5.
 Jory heard a voice at his side—a rough man's voice, human—"That's quite a pair of horns you have there, Nah."
Startled, then angry, Jory veered from his course and nearly bumped into an elderly baba lugging heavy sacks under each arm. She hissed at him, exposing the long, thin tongue-spike that was her sex organ. Her normally mud-brown eyes flared with a dim greenish glow, a sign that she was high on a fungal opiate that many peasants used to dull their existence.
Jory dodged past her. The speaker was a very thin human man of medium height, extremely thin. He must not have shaved in a week, for a gray-brown stubble populated the pasty wrinkles of his face. His hard eyes suggested mingled climates of dishonesty, greed, cruelty, and occasional flashes of kindness or mercy in the "inner land," as the Shurians called it. "Go away, bandit. I have no time for you."
The man, who wore a plain hempen cloak and hood, and carried a thin wooden walking stick, fell in beside him. "Oho! The fugitive is gutsy!"
Jory stopped. He reached over, bunched his fist in the other's cloak at the neck, and pulled him close. "I don't have time for this. What do you know about me? What do you want?"
The man's strength was surprising, despite his light frame. He captured Jory's hands in his and twisted them against his chest, while pressing the point of his stick against Jory's ribs. Jory, however, had studied with the castle retainers. He had traded lines of poetry for the calligraphy of parries and chops. He had learned from the bored and sometimes laughing warriors the alternative tensions between the soft, circular movements of the go and the harsh, angular movements of the ko schools of manual combat.
In an instant, Jory stepped behind the man while his hands were still trapped under the man's back-turned wrists. Jory dropped into a spread-leg stance that made his center of gravity lower than the other's. By leaning forward and subtly shifting his hip, Jory threw the man, and the man landed with a thud on his side. Jory stepped on the stick so it couldn't be lifted against him. "What other tricks can you show me, you oaf, before I make you into fish food?"
"All right! Let go!"
"You have one instant to tell me why I should. Or I should break your neck and move on." Jory was still panting from his run, and he looked nervously from side to side.
"I can save you, Master!" To call a human Master was mockery, but this bandit was sincerely trying to curry favor.
"I don't believe you."
"Let's head for Kusi-O."
"You must be crazy." But that was where he was headed anyway, to die, impaled on the space port's locked and steel-studded wooden gate. Driven by the need to move on, Jory let him up.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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