and we’ll leave you alone, okay?”

“Alone?” Dry breath rattled in a dry throat. “Alone?” His face appeared once more beside the crate and his round eyes fixed Gupti squarely. “We’re never alone.”

Gupti leaned back in mild surprise. Jimsa was not entirely squarely tied on, as it was said, but solitude was his one known pleasure. That was partly why he’d been assigned here. He hated being bothered only slightly less than he hated doing what others told him to do. The only thing he hated worse than those two things, however, was not being able to complain to someone about them.

The other reason he was bound within these stony confines was an awe-inspiring knowledge of weaponry. Or a disturbing knowledge, depending upon one’s point of view. As the King’s Guards had seen it when they had installed him some twenty years past, Jimsa was the perfect armorer. His background, whatever it had been, ensured that their weapons were always cared for, always prepared, and always lethal. As the local populace saw it, Jimsa was a bogeyman, an unseen hand whose works wreathed the barracks as a bristling reminder of an angrier past.

“That is an interesting point. Hm. The relationship of one observer to the next may well yield some effect upon their recollections. Hm. Not unlike the communal consciousness of most land and sea herd creatures, like the nakk, the hippocampus, and the southern gazelle.”

He reached up distractedly to scratch Hazhi’s head. “But not the northern ones. Interesting. Dhal Mhekai’s last work, Sahng-yi nye jong, conjectured the psychological variation as dependent upon the environmental differences of the two sub-species, noting the obvious lack of natural predators in that northern savannah, as contrasted against the more typical balance of hunter and hunted south of Agden’s Spines.”

“Unfortunately for us all, however, they are now extinct thanks to the unchecked fanatical religious idiocy of the Al-Haema, and Dhal Mhekai, himself supposedly gored to death, never did logically prove the source of said differentiation, which!” he said, snapping upright and continuing his walk with renewed purpose, “brings us back to the very problem at hand.”

This time, Gupti sighed loudly as he rolled his eyes.

“Now you’re simply being boorish.”

“Now I’m simply being bored.”

“Well then.” Manadan gave an exaggerated flourish, a moment before Gupti came to a stop on his own. “Perhaps our friend the armorer might be able to pique your interest with something less…complicated?”

Gupti, slightly ashamed at interrupting Manadan so blatantly, was only vaguely surprised that Manadan had kept precise track of where they were amidst all that rambling, down to the very last step.

In front of them, recessed within the stone walls, a gate of solid, pitted black iron stood imperviously. Almost three hundred years ago, the King’s Guards had this gate had commissioned the creation of the been sunk into the walls At chest height, a grid of steel bars had been set into the massive thickness, allowing an interrupted view of the barrack’s nearly empty weapons storehouse. Beneath the bars, a similar square had been cut, though the space was blocked by a scratched and gouged plate of steel on the far side.

It did not, however, allow a view of ornery and put upon young Jimsa, the Watch Armorer and Keeper of the Keys, and professional complainer, despite his meagre years.

Gupti rapped his knuckles upon the lip of the grated window. “Jimsa?”

“Eh.” A toneless sound, deadened by distance.

“Can we get our weapons?”

“Whassapoint?” Jimsa mumbled.

Gupti couldn’t resist. “Actually, that’s just it: we don’t have a point.”

Manadan groaned audibly and squeezed the bridge of his noise.

“Eh?” Confusion.

“Points,” Gupti prodded. “Get it? Points? Weapons?”

Jimsa leaned into view from around the side of a stout crate near the far end of the armory. Thin-limbed, pale-skinned and large-eyed, the Watch Armorer clearly hadn’t seen daylight since he’d been entombed in his current position, and his oil-stained leather jerkin was all that covered his ghost-like frame. Long, sparse hair hung in stringy lengths down away from his questioning face as he peered around the crate. “Whatchou sprekking, Gupti?”

4

Manadan’s hand lightly traced the outer wall as they walked down the carved stone stairs that led first to the armory and then to the cells.

“No sleep again last night, then.”

Manadan sucked sharply at his teeth. “What of it?”

Gupti rolled his eyes. “Nevermind.”

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Roll your eyes. It’s very rude to use visual cues when communicating with someone who has lost his sight.”

Gupti shook his head slightly. “Just because you can hear me sigh or exhale or whatever it is I just did, doesn’t mean I rolled my eyes.”

Manadan raised his cane slightly in acknowledgement. “True,” he turned his head slightly, “but, in point of fact, you did.”

