place of wild abandon, wild hope, wild despair, everything at extremes and nothing in moderation, dreams trodden into the muck and new ones sucked from bottles to be vomited up and trodden down in turn. A place where the strange was commonplace and the ordinary bizarre, and death might be along tomorrow so you’d best have all your fun today
At its muddy margins, the city consisted mostly of wretched tents, scenes better left unwitnessed by mankind assaulting the eye through wind-stirred flaps. Buildings were botched together from split pine and high hopes, held up by the drunks slumped against both sides, women risking their lives to lean from wonky balconies and beckon in the business.
‘It’s got bigger,’ said Corlin, peering through the jam of wet traffic that clogged the main street.
‘Lot bigger,’ grunted Savian.
‘I’d have trouble saying better, though.’
Shy was trying to imagine worse. A parade of crazed expressions reeled at them through the litter-strewn mud. Faces fit for some nightmare stage show. A demented carnival permanently in town. Off-key giggling split the jagged night and moans of pleasure or horror, the calls of pawnbrokers and the snorts of livestock, the groaning of ruined bedsteads and the squeaking of ruined violins. All composing a desperate music together, no two bars alike, spilling into the night through ill-fitting doors and windows, roars of laughter at a joke or a good spin of the gaming wheel hardly to be told from roars of anger at an insult or the bad turn of a card.
‘Merciful heaven,’ muttered Majud, one sleeve across his face against the ever-shifting stench.
‘Enough to make a man believe in God,’ said Temple. ‘And that He’s somewhere else.’
Ruins loomed from the wet night. Columns on inhuman scale towered to either side of the main street, so thick three men couldn’t have linked their arms around them. Some were toppled short, some sheared off ten strides up, some still standing so high the tops were lost to the dark above, the shifting torchlight picking out stained carvings, letters, runes in alphabets centuries forgotten, mementoes of ancient happenings, winners and losers a thousand years dust.
‘What did this place used to be?’ muttered Shy, neck aching from looking up.
‘Cleaner, at a guess,’ said Lamb.
Shacks had sprouted around those ancient columns like unruly fungi from the trunks of dead trees. Folk had built teetering scaffolds up them, and chiselled bent props into them, and hung ropes from the tops and even slung walkways between, until some were entirely obscured by incompetent carpentry, turned to nightmare ships run thousands of miles aground, decked out in torches and lanterns and garish advertising for every vice imaginable, the whole so precarious you could see the buildings shifting when the breeze got stiff.
The valley opened up as the remnants of the Fellowship threaded its way further and the general mood intensified to something between orgy, riot and an outbreak of fever. Wild-eyed revellers rushed at it all open- mouthed, fixed on ripping through a lifetime of fun before sunup, as if violence and debauch wouldn’t be there on the morrow.
Shy had a feeling they would.
‘It’s like a battle,’ grunted Savian.
‘But without any sides,’ said Corlin.
‘Or any victory,’ said Lamb.
‘Just a million defeats,’ muttered Temple.
Men tottered and lurched, limped and spun with gaits grotesque or comical, drunk beyond reason, or crippled in head or body, or half-mad from long months spent digging alone in high extremities where words were a memory. Shy directed her horse around a man making a spatter all down his own bare legs, trousers about ankles in the muck, cock in one wobbling hand while he slobbered at a bottle in the other.
‘Where the hell do you start?’ Shy heard Goldy asking her pimp. He had no answer.
The competition was humbling, all right. The women came in every shape, colour and age, lolling in the national undress of a score of different nations and displaying flesh by the acre. Gooseflesh, mostly, since the weather was tending chilly. Some cooed and simpered or blew kisses, others shrieked unconvincing promises about the quality of their services at the torchlit dark, still others abandoned even that much subtlety and thrust their hips at the passing Fellowship with the most warlike expressions. One let a pair of pendulous, blue-veined teats dangle over the rail of a balcony and called out, ‘What d’you think o’ these?’
