The burglar of sliceharb.., p.2
The Burglar of Sliceharbor, page 2
part #4 of Edgewhen Series
The crowd of blues turned to look at her as she strode toward them.
“You.” She pointed to the nearest woman. “Did you hit anyone?”
“No,” the woman said, surprised.
“Then you can go,” Tisha said. “How about you?” she asked the next man.
“I – I didn’t hit anyone.”
“You can go,” Tisha said. “Everyone who does not want to have been involved in the fight can go.” She said the words slowly and clearly, letting them sink in.
The crowd of blues began to melt like a pork tallow candle. The people in the pool began climbing out.
Gusty lowered his club, resting the end casually on the ceramic tiles in front of his sandaled feet. The two oranges behind him looked at each other warily.
Only two blues remained, a woman and a man. She looked angry. He looked worried.
“Now: what happened?” Tisha asked.
“These brutes threw my husband over the fence!” the woman said.
Tisha nodded. “I see. That’s very serious.” She turned to the blue man. “And what is your role in this?”
The blue man looked at the woman. “I’m her other husband,” he said.
Tisha nodded and tried to think of how she would feel if one of her spouses had been thrown over a fence. She’d be angry. She’d be worried that her spouse had been hurt.
Of course, she’d also have to recognize her duty to restore the peace. But these people weren’t foot soldiers in the Urban Cohort. She couldn’t expect civilians to stay as calm as urbies.
She asked the husband, “What did he do to get thrown over the fence?”
“Well …”
Yeah, Tisha thought. He had it coming, didn’t he?
“He told my brother to go back where he came from,” one of the oranges said.
Tisha looked the two giants over: bushy tufts of curly orange hair atop their heads, orange skin a bit yellower than Gusty’s, bellies somewhat paunchy over their wet loincloths.
Tisha had trouble telling them apart, so she was glad to know they were brothers. She didn’t want to be one of those blues who thinks all oranges look alike.
Tisha checked Gusty’s reaction. His broad, orange face was blank, which meant that he had decided not to react. Tisha tried to think of how Gusty would feel if someone had told him to “go back where he came from.” He’d be angry. And hurt.
“Ask him where he comes from,” Tisha told the woman.
“But I –”
“Ask him where he comes from.”
The woman set her jaw and looked the orange brother in the eye. “Where do you come from?”
“We live with our mother on Spinning-Glass Street,” the orange brother answered.
“So why did your husband want this gentleman to go back to Spinning-Glass Street?” Tisha asked.
“Oh, they were just arguing,” the woman said. “That one said the Senate should authorize naval support for the Reconciled Queendom, and that one said we had a duty to protect the culture ‘that had given us so much.’” She spat the words, as though Sliceharbor’s rebellion against the Empire of the Reconciled Queendom had happened only last week instead of 130 years ago. But all sorts of long-hidden animosities were rising to the surface lately, like corpses floating to the surface of Zeemo’s Eddy.
“And that’s when your husband chose to interject his opinions on the matter?” Tisha asked.
The other husband nodded.
“I see,” Tisha said. “You two should get your clothes – and your husband’s, too. He might be reluctant to come back inside.”
“That’s it?” the woman asked. “A man is assaulted, and all you have to say is, ‘Go get dressed’?”
“If you want justice, you can find a judge in the morning,” Tisha said. “Nothing can be done about it now.”
“You could arrest them,” the woman said.
“Only if they present an immediate danger to the public or an immediate threat to the peace,” Tisha said. “I think they’ve cooled off. What do you think, gentlemen?”
“We’ve cooled off,” one said. The other eyed Tisha suspiciously, but he nodded.
“Good night,” Tisha said to the blue couple.
Scowling, the woman allowed her other husband to lead her away.
“So we’re free to go?” asked one of the brothers – Tisha thought he must be the older one since he did most of the talking.
Tisha shrugged. “For tonight. She might seek a judgment against you in the morning.”
“We’re honest men,” he said. “We’ll accept a fair judgment.”
