Masquerades - Kate Novak [71]
The buildings were cobbled together from lumber scavenged from broken-down carts and driftwood from shipwrecks. None of them looked as if they could withstand a serious storm. Lean-tos, tents, and tarps filled in the spaces between the buildings. Sewage meandered through fly-lined trenches to a creek, which spilled into the sea.
What with the steep staircase and the stench, Alias could understand why the watch did not make a regular patrol of the area. Although Finder had given her detailed memories of Westgate, she had no recollection of the Shore, beyond the fact of its existence. Not even the curious, adventurous Harper bard had come down here.
Despite her costume, Alias couldn't have felt more out of place if she'd come down in a white coach pulled by six horses. People scurried ahead of her in fear, and she could feel jealous eyes following her down the street. It couldn't be her hidden weapon people feared or her rags they envied, but something she couldn't pinpoint.
From a low pen beside a ramshackle hovel came a vicious-sounding skronk. Alias peered into the pen. Inside was a mother pig and six piglets. Two of the piglets were fighting over a moldy cabbage stem. None of the piglets was plump (apparently there wasn't even enough garbage to feed them), but the two piglets fighting were just a touch less scrawny than the other four who lay, like their mother, in an exhausted slumber brought on by too little to eat and no hope of more.
I don't fit in because I look well fed, Alias realized, and willing to fight for my food if I get hungry again. The swordswoman slouched, shuffled her feet, and kept her
eyes down in an effort to dispel her warriorlike appearance. She joined some people at a well and waited her turn for a scoop of water. After she drank, she sat down near a lean-to where three drovers were playing dice, with penny stakes.
As she stared up the cliff at the city wall, Alias could pick out the newer stone in the section that had been rebuilt after the corpse of the dragon Mist had collapsed on top of it eleven years ago. The wyrm had been enlarged by a magical spell at the time, and Alias shuddered, imagining how much damage the dragon must have caused when it toppled over the cliff and landed on the slum below.
She was wondering who had scavenged the ancient dragon's skull when she noticed a lean but aggressive-looking young man approaching her. He wore a new tunic of brilliant green, and Alias thought he was handsome enough to serve one of the merchant houses, until he smiled and spoke. Only half of his teeth were still in residence, and his manner and his speech were too uncouth to recommend him to such a post.
"Ya jus' get ta the city?" he asked her.
Alias nodded, keeping her eyes down.
"Gotta pay the visit tax," he said.
"Not staying in the city," she answered. "Sleeping under the stars."
"Don't matter. Gotta pay the visit tax. It's a copper a night."
"Suppose I don't have a copper?" she asked.
"Then ya gotta stay out past the 'ill of Fangs, wit' the beasts and goblins. Wanna be safe near the city, gotta pay the visit tax."
Alias made an elaborate display of pulling the copper coin from her boots, secretly pleased that she'd managed to convince him she was just another victim. The man dropped her coin in a sack he wore about his neck. "Anyone else bother ya, tell' em ya paid Twig," he said, then moved off.
It wouldn't be worth it, Alias thought, to bring him in for extorting a copper. She watched Twig "tax" the camping
drovers, then move toward the hovels around the well. At each hovel he demanded coin for every inhabitant he saw. The tax was two coppers for those in a "real" house. Even the day workers who weren't new to the region paid Twig, though their money was probably labeled a "residence tax" or "insurance."
Rather than stop Twig, Alias wanted to get a feel for how far his dealings reached. The Night Masks, she realized as she followed Twig from a discreet distance, had found a