Shy thought they looked about as appealing as a pair of rotten hams. You never can tell what’ll light the fire in some folk, though. A man looked up eagerly with one hand down the front of his trousers noticeably yanking away, others stepping around him like a wank in the street was nothing to remark upon. Shy blew out her cheeks.
‘I been to some low-down places and I done some low-down shit when I got there, but I never saw the like o’ this.’
‘Likewise,’ muttered Lamb, frowning about with one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Seemed to Shy it rested there a lot these days, and had got pretty comfortable too. He weren’t the only one with steel to hand, mind you. The air of menace was thick enough to chew, gangs of ugly-faced and ugly-purposed men haunting the porches, armed past their armpits, aiming flinty frowns across at groups no better favoured on the other side of the way.
While they were stopped waiting for the traffic to clear, a thug with too much chin and nowhere near enough forehead stepped up to Majud’s wagon and growled, ‘Which side o’ the street you on?’
Never a man to be rushed, Majud considered a moment before answering. ‘I have purchased a plot on which I mean to site a business, but until I see it—’
‘He ain’t talking about plots, fool,’ snorted another tough with hair so greasy he looked like he’d dipped his head in cold stew. ‘He means are you on the Mayor’s side or Papa Ring’s side?’
‘I am here to do business.’ Majud snapped his reins and his wagon lurched on. ‘Not to take sides.’
‘Only thing on neither side o’ the street is the sewer!’ shouted Chinny after him. ‘You want to go in the fucking sewer, do you?’
The way grew wider and busier still, a crawling sea of muck, the columns even higher above it, the ruin of an ancient theatre cut from the hillside where the valley split in two ahead of them. Sweet was waiting near a sprawling heap of building like a hundred shacks piled on top of each other. Looked as if some optimist had taken a stab at it with whitewash but given up halfway and left the rest to slowly peel, like a giant lizard in the midst of moulting.
‘This here is Papa Ring’s Emporium of Romance, Song and Dry Goods, known locally as the Whitehouse,’ Sweet informed Shy as she hitched her horse. ‘Over yonder,’ and the old scout nodded across the stream that split the street in two, serving at once for drinking water and sewer and crossed by a muddle of stepping stones, wet planks and improvised bridges, ‘is the Mayor’s Church of Dice.’
The Mayor had occupied the ruins of some old temple—a set of pillars with half a moss-caked pediment on top—and filled in the gaps with a riot of planks to consecrate a place of worship for some very different idols.
‘Though, being honest,’ continued Sweet, ‘they both offer fucking, drink and gambling so the distinction is largely in the signage. Come on, the Mayor’s keen to meet you.’ He stepped back to let a wagon clatter past, showering mud from its back wheels over all and sundry, then set off across the street.
‘What shall I do?’ called Temple, still on his mule with a faceful of panic.
‘Take in the sights. Reckon there’s a lifetime of material for a preacher. But if you’re tempted by a sample, don’t forget you got debts!’ Shy forded the road after Lamb, trying to pick the firmest patches as the slop threatened to suck her boots right off, around a monstrous boulder she realised was the head of a fallen statue, half its face mud-sunk while the other still wore a pitted frown of majesty, then up the steps of the Mayor’s Church of Dice, between two groups of frowning thugs and into the light.
The heat was a slap, such a reek of sweltering bodies that Shy—no stranger to the unwashed—felt for a moment like she might drown in it. Fires were stoked high and the air was hazy with their smoke, and chagga smoke, and the smoke from cheap lamps burning cheap oil with a fizz and sputter, and her eyes set right away to watering. Stained walls half green wood and half moss-crusted stone trickled with the wet of desperate breath. Mounted in alcoves above the swarming humanity were a dozen sets of dusty Imperial armour that must’ve belonged to some general of antiquity and his guards, the proud past staring down in faceless disapproval at the sorry now.
‘It gets worse?’ muttered Lamb.
