“And when he does, it probably won’t be much,” said Tsege.
“It never is,” Hirute agreed. “The city people only pay attention to us during these useless ceremonies. We keep asking them for help against the Thabas, but nothing ever comes. If it weren’t for tradition and the Jagasti, there’d be no reason for us to come here at all.”
Tsege snorted derisively.
“And for some of us, even the Jagasti aren’t a good enough reason not to stay home,” he said.
There was a moment of uneasy silence before anyone else spoke.
“You’re talking about Jass Shebeshi,” Hirute said quietly.
Shebeshi was the Jass of Imbesh, a territory located in the remotest part of the remaining Matile lands. He had not come to First Calling with the others. Not only did Shebeshi refuse to participate in the nominally obligatory rites and ceremonies conducted in the capital; he also defied convention – and by most standards, common sense – by attempting to expand his lands into those held by the Thabas.
Thus far, Jass Shebeshi’s ambitions had not brought any consequences from either the Thabas or the Emperor. And the longer the rebel Jass went unscathed, the more significant his defiance became. It was even rumored that he had stolen some cattle from the Thabas – an act of near-suicidal recklessness on the frontier, akin to pilfering gold from the Emperor’s treasure house, for the Thabas valued their cattle above all else.
“You know, Shebeshi just might have the right idea,” Fetiwi mused. “If more of us joined up with him, and with each other, we could leave this so-called Empire behind and start something better on our own.”
He was looking directly at Hirute as he spoke, and in his eyes, the hidden meaning of his words was clear. Hirute’s response was harsh.
“If Shebeshi sticks his fool head out too far, he’s going to get it chopped right off his shoulders,” she said. “As for me, I’m not ‘joining’ anybody for any reason. The Thabas haven’t bothered us since I avenged Kassa’s death, and we get along just fine on our own.”
Hirute held Fetiwi’s gaze. A flash of anger – and perhaps something more – flickered in Fetiwi’s eyes before he looked away.
Hirute drained her cup of talla, then held it up to be refilled by the young girl who was serving the Imba Jassis’ table. When her cup brimmed once again, Hirute took another long swallow, then wiped her lips with the back of her hand, then wiped her hand on her chamma.
“I don’t trust these outsiders,” she reiterated. “I’ll be glad when we’re out of here, and that can’t be too soon.”
The others drank to her sentiment.
3
The Fidi were not the only outsiders in Khambawe. There were others, of whom the Matile were totally unaware. Their existence was the best-kept secret in the city. And the price for any betrayal of that secret would be paid in blood ...
On the seacoast, far from the lights of the Khambawe, a lone fishing-boat rested at anchor. It was indistinguishable from the many other craft that harvested the huge shoals of fish that swam close to the shore. Its owner, known to fellow fishermen as Sehaye, claimed to have come from Akara, a tiny island off the eastern mainland that had been considered remote and inconsequential even at the height of the Matiles’ power.
If others wondered what had caused Sehaye to venture so far from his homeland, they kept their questions to themselves. They had their own nets to mind, and little reason to cast any lines of curiosity into the life of a loner. Sehaye was polite but taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. His catches were neither larger nor smaller than usual. No one knew how he spent the meager profits he earned; he had neither family nor friends nor any known vices. He was seldom, if ever, the topic of gossip on the wharves. There were many more-interesting people to talk about.
Had they known the truth about Sehaye, however, the Matile fishermen would have burned his boat and sent him to the bottom of the sea tied to his own anchor. For the island he came from was not Akara, and it was not located to the east, but to the west. He was an Uloan, from the Shattered Isles that lay beyond the mist. As a spy, he angled for information that would help his people gain their revenge against the mainlanders. This night, he had news to send that he knew would create a furor on his home islands.