“Prove it.” It was a small risk, but worth taking. The more Manadan talked, the sooner he shed his hairshirt, and the easier he was to deal with. On the other hand, Manadan sometimes tightened up, guessing Gupti’s actual intent.

“Proof you say?”

Gupti smiled thankfully, but kept it inside.

“You, more than most every other creature in this ignorant open grave, know better than to demand such a thing. Despite the unsurprisingly common perception of most unenlightened peoples, which is to say, by virtue of my extensive early travels, all but the most nearly infinitessimally small numbers of genuinely wise and learned individuals, logical proof is, similarly unsurprisingly, practically unique in occurrence.”

“Why is this? Have you learned nothing from our time together? Have I not sought to teach you, to lift you from your darkened views, blinded as you were by the simple reach of your limited exposures previous to our engagement, here? Come, now!”

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Gupti slowed slightly as he turned, letting Manadan use him as a reference. The monologue, however, looked to be far more than he’d bargained for. “I wasn’t looking for a history–”

Manadan slapped Gupti’s leg with the steel reinforced tip of his cane. “You weren’t looking! Precisely so!”

The strike stung slightly, but Gupti let it pass, as he always did.

“I said ‘unsurprisingly’ before,” Manadan rolled onward, “in reference to the perceptions of the vast populations of so-called civilized peoples whose lives depend, sadly, upon this doomed rock we call home.

“I say it is unsurprising that so many should be so easily fooled, because they want to be so easily fooled. There is no other viable rationale for such large scale ignorance. Most people assume that what they see is real, and yet,” he lifted one pointed finger abruptly, “they are not truly looking.”

“A pair of horse-drawn carts carrying food collide in the middle of a busy intersection. Eyewitnesses abound, and all saw the same event, so the resulting account from each onlooker should be the same, neh?”

Gupti didn’t bother trying to answer.

“Untrue! Invariably, and I do mean invariably, the lay of blame, the order of events, fah!, even the time of day, will vary among them, often wildly. Indeed, this can be seen in no greater a number than two separate observers of a single incident, provided they are unfamiliar with each other.”

He paused for a moment, murmuring to himself and the wall, and Gupti waited patiently.

As Xin-po, the last Warden and one of the cruelest minds in memory, was rumoured to have written in his diary that night,

hammer, blade, and whip,
fire, rope, muscle, and bone.
nothing without fear.

The words had been carved into the bright quartz lintel above the main gate, and through a trick of the translucent stone, the letters glowed in the dark with a pale light, carried along its veins from the torches inside the barracks. The meaning, however, had long been subverted, and now stood for the indomitable spirit of the people of Salah al-Din. Without fear, nothing could hurt them.

Approaching the barracks gate, Gupti summoned an appropriately fake cough.

“Eh?” Dayen, the scar-faced gate guard, appeared behind the iron grill to the side. He swiveled his one good eye toward Gupti. A limp leer hung on his lower lip.

“Iya, Gayen.” Gupti returned the unsettling look calmly, silently imploring him, as he always did, to let them by. He could feel Manadan tensing just behind him.

Dayen squinted once, tightening, then turned back to Manadan. He squinted again. “Apologize,” he said.

“Preposterous!” huffed Manadan, pushing forward. “I’ve done nothing to you, whatever your superlative merits for such ignominious and certainly satisfying treatment, you marginally-witted, inordinately frustrating, living and breathing rationalization for the obstruction, disbarment, and outlawing of all practisement of the arcane, willful or otherwise, and I will apologize for nothing!” He rapped the steel-barred wooden gate with his cane while Hazhi hissed at the outburst and fluttered his wings. “Now let us pass, before we grow angry!”

Dayen grinned throughout this tirade, blinking rapidly in obvious enjoyment.

The cane lifted again, but the gate growled angrily, and then very slowly ground its way back over the deep grooves in the parched ground.

Gupti sighed and thought about getting something for dinner at Sazha’s, over on the corner of 18 and 39. It was no secret the old man was not the best cook, but what he lacked in skill he more than made up for in volume and conversation. A pile of staple storehouse rice cooked with bahma leaf and garlic, a thick layer of usually over-cooked turnip and fekt, and a smothering heaping of the fiery red malhi paste would clear whatever ailments might be present, lingering, or waiting in the wings, squeezing them out through the sweat and tears of simple gastric pleasure.

And then, leaning back from the wide wooden bowls, Gupti would release a burp of impressive scope, which inevitably summoned Sazha, who would tell Gupti a half-dozen stories he’d told a hundred times that week, and one or two that had happened that day. All the while, Manadan would pick out and fuss over the few individual slices of fekt he deemed palatable.

