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 Artemis, had arrived earlier in the tenday. He did not ask permission of Artemis 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 Artemis's subjects into making him a meal, or into offering him whatever other niceties could be found.
That was the part that angered Artemis more than anything. Artemis 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 Artemis's street for two thugs. In the five days that the new tough had been about, he and Artemis hadn't even seen each other. And certainly none of Artemis's wretched informants had asked for Protection against this new terror. None of them would dare even to speak with Artemis unless he asked them a direct question.
But there remained the not-inconsiderable matter of pride.
Artemis 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.' Artemis 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, Artemis decided, probably a man not unlike himself.
What tortured past had put the invader on his street? he mused. There is no room for that kind of empathy, Artemis scolded himself. Compassion gets you killed.
With a deep, steadying breath, Artemis 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.
Artemis 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 Artemis could not deny, a resignation he could not understand.
Somewhere deep inside him, in a pocket sealed away by the horrors he had known, Artemis 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 Artemis'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 Artemis, of course, the same way Artemis knew of him.
'At last you show yourself openly,' the newcomer said confidently. He was bigger than slender Artemis, though there was very little extra weight on his warrior's frame. His shoulders had been broadened by maturity, by an extra few years of a hard life. His muscles, though not so thick, twitched like strong cords.
'I have been looking for you,' he said, inching closer. His caution tipped observant Artemis that he was more nervous than his bravado revealed.
'I've never lived in the shadows,' Artemis replied. 'You could have found me any day, any time.'
'Why would I bother?'
Artemis considered the ridiculous question, then gave a little shrug, deciding not to justify the boastful retort with an answer.
'You know why I'm here,' the man said at length, his tone sharper than before-a further indication that his nerves were on edge.
'Funny, I thought I was the one who'd found
'You had no choice but to find me,' the invader asserted firmly.
There it was again, that implication of a deeper purpose. It occurred to Artemis then that this man, for he was indeed a man and no street waif, should already be above staking out a claim to such a squalid area as this. Even if he were new to the trade, this course would not be the course for an adult ruffian. He should be allied with one of the many thieves' guilds in this city of thieves. Why, then, had he come? And why alone?
Had he been kicked out of a guild, perhaps?
For a brief moment, Artemis feared he might be in over his head. His opponent was an adult, and possibly a veteran rogue. Entreri shook the notion away, saw that his reasoning was not sound. Young upstarts did not get 'kicked out' of Calimport's thieves' guilds; they merely disappeared — and no one bothered to question their abrupt absence. But this opponent was not, obviously, some child who had been forced out on his own.
'Who are you?' Artemis asked bluntly. He wished he could take the question back as soon as the words had left his mouth, fearing he had just tipped the thug off to his own ignorance. Artemis was ultimately alone in his place. He had no network surrounding him, no spies of any merit and little understanding of the true power structures of Calimport.
The thug smiled and spent a long moment studying his opponent. Artemis was small, and probably as quick and sure in a fight as the guild's reports had indicated. He stood easily, his hands still in the pockets of his ragged breeches, his bare, brown-tanned arms small, but sculpted with finely honed muscles. The thug knew Artemis had no allies, had been told that before he had been sent out here. Yet this boy — and in the older thief's eyes, Artemis was indeed a boy — stood easily and seemed composed far beyond his years. One other thing bothered the man.
'You have no weapon?' he asked suspiciously.
Again, Artemis only offered a little shrug in reply.
'Very well, then,' the thug said, his tone firm, as if he had just made a decision. To accentuate that very point, he took up the board, still dripping with the blood of the old man Decisively he brought it up to his shoulder, brought it up, Artemis realized, to a more accessible position. The thug was barely twenty feet away when he began his approach.
So much more was going on here, Artemis knew, and he wanted answers.
Ten feet away.
Artemis held his steady and calm pose, but his muscles tightened in preparation.
The man was barely five feet from him. Entreri's right hand whipped out of his pocket, hurling a spray of fine sand.
Up came the club, and the man turned his head away. He was laughing when he looked back. 'Trying to blind me with a handful of sand?' he asked incredulously, sarcastically. 'How clever of a desert fighter to think of using sand!'
Of course it was the proverbial 'oldest trick' in sneaky Calimshan's thick book of underhanded street fighting techniques. And the next oldest trick followed when Artemis thrust his hand back into his pocket, and whipped a second handful of sand.
The thug was laughing even as he closed his eyes, defeating the attack. He blinked quickly, just for an instant, a split second. But that instant was long enough for ambidextrous Artemis to withdraw his left hand from
