by Michael Shea
In the common room the bouncers doubled as waiters, and they flung the breakfast vessels down before their tenants with a vigorous clangour and frequent spills. When they lounged by the walls during lulls they watched the guzzlings of their clientele with a peeved and brooding air, gnawing absently at their leathern muzzles. Their scrutiny tended to hasten the breakfasters through their work and hustle them outside about their business. Though the fare had been adequate in mass and savour Hex, once outside, made himself amends for the meal’s hectic mood by stopping for a secondary breakfast—a mere culinary footnote to the first—in a wine-and-fry shop just down the cableway from the Leafmould Inn. When, greatly soothed, he sat back from his platter, he asked the tapster about an elusive, smoky scent that had teased him throughout his degustation of the braised Lumpet.
“It’s the Throttlers’ smudgepots,” the man told him. “The morning wind’s onshore in the autumn. It makes the wharfsiders half-daft all season.”
“Ah. The smoke that drugs the Slothers? Slows them down?”
“If anything really does that. Look here.” He hitched his peel jerkin’s demi-sleeve off a knotty, scar-silvered triceps muscle. “Their flap-tips hug you here while you’re strangling them—outsides of the shoulders. Lots of little things like sawteeth they have, there on their flap-tips. I was a good Throttler, but unfortunately I was a bleeder.”
“My condolences. At least it certainly seems to have made you strong.”
“It does that. You should see some of the ladies of the guild. They make the best Throttlers, really. More limber.”
Hex, reminded of the well-known savouriness of Slother, had turned half an eye upon the board of fare nailed above the counter. And thus he discovered a man slouched against a post of the shed’s awning, smiling a faint, acid smile at him. The man was slight and lean, a dun-co loured figure in breeches and jerkin of much-scuffed peel. His face, hawkeyed, was to Hex a sudden window on earlier years. The plunge of its long, narrow nose was brought up short by the solid horseshoe curve of a stubborn jaw brambled with coarse black beard.
“Sarf Immlé. Sit, and imbibe, old friend.”
Though Hex’s pleasure was real, “friend” was a bit of a falsehood, which he felt as he spoke it. They had enjoyed a cordial competition more than a friendship—arguers over midnight cups in the bistros of the Academy quarter. Both had had team-mates in these liquorish sessions of ideological arm-wrestling. The polarization of their affable, inebrious debating society was a fundamental one in the academic population as a whole. Hex was one of those who regarded that institution as an emporium of cultural models—a bazaar wherein actual, past, and putative forms of human experience were displayed for the promiscuous self-enrichment of anyone anywise interested. Sarf had always been one of those who saw the Academy as an arsenal of information by means of which to besiege the citadels of the Real World—the current one—with the goal of its reconstruction along more ideal lines.
Still, it was pleasant now for Hex to eat and order wine for this man who had once been fond of calling him a “hedonistic book-guzzler”. He felt raffish, a veteran knight of the road, to be meeting so far afield a man who had thought him a schoolish stick-in-the-mud.
“I won’t ask what you’re doing here,” he told Sarf with a grin, “because if you turn the question around on me. I’ll hardly know how to answer. As a matter of fact—”
“As a matter of fact, Bramt Hex, if you asked me what I’m doing here, I wouldn’t be at liberty to answer. You’re looking very healthy. You’ve gained some weight, haven’t you?”
“I doubt it. I’ve lost some, if anything. I’ve had some fairly rough going lately, actually.”
“Mmmm. Is it two years since I saw you last? I’m glad to see you’ve finally got out of Glorak. A man should do some travelling before he snugs his behind into that nice, comfy magus’ chair.”
“What makes you so sure I’ve been in Glorak all this time?” Hex’s hostly warmth had fled him. He now recalled vividly that galling calm of Sarf’s arrogance—that stolid absoluteness born of the man’s serene conviction that most of the world misread the game of life. But Hex smothered an urge to lie, and shrugged. Present needs must be kept in mind. Sarf had always been something of a vagabond intermittently, was locally well travelled. He might have a place where Hex could sleep for free. “I have been, granted. But I’ve been planning travel for some time now. I was just lately working on developing some, ah, new income to finance it. But, essentially, the enterprise misfired in a big way, and instead of properly shipping out of Glorak, I barely escaped it with my life. And since it comes up, have you got some place you could put me up for a few days? I just got here and I’m badly short of money.”