Returning to the spitting match in front of the gate, he watched Manadan try once again to pierce Dayen with a withering, though mis-aimed, look, but Dayen, alive thanks solely to a botched revanance spell he’d attempted to bring his wife back with nearly eighty years ago, was immune to most things, dark looks among them, particularly those from blind men. Instead, his half-sagging mouth hung blandly in response to Manadan’s narrowed, sightless eyes, until the door opened far enough to let them through.

“Have a good night, gentlemen,” Dayen called after them.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Manadan turned slightly, rasing a hand to the look of mock dismay hanging strangely on his face. “Oh, that’s right,” his face flattened to its normal barren anger, “you can’t.”

Gupti followed, shaking his head, as Manadan walked away.

Dayen simply continued to grin with deep, if lopsided, satisfaction. Insults no longer hurt him, either.

Inside, the entry hall was empty but for a trio of troublemakers who’d had too much fun the night before, sweeping the dust-ridden cobblestone floor and complaining about the unfairness of it all, while Watcher Peni kept an eye on them from where he’d propped himself up in the far corner. Gupti raised a hand and Peni returned the motion with a tired nod.

They made their way to the Watch Captain’s room at the near end of the hall.

“You’re late.”

Manadan didn’t miss a beat. “And?”

Leaning over the scrolls and tablets on his table, Captain Radib ab Soleera ap Nagwa lifted his head to look at them both evenly for a long moment. Tattoos of blue and black laced his bald head, reaching down across his temples and the bridge of his squat nose, and looping up onto his strong cheekbones from the back of his neck. He’d done them all himself.

“Just because the world is ending,” he said calmly, “doesn’t mean I can’t make you suffer in the meantime, Manadan.” He paused. “There’s still plenty of time for suffering.”

Manadan held himself still. Hazhi’s tail lifted casually over Manadan’s far shoulder as the Sik-wa settled himself into a resting position, his wings leaning together to create a narrow triangle of skin. Gupti slumped in frustration.

Radib let out his breath and rubbed his eyes with a tattoo-covered hand. “Look, I’m already too tired for this, and the shift’s just started. There’s nothing on the list so far, so just do the beat. You’ve got,” he straightened up and looked at the dark stone tablet set into the wall beside him. Its surface was covered with a chalked grid and chalked numbers, all but one of which was crossed out.

“Aught-five?” he said, surprised.

Gupti was also surprised, and looked over at the Watch assignments, himself. Sure enough, he and Manadan were set for block 05, the slums’ current unofficial gambling arena. No matter how many underhouses the Watch closed, there were always new places for people to find themselves at the wrong end of a bad decision.

Manadan, who had been banned from there three months ago, after a series of escalating private altercations, which still bothered Gupti, didn’t move.

“What was Ifa thinking?” Radib stared at the stone before turning to Manadan disrustfully. “This better not be another trick of yours.”

Manadan simply stared forward, blankly.

“Answer me,” the Captain ordered. “Did you fix this up?”

“No, sir,” Manadan answered tonelessly. “I did not ‘fix this up.’ And,” with the slightest insolence, “I do not do ‘tricks.’”

Radib pulled a hand across his face in frustration and stared up at the ceiling. Turning back to the assignments, he shook his head. “Of course. Everyone else was on time for once. Dammit.”

He closed his eyes, sucked in a deep breath, and then slowly blew it out through tight lips.

“Gupti,” he said finally, peering distrusfully at Manadan. “Keep him in line. If you run into anything, anything at all, call for assistance.” He leaned toward Manadan. “Do not address it yourselves, do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Gupti nodded.

“Yes, sir,” Manadan echoed flatly.

Radib looked at them both, then waved a dismissive hand. “Fine. Go. Just remember: call for assistance down there.”

3

Manadan stood in front of his apartment, his hook-topped walking stick tucked in the band of his waistcoat, his fragile fingers crossed neatly in front of him, his thin ears listening to every movement on the street before him. On his shoulder, Hazhi sniffed and scented, his serpentine head swooping and swaying beteween the wavering uprights of his wings.

Three tenements away, Gupti just spotted them through a chance gap in the throng and a sudden grin glittered in his eyes. Quickly, before the man or the Sik-wa could pick his scent from among the rest of the dust-covered people, he slipped down the next alley between buildings. The crowd had lessened considerably, as many had reached their homes by now, but there were still plenty of people and shadows to hide among.

