Forever after, I will not ignore such injustice. If I chance upon one of Nojheim’s spirit and Nojheim’s peril again, then let his wicked master be wary. Let the lawful powers of the region review my actions and exonerate me if that is what they perceive to be the correct course. If not …
It does not matter. I will follow my heart.
The Third Level
The young man’s dark eyes shifted from side to side, always moving, always alert. He caught a movement to the left, between two ramshackle wood-and-clay huts.
Just a child at play, wisely taking to the shadows.
Back to the right, he noticed a woman deep in the recesses beyond a window that was just a hole in the wall, for no one in this section of Calimport was wealthy enough to afford glass. The woman stayed back, standing perfectly still, watching him and unaware that he, in turn, watched her.
He felt like a hunting cat crossing the plain, she just another of the many deer, hoping he would take no notice.
Young Artemis Entreri liked that feeling, that power. He had worked this street-if that’s what it could be called, for it was little more than a haphazard cluster of unremarkable shacks dropped across a field of cart-torn mud-for more than five years, since he was but a boy of nine.
He stopped and slowly turned toward the window, and the woman shrank away at the merest hint of a threat.
Entreri smiled and resumed his surveying. This was his street, he told himself, a place he had staked out three months after his arrival in Calimport. The place had no formal name, but now, because of him, it had an identity. It was the area where Artemis Entreri was boss.
How far he had come in five years, hitching a ride all the way from the city of Memnon. Entreri chuckled at the term “all the way.” In truth, Memnon was the closest city to Calimport, but in the barren desert land of Calimshan, even the closest city was a long and difficult ride.
Difficult to be sure, but Entreri had made it, had survived, despite the brutal duties the merchants of that caravan had given him, despite the determined advances of one lecherous old man, a smelly unshaven lout who seemed to think that a nine-year-old boy-
Entreri shook that memory from his head, refusing to follow its inevitable course. He had survived the caravan trek and had stolen away from the merchants on the second day in Calimport, soon after he had learned that they had taken him along ultimately to sell him into slavery.
There was no need to remember anything before that, the teenager told himself, neither the journey from Memnon, nor the horrors before the journey that had sent him running from home. Still, he could smell the breath of that lecherous old man, like the breath of his own father, and his uncle.
The pain pushed him back to his angry edge, made him steel his dark eyes and tighten the honed muscles along his arms. He had made it. That was all that counted. This was his street, a place of safety, where no one threatened him.
Entreri resumed his surveillance of his domain, his eyes scanning left to right, then back across the way. He saw every movement and every shadow-always the hunting cat, looking more for prey than for danger.
He couldn’t help but chuckle self-deprecatingly at the grandeur of his “kingdom.” His street? Only because no other thief would bother to claim it. Entreri could work six days rolling every one of the many drunks who fell down in the mud in this impoverished section and barely scrape enough coins together to eat a decent meal on the seventh.
Still, that was enough for the waif who had fled his home; it had sustained him and given him back his pride over the past five years. Now he was a young man, fourteen years old-or almost fourteen. Entreri didn’t remember his exact birthdate, just that there had been a brief period right before the even briefer season of rain, when times in his house were not so terrible.
Again, the young man shook the unwanted memories from his head. He was fourteen, he decided; as if in confirmation, he looked down at his finely toned, lithe frame, barely a hundred and thirty pounds, but with tightened muscles covering every inch. He was fourteen, and he was rightly proud, because he had survived and he had thrived. He surveyed his street, his domain, and his smallish chest expanded. Even the old drunks were afraid of him, showed him proper respect when they addressed him.
He had earned it, and everybody in this little shanty town within the city of Calimport-a city that was nothing more than a collection of a thousand or more little shanty towns huddled about the white marble and gold-laced structures of the wealthy merchants-respected him, feared him.
Everybody except one.
The new tough, a young man probably three or four years older than Entreri, had arrived earlier in the tenday. He did not ask permission of Entreri before he began rolling the wretches in the mud, or even walking into homes in broad daylight and terrorizing whoever was inside. The stranger forced Entreri’s subjects into making him a meal, or into offering him whatever other niceties could be found.
That was the part that angered Entreri more than anything. Entreri held no love, no respect, for the common folk of his carved-out kingdom, but he had seen the newcomer’s type before-in both his horrid past and in his troubled nightmares. In truth, there was room on Entreri’s street for two thugs. In the five days that the new tough had been about, he and Entreri hadn’t even seen each other. And certainly none of Entreri’s wretched informants had asked for protection against this new terror. None of them would dare even to speak with Entreri unless he asked them a direct question.
But there remained the not-inconsiderable matter of pride.
Entreri peered around the shack’s corner, down the muddy lane. “Right on schedule,” he whispered as the newcomer strolled onto the other end of this relatively straight section of road. “Predictable.” Entreri curled his lip up, thinking that predictability was indeed a weakness. He would have to remember that.
The new thug’s eyes were dark, his hair, like Entreri’s, black as the waters of the Kandad Oasis, so black that every other color seemed to be mixed together in its depths. A native-born Calimshite, Entreri decided, probably a man not unlike himself.
What tortured past had put the invader on this street? he mused. There is no room for that kind of empathy, Entreri scolded himself. Compassion gets you killed.
With a deep, steadying breath, Entreri steeled his gaze once more and watched coldly as the invader threw a staggering old man to the ground and tore open the wretch’s threadbare purse. Apparently unsatisfied with the meager take, the young man yanked a half-rotted board from the uneven edge of the nearest shack and whacked his pitiful victim across the forehead. The old man whined and pleaded, but the tough struck him again, flattening his nose. He was on his knees, face covered in bright blood, begging and crying, but got hit again and again until his sobs were muffled by the mud that half-buried his broken face.
Entreri found that he cared nothing for the old wretch. He did care, though, that the man had begged this newcomer, had pleaded with a master who had come uninvited to Artemis Entreri’s place.
Entreri’s hands went down to his pockets, slipped inside, feeling the only weapons he bothered to carry, two small handfuls of sand and a flat, edged rock. He gave a sigh that reflected both resignation and the tingling excitement of impending battle. He started out from the corner, but paused to consider his own feelings. He was the hunting cat, the master here, so he was rightfully defending his carved-out domain. But there remained a sadness Entreri could not deny, a resignation he could not understand.
Somewhere deep inside him, in a pocket sealed away by the horrors he had known, Entreri knew things should not be like this. Yet the realization did not turn him away from the battle to come. Instead, it made him even angrier.
A feral growl escaped Entreri’s lips as he stepped around the shack, out into the open and right in the path of the approaching thug.
The older boy stopped, likewise regarding his adversary. He knew of Entreri, of course, the same way Entreri knew of him.
“At last you show yourself openly,” the newcomer said confidently. He was bigger than slender Entreri,