Now the barest ghost of mirth haunted Sarf’s broad mouth and solid, scraggly jaw, but Hex grew glad again, knowing his man. With Sarf refusal would be dry and direct. His droll gravity portended—after some aggravating catechism—compliance.
“Your outfit looks new,” Sarf offered. “Costly shortsword, good boots. Are you really destitute, or only relatively destitute?”
“All men are relatively destitute. I have, oh Inquisitor, not twenty lictors to my name.”
“Still, you could have bought cheaper gear and had more cash left over.”
“The gear has to wear. It’s likely I’m going to have quite a way to travel to reach my destination. It’s a rather unusual destination, I can tell you that.” He sensed that seeming eager to talk about his project would prod Sarf to revert to his own, the mystery of which he had been so quick to allude to. He was not wrong. Sari’s hand made a sweep of dismissal and he sat forward.
“It’s odd that you ask me to put you up, Bramt Hex, because I find myself in a position to do just that, while at the same time, there is what you might see as a catch in the arrangement. Would you like to go for a walk and talk about it?”
Out along the cableway, they wove through the sun-speckled shoals of slumfolk. Everyone was out. The elderly were abroad with their grandchildren, for it was peak market hour. At the same time many of the workers on the littoral—Throttlers and Spongers—were filtering back to their neighbourhoods to quaff the cup and cut the loaf at leisure while a high tide drowned their harvest grounds. It seemed a carnival crowd, genially boisterous, wearing its universal motley of leafshadow. A pale flurry of nutshells abruptly decorated Sarf’s hair and beard, and a second later a melon rind jounced off Hex’s shoulder. From the foliage above the scholars’ upflung curses and shaken fists there rained down a multi-voiced snickering, and one shrill declaration—made zestily in a childish treble—was heard: “Boy, I really got the fat one good!”
The pair proceeded. Sarf, promising fuller discussion at a wineshop he had in mind, remained mysterious during their walk. He seemed mainly bent on getting Hex to notice how much of the Ungullionites’ gear—boots, caps, tool-belts—was made of peel. Hex soon lost patience.
“Do you have to be so portentous? I’m wearing the stuff, it’s obvious everyone uses it here. Proceed to the point.”
“That place,” said Sarf, his air of portent unruffled, “has a quiet corner in its patio. There’s a local red that’s very tasty hot and sugared.”
Hex followed, resigning himself to Sarf’s pace as long as Sarf was treating. The wineshop he indicated had beside it a low platform offering drinkers tables at a slight elevation above the cableway. Down-cable from it was a zone of particularly big trees, grandfathers standing somewhat wider-spaced than the norm, and permitting cave-ins of gold noon light that drenched the earth around them. Through a high lattice of gaps Hex glimpsed—at not too great a distance—a watertank dappled yellow and green.
“I know the neighbourhood,” he began as they took a table at the corner of the platform farthest from the cableway.
Sarf waved this preface off. “Some of the oldest and most irascible trees are hereabouts. They call the area Wrestlers’ Grove for all the riots that have started here. That’s why it’s such a qu
iet neighbourhood—did you notice?”
Traffic was light, and the pitch of voices low, even along the cableway. Hex nodded. “Then, surely, there’s more danger here of being overheard—I mean, about this momentous business of yours?” He felt himself leering a bit, but couldn’t help it. But Sarf’s composure was, he had to concede, impressive.
“I’ll let you tell me if it’s momentous or not, Bramt.”
He broke off to order, bespeaking a pair of sweet mulled reds. Just like the man! Those rare times you could badger him into buying a round, he always ordered for everyone what he decided they should drink, rousing numerous outcries and boisterous reorderings. Now Hex let it ride, rather liking sweet-mull. When the tapster—a man whose dewy baldness proclaimed a certain nervousness—had retired, Hex bowed:
“Speak. Detail your marvels, by all means.”
