In a few more blocks, the multi-levels gave way to a maze of small houses and shops. Not even an attempt at webbing here, and the walls oozed a mossy green, stippled here and there with mustard yellow. Under every window sill, up under the overhang of roofs, purple fungi hung in fleshy, trailing sprays. The city, named Palace just as the planet was, lay prey to a vast variety of moulds and spores. Kata had no idea why the humans had chosen to build their capital on the edge of the biggest swamp on this watery continent. The citizens never seemed to know, either, when you questioned them. They liked filth, humans - that was to Kata’s mind the simplest answer.
Through twisting streets he followed the detailed and precise directions of his employer’s agent until he came to a nondescript scale polishing studio. Carved into the frame of the door was a series of hieroglyphs, the equivalent of a grandmother’s knots, each standing for a moment of crisis or triumph for the line who owned the shop. Even on the homeworld most Leps these days replaced the glyphs by datablocks and Map icons - human innovations. Few Leps could even read the old symbols. Kata, however, read off the glyphs to himself and then wondered why he’d bothered. This family of scale polishers had only one claim to fame: their eldest son had gone over to the invaders and died in the war. Still, it showed more patriotism and pride than he’d seen so far in this quarter of humanized Leps, human-sympathizing Leps. Kata scratched politely at the door. After a few moments a tiny panel slid back, revealing a peephole and a slitted grey-gold eye. ‘E-ya?’ The voice rapped the question out, crisp and demanding. Kata’s crest rose in the Lep equivalent of a smile. Here was a youngling with a bit of the true arrogance.
‘K’ chaak ni-ta!’ I demand your throat! Kata might admire the door warden, but damned if he’d be dominated by him.
The door swung open so hard it bounced back against the wall. With a growl the door warden strode out, slashed skirts swinging round his powerful thighs. Kata sized him up quickly: the warden was at least a foot taller and much younger than he. Red and pale green scales marched down his grey arms in diagonal lines. So, his line came from Palace, and he himself had most likely been hatched and raised here. The male looked Kata up and down, then spat.
Kata raised his crest, then began to circle the youngling. He could hear the sound of windows being thrown open, doors being flung back. Leps called out, Leps came running to form a circle in the street round this dance-fight. Off to one side stood a grandmother with a bevy of young females behind her. Kata took off his jacket and shoulder-sack, then with a bow of respect handed them to the old woman for safekeeping. She raised her crest slightly and nodded her approval. Kata turned to the men’s side of the circle.
‘Watch well, my brothers!’ Kata called out. ‘Watch and see how the old ways live!’
The youngling raised his own crest, a grin of agreement. In the sensible corner of his mind, Kata called himself a fool for engaging in a public display like this. The fewer people who knew that the Outcast was on planet, the better. But to turn down a dance challenge? Never!
At first, the two merely circled one another. As the challenged one, the door warden’s turn came first. The younger Lep began to spin, to leap high in the air. With every leap he flung his muscled arms toward the sky. The crowd began to clap and stamp their feet, pounding out the rhythm of the dance. Next the youngling feinted powerful blows, side strikes and claw swipes at his adversary while he kept up the dance, leaping right, then left. Kata merely watched, never flinching even when a clawed hand swept within a few centimetres of his eyes. At last the youngling finished his set. His huge scaled chest heaved as he lifted his head to the crowd, right and left, calling upon them to judge his adversary against him. The crowd fell silent. Heads turned; crests raised; eyes, gold and green and black, studied Kata. He could practically hear what they must be thinking. The youngling was strong and fast, with some grace and a store of confidence that would be the joy of any grandmother. What would the scrawny middle-aged Lep with the undistinguished scalings do in answer?
Kata showed his throat to the crowd, first right, then left. Slowly, as slowly as he could manage, he spread out his arms and hands to the sky. The crowd gasped: to claim the slow fight, the silence, was the right only of a great dancer. No-one moved, no-one clapped while he forced each claw out of each fingertip, very slowly, one by one. With his hands raised against the sky, he began to sway, very slowly, right and left, over and over. At the last claw the crowd gasped. ‘Zah!’ Kata called out.
