she needed to do. The knowledge that he needed to do right by Angela in return for her understanding kept Rik grounded. And it kept him aware that, even here, he needed to have the family’s interests at heart—at least some of the time. He was also allowed to enjoy himself.
So he turned his attention back to doing that, making his way past the lantern-hung shops and stalls of Little Cheaping Street and continuing on through the pens and cages of the beast-market of Welladay Square, now shut down for the day, toward the town center. Omnitopia City had grown rather peculiarly, in fits and starts, and in this part of town, one of the oldest, the peculiarities were obvious. Probably why I like it so much . . . As Arnulf walked on, the architecture of the houses and shops around him shifted abruptly from muck-plastered Pythonesque Retro Feudal to sandstone-arcaded Mitteleuropean to prefab neo-Tudor to bleak Sixties revisionist to suburban stuccoed strip mall. Buildings in styles that in the real world had existed separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles—if they’d actually existed at all—had sprung up here in little groups and ghettos, as if huddling close for company, or else they hunched down or speared up singly and with apparent unconcern right next door to one another. This haphazard but enthusiastic arrangement went right back to the time before the City had grown itself an actual government. The earliest gamers exploiting the site, finding no controls yet in place, had thrown the buildings up to their own tastes, with great speed and utter lack of concern about the general look and feel of any given neighborhood. As a result, this part of the city looked like the creation of someone who had visited Disneyland while on crack and then the Mall of America while on acid, and afterward had attempted to synchronize their styles.
But to Arnulf’s mind, this architectural form of ADD just added to the neighborhood’s charm. It physically reminded you that once upon a time, this place had been nothing but a small rough rocky island off the coast of Himardell, itself probably the least interesting minor continent in all of old Telekil. It had been the sort of place no one bothered journeying to, a useless scrap of territory that no Elf or Man or even Gnarth could have been bothered to get into a fight over, because there was nothing to fight over. Elich Island had been nothing but a houseless rock in the sea, straggly around the edges with seaweed, streaked with bird droppings, and worthy of no attention whatsoever.
But then everything had changed.
As Arnulf walked, the streets got broader, and people began to pass him. Every kind of person, every kind of character you could imagine, and a lot that you couldn’t, became more and more frequent as you approached the town center: Dwarrows wearing three-piece suits and carrying Armani ax-cases; strolling, elegant Elves burdened with swords and spears and shopping bags; Men in every kind of human dress; holidaying Gnarths in Hawaiian shirts and fanny packs, pointing cameras at everything and ignoring the uneasy sidelong glances of the humans and other species; pack unicorns, hedge-dragons, and basilisks in mirrorshades; half-beasts and werebeasts and hunting cats and wolven—creatures familiar and creatures unimaginably strange, all making their way purposefully toward or away from the center of the City, like blood entering or leaving a hidden heart. Finding the buzz contagious, Arnulf quickened his pace as he crossed the boundary into Third Quarter. Here the street in front of him opened out even further, the cobbles gave way to fine set stone, and the houses on either side started to look more like Italianate palazzos than anything else, with ornate gilded ironwork and stained glass windows. Here and there an old blunt fieldstone tower or other feature of someone’s stubbornly unredeveloped unreal estate still broke through the surrounding glossy veneer of wealth and success, suggesting that it was still location, location, location that really mattered, not the fancy trappings of the nouveau riche. And indeed, if you had managed to pick up a piece of property in this part of Elich Island when the city was building, then you could truly be said to be successful. Especially just here, right by the most famous reminder of the Change.
Arnulf came out at the bottom of Quarterlight Street into the Plaza of Exploration, its smooth-paved expanse brightly lit by torches and magelight-powered spots.