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the flows of human traffic, kicking trash and calling out to each other in voices too coarse for their scant years.
    The air was thick with the smell of grox oil from the streetlamps. It was a salty, burned-meat smell, and it clung to clothes and hair and skin. No bath or shower ever seemed to remove it completely. One came to ignore it in time, but it still bothered Ordimas Arujo. He had only been on Chiaro a year.
    It still struck him, too, the oppressive nature of the place. Hemmed in between the sheer cliffs, which rose four kilometres high on either side, the city blocks were pressed together like people in an overcrowded train. The tallest buildings, precariously top-heavy and shoddily built, loomed like dark, hungry giants over the inhabitants, as if readying to fall upon them and feed. Thick black utility cables hung between them like the strands of some chaotic spider’s web, humming with electrical power and badly digitised voices. Alleyways were often so narrow here that the broad-shouldered men from the mines had to walk sideways down them just to get to their own tenement doors.
    Such was the life of the average Chiarite, at least here in Cholixe. Those of loftier rank mostly lived and worked in structures cut straight into the canyon walls. Their broad diamonite windows, warm with steady golden light, looked out over the city below; not the best view perhaps, but Ordimas suspected the air was a lot cleaner up there. He could imagine how it felt to look down on this grimy, oily pit of a town while one drank fine liquor from a crystal goblet after a hot shower.
    Not this time.
    He had known both the high life and the lowest in his many travels, but man-of-station was not his role here on Chiaro. Here, he was a humble street performer. Here, he was the Puppeteer.
    It was the younger children of Cholixe for whom Ordimas regularly performed. Day after day, at the southern edge of Great Market Square, he set up his benches and the little plastex stage on which his stories played out. The local vendors had no love for him, always scowling and cursing at him, warding themselves against black fate with the sign of the aquila while he and his assistant arranged the stage. But they had no authority to move him on, and he paid them no mind. They didn’t interest him much. The children, however…
    So many more than before. And so strange, this new generation.
    As the modest crowd watched his marionettes dance on the tiny stage, Ordimas peered out from behind the gauzy screen that hid him. Aye. So strange. While half the audience laughed, clapped and gasped at all the proper moments, the others sat as cold and motionless as mantelpiece figurines. Nothing reached them. No words passed between them. No flicker of emotion or interaction at all. There were boys and girls both, and all seemed to share a queer aspect. Their hair was somewhat thinner than it ought to be. Their skin had an unhealthy tint to it. And their eyes, those unblinking eyes… He couldn’t be certain, not absolutely, but they seemed to have a strange shining quality, like the eyes of wolves or cats, only to be seen when thick shadow passed over them.
    Most unsettling of all, however, was a fact more related to their mothers than to the children themselves. Ordimas had seen these women before here in the market. He had a good eye for beauty, despite, or perhaps because of, his own wretched form. He often watched the young women pass by. That’s why he was certain, without a shadow of a doubt, that some of their pregnancies had lasted less than three months.
    Three months. It shouldn’t be possible.
    Yet here they were, standing over their tiny charges as his performance came to an end, living their lives as if nothing was amiss. It was absurd.
    His marionettes took a bow signalling the end of the show. Ordimas manipulated one cross-frame so that the puppet of Saint Cirdan, having vanquished the warboss Borgblud in the final act, raised its sword aloft.