Michael Flynn - The January Dancer

The giant cocked his head. “And what foight is it o’ yers?”

“They took something of mine. A dancing stone. They’ll sell it for me, they said. I’d get a finder’s fee, they said. I’ve got a paper signed by Jumdar. But I don’t trust them.”

Micmac Anne laid her hand on his arm. “Hush, Amos. They fixed our ship.”

“They do have a way,” the giant said, “of coming into things that don’t belong t’ them.” And so saying, he departed to inquire at the next table.

The fancy man watched the departure. “He’s not going about his quest very discreetly. Or is a loud whisper what passes for stealth on his simple world?”

“The Eireannaughta,” said Anne, “are rather a straightforward lot.”

The mahogany woman raised her brows. “A dancing stoon? What iss this tell?” The others clamored to hear the story and January recounted, with relatively little embellishment, his discovery in Spider Alley. “And I signed it over to Jumdar,” he concluded. His ruddy face beamed as if happy that he had done so. “I don’t know what came over me, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now it sits in the ICC vaults on New Eireann.”

“Or it’s oon Gladioola by now,” said the Alabastrine.

January shook his head. “No, they’ll send it all the way to Old ’Saken. I hear Lady Cargo is a collector of antiquities. Gladiola’s in the wrong direction, and there hasn’t been time yet for a message to reach ’Saken and a courier ship arrive.”

“Woodn’t this Joomdar send it right oof?”

“I don’t think she could spare a ship. She’d already sent two troop carriers on to Hawthorn Rose just before we got there, and needed the other two to keep order on the planet.”

The man in the colorful shirt asked, “Do you plan to go back for those other…What’d you call them? Immovable Objects?”

January turned to him. “If I could, they wouldn’t be bloody well immovable, now would they?” His vehemence surprised the others. He finished his ale and set the pot down with emphasis. “I shouldn’t have made that deal,” he said again. “I’ve good mind to go there and demand the Dancer back. Damned thieves, that’s what the ICC is.” He said that a little too loudly, for several men in ICC uniforms at nearby tables frowned in his direction.

“I think we’re well shut of it,” said Micmac Anne, but she wouldn’t say why.

“Maybe with better equipment,” said the fancy man thoughtfully, “they’d not be so immovable.”

“They’re guarded by the Irresistible Force,” January reminded him.

The fancy man shrugged, as if to say that irresistible forces were a ducat the dozen and he dealt with them handily every day.

“A friend oov mine from Friesing’s World,” said the mahogany woman, “he mentioned a stoory from Oold ’Saken aboot a Twisting Stoon. I wonder if that’s the same oobject.”

Anne asked how the story went, but the woman didn’t know. “It was joost in passing. I think he said it was a scepter, maybe.”

“The scepter of King Stonewall?” Anne named the prehuman king that Johnny Mgurk had mentioned.

The other woman shook her head. “He never sayd.”

“What difference,” grumbled January, still intent on his own grievances. “It’s all fantasy anyway.”

And yet the stone had moved and turned and twisted. That much was no fantasy.

Evening had gotten on and the streets outside the Bar had dissolved into patterns of darkness broken only intermittently by streetlamps or the cyclopean headlights of auto-rickshaws shuttling between the Bar, the Hostel, and other, less comfortably named places.

The Corner of Jehovah was a ramshackle collection of buildings sprawled behind the Bar and permeated by a circulatory system of narrow and twisted alleys. It was here that the First Ships had landed and ecofast dwellings had been built for each of the crew on half-acre lots. There had been a river running through it at the time; but it was an underground sewer now, and acted the part. The original crew housing had been modified over the generations with additions and extensions and sublets as the population grew. Each addition was more slapdash than its predecessor, and it seemed as if a building were a growing thing anxious to maximize the area into which it would one day collapse. It was said that every building in the Corner was in the process of going up or coming down, and the only way to tell which was by the degree of entropy in the construction materials piled beside it. The Corner was a warren now, a topological network of unknown connectivity. The original lots were buried beneath the jumble. Boards and runways coupled rooftops; tunnels linked basements—and not always the ones expected. Occasional flyovers leaped across street or gulli from the mid-story of one building to a mid-story of another. To enter one edifice in the Corner was to enter all.

Not that entering was a good idea.

From the rooftops, the lights of Port Jehovah and of the capital itself seemed a distant galaxy. The man who called himself the Fudir danced along the skyway of planks and rickety bridges with a squirrel’s cunning, tracking the figures stumbling through the moonlit alleys below. “Big dikh,” he muttered to himself, “but the man’s my key.”

Sweeney the Red had stopped at the alleyway’s entrance and, pushing his charge deeper into the narrow street, turned to face the way they had come.

“Murkh,” the watching man said. “Fool. That’s Amir Naith’s Gulli. A dead end.” And it would be a dead end, too, he saw. The red giant pulled a long knife from his belt. “I wonder if that was the least conspicuous man they could have sent.”

Or had he been sent with his conspicuousness in mind? There were layers here.

The Fudir scurried to the corner of the meat-dukān that overlooked the intersection, and from it he studied their back-trail. Yes. There was the third man, minus now his colorful shirt and flashy jewelry, moving easily from shadow to shadow past the shuttered shops and kiosks that lined Menstrit. This late in the evening, there was little traffic, only an occasional auto-rickshaw to momentarily spot-light the hunt. At each cross street and gulli, the pursuer paused and looked briefly into the deeper shadows of the narrow lanes.

The watcher considered the red-haired giant. “If you don’t want him to know which gulli you’ve gone down,” he whispered, “don’t stand in the mouth of it like a hotel doorman.”

The pursuer came finally to Amir Naith’s Gulli. He and the giant made eye contact, and the giant gestured into the alleyway with a toss of his head.

“So, it’s like that,” the Fudir decided as Sweeney stepped aside. “I hope you were well paid for the treachery.”

The fine-featured man turned a little as he passed Sweeney, and the redhead jerked three times and slumped to the ground.

“And paid quickly, too,” the watcher muttered, not without some satisfaction. Sweeney had been a fool to expect any other coin. The Fudir pulled a whistle from his cloak and gave three short blasts. Then, throwing his hood up, he clambered down a ladder affixed to the side of Stefan Matsumoto’s pawn-dukān. As he descended he began to sing.

Hunter and prey had frozen alike at the sound of the whistle. Now, seeing a drunk stagger out of the dim end of the alley, the latter retreated into a darkened archway, while the former resumed his stalk. Dropping the song, the Fudir closed with him, one clawlike hand outstretched. “Bhik, bhik,” he pleaded. “A few coppers, tide me over?”

“Off with you,” the man snarled. “I’ve a debt to pay.” Then he took a closer look. “What, your inheritance hasn’t come yet?” He laughed.