“If there is such a thing in this town,” the younger one said. “You know the judge will be blue.”
Gusty frowned.
“We’ll worry about that in the morning,” said the older one. “Let’s go get dressed.”
“We’ll walk you home,” said Tisha.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“We’ll walk you home anyway,” she said. “We need the exercise.”
* * *
Bendoko knocked on the door of a warehouse near the docks. Big sandaled feet shuffled on the other side, but no one opened for him.
“It’s the Crane,” Bendoko said.
The door opened. It had been designed to accommodate orange people, but the figure in the doorway made it look small. His muscular shoulders filled the width. His bushy-haired head brushed the top. Scant light leaked around his silhouette into the shadowy street.
Bendoko kept his voice steady and said, “I’m here to see Mendu.”
Sunny Too-Tall shook his head – a gesture that reminded Bendoko of an irate ox.
“It’s late,” Sunny said. “I’m not going to wake him.”
Bendoko glanced at the gauze-covered window that faced the street – the window of Mendu’s office. It was illuminated.
“He’s not asleep,” Bendoko said. “He stays up all night counting his money. You go ask him. He wants to see me.”
A voice spoke up from inside: “Close the door. You’re letting out my air.”
“It’s the Crane,” Sunny called over his shoulder. “He wants to see the boss.”
Another huge pair of sandals shuffled to the door. Sunny stepped aside so his brother could get a look.
Tiny Too-Tall was a head shorter than his brother, but still plenty tall enough to look down on Bendoko.
“The boss doesn’t do business this time of night,” Tiny said. “You know that.”
“He sent me to fetch something,” Bendoko said. “He told me to bring it here as soon as I got it.”
Tiny looked up at Sunny and shrugged. “I got no problem with that,” he told his brother. “You got a problem?”
“I guess not,” Sunny said.
Tiny looked down at Bendoko appraisingly. “Now maybe the boss will have a problem, but if he has a problem then it won’t be our problem. It’ll be the Crane’s problem, right?”
“I guess,” Sunny said. “More work for us, though.”
Tiny patted his brother on the shoulder. “You can handle it. He’s skinny. It’s not like heavy lifting.”
Before taking up with Mendu, Tiny and Sunny had been shakers – they had made their living by catching smaller people and shaking them until their money strings fell off. It was the sort of terrifying, nonlethal assault that only oranges could pull off. Now that they worked for Mendu, they had a reputation for terrifying, lethal assaults as well.
Tiny disappeared into the warehouse. Bendoko didn’t like being left alone with Sunny. The man’s navel was at Bendoko’s eye level.
“What are you wearing?” Bendoko asked.
Everyone in Sliceharbor wore a sari. It was easy to take off when you needed to swim, and it was easy to put back on – just pleat the skirt, wrap it around your body once or twice, and drape the excess cloth over your shoulders. A sari was loose enough to let the air circulate around your skin, and the flopping fabric would brush off mosquitoes as you walked down the street.
Everyone in Sliceharbor wore a sari, except that lately a lot of oranges dressed like Sunny. Sunny’s back and shoulders were bare. In front, he wore some sort of scarf that wrapped around his neck and fell down to his round, orange belly. The end of the scarf was attached to a wooden ring centered on his navel.
The ring was big enough that Bendoko could have put his fist through it. He didn’t. He didn’t want to be anywhere near Sunny’s navel.
The bottom end of the wooden ring was secured by a strip of fabric that came up from Sunny’s loincloth. Bendoko’s observations stopped there. He certainly didn’t want to know any details of Sunny’s loincloth.
“I am wearing a mongzhi,” Sunny said. “It is the traditional dress of my people.”
“What people? Oranges wear saris like the rest of us.”
“Maybe here, in the blue people’s town. But in the Motherland, we wear mongzhis.”
The blue people’s town? Sliceharbor? Everybody knew that Sliceharbor had more orange people than any other port in the Republic.
From somewhere behind Sunny – and his skimpy mongzhi – Tiny called, “Let him in.”