As he slipped along the backs of the next two homes, he lifted his eyebrows high and raised a finger to his lips to forestall the greetings. This wasn’t their regular area, but most tenants here knew him from his association with the foul-tempered Manadan, and they treated him like a martyred saint as a result.

Smiling satisfiedly to himself, Gupti hurried quietly down the last alley between the houses. People moved past him in the other direction, but all obeyed his furtive silence; Nasra and Qini, the old Jamba twins with ropes of grey hair hanging to their knees, held each other’s hand as they smiled in return and gave him encouraging signs.

Padding softly to the front corner, he took a long slow breath. He could move quietly when he had to, and the people moving along the street would further deaden his movements, as well as distract the obsessive little bee-keeper.

As he slid his head slowly around the wooden corner, Manadan walked purposefully past the alley entrance, joining the crowd. “You’re late.”

Un-dismayed, Gupti moved after the gaunt little man. He’d been trying, off and on, to catch Manadan by surprise for more than a year, now, without success. It was as much habit, now, as anything else.

Passing Manadan, he lifted a hand to Hazhi, whose forked tongue licked at the faded remnants of honey on his fingertips. “Did you tell him, little one?” he asked the Sik-wa playfully.

“You are too well known and too well liked,” Manadan said without pausing, “while I am universally loathed. When the rest of the slaves notice you trying to sneak up on me, they cannot restrain themselves. One could hear their ignorant, excited whisperings in a dead sleep.”

Gupti didn’t reply. It was probably true enough, but there was no need to rub it into the rest of Manadan’s wounds. Also, though Gupti certainly did not know all Manadan’s thoughts, he had learned early on the cursed man was always touchiest at the beginning of the shift.

He took his place a pace ahead and a little to the left. From time to time, Manadan’s cane would graze the side of his sandal for reference, or Hazhi would emit a small squeak or hiss to help his foster father right himself or avoid an eddy in the stream of people, but for the most part, Manadan made his way by his own meticulous sense of direction and years of counting the steps of most every road in Salah al-Din.

After several minutes of walked in the relative silence of the shuffling crowd, a wide circle of lampposts at the far end of 24 came into view, illuminating the two-story patchwork of wood, stone, and iron within. Great rectangular blocks of pale red sandstone and milky quartz, ranging in size from large to monstrous, sat bolted into a brackish iron girdle that formed the foundation. At the gates, the grey, petrified stumps of trees extinct hundreds of years ago framed the wide doors cobbled from the wreckage of more recent fires. Mortared hilt-first into the top of the first story, a wicked medley of weapons confiscated from generations of criminals formed a vicious crown of thorns.

Above this barbed deterrent, ran a waist high railing of tar-covered planks. The tops of the reinforced boards had been cloven into points which gouged upward like a magnified version of the lower jaw of a Goar rat Manadan used to have in his study. Like those of that long-dead animal, each of these teeth had tasted its share of blood.

Revolt was less an act of sudden explosion, here among the bottom of the bottom, than it was a fact of almost predictable regularity. Had someone cared to record the events of the Salah al-Din, an unlikely event in the best of times, that record would not mark such occurrences as upturning the steady routine and constant fabric of daily life, for there was only one fact of life in the times before: pain. All else was illusion.

The only change revolutions had ever brought was in how much pain was endured. Revolutions were short, savage, and powerfully crushed every time. Thus, it was not before the memory of the last revolt could safely be colored in the memory, not of those precious few who may have survived, but of those who came after, and those who came after them, that the threat of another revolt could rear its head. Only then could even the angriest of the populace rationalize the need to destroy their oppressors and the tools of their oppression.

Indeed, every piece of the North Quarter Barracks had been burned up, blown apart, or torn down over its lifetime, as often from within as from without. Before, it had housed jailers as well as criminals, and from time to time, the one was not enough of a match for the other.

Not surprisingly, the last major expulsion had ripped through the barracks when news of the end had come. At that time, the jailers had still been King’s Guards, brutal, angry creatures assigned from ouside the slums by those who only set foot within Salah al-Din to satisfy some private thoughtless whim or some long-meditated act of malevolent depravity which could only be overlooked when no victims of any consequence were involved.

Thus, when news came of the end of existence, when it was finally understood by all to be the truth, those that had placed the Guards in power immediately turned away to save themselves, and there was no hope for those now abandoned, regardless, or because, of the power they had wielded up to that one moment.

“Iya, Gupti,” grumbled the hulking Ghan Mori clapping him on the back.

The force of the giant-spawn’s friendly touch knocked Gupti forward three steps, and right out of his heavy thoughts.

