Immediately after he arrived, he went to Old Town, the entertainment district, where he strolled Tyme Street from end to end, examining the displays outside every joy shop, relishing the menus recited outside every café savoring every familiar sight and smell. At the bottom of the street, where a rusted iron railing leaned above the sluggish river, he turned the steepish corner and looked down a slanted flight of stone steps into the Swale. Whenever he thought of himself as a youth, orphaned and lonely, he remembered himself doing exactly this: walking down Tyme Street, slowing his steps as the street narrowed above the river, almost stopping as he heard the clucking water at that final corner, wondering each time what marvel would be around the bend. Now, as he came around it once more, he knew no matter what else might have changed, the Swale had remained the same.
Now as always it seemed strangely empty for such a populous place. On one side the river crawled under ancient piers and around the hulls of silent boats. On the other, vast timbered structures pocked with blind niches leaned toward one another over narrow alleys. Every wall was pitted with doors, massive doors, iron-hinged doors, tightly shut or barely ajar. There were peepholes too, and windows where heavy curtains quivered continually, as at the touch of a restless hand. Behind the doors one could catch glimpses of tortuous corridors leading off into dimly lit interiors, and twisting stairs bending upward to tiny tilted landings that seemed built more for spiders than for people. Dank walls dripped with river sweat and stank of damp rot. Everything in the Swale suggested the disreputable and decadent, the presence of debauched and covert pleasures. The sound of the Swale was a muted growling, the murmur of a swarm in a hollow tree, not immediately visible or threatening, but ominously present, nonetheless.
A short way down the Swale was a gambling establishment run by Zasper’s oldest friend, Ahl Dibai Bloom. Zasper was no sooner in the door than he heard the greeting:
“So you’ve come home, eh, Ertigon?”
“Better late than never, Bloom.”
“Thought it’d be never, so I did.” Bloom scuttled across the room and zoomed his elevator legs, looking down on Zasper from on high. “Thought I’d see you never again, Ertigon.”
That had been what Zasper had thought too, once.
Bloom tugged him to a table more or less secluded from the ruckus going on.
“So, what brings you back again, Old Man?”
Because Bloom had more sense than most people, Zasper tried to explain.
“Lately … lately, do you get the feeling something isn’t right?”
“You mean in addition to the normal everyday constant things that aren’t right. Like these phlupping taxes, and the number of babies getting knocked off in the street, and …”
“I mean,” said Zasper with a good deal of dignity, “something else, Bloom. A kind of feeling I’ve had lately.”
Pressed for details, he could offer only generalities. He said it was only a feeling, as though some hideous danger lurked just out of sight. Danger was an Enforcer’s constant companion, of course, and Zasper said he didn’t mean any ordinary danger, like maybe getting killed, but something worse than that, far worse than that.
Bloom listened without being impressed, but then it took a lot to impress Bloom. Still, he was a friend and Zasper hadn’t that many friends left alive. Whether Bloom understood or not, Zasper was still most comfortable in Bloom’s place or around the Swale.
He came there often in the evenings when the river mist rose thickly and the lamps made balloons of light in the soggy air. Sometimes he stood at a corner for an hour or more, listening, watching, soaking up the quality of anticipation he had always felt there, the expectancy that hovered, as though something remarkable were about to occur, some wonder were to creep down the nearest alley, emerging at any moment. If he turned his back, he would miss it. The opportunity of witness would be gone unless he waited, patiently, for whatever it might be.
One evening while engaged in this solitary occupation, his scanning eyes detected movement where no movement should have been. Turning his head slowly, focusing on the shape of a crouched shadow, he translated the image into a scarcely credible reality—a girl child. A girl child, moreover, full of nervous twitches, half-suppressed fits and starts and trembling shivers that betrayed her presence beside the bulky hinge post of a tightly closed door. The door was carved in high relief with assorted pornographic scenes to advertise the establishment behind it, a brothel of a particularly unhealthy sort.
A girl this age had no business anywhere near there. Who was she? What child would dare these threatening alleys to hide herself in such a place? An older and more experienced person would be ill advised to do so. A girl child had no business in the Swale at all!
He moved silently, as Enforcers are taught to do, around and behind, coming up from a direction she would not expect. He did not speak until he had one iron-hard hand fastened firmly on her shoulder.
“What in hell are you doing here, girl?”
It wasn’t so much a question as an exclamation, and though his voice was purposefully harsh, his prey did not seem frightened by it as she hung almost limp in his grip. He thought she drooped there like some little animal, too shocked to struggle, maybe playing dead the way they do, waiting for him to drop her so she could scurry off.
Instead, he drew her into a half-lighted doorway to get a good look at her, a pale-skinned child, thin as a scabbard, topped by a tangled mop of flaming hair. He noticed her gnawed and bleeding fingers when she pushed the hair away from a tear-runneled face, away from stone-green eyes
