ransom, and yet I know he is alive, even before the fetish priest consult the older gods who tell him this is so. But there are forces, you two. Ill wind rolling through the cities in the hot season, and taking what is not for them. Day robber, night thief, I can’t tell you what you will find. But we talking too much. I give you four nights. If yes be your answer, meet me at the collapsed tower at the end the street of bandits. You know this place?”
“Yes.”
“Meet me there after sunset and let that be your yes.”
He turned his back to us. Our business was done with him for the time. They came back to me just then, the woman he killed and the man he made a eunuch.
“Silly Tracker, surely you know how eunuchs are made? That man will surely die,” the Leopard said.
I asked the landlady to allow the Leopard stay in a room I knew was empty. I wore nothing when I spoke to her, so she said yes, of course, but now the rent is double, or you will return from one of your trips to find nothing in your room. But I have nothing, I said. The Leopard took the room after I told him that should he find some tree to sleep in as a beast, somebody would take a perfect shot from a bow and arrow and get him right through the ribs. And all the prey in the city belonged to one man or another, so one could not roam about and hunt them. And even if you did kill somebody’s goat or chicken, do not bring it back to the room. And even if you did bring it back to the room, do not spill even a drop of blood.
This annoyed the Leopard but he saw there was wisdom in it. I knew he would be in there pacing and pacing, knowing he could not growl. Trying to sleep in the window but knowing he could not, and smelling blood quicken under the flesh of prey down below in the animal pens. So he brought the boy up to his room. The third day he came up to my room, grinning and rubbing his belly.
“You look like you sneaked an impala into your room.”
“Quiet as it’s kept. I might have been the glutton lately.”
“The whole inn knows of your appetites.”
“You must be the one nun in the whorehouse. Fantastic beasts, fantastic urges, Tracker. Where go you today? I shall see your city.”
“You already saw the city.”
“I want it through your eyes, or rather your nose. I know there is something in this city waiting for us.”
I looked at him straight. “Go whoring on your own time, cat.”
“Tracker, who’s to say we can’t do both?”
“As you wish. Go wash.”
He poked out his tongue, long as a young snake, and licked both his arms.
“Done,” he said, and grinned. “Who shall we see? A man owing you coin, whose legs we shall break? To us each a leg!”
They say Malakal is a city built by thieves. Malakal is mountains and mountains are Malakal. The one place that was never conquered because it was the one city nobody ever dared to try. Just the trip up to the mountains would exhaust men and horses. Nearly every man here is warrior born and most of the women too. This was the King’s last stand against your Massykin people of the South, and that from here we turned back the war and beat you southerners back like the bitches you are. Truce was your idea, not ours. Nearly every city spreads wide, but Malakal reaches up to the sky instead, house on top of house, tower on top of tower, some towers so thin and high that they forgot steps, leaving you to get to the top by rope. The towers themselves stacked so close that they seemed to have collapsed on each other, and to the south of the first wall was one that did, but was still in use. Four walls enclosed the city, built each inside the other, four rings built around the mountains that rose out of each other. Men built the first wall over four hundred years ago, after old Malakal went to ruin. The fourth and last wall was still being built. Come to it straight and Malakal looks like four forts, each rising out of the one below it, and towers set on top of towers. But