“Ghan!” he exclaimed, catching the pouch of dates and stumbling to catch up with the long strides. “Careful, there,” he smiled broadly. “Attacking an officer of the Watch is a serious offence!”

From twice Gupti’s height, Ghan looked down at him. Burnished dust from the long, tiresome walk coated his legs and waist, leaving him even more obviously half-man and half-giant than otherwise. Above his loincloth, a nicety he’d adopted soon after arriving seven years ago, his broad, bare chest, arms like columns, and block-shaped head rose from the dusty lower body with a chalky greyness, carved and cut with a rough, imprecise hand. A statue, unfinished, and tired of waiting.

Wide-set, flat grey eyes showed neither lids nor pupils, but fine crack lines in the corners revealed his understanding. At the very bottom of his face, beneath the blank, nose-less space under his eyes, the near edge of his mouth split upwards slightly.

Laughing, Gupti slapped him on the thigh, making sure to do so palm down, to save his knuckles. “Be good, neh?”

Ghan nodded slowly as he moved off, one chiseled arm raised in parting.

Panting slightly as he slowed from the awkward, half-jogging pace, Gupti pressed a hand to his rounded side. “Should’ve asked him for a ride.”

Watching Ghan’s torso rise and fall with his methodical, enormous steps, Gupti regained his breath, and his inner balance. What purpose was there to despair? The teachings of B’el Lakompa spoke of the weakness of that emotion, and guided his followers toward better communion with the present, where despair could not exist.

Even T’fa, the Academic, discussed the dangers of despair, particularly during times of conflict. The best Watchers were prepared, focused, and able to resist both the uncertainties of the future and the misgivings of the past. Salah al-Din needed Watchers in the moment, outside the concerns of the populace, who could be counted upon to uphold their oaths and the way of law, who could be trusted to avoid temptations.

“Magyi!” In a hole cut in the wall of the third floor of the nearest building, a boy leaned out, waving, his grubby face lit from below by the lamppost on the corner.

One dust-covered hand, then two, lifted from the river of people ahead of Gupti, floating on the surface. “Iya, Abdi!”

All things existed in the moment. One had only to see.

Slipping the last date into his mouth, Gupti savored the thick suffusion of honey and the plump firmness of the pungent date as he walked down Road 49. It was one thing to strive for excellence; it was quite another to give up all enjoyment.

Past the intersections with 20 and 22, Gupti rode the steady tide of tired workers toward Manadan’s apartment. By the time he reached Road 24, the hollow boom of the Watch Clock, its yellow-white bones rising impossibly above the slums, was sounding the half-hour.

“Magg,” Gupti cursed. They were late.

He remembered watching the captive and weakened wind spirit slowly beat back the flames with a rough and blinding spray of sand and air. Anyone capable of doing so had turned out in the midst of that wild, skin-tearing tempest of shredded stone and shredding winds, to watch the living embodiment of that which had been lost.

In the dusty, choking aftermath that hung in the dead air for weeks afterward, the open sores of the scorched buildings had been bandaged with the remnants of the more fully ravaged apartments nearer to the edges, that Manadan had referred to as unsurprisingly cannibalistic.

Gupti chewed the gummy date to tiny pieces as he ruminated on this Manadan-like moment. It seemed the bitter old bee-keeper and tomb-walker was finally rubbing off on him.

There was no denying that life in the slums was unfairly hard, with the death of the wind and the end of the world coming slowly and steadily for them all, but the days before had been unarguably cruel. There honestly was no comparison.

Uprisings, plague, corruption, factional strife, and everything else the pack and press of far too many bodies in far too small a space would yield. All of it had been expected, understood, however mindless, malicious or luckless its source. There were countless precedents for each.

The Academy had revealed the repetition of history, the inevitable and unchangeable workings of the universe in the gears of the mighty and near-eternal D’nom machinery. Famine, war, and cleansing flame; monarchies, theocracies, and so-called republics; invasions, divisions, and three temporal revisions; the ring walls of Ullah Fariq Mahkisi had seen it all, and endured it all.

The D’nom had never lost, and Mahkisi had never fallen, but the memory of its enemies was painfully short. Internal and external, new and old, they constantly sought to breach the city’s defenses. Wave after wave, tide after treacherous tide, though, the outcome was always the same. All who failed to conquer, flee, hide, or negotiate found themselves, for the remainder of this life, within the grid-lined, barren simplicity of the Salah Al-Din Slums, bound to slavery and abuse and misery.

All that had been before.

