dipping a coin or two. But Marius was not in the mood to play games with street rats. When the next casual bump arrived, and the bumper’s hand flitted into the inner pocket of his cape he grabbed the offending wrist, spun the startled thief around, and pushed them both into the mouth of the nearest alley.
“What the hell is your game?” he snarled, leaning down so that his dead face filled the view of the child cowering in front of him. A girl, no more than eight or nine years old by the look of her. She looked just like any other street rat; dirty and dishevelled from a lifetime of begging scraps from whoever trod the cobbles upon which she slept. But Marius knew the signs. The dirt was just a little too carefully spread over her face, a little too effective at blurring distinguishing features. The scraps she wore were roomy rather than ragged, all the better for the multitude of hidden pockets they undoubtedly contained. The wrist he held had strength within it that spoke of at least semi-regular feeding.
“Whose are you?” he growled. He grabbed her other wrist, held them both in one hand, and used the other to roughly push her sleeves up to her shoulders. He twisted her arms this way and that, examining the wrists, the inside of the elbows, her armpits. Not finding anything he reached out and grabbed her jaw, turning her head back and forth until he located a tiny tattoo just below her ear – a small fish with a hook protruding from its mouth.
“A Salmon Streeter? Look!” He let go of her jaw and held his hand up, spreading his fingers so the webbing between thumb and first finger was visible. A tiny tattoo of a horse’s head nestled within the space.
“Pony Lane boy from way back.” In reality, Marius had tattooed it there himself three years previously, part of a failed scheme to embezzle the street gangs around the old market districts that had led very quickly to his last exit from the city. “Tell Old Gafna to teach his brats better. Trip, dip, flick. It’s not that difficult.”
He dragged the terrified girl down the alleyway and back into the street, stepping through the flow of human traffic until they stood equidistant from any path of escape. Marius let one wrist go, keeping a firm hold on the other, and let the girl strain to be free. People barged past on both sides. Marius stood still. Pedestrians stared as they passed, without bothering to intrude. Still Marius made no attempt to move. Then he saw a child across the way, indistinguishable at that distance from the masses of underage poor who choke the streets of any big city, except that this child most definitely did not glance at the unusual sight of the cowled immobile stranger and the urchin girl so obviously in conflict. He moved past, hugging tight to the wall, completely failing to notice Marius staring at him, before turning into an alleyway and disappearing into the darkness within. Marius pulled the girl towards him sharply, so that she stumbled and bumped her face into his hip.
“Get,” he said, pushing her away so that she tripped and fell backwards into the stream of humanity passing them. As soon as she was hidden by the press of legs he stepped back towards the side of the road and strode swiftly away. Only when he had traversed several blocks did he stop, and step into a nearby doorway. He leaned against the doorframe, and slipped a hand into the inside pocket of his jerkin.
“Clever girl,” he said with a smile. The thruppence he had placed there during their altercation in the street was missing. He reached into a pocket slightly further down, better hidden by the stitching, and removed a small pouch. He counted out three tenpennies worth of coins, dropped the pouch into the street, and returned the money to his pocket. Good girl, but not good enough to notice her own victimisation. Old Gafna would correct her mistakes.
Marius slipped into the street and continued on his way. Word spreads quickly, at street level. No more fingers troubled his journey.
The Borgho City docks ran for several miles along both sides of the Meskin River, a mile-wide brown snake that had long ago been domesticated by regular dredging, tide-breakers, and a profusion of weirs and locks further upriver. The docks were a mini-city in their own right, with their own culture, their own language, and several customs that would appear bizarre to anybody who wandered in from even a mile outside the unofficial city limits, even if they had been a Borghan their entire life. There was no logical reason, for example, for a ship’s captain to throw overboard a corn dolly dressed like Severn Magnassity, the folkloric discoverer of the mythical port of Haventide, but you’d never find a ship that sailed out without having done so. Generations of families had garnered a tidy living from making dollies and selling them at dockside. Each such family had their own particular tradition when it came to folding the corn just so, cutting and tying arms and legs one way and not the other, sewing and folding Magnassity’s uniform in one particular shade and not the next. As each distinctive style of Magnassity became associated with this plentiful fishing season or that devastating tornado, they went in and out of fashion, became famous or infamous in their turn. Fortunes waxed and waned, dolly families climbed and fell within their own unique caste system, marriages were made, alliances were broken, and woe befall the outsider who uttered the words “But they’re just corn dollies” in the wrong tavern. So the culture of the Borgho wharfs progressed, and drew the mismatched travellers and vagrants who occupied them closer together, until all who lived there spoke the quayside patois, where knowing the difference between a topreeb and a jibreeb makes all the difference, and no dictionary in the world can help you if you don’t. The
Marius had friends who worked the ships. People like Marius had friends everywhere. It’s harder to do the kind of business Marius did without the right sort of introductions from the right sort of people, and Marius had been doing that kind of business for long enough to build up a significant web of contacts. The only problem, such as it was, was that Marius’ kind of friends invariably didn’t recognise him without money passing between them first. Thankfully, the streets were crowded. Within half an hour, he was able to stop in the shadow of a tenement at the western fringe and distribute several tenpennies worth of coins into various hidden pockets, as well as two wedding rings which had probably been on their way to a pawn shop.
By common consent, the docks did not tolerate dips. There were a million ways for a foreign sailor to lose his money in a city like Borgho. The most interesting ones were illegal, or at best, highly immoral, even by Lower Scorban standards. It was mutually agreed, in an unspoken pact going back centuries, that what the city guard did not see it could not close down. And too much money fed too many people in the area for anyone to want that arrangement to go bad because the wrong sailor got dipped before he could lose money to his satisfaction. It was not a case of one bad apple ruining a whole bunch, so much as the whole barrel being rotten but the customer not needing to know until they’d already bought it and carted it home. Besides, an off-duty guard’s money was as good as a sailor’s, and nobody wanted to dry up a regular source of revenue. So: no dips; no footpads; no knives dug into ribs and sudden visits to side alleys. Marius knew the rules, and at what street corner they started to apply. As soon as he passed the end of Fishwife Lane and turned onto the wide street known to all as The Pipe Barrel, he left his fingers in his trouser pockets, and walked without caution past the crowds that milled about the endless stalls and displays of the city’s most determinedly honest criminals.
Remmitt Paschar looked like a corn dolly made flesh, his sun-baked skin having been flogged so often for so many civic misdemeanours that it had taken on the scarred and wizened aspect of the dried corn husks. Like a true Borghan street man, however, he had turned this impediment to his advantage. Decked out in whichever style of blue uniform was in favour amongst the dolly families this year he paraded throughout the docks, offering the discerning new arrival slivers of the genuine decking of Severn Magnassity’s sloop the
He was just taking the weight off for five minutes, sitting on an upturned crate in the space at the back of a mussel-fryer’s stall, trying to light a fresh snout from the butt of a dead one, when Marius slid past the stall and stood over him.
“Hello, Remmitt.”
“Ach!” Paschar leaped backwards off the crate, banged the back of his head on the wall behind him, and fell back to Earth. “God damn it.” He scrabbled across the grimy cobbles until he recovered the bent snout and jammed