They began to clap and stamp in the sacred rhythm. Kata began to move, to turn in place, slowly at first, then faster. The clapping swelled to match his speed as he whirled in place, faster, faster. The pounding feet of the watchers struck the rhythm for his pounding heart, so fast that the alley seemed to blur around him, but even so, each time he faced his adversary he made, with icy precision, a swift stab of a finger claw that would have blinded a blood opponent.
Round and round - then all at once he stopped. The crowd roared as he leapt far into the air, above the heads of even the tallest of the watching Leps. He landed in a perfect crouch with his clawed hand thrust up in an underhand throat strike. The youngling yelped and stumbled back. Breathing slow and softly, Kata held the position for a moment, then stood to raise his head to the watchers and ask for their judgment.
The crowd sighed, long and hot, as if they had seen a ritual mating. The grandfathers among them looked at each other, then hissed.
The young door warden slumped, spreading his arms out to acknowledge the judging, then stood straight and strode over to Kata. Only his eyes betrayed his fear. He tilted his head backward to expose his neck, then waited.
Kata leapt forward, snaked his head round, and touched the male’s soft throat with his teeth, merely touched points to skin. Let the boy tremble, and he would drink blood.
‘E-ya?’ The youngling spoke softly, politely, but there was no trace of a whine or a beg in his voice.
Kata released the folds of throat and stepped back, licking the taste of salty skin from his lips.
‘Eh, sid cad ni-ya.’ Ah, your throat tastes of piss! But he raised his crest as he said it and clasped the boy forearm to forearm.
All round the crowd applauded in the low rumbling that sounded like human laughter, a shaking of the heart. The grandfathers nodded to one another, then called out, telling the crowd to go home and clear the street.
Kata reclaimed his goods from the grandmother, who allowed herself another slight crest-lift of approval, then followed the youngling inside a dim salon, smelling of scented oils and rubbing alcohol. All along one wall stood red couches, each flanked by a tray of implements and soft cloths. Along the facing wall ran mirrors. At the back stood an open door leading inward.
‘Do you know who I am, now?’ Kata said to the boy.
‘With all submission, I need the password.’
‘Good for you! Kel amin del Umin.’ No honour with Humans.
‘Amin kath voli.’ None except dead ones.
The youngling raised his head.
‘We are honoured to host you. My name is Sar Elen.’
‘What? Sar and Elen? Only two names? Do you shun the name of your line?’
‘My line has no name until our people have a Standing.’ Kata grinned. He never formed friendships, but he liked this youngling.
‘We have a network,’ Elen went on. ‘There are a lot of places you can shelter.’
‘Well, that’s very good of you, but I don’t dare. I’ll find my own shelter, youngling. Knowing where I am could kill you. Do you realize that? We’ll never regain our Standing if the faithful get pulled in by the Palace police.’
‘True. I take it you’ve come to use the passage?’
‘Just that.’
Elen led him into the shop’s back room, stacked with boxes of cloths and big plastic jugs of oil. He opened what seemed to be a closet, empty except for a bright red robovac on the floor and a rack of brushes and attachments hanging on the back wall. The youngling stepped back and merely waited, but his crest kept raising despite his obvious efforts to keep it down.
‘What is it?’ Kata snapped.
‘I think you’re in for a surprise, that’s all. About this door.’
‘Well, I know it’s hidden. Don’t worry. I know how to unlock it.’
Elen’s crest quivered from the effort of staying flat.
Kata opened the shoulder-sack and took out what appeared to be an amber pendant. Whispering the activation name made the yellow-brown transceiver crystal first glow, then send out an electronic pulse - not that Kata could hear it, of course, but the hologram of cleaning equipment disappeared, revealing another door.
‘Fare you well, Elen,’ Kata said. ‘And always watch your back.’
Kata opened the door and stepped through. A sensation like a thousand cold fingers ran over his scales, making him shudder and twitch. For a moment he nearly retched; then the sensation stopped as suddenly as it had started. He staggered a few steps forward and found himself inside a grey room with a black door on the far side. When he spun round, he saw that the door into Sar Elen’s shop had vanished.
‘What?’ A trap, was it?
Yet he remembered things, a casual remark from his contact on Souk, and bits of data he’d learned in school, too, about the old days in the Pinch, before the hypershunts had closed and sealed it off from the rest of civilization. They had marvellous technology in the old days.
‘Transport gates.’ He whispered the words aloud. ‘It has to be!’