“Fine. I will ask you to note the steps involved in the production of peel. Also note, please, the absence of polemic from this description. Hear how this lucrative fabric is derived, and then tell me if any moral judgements are suggested to you by the hearing. Agreed? Good. Ah! Here…”
They took up their new-delivered mugs, and clinked them. The trite gesture caused Hex a surge of pleasant humour. Eversour but not unbrilliant Sarf Immlé! Suppose he were on to something momentous? The mull’s heat and sweetness were good, but its aftertaste was resinous, and kept one sipping to wash it out.
“Peel is made in Slimshur, Bramt. That’s a commercial confederacy of East Shore towns that share a unique, hundred-league stretch of coast. The land there is naked bedrock that slants into the sea at a very gentle angle. All Slimshur’s bays are wide and shallow—a man could wade a half-mile offshore before reaching a fathom’s depth, though of course no man would want to wade offshore. All the towns there stand at places where inlets deep enough for harbours adjoin smooth and level slopes of rock into the sea. So much for the scene of the peel-harvest. I hope I have not been too ploddingly circumstantial so far?”
“You are a master of narrative.”
“The scene of the harvest, as I say. Now to the Seeding of the Fields. By the Fields I mean the long, gradual slopes that are one of the prerequisites of a townsite. These are seeded with men. Convicts. For mark you: Just inland of Slimshur lie the vast satrapies of Pil the Unkillable. Juridical excesses are the peculiar characteristic of all this empire. Courts are innumerable and statutes draconian. The convicted and doomed have become one of the empire’s major exports, since they are so numerous that the Pillians have long ago discovered the expediency of selling the guilty rather than suffering the expense of executing them themselves. Slimshur lay at hand to embrace the practice, having used cattle to seed their fields thitherto. What had been a rather anaemic and localized industry swelled—once stoked by human fodder—to vigorous, full-blooded health. At present a certain notorious West Shore entrepreneur is the factor of the Slimshurians’ product. Those industrious shorefolk pay the Pillians with this man’s gold, and march their purchased human fuel to the shore, to those towns couched in their little bays and coves where those hard-working folk flourish. And when they seed their slopes with these convicts, they do what they call a distasteful duty—they will not hear it called a crime.”
“I must interject here,” Hex put in. “Your remarks have not been without covert polemical touches. Still your account is intriguing. Get to the crime, then! How are these convicts used?”
“It is generous of you to ask. If you weren’t Bramt Hex I might suspect you of some glimmering of social concern! But hear. The slopes of Slimshur are seeded with men twice a moon—at half and full, the latter for some reason, bringing the higher yield. One to three score convicts are chained to the slope about a quarter mile inland from the sea.
“They are set out just at dawn. In the early light they soon become visible to certain creatures which inhabit the coastal waters, called Shlubupps. When the Shlubupps descry the convicts, their eyestalks extrude from the water. The townsfolk, witnessing the harvest from their various city-walls, raise at this point the cry water broken. At this cry an instrumental ensemble, also posted atop the walls, strikes up music whose effect is to encourage the long toil of the Shlubupps out of the surf, and up to the slope to feed upon the convicts.
“Each Shlubupp is over three rods long, and a dozen might emerge at a time, more if the offering is greater. The creatures’ bulk, normally water-supported, can be moved upslope only with the greatest labour. And so the beasts, in their toil, lubricate their passage with great volumes of frothy digestive slime—more voluminously the more difficult their progress. The thick layer they produce in their climb is First-Pile peel. The lighter layer they exude on their descent—already smoothed by the First-Pile—is called Second-Pile. Once beaten and dried, the two-ply stuff is peeled from the rock with winches. It needs only shipment, curing in West-Shore warehouses, and separation to be cut and marketed. So. The exposition is done. Are you moved to make any remarks on the ethics and justice of the situation?”
“Tell me first, Sarf—What offences are capital in the Satrapies of Pil the Unkillable?”
“Well asked. They include, among what we would call the more serious crimes, such peccancies as Mocking a Social Superior, Coughing During Tax-Collecting Ceremonies, Left-handed Nosewiping, and numberless others of equal whimsicality.”
