Man Eater Read Online Free PDF

she replied evenly.
    Sulkyboots was unfazed. ‘No,’ she rasped. ‘You watch me .’ She kicked a pebble into the fishpond and both reflections disintegrated.
    Then suddenly the girl’s breath was hot on Claudia’s cheek and she smelled sweet aniseed from her mouth.
    ‘Interfere and I’ll kill you.’
    A small obsidian blade was suddenly thrust in front of Claudia’s eyes.’
    ‘I mean it,’ she spat. ‘Fuck with me and I’ll kill you.’

I II
    Balbilla squeezed past the counter and peered up the main street for the umpteenth time. That fog had lifted, you could see a long way, but there was still no sign of Fronto. She chewed her lip and frowned.
    ‘What’s wrong, love?’
    ‘Nothing, Dad.’ Umpteen times they’d had that exchange, too.
    High noon and market day at that, the street was as busy as it ever got. Word was, once you could hardly move through the crush, leastways, not without getting your bum pinched, but Balbilla had been spared that indignity. When the Emperor diverted the road, she was just eight years old and it had been left to her father to explain why folk didn’t travel this way no more. And, later, why her family and friends had moved away.
    ‘We won’t have to move, will we, Dad?’
    Her mam had died giving birth to her brother, so it had been just the three of them, Balbilla and her Dad and the baby, and even he’d died before he turned three. She didn’t want to have to move on.
    ‘Course not, Bill.’ She remembered the way her father had ruffled her hair. ‘We’re Tarsulani, we don’t go no place.’
    And so they hadn’t, but the trade from his shop had dwindled. Once, long ago, he ran a profitable clothes dealership. Then he moved into the second-hand market. And five years ago, around the time she met Fronto, he’d been reduced to selling rags.
    Her nose wrinkled as she squinted into the sun. All around Tarsulae the same daily scenes were being enacted. Kiddies playing, dogs grubbing, spits turning, gossips embroidering the meagre news. There were mingling smells of over-used cooking oil, badly tanned hides, temple incense and yeasty bread. By the Mausoleum Gate, the little beggar girl who’d been blinded by her mother so she could earn more rattled her bowl, and opposite the Temple of Vulcan, the brickmaker was bad-mouthing his pregnant wife, taking out on her the fact that he had no livelihood left in this ramshackle town. Sneaking out from the basilica was the advocate’s bow-legged secretary, off to tup his boss’s wife while the lawyer was engaged with a client, and down by the tavern was that new Prefect, she’d forgotten his name, adjusting his chinstrap before clambering into the saddle. But no Fronto.
    ‘Dad, I’ve got to nip home, all right?’
    It was one of his bad days, she felt awful at leaving him, but she just had to know. Besides. There was something she had to tell Fronto. Something important.
    ‘Want me to close up?’
    Her father shook his grey face vigorously. In all his life, he’d never shut during the day and he wouldn’t start now, sick or not.
    ‘Well, I’ll be back soon as I can.’
    Chances were, no customers would call to bother him, and if they did he wouldn’t notice. He spent a lot of time sleeping now she’d got him that draught from the herbalist.
    ‘Why don’t the old sod give up like any normal bloke?’ Fronto had been most indignant when she’d told him she intended to help out in the shop. ‘Croesus, I’ve offered him dosh enough to see his days out, he don’t need to work.’
    ‘It’s charity, love, and you know how Dad feels about hand-outs.’ Stubborn was too kind a word. Many’s the time she’d begged him to move in with them. (Well, she could clear it with Fronto later, couldn’t she?)
    ‘You’ve got a nice place, Bill, and don’t think I don’t appreciate the offers but this here’s my home. Was my father’s before me, and his father’s before that.’
    Balbilla sighed. Four generations had