Sunny took a palm frond from its hook by the door and handed it to Bendoko. Bendoko brushed his mosquitoes off and handed the palm frond back. Sunny nodded and stepped aside.
The air inside the warehouse smelled sharp and tangy. Tiny and Sunny could create smells that drove away mosquitoes. It was a little bit of common magic that all oranges knew – like blue people’s ability to sense water currents.
The door to Mendu’s lamplit office was open. Bendoko stepped inside. He shut the door behind himself, glad to be leaving the presence of the Too-Tall brothers. Normally, he got along with oranges, but Sunny and Tiny had never been interested in getting along with anybody except Mendu.
Mendu looked like a skinny man who’d been given a fat man’s skin. It hung loosely from his arms and his neck. His scalp – shiny blue in the lamplight – was wrinkled like wet laundry.
Fine hairs coated Mendu’s jowls. Bendoko wondered how old he was. Blue men started growing hair on their faces when they reached their forties. Mendu’s beard was white, which meant he was well over sixty.
Ink on Mendu’s fingers betrayed the fact that he had been going over his accounts. But his desk was clear now – no ledger, and no sign of the money he had been counting.
“Job go smooth?” Mendu asked.
“Yeah, real smooth,” Bendoko said. He dropped his shopping bag on Mendu’s desk and took out the scroll case. “Do you have my money?”
Mendu held out his hand. Bendoko gave him the scroll case. Mendu examined it, turning the lacquered wood in his hands, running his blue fingers along the carvings.
“I have your money,” Mendu said. “And I’ll be keeping it a little while longer.”
“Half up front, half when the job is done,” Bendoko said. “I did the job. So give me the other half.”
Mendu slapped the scroll case thoughtfully into his palm. “No, Crane, it looks like you did the job. But the job isn’t done until my client says it’s done.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I won’t pay you until I’ve handed this off to my client.”
“You said you have the money now.”
“I do,” said Mendu. “But how can we be sure this is the right scroll? Are you an expert on holy scrolls? I’m not. We’ll have to see what my client says.”
Bendoko chewed this over. “Your inside man said it was the right scroll.”
Mendu looked up. “What inside man?”
“He was in the library,” Bendoko said. “The scroll got moved after you made the map, and he showed me where it got moved to.”
“I thought you said the job went smooth?”
“It did go smooth. He just, you know, gave me a little help … to make it smoother.”
“Did you see his face?” Mendu asked sharply.
“What? No,” Bendoko said. “He kind of didn’t want to be seen.”
“You listen to me, Crane. You saw no one, got that?”
“Right, right. I didn’t see him.”
“Didn’t see whom?”
“Ah … no one. Because … there was no one there to see?”
Mendu relaxed a little. “That’s right. That’s right, Crane. You did this job alone, because you’re the best, right?”
Bendoko nodded. “Right.”
That part was true at least. He was the best.
“Good,” said Mendu. “Because – Crane, you’re my friend, so I want this to be clear – if anyone hears that anyone was in on this job except you and me, my client can squish us both like bugs. Like bugs, Crane. He’s that big. You got it?”
“I got it.”
“Good.”
“So … when do I get my fifty imperials?”
Mendu shook his head. “Come back tomorrow night. All right?”
Bendoko shrugged. “All right.”
He didn’t like waiting, but he knew Mendu would come through. Probably.
* * *
To Gusty Longbread, Spinning-Glass Street felt like a neighborhood that didn’t know what it wanted to be. It was near the Palace District, but the streets weren’t wide enough to be pompous. It had the hard-luck feel of Lowtown, but it lacked Lowtown’s dark, twisted alleys and baffling dead ends. The lingering scents of barbecued goat and chicken reminded him of Tisha’s Lithfield – except Lithfield was for blues and the houses on Spinning-Glass Street had been built for people Gusty’s size.
“This is it,” the older of the two brothers said, indicating a house that looked like it hadn’t been remodeled since the Imperial days. The paving stones in front smelled of chicken droppings.