Before, there had been wicked taskmasters and unfair laws. The slums had been vicious and angry and brutal, a cesspool of swollen pain, thick misery, and squashed hope. Generation after generation had broken itself against the timeless walls, the sad survivors ground to pieces in the mines and waste pits and slaughterhouses.

Before, there had been blind excess, wholesale greed, and raucous, exuberant waste. Chaos had been the only law as the rest of the city ravaged the slums and those within with a wanton abandon that left no space for the imagination of horrors.

Before had been evil. After had been life.

The discovery of doomsday had changed everything. Even as the world outside fell apart, dying a protracted and painful death of bone-sparching nothingness, the slums proved they were nothing if not resilient.

Gupti had only just been born, but his oldest surviving sister often told him about the day the sorcerors had learned the date, to the year, day, minute, and second, of the end of civilization and the world.

The elements had long been out of balance, struggling for dominance, and the city had weathered the resulting wild flux of seasons for more than a hundred years, but on that day, the elementals of fire had won, and therefore, in fifty-seven years’ time, the city and the world would be consumed by the unquenchable flames of Zhak ab Visi al-Naboul.

A child’s bedtime scare in any other age.

Naira described the mindless havoc across all areas of Mahkisi, nowhere more wildly present than here in the slums. The iron grip of the upper city had disappeared when the ever-present wardens, brutal and ruthless in their demand for absolute control in the name of Mahkisi, vanished beyond the monstrous gates of Salah Al-Din at the first news of this doomsday.

The people of the slums, once proud and vicious and vibrant races, who had long since been caged as slaves and less, were suddenly armed with this vacuum of forgotten freedom, but no one to release their unforgotten vengeance upon.

Then came the darkest days. There was far too much pain and fear and memory to be ignored, and far too small a place to forget.

So the slums had fed on themselves.

The first months were anarchy and death on an unprecedented scale, even for the Mahkisi. There was no escape and no safety. There was only survival. These were the years at the beginning of Gupti’s memory.

Dodging the prowl gangs that cackled and hunted their way through ever-changing blocks of home territories; scrabbling for bits of cast off leather to make weak cold stews because the sight or smell of a fire would draw predators out of the very walls and earth; sleeping with one ear against a door or wall to hear the vibration of footsteps; and all the while, the stench of the silent, dead air.

Gupti said nothing and they walked silently through shadows of the crowds returning home by the light of the lampposts.

They passed Ba Maura leaning against the doorway of her mostly empty goods shop. The middle-aged widow was having her daily indulgent natter with the squat, hunched form of old Sef. She waved hello at Gupti over Sef’s bowed shoulder.

Gupti waved back, his eyes trailing warily across Sef’s mis-shapen form. The old man had the distinction of surviving the deadliest cave-in in memory. Eight hundred and forty two known workers, and countless slaves and undocumenteds, had been caught forever in that horrible sabotage twenty-three years ago.

Sef, a cocky dig diver at the peak of his game, had found a new vein and stumbled upon the malevolent Gorts as they prepared the disaster. Surprised and overwhelmed, Sef had been dealt with in ways that none knew for certain. All that was known was that he’d dragged himself back into the city almost two weeks later, with almost every bone in his body broken, along with his mind.

“She started it.”

Gupti plucked a honeyed date from the oiled pouch, popped it into his mouth, and offered the pouch to Aneesh. “Can you tell me what I’m going to say?”

Aneesh, five dates in her small hands, sighed and rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter who started it.” She grimaced peevishly and then squashed two dates into her mouth. “Yeah. I know.”

Gupti nodded. “I think you will.” He touched her head and smiled down at her. “Now go on. Ba Yanna will be expecting you soon. I want to see you both tomorrow night, okay?” He cocked an eye at her, warningly. “As friends, understood?”

Aneesh sighed dramatically. “Uh-huh,” she managed to say around the sticky, chewy dates. She hugged his soft waist quickly, leaving sticky spots on his dingy uniform, and ran off.

“And save one of those for her!”

The tawny, scrawny girl raised an arm and then was gone, lost in bodies and dust and shadow.

He sucked on the sweet treat, pressing the chewy fruit against the roof of his mouth. Another of Manadan’s favorite sayings sounded in his mind: You can’t save them all.

He sighed. He knew it was true, but he always did his level best to forget.

Around him, the steady flow of retiring day workers moved under the light of the three working lampposts at the intersection of 49 and 18. The very young skittered underfoot, called out, chased one another, and grabbed at their elder brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents, as the constant stream of working families returned home.