A scrawny, dark-skinned, narrow-faced man with a tangle of short, undecorated braids sprouting on his head, Sehaye sat near the stern of his boat. He was carefully stuffing a small tube of wood down the gullet of something that, at first glance, looked like a motionless fish. But the light of the Moon Stars showed that the object he held in his hands was nothing at all like an ordinary piscine. Its body was scale-less; viscid, as though created from some repellent internal organ rather than nurtured by any natural process. Its fins tapered at odd angles, and its eyes resembled flat pieces of stone stuck into the substance of its head, as a child decorates a model molded from clay.
The construct was called a gede, and it was a product of the Uloans’ peculiar version of ashuma, a version that had long ago deviated well beyond the type of magic practiced by the mainlanders.
A grimace of distaste crossed Sehaye’s face as he completed his task. No matter how many times he had sent such messages to the Uloas, he could not accustom himself to the touch of the gede’s skin. He had brought two of the constructs with him when he came to the mainland and, as the huangi – the master-sorcerers of the Islands – had instructed, he had placed them in a stagnant pool near his small house. No matter how many times Sehaye pulled a gede from the foul-smelling water, there were always two of them waiting for him when he returned.
He reached over the side of his boat and gingerly placed the loathsome construct into the water. It sank like a stone beneath the surface – then came to sudden, sorcerous life, rising and shooting away far more swiftly than any natural fish could swim. Its path led to the Shattered Isles; its unpleasant wake remained long after its body had swum out of sight.
In the tube was Sehaye’s written account of the coming of the Fidi. He knew no harm would come to the thing he had sent to his masters; even the most ferocious predators in the sea would swim far away to avoid it.
He watched its path as it disappeared in the darkness. Then he retired to the sleeping-mat laid out below the deck. He did not plan on losing sleep wondering what the huangi would do with the information he had sent them. Once they decided, they would let him know, and he would do whatever they told him.
In his own way, Sehaye was just as much a construct as the gede. That did not bother him. He was working toward Retribution Time, when the Uloans would return from the islands and destroy the mainlanders. And now he believed that time would come sooner than he had previously thought.
When it came, he would be happy, for he had become weary of living among the arrogant, decadent Matile. He longed for the day when he could slice his fish-knife through the bellies of the idlers who lounged at the wharfs.
Soon come, he told himself. It soon come ...
CHAPTER FIVE
Tsotsis
1
Khambawe had been a city in crisis long before the Fidis’ ship appeared in its harbor. Like a fruit rotting from the inside, the Jewel City’s shining surface was pleasing to the eye, but masked the decay rotting at its core. And the corruption was spreading, slowly and inexorably.
Even at the height of its past splendors, Khambawe’s streets had been infested with thieves, and the honest people in its districts of destitution had labored, borrowed, and begged to maintain their existence, only to fall victim to those who preferred to pilfer what others worked hard to obtain.
Then, in the wake of the Storm Wars, much of Khambawe, as well as many other cities in the Matile Mala Empire, had quickly succumbed to ruin and neglect. Some of the areas torn apart by war had been repaired only indifferently; others, not at all. As the Empire’s decline accelerated, so did the advent of lawlessness in the crumbling inner precincts of its ravaged cities.
Children whose parents and other ol
der relatives had died in the wars grew up unattended in an environment that rapidly become almost feral in its sheer harshness and brutality. For safety, the children banded together in gangs; for survival, they stole whatever they could find. They began to call themselves tsotsis – the unwanted ones. Their lives were short and fierce, and they were as deadly to each other as they were to outsiders.
At the time when the tsotsis had been most vulnerable – the time when the gangs were first forming even as the Matile as a whole were struggling to piece their society together again – the city’s authorities had been too weak and distracted to give the incipient problem the attention it needed. Now, it was much too late to begin such intervention. Even an army would have had difficulty in dislodging the tsotsis from their lairs. And Khambawe’s army was not available for such a task – not when there was still the danger of attacks from the Uloans.