He walked back to the wall that once had been a door and ran his hand along it. Not a seam, not a welt, nothing. He must have been delivered inside this room by a technology everyone thought lost forever. He could be anywhere at all on Palace, anywhere! He had the feeling that he’d never know, because he was willing to bet high stakes that the door on the other side would drop him back into the Lep quarter at yet another location. He went still for a moment, listening to something He’d heard - or was it that he felt the sensation around him? A very low throbbing hum or a distant vibration, perhaps heavy machinery? The sound of whatever it was never seemed to vary its rhythm, a big pulse, two small fast pulses, over and over. Turning, he considered the black door. Should he try to open it? His instructions said otherwise: walk through the passage and wait for our leader to join you. Very well. He’d wait. Kata knew this leader only by the code name Riva, an ancient word meaning ‘unblemished scales’. He had to be another Lep, but Kata was only thinking of him as ‘he’ for convenience sake. Was he male, female, of what line, what off-world Standing? Kata hoped that he was about to find out. Riva had hidden behind third parties and coded packets from the beginning. Kata had taken other jobs from him, over the years: an assassination here, a smuggling job there. Always the work had harmed the human presence in the Pinch. Always Riva, through his underlings, had spoken of the grand day when the Ty Onar Lep would once again be the masters and all other races, their slaves. It was an old dream, this empire of domination, and one that most of the Ty Onar had repudiated, over the long years when they’d been trapped in the Pinch. These days even the warlords of Ri talked of cooperation and the pooling of resources. But a few, a grand faithful few, remembered the old ways. Riva led them, and Kata served them in any way he could. Soon, any moment, he would meet the Lep who inspired them all.
But Riva was still hiding. On the wall to Kata’s right a spot of light appeared, then burst, spread, and reformed into a hologrammatic projection, a revenant as they were called. Riva himself or herself, as the case might be, sat somewhere else, somewhere far away, even, controlling the rev through the Map, seeing and hearing through sensors on the walls. The hologram was a good one, a beautifully detailed grandmother Lep, clutching her knotted silk. Hie scalings down her arms matched those of the Line of Tal, the markings that Kata had dyed away. Riva must be a cybermaster, Kata realized. Only a skilled master of the Map could create such fluid and detailed hologram. But - Leps were barred from the Cyberguild on Palace. An interesting riddle? No, a useful clue.
‘Well, you’re punctual, I see.’ The revenant’s voice, speaking Gen, was female.
‘Ki-ovi-ta y-ya-lo ni -’ When will you let me see your ‘Gen, my friend! Speak Gen!’
‘T-ka Gen, li-dua iyik’t Lepir.’ Gen stinks, in the mouth of the Hero of the Lep race. The revenant laughed and ran her fingers over her silk, but she said nothing. After a moment, Kata surrendered.
‘Oh, whatever you want,’ he said in Gen. ‘You didn’t bring me here to talk, anyway. There’s someone you want dead?’
‘Most certainly, my friend, but you’ll be more than just a hired killer. I have many other tasks for you here on Palace, and the language of the Leps won’t be much help to you. Best that you get used to speaking Gen from now on.’
‘So?’
‘So, be patient, Vi-Kata. You’ll understand everything soon enough. For now, I have a simple enough errand for you. Two Humans in the Pleasure Sect must die.’
‘The Pleasure Sect?’ Kata clacked his snout in the Lep equivalent of a sneer. ‘That’s just a brothel and playground. The citizens there are prisoners. What danger could anyone there represent?’
‘That isn’t your concern, my friend. These deaths are both small matters, yes, but-’
‘On this world they take deaths seriously,’ Kata interrupted. ‘We’d better have good reasons for causing them.’
‘True. You’d best be very careful. Don’t arrange anything spectacular, shall we say?
Caution first, even if you need to take a little extra time. After all, we’re building a revolution. We need patience.’
‘A revolution?’
Grandmother Riva opened her fanged mouth in a hideous grimace. It took him a moment to realize that the revenant was meant to be smiling - but it was a human smile.
‘We tried outright war, didn’t we? And it failed. You’ve heard the War Council on the homeworld, snivelling about peace, snivelling about pacts and treaties! We can’t count on them for help. If we are to better our lot here on Palace, we must hatch our own eggs.’