Hex paused before answering, and in this blink of silence an eerie, muted roar drifted towards them from Wrestlers Grove. It was a human outcry, a brief, throbbing basso raised in rusty, resonant complaint. Hex blinked, but Sarf shrugged and bade him with an arched brow say on.
“All right, Sarf. If all you say is truth I freely grant all three are murderers of equal guilt—suppliers, processors and purchaser. Is this the judgement you—”
The Tapster, who had just approached with the carafe at Sarf’s signal, spilled some wine on the table top, apparently startled by a second blurred shout from somewhere not too distant in the woods. “Eh? What is it?” Hex prompted the man with some pique, withdrawing his sleeves from the spill’s vicinity.
“Some neighbourhood quarrel,” the Tapster said, looking graver than his dismissive tone. “Forgive me.” He plied his sponge and withdrew.
“So you grant it’s murder,” Sarf solemnly prodded.
“I just said so. Advance your tale, please, that I may get some grasp of its fundamentals.” This last was an old joke from their impudent and disputatious Academy days, though in fact Hex was impressed by the story thus far. Sarf refused to smile.
“One of its fundamentals, Bramt, is that the killing of murderers is not itself murder. You grant that, of course, don’t you?”
“Well, yes, by and large.”
“Good. Then I can tell you what I and my associates have afoot. You’re bound to secrecy of course, whether or not you join us?”
“Yes. So be it. So, where in this murderous peel-cycle do you propose to strike? The entrepreneur perhaps? Wealthy world-manipulators were always favourite targets of yours.”
A sour pleasure somewhat warmed Sarf’s eyes. Fractionally, he smiled.
“The foreseeable guess, Bramt—only right in part, and far less bold than our actual plan. It’s a whole Slimshur town, a village full of the monsters’ caterers we’re going to kill. Yes. Those pimps of human flesh to the lust of homicidal worms.” Though it grew, Sarf’s jubilation remained soft-voiced, an effect Hex found disquieting, even as he felt Sarf’s words rouse his own enthusiasm. “Now as to the right part of your guess, the peel we’ll make of them—yes!—will finance a further assault on the entrepreneur. For Arple Snolp has long been our foremost adversary. His power compels any effective attack on him to be well-funded.”
“Snolp? Arple Snolp? I know this man, Sarf. I’ve stood near to him as we now sit, and talked with him at length.”
Visibly, Sarf in his turn was impressed. “When? Where?”
“In—”
There was a shout and a sharp, splintering noise of imp
act. Their vigour and shocking nearness brought every drinker’s head up, and the tapster out to half-crouch—taut and pallid—in his shed’s doorway. A scrambling noise behind a shack across the cableway focused all eyes above. On the roof of the shack—which was perched some twenty feet off the ground—a man swarmed into view. He was small and monkeyish; his clothes were torn. He scuttled across the roof, ploughing up clouds of dead leaves, and with no slightest quiver of a pause he dived straight off its nearer edge, hands stretched towards a laundry-rope a good twelve feet below.
The rope groaned, but did not give. With a half-swing the man flung himself—heels first—clear across the cableway. He struck and clung like a cat to the railing round the patio. The tapster bustled forth with curious shooing gestures. The ragged fugitive jumped into the patio, threw off the tapster with one squirrel-quick feint, and vanished through the door into the wine-shed. Everywhere the drinkers were carefully rising to their feet. The shack across the way began to rattle and quake furiously. A second figure mounted its roof.
This was a large woman with jaggedly cropped hair and huge shoulders. Her massy neck was oiled, as were her naked, sinewed arms.
“A Throttler,” Sarf murmured thoughtfully. He and Hex stood now too, sensing that those around them were acting from experience.
“Dog!” the woman bawled. She aped her quarry’s heedless plunge. The clothes-rope snapped—whip-loud—beneath her. With a meaty, smashing noise she dropped from view behind a plank fence marking the back of someone’s property. Crunchings and growled curses followed. Then a grunt, and the fence exploded into splinters. The Throttler marched to the cableway and bellowed up at the wine-shed.
“Here! Oh yes, you sodden weasel! You would flee here! You snivelling wine-sponge! I’m going to rip this place down around your arse, and then I’m going to twist your wretched frame till the grog squirts out of your ears!”