Few were the outsiders who dared to enter the tsotsis’ grim realm without a specific purpose – usually one that involved dishonest intentions on their own part. Fewer still were those who returned alive to tell of their experiences. But the tsotsis themselves were far from confined to the parts of the city they claimed as their own. Like predators in the wilderness, the gangs prowled Khambawe with impunity, robbing individuals as well as mercantile establishments, abducting the rich and holding them for exorbitant ransoms, and trafficking in gambling, prostitution, and a narcotic leaf called khat. They had even managed to infiltrate elements of Khambawe’ society that would have been beyond their grasp had the tsotsis not become masters of disguise and deception.
If the tsotsis had ever become united, they, not the Emperor and the Degen Jassi, would have ruled the streets of all Khambawe, not just their own areas. But savage, long-term blood feuds among the various gangs, which called themselves “sets,” prevented even the contemplation of such a mutually beneficial alliance. The sets had long ago divided the core of Khambawe into warring fiefdoms with boundaries that shifted like sand in the wind. Their territorial wars were like those of the Thabas in the southern hill country, and every night, the hyenas and wild dogs that infested the streets fed on the tsotsis’ casualties.
And of all the bloody, blighted districts over which the tsotsi sets battled each other and reigned supreme, none was more violent and dangerous than the one called The Maim ...
2
The shamasha girl who had removed Tiyana’s First Calling costume possessed a name. But she had ensured that no one within the Beit Amiya knew what it was: Kalisha. It was a name that had been bestowed upon her by a long-forgotten mother on the day she was born. And that mother had given Kalisha precious little else once the child was weaned from her breast.
In the Beit Amiya Kalisha, like the other female servants who ministered to the needs of the Vessels, was addressed primarily as “you, shamasha” or “you, girl.” And she did not encourage her employers to learn what her name was; or, indeed, anything else about her.
For Kalisha’s name was not the sole secret she kept. She was only playing a role as a shamasha, hired like so many others who flocked at the entrance of the Beit Amiya, hoping to gain not only employment, but also a respite from the difficult life of the streets of the poorer parts of Khambawe.
Yet Kalisha was not just any child of the streets. She was a tsotsi.
Had Tiyana or anyone else in the Beit Amiya known of Kalisha’s affiliation with the thieves and murderers who were beyond even the reach of the Jagasti, she would have been banished from the premises of the House, if not slain outright. Officially, the tsotsis were conceded only the parts of Khambawe that no one else wanted. The rest of the city was supposed to be off-limits to them, but the reality of the tsotsi problem was far different from the fabrications the Degen Jassi desperately wanted Khambawe’s populace to believe.
The tsotsis had little difficulty penetrating the more respectable parts of the city whenever they wanted, and not only to pilfer and plunder. Often, like Kalisha, they posed as servants and menial laborers, roles through which they could gather information and plan future robberies. The tsotsi sets called such masquerading “fronting.” Kalisha knew of several other tsotsis from sets other than her own who were fronting within the walls of the Beit Amiya. But she had better wit than to let them know she knew who they were. She was certain the others knew about her as well. An unspoken truce held among the tsotsis fronting in the Beit Amiya. They knew it was to their mutual benefit not to pursue their sets’ rivalries under the noses of the Amiyas.
Kalisha was well outside her place of employment now, slipping like a shadow between buildings and through alleys in which no one else from the Beit Amiya would ever willingly go. Her only garment was a scrap of black cloth twisted around her slender hips. A small, sharp knife nestled snugly between the cloth and her skin. When she slipped into the pools of darkness that lay beyond the reach of the Moon Stars, Kalisha was all but invisible. And when she emerged again into the light of the Moon Stars, she moved so quickly she could hardly be seen.
Anyone watching her would have considered the route she took circuitous and without any conscious purpose. But there was a method to her meandering course; it was not as random as it appeared.
Kalisha never duplicated her path on the clandestine trips she took to the Maim. Nor did she allow the same number of days or weeks to pass between such journeys. One of the few pieces of advice her mother had given her was these words: “Predictable tsotsi be dead tsotsi.” She never thought of her mother much anymore; not since she had died in a skirmish between her set and another.
