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By Root 670 0

and artisans, to red-brick boardinghouses and then to brickyards, cotton-presses, livery stables. The gaps between buildings grew wider, yielding to undeveloped lots of rank weeds or stands of trees that had seen the Houmas and the Natchez Indians camp beneath them. The pavement failed, the roadbed narrowed to a path which in turn became a slot of gumbo-thick mud. Among the trees, the buildings dwindled to shacks and sheds, nailed together from the planks of the flatboats that came down-river filled with Ohio corn, Indiana hogs, lowa pumpkins, and illiterate Kentucky ruffians in Conestoga boots, spitting tobacco in all directions. At night, cicada-roaring darkness lay between the trees like God's curse upon Egypt, broken only by the feeblest splodges of lantern-light from makeshift taverns that bore names like The Rough and Ready and The Nantucket Virgin. From those dim doorways hoarse shouts and curses resounded, the crash of breaking benches punctuating the tinny laughter of whores.

This was the part of town called the Swamp. It was here that the half-savage Kaintuck keelboat crews took refuge, and the gamblers, publicans, and harlots who fleeced them. It was here that the runaway slaves hid out, in sheds and tents far back in the trees; here that gaggles of snarly-haired prostitutes hunted, giving themselves to forty men a night in rooms barely wider than the beds they contained or on shuck mattresses on the floors of tents; here that the poorest of the city's poor squatted in squalid cabins among the marshy pools.

The hypothetical visiting stranger would have, by this time, learned how Perdidio Street acquired its name: attenuated to a mucky track, it finally lost itself—elle se perdre, the French would say—in the soggy ground.

That is, if the hypothetical visiting stranger even made it this far, and hadn't been knocked on the head in the dark beneath the trees and relieved of his watch, his purse, his boots, and possibly his clothes as well.

Only strangers in town ever wandered into the Swamp. The local inhabitants knew better.

All except Benjamin January, January reflected as he made his wary way through the darkness toward the shouting and the grimy dots of light. Benjamin January doesn't have the sense to stay where he isn't going to get his head broken for going into the Swamp at this time of night.

He'd come, not up from St. Charles Avenue as a white man would have, but around through the literal swamps at the back of New Orleans, his head wrapped in a length of mosquito-netting against the insects that made the soggy ground nearly uninhabitable in summertime. He listened behind him in the moonless dark, less because he thought Queen Régine might be still on his heels than because slave-stealers sometimes haunted these inky woods, looking to kidnap runaways for resale. For this reason, too, he kept the slide over his lantern, leaving only the barest whisper of light to illuminate the path.

It was a good thing he did, for its stray gleam caught the round gold eye of an alligator lying in the path—a big one, to judge by the glint of teeth as it opened its mouth and lunged at him—and January got soaked to the thighs in water that smelled like a cesspool, stumbling into a bog as he circled wide to avoid it.

Queen Régine must be losing her touch, he thought sourly as he tripped over tangles of elephant-ear, seeking the elusive path again. There weren't any water-moccasins in that pool.

A deadfall log seemed to materialize underfoot, and he banged his shins.

When I find Hannibal Sefton, I'm going to wring his neck for him.

Ahead on his right he could see lights: the long, ramshackle shed known locally as The Rough and Ready. Lantern-light glowed ruby through the cheap calico that comprised one wall, and like a shadow-play January saw men leap up from the makeshift card-table, cursing like the Devils in Hell. The next moment one man was hurled through the fabric wall, bringing the whole of it down with him.

Women screamed. A large gentleman in buckskins collided with the bar, which, being only planks laid