Moving to the left, he neared the charred and stunted remnant of the unlit lamppost. Knuckling the post, he made a mental note to gently remind Fa’ Loukh, local appointee for the Ministry of Housing and Traffic, that the post still had not been replaced.

Beside him, a man stumbled and another man shoved him aside. The first man pushed back automatically and immediately a circle of emptiness surrounded them, bordered by slowing, vaguely interested figures.

The second man, dressed in the faded remnants of a western khatouf, the last vestige of his proud ancestry, bore an evil look and tensed to lunge at the first man, a lean and once-handsome figure long since drawn with too-sharp features and too-shallow cheeks. Then he noticed Gupti.

Gupti hadn’t moved, but the circle had swelled around him, and he turned slowly to face the men, letting his uniform do the work, under the unblinking gaze of his eyes.

The pause interrupted the reactionary anger, and almost immediately the flow of bodies resumed, sweeping the two men along, separating them with the subconscious awareness of the masses, and leaving Gupti alone once more.

He sighed deeply and lifted the pouch in his hand. Aneesh had, indeed, been hungry. There were only three dates left. More from habit than hunger, he popped another into his mouth. Even so, the honeyed sweetness no longer satisfied him. He shook his head and looked around. Everything here balanced upon the edge of a knife.

Hundreds upon hundreds of filthy, exhausted people rustled and bumped and sidled and shifted against one another, sweating evenly in the constant heat. Their eyes followed the unchanging track that led home. Their shoulders sagged and their backs slouched from the ultimately futile work of the last fourteen hours. Even the children’s cries had turned petulant, whiny, and shrill in his ears.

Gupti tried to blink himself free of this uncharacteristic melancholy. Pulling a thick hand over his face, he yawned, arching back, only to find himself gazing up at the charred tops of the nearest buildings. The Ayeed fire, back in the year of the Ninth Rat, had only danced across the tops of these more central tenements before the djinn had been summoned at last.

2

“Iya, Gupti!”

“Mmph,” Gupti replied around a mouthful of one of Cassa’s sticky buns. “Iya mo, little one.” He swallowed happily and tousled the dirty little girl’s hair. Aneesh’s eyes were bright and alert, clearly reflecting the dancing flame of the nearest lamppost, and she smiled back up at him.

She’d managed quite well these last few seasons, particularly since her mother had fallen to the last bout of raj’e to sweep through the slums, though that was of little surprise to Gupti. Gupti would not judge the mother, nor would he judge Aneesh’s freedom from her.

“Gupti,” waved Yusi, passing in the other direction. Gupti raised his hand in return.

“Gonna catch some murderers tonight?”

Yusi grinned indulgently at Aneesh, then winked at Gupti. “Careful, with that one. She’ll have your job, soon.” He slapped Gupti on the back and continued home.

Gupti grunted warmly, took another bite of bun, and looked back at Aneesh. She was a dozen years this year, nearly of age, though still short for her sex. Even her younger sister, Iswa, was taller by several inches, already. Unlike Iswa, however, Aneesh didn’t even pretend to worry about bathing. Almost a uniform brown from the earth and the filth and the natural burnish of her father’s skin, she’d learned to camouflage herself well among the people, animals, and buildings of the slums, which had come in very handy when avoiding her mother’s cane.

Aneesh had required little adaptation to life without her mother, without a constant home. There had been little change, and Aneesh had kept her head above water easily. It was Iswa, however, that Gupti most worried over.

“Where’s your sister?”

“You gonna catch some murderers?”

“Where’s your sister?”

“You gonna catch some murderers?”

“Where’s your sister?”

Aneesh pouted, her hands on her hips. “Who cares?” she muttered finally. “Probably married.” She stuck her tongue out and winced.

Gupti held the last piece of sticky bun in front of his mouth a moment while he stared at the girl. Aneesh scrunched her face, daring him to disbelieve her, which proved her lie. He shook his head and popped the iced bread into his mouth.

“You shouldn’t lie.”

Aneesh opened her mouth for a flip comeback, but Gupti’s sad eyes derailed her intent. She shrugged exaggeratedly. “Everybody else does.”

Gupti softly touched a knuckle to her cheek. “I don’t.”

Aneesh gave him an exasperated look, surprisingly adult for her age, and Gupti laughed and pat her head again.

“So are you gonna catch some murderers?”

Gupti caught himself, then laughed even harder.

“You don’t lie, right?”

“No, I don’t,” he answered, holding his side with one hand and smiling. “But I can’t tell you what I don’t even know.”

Aneesh’s face sagged and she blew out disappointedly.