Now, Kalisha skittered through the city’s meanest streets like a spider, never spending more than a moment in any lighted area. The closer she came to the Maim, the fewer of those spots she found. The buildings she passed became shabbier, the streets narrower, the smell of urine and rotting garbage stronger, the scuttle of rats’ feet louder. No trees or flowers grew here.
Tsotsi-set symbols – patterns of slanted slash marks decipherable only other tsotsis – were scratched into the walls of some of the houses. They were messages of hate and defiance, territorial markers, challenges, insults. No one bothered to try to eradicate the symbols anymore, for they would only be replaced almost as soon as they were erased.
It was becoming quieter now. Only the occasional scurry of a rat broke the silence; Kalisha herself moved almost without a sound.
Thus far, Kalisha had encountered no one. Only fools – or other tsotsis – revealed themselves in the streets this close to the Maim, especially at night. In the corners of her eyes, she had detected a few flickers of movement in the shadows and assumed that whoever made them was also on tsotsi business. She did not want – or need – to know more than that.
As she passed a half-fallen wreck that might once have been a shop, Kalisha heard growls and the sound of snapping bones. The noises were coming from the direction where she needed to go, and so she continued. She fought down a spike of fear when she drew close enough to see what was making the horrible clamor, even though she had already suspected what it was.
A hyena was tearing at a nearly naked corpse – the remains of a luckless victim of the tsotsis, stripped of everything valuable and dumped in the street. In the time before the Storm Wars, hyenas never dared to venture near Matile cities. Now, they were as numerous as the packs of dogs with which they sometimes competed. As they did in the wilderness, hyenas disposed of the dead in the neglected parts of Khambawe.
The hyena raised its head and glared at Kalisha, who kept her distance. Blood dripped from its massive jaws and speckled its mangy fur. Kalisha stared back at the beast. She kept her hand on the hilt of her dagger. She had no illusions concerning the effect the weapon would have if the hyena chose to attack her. But she also knew she would soon be dead if she betrayed any sign of fear.
As well, there was the chance that this beast was more than a hyena. It could be an irimu, a creature of legend that was human by day and turned into a hyena at night. Kalisha had scoff
ed at the legend, thinking it was nothing but a tale for children. Now, she could not be so certain it wasn’t.
The hyena stared at her a while longer before uttering a series of high-pitched yips that sounded like demented human laughter. Then the scavenger returned to its grisly repast, and Kalisha moved on, still uncertain whether or not she had, indeed, encountered an irimu.
She was even warier now, constantly on the lookout for danger that walked on four feet – or two. But nothing else accosted her before she reached her destination, which lay at the hostile heart of the Maim.
3
Eventually, Kalisha reached an opening between two buildings that leaned against each other so precariously only their proximity to each other prevented them from collapsing into the street. From the far side of the opening, she heard the welcome sound of drumming.
Kalisha squeezed into the opening, and darkness of the space between the walls swallowed her. Moments later, she emerged into a courtyard, beyond which stood a tumbledown aderash – a mansion that had in the distant past belonged to a Jass. Now it housed a notable of a different kind.
As she crossed the courtyard, Kalisha’s posture straightened, and her eyes no longer flickered back and forth, searching for danger. As well, her gaze lost the studied impression of vacancy she and other servants, fronting or not, affected in the Beit Amiya. Here, in the Maim, she was not just another shamasha among people who believed they were her superiors. Here, she was an equal.
A single tsotsi stood at the entrance to the broken building. He was a lean young man clad only in a black leather senafil studded with silver. His head was shaved except for a strip of braids that hung from the middle of his scalp. Both his hands were wrapped around the shaft of his tirss: a fearsome-looking weapon that sprouted tines like the sharp fangs of a carnivore. That, indeed, was what the name meant: “teeth.” The weapon was designed not only to kill, but to inflict grievous pain as well. At the sight of Kalisha, the tsotsi’s hands clenched on the hilt of his tirss.
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