Gastown Sample Chapters
The chase was on. Over the ice topped walls, down the alleyways, across the canals, and scrambling up onto the frozen rooftops. The two boys moved quickly and silently, as only meat deprived trackers could. They did not want to give the pursuit away and alert others to join in the hunt. Scavengers like them who scurried in the gutters looking for anything to give them a nutritional edge. The quarry was too precious and the gild Mo Dickens would hand over would keep them in bludbrood for a full lunar. It might even spring for some worn out kamiks with enough tread left to keep their calloused feet dry in the Four Kith.
The billee was on to them from the start. It moved fast and furious and kept to the shadows, scurrying up and away from the persistent coursers. Mudlarks had tried before, but she was wise to their game and ran like the wind. She paused on an ancient beam, high up in the eaves of an old building, and peered down below at the two footers. They went past and she relaxed for a moment. Then they stopped and one of them looked up. He pointed a finger in her direction and they both started to climb up after her, hand over dexterous hand. They were denizens of the Slough and this was their world too. They moved through it with consummate ease. Killers to her and her kin. Consumers of billee flesh. If they could catch her.
She stopped her easy lope for a moment and took stock of the terrain. There was no cover in any direction, just neverending snow and ice. She raised her nose skyward and up from the trail and sniffed at the cold air. A gentle breeze from the north carried the sanguine smell to her flared nostrils and gave her all of the information she needed. The end was near. The blood scent said so. It was thicker now, richer in iron. Life was ebbing out of their prey as he sought to outrun them. That he could never do.
Kasha gave a signal to her three sisters and they continued with the chase at a slightly faster pace. No reason to exhaust themselves, but they did need the meat. It was five solars since their last kill and their bodies pained them from lack of sustenance.
Joe was late again, and as a penalty his father would make him stay in the steam room for the rest of the week with only the squeakers and the silent kolmen for company. He did not mind too much. The kolmen were no trouble as they fed the vast furnaces with the seemingly never-ending supply of black gold, their bodies slick with the dust and their sweat from working so close to the heat. They did not talk. They could not. Their reward for working in the heart of the citadel was to have their tongues ripped out so they would never divulge the secret few of them ever knew. Most of them died at a young age from the kol dust which lined their lungs and turned them black. However, they provided a good living for their families, and there was a steady stream from the younger generation to give up conversation, and pick up the shovel and pick. One life to feed many.
Kasha stood a small distance away from the homestead as the fire razed the building. Flames danced in angry shapes and smoke billowed into the sky, a beacon to the destruction of a family existing on the edge of civilization. And civilization, or what passed for it, was where Kasha was now headed. She pulled up the fur hood over her head, adjusted the snow goggles made from snow shoveler bone and sinew, tightened the straps of her backpack, and stamped her feet to ensure the bearpaws, the snowshoes woven from small branches, were tightly in place. She was armed for her journey too: a small axe on one side of her belt, a knife thrust in the middle, and a short sword attached on the other side. The heavy furs would keep her warm, but it would take some time to adjust to the smell of the accumulated sweat of others.
The transformation of Mo Dicken’s meat emporium was almost complete. Although he had very little to do with the decorative touches, he had supervised the movement of his precious slager table, the massive woodblock put together from three mighty ironwood trees. The blud from a multitude of carcasses stained the wood like a sacrificial slab, and though he was very proud of his trade, and his status as Hetman within the slager community, he agreed to move it to one side and cover it over for this one, very special occasion. All to please Jojo and his very pregnant daughter.
JoJo Dickens moved with a steady purpose. She pushed, shoved, and cajoled her army of conscripted helpers to sweep up the old rushes, and put down fresh flooring, remove all the cobwebs from the eaves, scrub the walls clean of dried blud, and generally wash the place out from top to bottom. It was not just the huge chamber which received special attention, the large courtyard was spruced up too. Mo Dickens’s apprentices grumbled at all of the work, but they knew a tremendous feast awaited them on the other end of all of the cleaning, so they muscled up and kept the complaints to a minimum, and outside of Jojo’s aural range.