“Besides,” Gupti said, resuming his walk, “it’s Arbala. Murderers usually wait for the weekend.”

Keeping two steps for each one of his, Aneesh clearly didn’t believe him.

Gupti raised his eyebrows. “Truth. It takes a lot out of a body to kill someone. There’s too much work to be done during the week to waste on such endeavors.”

She squinted up at him, gauging him.

Gupti shook his head and spread his hands innocently. “As a friend of mine likes to say, the easy answer is usually the right one.” He nodded to himself. “And he’s usually right. Which is why,” he began, turning to her, “I can guess that you had a fight with your sister again.”

Aneesh glanced up, then down. She shoved her hands into the pouch-pocket on the front of her shift.

With a final forced intake of breath, he hooked his fingers expertly through the hole in the door left by the last thieves, who had found the only thing worth stealing in the entire apartment was the metal of the lock itself, and pulled it open.

Squeezing the breath he’d trapped in his chest, he forced himself as upright as he could be and stepped down the wood stairs as easily as any other man his age. He knew it was vanity, he knew it was all the more foolish for his appearance in a nightshirt and slippers, but he refused to give them any excuse. The only thing worse than fear was pity.

Tonight, however, he was rewarded for his efforts, as the younger half of the tribe of occupants in the apartment below pushed themselves up the stairs, arguing weakly and shoving one another. Steeling his face into aloof passivity, Manadan listened to their heavy passage, his palm, arm, and shoulder firmly against the wall.

Almost immediately, they silenced as one, though their grunts and whispers and tight breaths were as obvious as if they had hailed him directly and slapped him on the back in greeting. In a hesitant rush, they moved past him, the air between him and them moving the damp folds of his nightshirt, and piled into their apartment. As usual, before the door had shut behind them, the tireless mother was already shouting at them.

Manadan’s chest began to ache, but he kept the breath within. Twelve. Thirteen. Unlucky Fourteen. Landing.

On cue, Hazhi reared slightly and shook himself, gasping and stretching. A thin hissing slipped through the small space between the stairs and the rear door. As Manadan continued to breathe out in tight control, he tracked the descent of a drop of sweat down through his thinning hair, along his scalp, across the small open space of the back of his neck, and down into a fold of the nighshirt.

Hazhi settled down again and Manadan, emptied, breathed in once more. His limit was approaching. He pulled the door open, stepped down the two outer steps, and traced the rough side of the building nineteen paces through the silty, muddy earthen track that separated each of the tenement buildings in the Salah Al-Din Slums.

At nineteen, his effort squeezing tears from his blind eyes and pulling blood from the lip he was biting, he reached the rear corner. There, he paused for barely a moment; just long enough to listen for sounds of the privy in use.

It was a public bathhouse, designed to accommodate the tenants and slaves of the four buildings at each of its corners. Instead, it served those plus the block of twelve surrounding them. The perception of whether this grossly inadeuqate construction was the result of stunning, but unintentional, bureaucratic ignorance or genuine and calculated malice depended entirely upon whether one lived there or not.

Whatever the answer, the simple fact was, beyond the simple mathematics of its filth and the ensuing and perennial reek which could only be borne by those born to it, it was simply never empty. Nonetheless, each night, Manadan strained against this incontrovertible truth, this permanent fact, in the vain hope of a single moment of silent suffering.

Tonight, of course, was no different.

A pair of dirty children chased a dog out of the nearest entrance, shouting and threatening it. The dog’s heavy breath and lolling tongue passed in front of Manadan as he moved steadily for the entrance. The children’s shouts quieted, then turned to curses they hardly understood the meaning of, once they were well out of reach. Manadan ignored them, counting down the last steps of his journey.

Eleven. A hand on the door frame, slick in the heavy air and from the touch of five hundred hands a day for years on end.

Eight. A knuckle against the inner doorway to the stalls. Even so little a touch yielded some residue. Hazhi lifts off, hunting for a meal in the dark rafters.

Five. A knee beside the wide stone wash-basin, with its limpid gurgle of re-circulated well water passed down from the bathhouses further up.

Three. Filthy straw covers the mud but not the smell. A woman berates a man for drinking away the rent. The man shushes her as Manadan nears. The woman only grows angrier.

One. An empty seat without the embarassment of brushing against someone so exposed.

Sitting on the bench, tensed forward with his head in his hands, entirely a victim of his mortal failings, Manadan cried in pain and weakness and shame, his only solace the woman’s ceaseless screech and the shelter of its commonplace noise.