Shadowkill

##

She went round another angle and saw a clot of angry, shouting, arm-waving locals and three guards trying to shift them away from an accident. A tractor without its flats being raced along the thruway by a gang of boys had crashed into a handcart loaded with local chicken-types. There were feathers everywhere, blood, squawking birds, locals trying to get at the boys, the guards pissed off at everyone. A different set of guards. These had dark crimson uniforms with green strips angled down the front. One of them lost his patience entirely, aimed his pellet rifle at the ground and blew a hell of a hole in the dirt.

The crowd scattered and the boys on the tractor ran off.

The only one left was the hapless soul with the handcart. The guards hit him a few licks and went off, leaving him to right his cart, repack it, and trundle it around the new hole in the middle of the road.

Laughter and a satiric run on a stringed instrument of some kind.

Rose looked around.

A street musician was standing in a doorway, swaying, a lutelike instrument cradled in his arms. His face was flushed and he looked more than a little drunk. After a moment he began to sing, improvising a comic account of the accident, describing the guards, the careless boys, and the hapless would-be trader in scurrilous terms, picturing them as capering ludicrously about the hole in the road which he invested with enormous significance, mostly sexual and wholly comical. He had a crowd in moments; laughing and clapping with him, they threw coppers at the case open at his feet. Then someone yelled, someone else took the lute from the singer and bustled him away and again the street was empty-until a squad of guards came marching around an angle.

Behind them the Vaarlord of this Kehvar (quarter, ward, neighborhood) lolled on the seat of a groundcar, his gorgeousness exhibited behind pelletproof glass as he looked over his subjects. He was a big man, with a seamed, scarred face. He didn’t loll well. Cultural things, she thought, idleness as an attribute of greatness. No, as a toiler, he was an abject failure. There was too much animal vigor in the man; his eyes moved over the houses and the people, over her as one of the people, with hard possessiveness. His hair might be gilded, his mustache and goatee stiff as gold wire, his face enameled white, his lips carmine, but none of that mattered. She watched him pass and shivered. Head down, Rose, she told, herself. It’s survival time.

Quiet went down the street with him, the people around her going still as he passed, prey beasts in the presence of a lion, praying he wasn’t hungry.

One of the guards following him looked at her, interest sparking in his eyes. He kept walking, but he turned his head to watch her as he went along.

As casually as she could manage, Rose turned down one of the semi-streets that crossed this one, moved swiftly through several angles, ran into a swarm of beggar children, turned again to get away from them, nearly ran into two guards at the boundary between two Kehvars engaged in a bracing match that was clearly, on the verge of breaking into a shooting war. The locals were smarter or faster than her, they’d gone for cover. She backed off as quickly and quietly as she could, ducked down another of the winding ways and made her way back to the main trafficflow.