Wandering the streets, Serrin stopped on his way up the narrow one leading to the hilltop castle and gazed idly into the window of a confectionery shop. Some colorful little boxes caught his eye and he bought one, only to find a distressingly heart-shaped chocolate biscuit inside. Accompanying it was a tiny piece of paper, which said that these were "Student's Kisses," sweets sent by one student to a potential sweetheart whose chaperone prevented any more direct expression of ardor.
We've come a long way, Serrin thought bitterly. Nowadays, your sweetheart boffs your brains out for three days, then sells you to the tabloids. He turned left into the Marketplatz and idled on to the Haupstrasse, hunting coffee and fresh-squeezed juice in one of the innumerable cafes.
Maybe I should visit the university, he thought idly. Finish some of that work on masking techniques I was trying to do at Columbia. Oh, what the hell, I've had enough work for a while. Let's go see what Frederick of Bohemia left us on top of that hill.
Kristen ran like crazy away from the multi-colored markets and stalls of Strand Street to disappear into the crowds of Lower Adderley, where she picked her way toward Heerengracht and the waterfront with her scavenger's prize. Today she'd gotten lucky, coming upon the
scene just as the police surprised the steamers in the act of grabbing the wallet from a man they had doubled up on the ground.
Kristen wasn't given to thieving, the police were too hard on that, but she knew when something could be had for nothing. While the police took up the chase in the opposite direction and a couple of bystanders bent down trying to help the groaning victim, she'd gone straight for the shoulder bag still lying on the ground where it must have gotten flung in the scuffle. Snatching it up, clutching it tightly to her chest, she was sure nobody had seen her as she made like a devil rat for the Sisulu Markets. But with her height and headful of tight curls, Kristen wouldn't really feel safe until she got there. All she could do was pray that the effects of her morning's dagga weren't too obvious; the weed had been strong, flighty, brightly mellow.
The builders had modeled it on San Francisco and Sydney, or so they'd said when developing the derelict industrial wasteland of Cape Town's waterfront. And maybe it hadn't turned out too badly after all. The waterfront was her home, one of the few places in all of the Confederated Azanian Nations where you really weren't likely to get shot just for being the wrong skin color, religion, or meta-type. For Kristen, being half-Xhosa, half-Caucasian, that meant a lot. Down here, all she had to worry about was racial prejudice, and not murderous intent.
She gazed idly out at the huge rusting hulk of the oil tanker beached permanently on the sands of the shallow coastline. Some twenty thousand people lived in the gutted remains of that ship, a ragged army of homeless. Many of them labored on the breaking crews that went out each day to work over the junked ships towed into the bay, huge derelicts whose faceless owners had sold them for scrap to the city council. Using nothing more sophisticated than hammers, the tanker people broke their backs pounding up those hulks for the metal. They got peanuts for the scrap just enough to subsist while the city fathers reckoned the price they paid for the abandoned ships cheap if it kept twenty thousand social misfits from
preying on the tourists. Kristen knew one or two of the wreckers, but still hadn't fallen so low herself.
Kristen grinned as she sat down with some kaf and a plate of blatjang, picking at the chicken with one hand while going through the bag with the other. Eighty UCAS dollars, fives and small change; the man must have been using it for small purchases in the markets. No doubt he'd left his plastic and most of his documents back in the hotel security box. Standard tourist precaution, she thought. But eighty bucks suited her just fine. It would feed her for weeks, even buy her a hotel bed. Better still, she could also get high on it for a month.
She looked around to see if anyone was watching, if it would be safe to leave the bag and leave. Uncertain, she pretended to be searching for something, a recalcitrant lip gloss maybe, in its obscured depths. The first thing she pulled out was a magazine, which she dropped carelessly onto the table, and had just begun to fish around in the bottom of the bag when the picture on the magazine's cover caught her attention.
Kristen suddenly felt very cold in the seaside warmth, an unusually balmy, twenty degrees Celsius on this winter day. She wasn't acquainted with more than a handful of elves dangerous, proud-crazy Zulus come to bad times in this city people she knew well to avoid, with their doubled contempt for her mixed race. She had never seen anyone like this elf in her life, of that she was sure. But the image seized her, and wouldn't let go. She flicked the tabloid's pages, saw him seated smiling in the sunshine, then turned the magazine sideways to look at him another way. She knew she'd never seen the bugger. She was also certain she'd known him all her life.
Maybe she'd seen him on a movie poster or on a plug-ger for a rock concert, or maybe on a police poster or something amp; Frag it, she thought, I wish I could bloody well read. Who is he?
As if on cue, the Javanese man rounded the corner of the waterfront, the white of his flowing clothes drifting in the breeze like the clouds scudding toward Table Mountain, and gave her a cheery wave of the hand. She gestured him over, waving the magazine rather foolishly above her head.
"Nasrah, you want to earn a few bucks?" she asked brightly. He raised his eyebrows and smiled.
"You trying to sell me something again, Kristen?" "No, all I want is for you to read to me." He gave her a slightly sideways glance, drew a pair of battered glasses from a pocket, and barely had them perched on his nose before she almost pushed the magazine straight into his chest.
"Here. Start here. Tell me about him."
The wine shop was open late.
Serrin remembered that his Welsh nobleman friend, Geraint, had told him that if ever in Germany, he should try to find eiswein, the extraordinary yellow wine made from grapes rotted on the vine after the first frost had crystallized their liquid into a supremely concentrated fermentation. He took the bottle back to his hotel room, which suddenly filled with the scent of fruits and flowers the moment he uncorked it. Serrin poured himself a glass, then raised the cold wine to his lips and tasted the delicious sweetness as the nectar slid down his throat as smoothly as water dripping from an icicle. He was astonished; nothing he'd ever known had tasted like this. One glass would never be enough.
He woke with a start just after midnight, knocking the empty bottle away as he stretched his arms and yawned wide enough to almost crack his jaw. Hungry now, and sure he would need some exercise before being able to sleep again, he used his night key to let himself out onto the street, passing by the church, making his way through the scattered university buildings toward the bars, where he would still be able to find food at this hour.
The tiny alleyways around the university were deserted, barely lit. Suddenly, panic gripped him as his spell lock screamed with its knowledge. Looking around wildly, the elf was sure only a threat to his life could set off such a warning. He threw up a barrier spell just as the
first heavy dart struck the wall behind him with a brutal crunching sound.
A red spot had also appeared on his chest, an IR rangefinder, and Serrin risked an instant of astral perception to find its source. High on the roofs above he glimpsed a second figure, shadowy and silent, melting out of the shadows to his left. He slipped out of astral in double-quick time and decided to try to take out one of the fraggers with some heavy hitting. No sense in doing things by halves.