shadow moved. He heard a voice and stopped, holding his breath so he could hear better.
The voice was answered by another, deeper voice, then the shadow was joined by another. The first voice, which Pristoleph thought might have been one of the boys’, giggled and said something he couldn’t understand, but it was clearly a woman’s voice. The two shadows grew larger, and the sound of footsteps echoed away. The shadows were gone.
Had he simply strolled down the alley, the whore and her mark would have left him alone, and perhaps Mandalax’s gang would have too. Not that either of the adults, plying that particular trade in that particular neighborhood at that time of night, would have lifted a finger to save his life. Still, a witness is a witness is a witness.
Pristoleph didn’t want to see the source of those two shadows. He knew what they were and what they were doing, but not who they were.
He didn’t think the woman was his mother. He’d heard her clearly enough to have recognized her voice if she was, but still
Pristoleph hadn’t seen his mother in two years and hadn’t lived with her for three. People in the ragged clutch of rat-infested hovels they called a neighborhood had told him she was beautiful, but Pristoleph could only see the dirt. They told him she was good at what she did, but what she did disgusted him. He’d heard she used to be rich, but used to be didn’t pay the rent. What she’d paid the rent for the first nine years of his life with her was her body. When times were good, when the nights weren’t too hot and commerce made the Third Quarter jingle with coins, she grew pudgy, voluptuous. When times were hard, and the nights too sticky for thoughts of bodies intertwined, she grew slim.
Either way, Pristoleph’s own ribs showed through skin stretched tight across them. His elbows and knees bulged, and his eyes were sunken and sallow. He was hungry all the time, regardless of the men coming and going, and his mother coming and going. He never remembered he and his mother eating together.
Which isn’t to say there weren’t the occasional good memories, few and far between as they may have been. They had spent one particularly stormy night sharing a lump of moldy cheese and stories of djinn, laughing. It was that night that she told him why his skin was red, and why his orange-yellow hair swayed on his head out of sync with the breeze, sometimes jumping over his scalp like a flame. She told him he wasn’t entirely human. She told him about the beast of fire that had come to her in the guise of a man, cloaked in the illusion of a customer. Where she might have told him the details of that brief moment they’d shared, instead her eyes had grown distant with the memory of pain and degradation even someone who had grown accustomed to pain and degradation had trouble remembering.
His father, the fire elemental.
His father, the rapist.
His father, the monster.
My mother, he reminded himself, the whore.
Pristoleph continued on, sticking to the alley directly under the wall, moving from crate of garbage to overturned barrel to pile of rotting timber. When he came within sight of a beggar asleep next to a tiny, sputtering fire he’d built of rocks and pieces of broken brick in a circle on the muddy floor of the alley, Pristoleph stopped. Mandalax and his gang would have to come to him.
He crouched under a big wooden box that looked like some kind of fish or crab trap that had been left leaning against a stack of similar contraptions. Water that smelled of rotting fish and brine had collected in greasy puddles underneath them, and Pristoleph kneeled in the muck without a moment’s thought to the stink soaking into his ragged trousers.
The beggar wasn’t snoring. Pristoleph wasn’t sure the man was even breathing. The crackle of his little fire was the only sound. Pristoleph concentrated on that.
He had only a few minutes to wait, then the first boy appeared. He was a head shorter than Pristoleph, thinner, and he moved in the dim firelight without the confidence of darkvision. Pristoleph could see the short, thin blade in the boy’s hand: a paring knife probably stolen from the back door of one of the Fourth Quarter’s unsanitary dives.
Still, it was a big enough knife to open a vein.
The boy stepped closer to the fire, looking down at the beggar then scanning the darkness for Pristoleph. There was a scuffle of feet, a tin cup accidentally kicked across gravel, and a second boy appeared at the edge of the meager firelight. Taller, sturdier, the second boy put a hand on the first boy’s shoulder and whispered into his ear so quietly, Pristoleph couldn’t hear even a hiss.
The boy with the paring knife moved closer to thefire, and that made Pristoleph smile. He set his eyes, all his concentration on the tiny flame.
“Lumps,” the taller boy said. His voice, barely above a whisper, sounded obscenely loud in the pervasive silence. “You got him?”
Fingers wrapped themselves in the loose fabric of Pristoleph’s torn, soiled tunic in the middle of his back, and cold metal pressed against the skin over his right kidney.
“I got him,” the boy who’d grabbed him said, his voice dripping with self-satisfaction.
Pristoleph didn’t concern himself with the knife at his vitals. He spun as fast as he could, and that would just have to be fast enough. He threw his left elbow up and around behind him, catching Lumps in the temple hard enough to send a numbing shock through his own arm. Continuing his spin, Pristoleph punched the already stunned boy full in the face with a wild roundhouse. Lumps fell heavily onto his behind, his rusted kitchen knife whirling away to clatter noisily at the foot of the city wall.
The boy with the paring knife stepped into the firelight. His feet apart, he appeared ready to spring forward at Pristoleph. He took one step closer first, his bare toes touching one of the broken bricks that ringed the still- unconscious drunk’s makeshift campfire.
Pristoleph gave the little flame a glance, a sharp moment of his attention, and the fire flared to life. The nearly pitch dark alley flashed with yellow light and the boy with the paring knife fell back into his taller friendand it was bright enough for Pristoleph to see both of them. The boy with the paring knife, blinking, was naked but for something that almost looked like a diaper. His skin was stained black with the soot of his victims’ chimneys. Startled by the burst of flame, he still hadn’t dropped the little knife.
The taller boy was cleaner, better dressed, and looked at Pristoleph with hatred.
“Mandalax,” Pristoleph said. “What do you-?”
Pristoleph stopped talking when he had to throw another elbow in the face of Lumps, who’d come at him again from behind. Lumps went down with a broken nose. Pristoleph could tell by the sound he made when he hit the ground that Lumps wouldn’t be getting up for a while.
“Kill that freak!” Mandalax shouted, and footsteps echoed from everywhere.
Pristoleph kicked hard behind him and took another boy, one who’d come running up from the darkness behind him, in the knee, There was a loud crack and the boy went down screaming.
The rest of the boysPristoleph still couldn’t tell how manystopped short. They obviously weren’t prepared for a fight. They were weak. They knew it, and Pristoleph had been the one who was waiting for them
“You and me, Mandalax,” he said.
The boy with the paring knife looked back over his shoulder and up at the gang leader. Mandalax, shaking, trembling, took a step back.
Pristoleph smiled.
The boy with the paring knife, covered from head to bare feet in soot, stabbed back, underhand, and sank the short-bladed knife into Mandalax’s groin. The boy’s scream was high-pitched and ear-rattling but stopped short when the paring knife turned and cut deeper.
“Sorry about the fire, Wenefir,” Pristoleph said. “Can you see all right?”
“I don’t need to,” the soot-covered boy said.
Pristoleph had met him a tenday before, and considering what Wenefir had lost working the chimneys for the sadistic, tyrannical Mandalax, it hadn’t taken long to turn him. The rest of Mandalax’s gang, with the exception of his unconscious brother Lumps, just watched as Wenefir took his pound of flesh in revenge. By morning, all but Lumps and his castrated brother belonged to Pristoleph.