“I guess we don’t need to knock,” Tisha said.
“Yeah, you don’t need to stick around, either,” the older brother said.
Tisha looked up at Gusty.
Gusty shrugged.
They had escorted the boys safely home from the pool house. In the morning, urbies might come knocking to escort the boys to a judge, but that was up to the man they had thrown over the fence. Gusty and Tisha’s job was done.
“Well, good night,” Tisha said.
Tisha turned to leave. Gusty turned to follow her. But then the door opened.
The mother of the house stood there, eyebrows lowered in a frown.
“What happened?” she asked.
She wasn’t talking to her sons. She was addressing Gusty.
“I’m afraid your sons were involved in an altercation at the Green Lagoon pool house,” Tisha said.
The woman’s gaze remained on Gusty, as though Tisha hadn’t spoken. She stepped out onto the street.
“Get inside,” she said.
Her boys disappeared through the doorway.
Now that she was in the moonlight, Gusty could see that her shoulders were bare and her navel was exposed. She was wearing a mongzhi.
Oh no, he thought. She’s one of those.
The mongzhi was the traditional dress of the Queenies, the oranges who still lived in the Motherland under the rule of the Reconciled Queendom. Sliceharbor oranges wore mongzhis only at weddings and funerals – at least, that was the way things had been until two years ago. The war had changed everything.
“I said, ‘What happened?’” She still didn’t look down at Tisha.
“Someone at the pool told your sons to go back where they came from,” Tisha said. “So your younger son threw him over the fence.”
“And what did you do?” she asked, still addressing Gusty.
“I climbed over the fence to stop the fight,” Gusty said.
“If you laid so much as a finger on my boys –”
“He didn’t,” Tisha said.
Finally, the woman looked down at Gusty’s partner. “I didn’t ask you, urbie. I’m talking to him.”
“He’s an urbie, too,” Tisha said. “He helped me calm the people down, and then we brought your sons home. They’re fine.”
“I suppose I’ll be taking my boys to a judge tomorrow,” she said with a sneer.
“Possibly,” Tisha said. “That’s not up to us.”
The woman said, “They do this on purpose, you know. They pick fights with orange boys, and then when they get beat, they can call in their judges. When was the last time you heard of a blue judge ruling in favor of an orange person?”
Gusty didn’t know. He didn’t think the judges were out to get orange people, but they wouldn’t show any sympathy either. Not in this case. Her son had thrown a man over a fence. That was assault. A blue judge wouldn’t be able to see it any other way.
“I’ve got a friend whose sister used to go to that pool on Nailmaker Street,” the woman said. “You know the one?”
“Yeah,” Gusty said. He and Tisha had often been assigned patrol duty in Lowtown.
“She can’t go to that pool anymore. You know why?”
“Yeah,” Gusty said.
“Why?” Tisha asked.
“Because the owner has closed the pool to oranges,” the woman said.
“What?” Tisha asked. “All oranges?”
“Too many fights,” Gusty said.
“Are you sure?” Tisha asked.
“Yeah,” Gusty said. How could she not have heard? All the urbies had been talking about it last week – the orange ones, anyway.
“They want us to start fights,” the boys’ mother said. “They want us to get thrown out of their pools. And you’re helping them.”
“We’re just doing our job,” Tisha said.
“I’m not talking to you; I’m talking to him.” The orange woman shook her head. “There’s a war going on, and you’re gonna have to choose a side. And their side doesn’t want you.”
She turned her bare back on them and shut herself up inside her house.
Gusty and Tisha stood in Spinning-Glass Street staring at the door. After a while, Tisha suggested, “Back on patrol?”
Gusty grunted.
They started walking.
Tisha asked, “She got to you, didn’t she, Gus?”
Gusty grunted. Yeah, maybe she had gotten to him a little. But she was wearing a mongzhi. You couldn’t take her kind too seriously.
The orange urbies called the mongzhi-wearers “navel oranges”. It was a joke name, but the situation wasn’t very funny.
