'On the blood wart of course! Only a fool would bet on a star against a blood wart Come on, how much are you good for?' Her eyes flashed the eager electricity that he felt rising around him everywhere, like the tide.
'Lot of people are fools, then.' The man in the cloak stretched his mouth, and jingled the markers in his fist.
Tor made a rude noise. Behind her the crowd murmur crested and broke, the echoes flowed away into cracks and shadows; the room waited. Sparks saw two beings — one human, one not — step into the empty space carrying oblong boxes. The alien's skin had an oily gleam, its arms were fingered with long tentacles. 'Are they going to — ?'
'Them? Gods, no! Those are just the handlers. Come on, come on, place your bet!' Tor pulled his arm.
He rummaged in his sack of belongings, fished out two coins. 'Well, here's — uh, twenty.'
'Twenty! Is that all you've got?' Tor looked crestfallen.
'That's all I'm betting.' He held them out.
The shrunken man took his coins without comment, and flowed away into the crowd.
'Hey, this isn't illegal or anything, is it?' Sparks hesitated.
'Sure is... Clear us a path through these highborns, Pollux. We want a front-row seat for the last of the big spenders here.'
'Whatever you say, Tor.' Pollux pressed forward with single minded purpose. Sparks heard curses and sudden yelps of pain marking his progress through the crowd.
'But don't worry, Summer, it's not the death sport that's illegal.' Tor pulled; Sparks found himself somehow halfway to the ring already. 'It's just the importation of restricted beasts.'
'Oh. Sorry—' as he stepped on a gem stoned hand. About half of the crowd seemed to be laborers or sailors, but the other half glittered with jewels in the dim light, and some of them had skin the color of earth, or hair like clouds. He wondered whether they had stained themselves on purpose. Tor jerked him down at ringside; he folded his long legs under. Beside him Pollux towered back on his support leg; there were useless shouts of 'down in front.' Tor pulled out her flask and drank, handed it to Sparks. 'Finish it off.'
The changing flavor of the smoke was already weaving a soft cocoon around his head, separating him from himself and everyone else. He put the bottle to his mouth and drank recklessly; there was plenty to finish. His throat hurt, making him cough.
Tor patted his knee. 'That puts you in the mood, doesn't it?'
He grinned. 'For anything,' hoarsely.
She took her hand away. 'Later, later.'
Gulping, Sparks turned back with her to look out over the low partition; the movement made him giddy, like the sudden drop of a sea swell. The potential energy of the place was singing in him now, and the crowd's long sigh of indrawn breath was his, as the handlers threw open their cases and leaped clear.
If the whip-fingered alien in the arena had stunned his eyes (al though suddenly nothing surprised him), it had been no more than a promise. Now, over the rim of the container in front of him spilled a mass of lashing, fleshy tentacles; groping, slipping downward, drawing after them a flaccid pouch of body mottled like a bruise. 'The blood wart Tor whispered. It had no head that Sparks could see, unless its head and body were all one, but ragged pincers scissored among the tentacles. He heard them click in the waiting silence. Abrupt movement at the other end of the square pulled his eyes away — 'The starl,' Tor muttered — to a liquid shadow of black on black: the dappled hide of a sinuous creature as long as his forearm. He caught the spear of light from a bared tusk as the starl whined far back in its throat. All light was centered on the square now, and every eye. The starl circled the blood wart oblivious to the crowd, still keening far back in its throat. The blood wart tentacles lashed the air but it made no sound — even when the starl struck, ripping a flap of skin from its heaving pouch-body. Its tentacles whipped frantically, caught and wrapped the start's narrow head. 'Poison,' Tor hissed gleefully. The starl began to scream, and its scream was lost in the hungry roar of the crowd.
Sparks leaned forward, drawn like a wire, knowing a dim surprise as the cry of protest he had expected came out of his throat as a hunting cry. The starl pulled free, snapping and ripping in a frenzy of pain at the blood wart tentacles and its soft, flabby body. The blood wart floundered, its oozing tentacles flailed again ... and exulting in his own lost innocence, Sparks threw open his heightened senses to take in the ballet of death.
An eternity later, but all too soon, the starl lay with sides heaving as the blood wart wrapped it in strands of broken tentacle and closed in for the kill. Sparks saw the whiteness of the start's wild eye, the white-and-red- flecked straining mouth; heard its strangled moan in the sudden silence as the pincers found its throat. Blood spurted; drops spattered his slicker and his sweating face.
He jerked back, rubbing his face, stared at his hand freshly bloodied. And suddenly he had no need to look back again, no need to watch the flattened bladder fill and flush red or the redness seep out through its torn sides as the blood wart drained its victim... Suddenly he had no voice either, to join the clamoring dirge of curses and cheers. He turned his face away, but there was no escape from the gleaming insanity of the crowd. 'Tor, I—'
And turning, he discovered that she was gone, that Pollux was gone... and that the sack filled with his belongings had gone with them.
'I'm telling you, sonny, we got no city work available for a Summer — you can't handle machinery, you don't know the social codes; you got no experience.' The posting clerk looked at Sparks over the sill of the tiny office window the way he might have looked at a backward child.
'Well, how can I get experience if no one'll hire me?' Sparks raised his voice, frowned as it beat back on his aching head.
'Good question.' The clerk gnawed on a fingernail.
'That's not fair.'
'Life ain't fair, sonny. If you want work here you'll have to change your clan affiliation.'
'Like hell I will!'
'Then go back where you belong with your stinking fish skins, and quit wasting the time of real people!' The man behind him hi the line pushed him aside; the gloved hand was studded with metal.
Sparks turned back, saw the gloved hand make a fist twice the size of his own. He turned away again, away through the laughter, and went out of the hiring hall into the street. A new day brightened at the alley's end beyond the shuttered walls, after a night when storm clouds had blackened the stars but darkness had never fallen here in the streets of the city. There had been no way to hide his rage or his humiliation, or the misery of the vomiting that had purged what he had drunk, and seen, and done. He had slept like a corpse on a pile of crates afterward, and dreamed that Moon stood looking down on him, knowing everything, with pity in her agate-colored eyes ... pity Sparks pressed a hand over his own aching eyes to pinch her face away.
Down the long slope of the street lay the harbor beneath the city, and the trader's small boat waiting to take him home. His stomach twisted with fury and sick hunger. In not even a day he had thrown away everything — his belongings, his ideals, his self-respect. Now he would creep home to the islands, having lost his dream, and live with Moon's pity for the rest of his life. His mouth pulled back. Or he could admit that he had learned the real lesson: that Carbuncle had only stripped him naked of his illusions, taught him that he had nothing, he was nothing ... and that he was the only one in this mother lorn city who cared. Whether that ever changed or not was in his hands only.
His empty hands... He moved them helplessly, brushed the pouch hanging at his belt, the one thing that Tor and Carbuncle had left him: his flute. He drew it out gently, possessively, put it to his lips as he began to walk; letting melodies from the time he had lost ease the loss of everything else.
He moved aimlessly up the street, shutting out the restless motion that never ceased even through the night. Strangers looked at him, now that he had become oblivious to them. He did not notice, until at last something rang on the pavement in front of him. He stopped, looking down. A coin lay at his feet. He bent slowly, picked it up, flexed his fingers over it in wonder.
'You'd make more if you worked the Maze, you know. The listeners there have more to throw away... and more appreciation for an artist.'
Sparks glanced up, startled; saw a woman with dark, plaited hair and a band across her forehead standing before him. The crowd separated and flowed around them; he had the feeling that they stood together on an island. The woman was his Aunt Lelark's age, or older by some years, wearing a long dress of worn velvet and bands of
