Skeen's Return Read Free Page B

this with blights …” she waved a hand at the tumbledown structures on the bank, “… a lot like this, and whenever anything happened around those blights, we used to snake down there and see if we could make a dime or so out of it. Street kids can be useful, Peg, if you trust them as far as you can see them and know a little about how to take them. And right now we need one.” She looked around at the others. Lipitero, her form and face concealed by a voluminous cowled robe, sat with her back against one of the old bitts, an anonymous lump, waiting and willing to continue waiting until Skeen was ready to move. Timka perched on another bitt, her eyes half shut, her face unreadable. Ders was jittering about, but that meant nothing. He seldom sat anywhere longer than five minutes at a time; she suspected he couldn’t stay still any longer, that there was a switch in his brain that set him on PACE at predetermined intervals. Hal and Domi were immersed in a game of stonechess. Hart was talking softly to the Boy who was absently making the Beast sit up and beg for bits of raw fish. Chulji squatted on his four hinder limbs while he preened his antennas with the hooks on his wrists. “Let’s wait a while more,” she said. “We might acquire a guide. Which is better than barging in and starting something we maybe can’t handle.”
    A small skinny boy ambled down the cluttered alley, a pre-pubescent Funor, the knobs of his horns two gray velvet buttons poking through lank dirty hair whose original color might have been a pale reddish brown; it shifted with the wind and the quick darting moves of his head. He wore a ragged tunic of some thick coarse material rather like worn canvas, the arm-holes and sliced-off bottom blooming with cottony fuzz. He kicked casually along the coarse dirt, tickling weeds with a whippy stick, whistling through tooth gaps. After the first furtive glance at the strangers, he seemed to ignore them though Skeen’s memory told her he was keeping a sharp eye on them.
    She stirred. “Got a minute?”
    The boy stopped (well out of reach, poised to dive away if it seemed necessary) and considered her briefly, then his dark eyes skittered from her to the others and back. Then he raised a small hand with three fingers, one excessively thin, the other two thick as the thumb. Thumb and thick fingers looked clumsy but that was probably deceptive. He rubbed his thumb across his fingers in a rapid flutter, a sign that had so far in Skeen’s experience proved universal.
    Skeen dug into her belt pouch (regrettably flat), brought out one of the broad coppers that served as small change on this world and held it up. The boy gave it a scornful look and fluttered his thumb some more. She shook her head. He turned to leave. She let him go. He took one step, then another, then looked over his shoulder at her. She held up two coppers. He drifted back, cupped his hands together to make a hollow. She tossed him one of the coppers, kept the second. “We want a place to light,” she said. “Somewhere that’s quiet …” she paused after the word, gave him a one-sided grin, “and the Keeper’s reasonably honest, don’t pitch the clients to the nearest slaver, and where the ale don’t take the lining off your throat. You got that? Good. And cheap, young friend. We aren’t silkers looking for delights.”
    For the first time, he gazed directly at them, one after the other, ending with Skeen, his mouth open, stupidity glazing his eyes; he picked at his nose, kicked one foot back and forth over the dirt, blinked slowly at Skeen, held up his skinny finger.
    Ders snorted and would have said something, but Domi touched his arm before the words could spill out. “Wait,” he murmured, “let Skeen work.”
    Skeen frowned, tossed the boy the coin she was holding, dug out another and showed it to him. “When we get