A STICKY BUSINESS by C S. Williams
The Serpentine is a partially cobbled street that zigzags its way like a snake through the Maze. At one end stands the sleaziest, skungiest, most disreputable dive in all of Sanctuary: Sly's Place. Since Sly's death several years ago no one knows who owns the place, but it is run by a huge man in a mailed vest. His name is Ahdio. His origin is questionable, but in this neighborhood so is everyone else's,
To the right of Sly's Place is a dark, narrow, dirty, uninviting lane known as Odd Dirt's Dodge. Nobody lives there, or will admit they do. The wider street to the left of Sly's is the Street of Tanners. The stench there on a hot day can make even a Downwinder nauseous.
Three blocks down Tanners is the location of Zandulas's Tannery. Zandulas is a friendly enough fellow, if he would ever bathe.
Zandulas's supplies Chollandar's Glue Shop next door. The proprietor, called Cholly by his friends, makes the finest glues and pastes in town. He uses only the best ingredients: tree sap, inedible fish, hooves and unusable hides, flour, acids and other compounds from the chemists, and people.
Each night in Thieves' World people meet violent ends. Some die by accident, others by "accident," others by design. Most are left where they lie or dropped in some dark alley. Many of them have led useless lives and belong to a social class deemed worthless. No matter what his life had been, in death no man is worthless to the gluemaker. Under license from the Governor he and an apprentice go out with a wagon every morning and pick up the remains from the previous night's mayhem as a social service. Cholly will not, however, pick up a corpse that has apparently died of disease. Those he leaves for the Charnel House wagon.
For a substantial fee he also makes house calls.
The bodies are stripped and dismembered and the goods sorted. Scalps go to a wigmaker, clothes and leather goods and weapons to used goods dealers in those items, gold teeth and jewelry to jewelers. The rendered tallow is ladled off and sold to a soapmaker. The bones are dried and used to help fuel the fires under the great iron pots. Yet all these are bonuses, for the primary product is glue. Nothing is ever wasted at Chollandar's.
Cholly awoke from an elbow nudged into his amply padded ribs. He grumbled and rolled over, snuggling deeper beneath the woolen blanket. The elbow returned with greater force.
"Get up. It's time you left for work."
"Yes, Pet," he groaned.
A small tortoise-shell calico named Crumpet was sitting on his hip, purring loudly. She was a smearing of orange and black with a white chin, feet, and belly. The gluemaker often called her-lovingly-the ugliest cat in Sanctuary. He picked her up and gently placed her at the foot of the bed before crawling out from beneath the coversHe pulled on a faded black tunic and belted it with his weapons belt. On the belt were a dagger, an Ilbarsi knife, and the axe he used for dismembering corpses and chopping firewood. Onto bare legs he drew soft-soled knee boots. A knife was sheathed in the top of the right one. Finally he wriggled into his vest, heavy leather covered with iron rings, and slid his wax-boiled vambraces onto his forearms. He did all of this in the dark so Ineedra could go back to sleep. He kissed her and went downstairs to the kitchen.
"Oh, all right, nuisance," he gently chided the cat nibbing against his leg and purring. "You know, most cats have to find their own food."
He fed the puss some chopped meat and fixed himself a thick slice of hard sausage and a wedge of cheese between two pieces of black bread. He washed it down with watered wine. Crumpet finished eating before he did and began preening herself, ignoring him with that aloofness only felines are capable of.
It was a miserable morning. Usually Cholly took his time to walk to the shop, but not in this downpour. The cobblestones were slippery and unpaved streets were slimy bogs. Twice he had to backtrack and take a different street. At least his greased boots and oilcloth cloak kept him relatively dry.
He opened the big brass lock and replaced the key in his pouch. The front portion of the shop consisted of row upon row of shelves full of clay jars, each jar marked with a symbol that told him what compound the pot contained. At the rear, in front of a curtained doorway, stood a large wooden counter.
He slapped his hand onto the counter and was answered by a yelp. "Aram, get up. It's time to get started. Go wake up Sambar."
A tall, lanky youth of perhaps sixteen years crawled sleepily out from beneath the counter, yawning widely. He stood and stretched, scratched, and ran one hand through a shaggy mop of blond curls.
"Morning, master," he yawned.
Aram went through the curtained doorway and crossed the brick floor of the rendering room with its four huge iron pots, firewood and dry bones in the rack, and shelves and bins of ingredients. On one side was a butcher's beam and a water pump. A second curtained door, wider than the first, opened onto the stable.
Enkidu and Eshi, two grays with hooves the size of dinner plates, were in their stalls. In one comer of Enkidu's stall a pudgy boy witli olive skin snored beneath a coarse wool blanket-
"Get up, Lazybones. Old Baldpate's here. Rise and shine," Aram announced, giving the fourteen-year-old a kick.
"Already?" Sambar stood and shook the straw from his blanket, folded it, and hung it across the stall divider. Satisfied, he brushed the straw from his tunic and began picking pieces from his blue-black straight hair.
By the time the boys had had a bite of bread and cheese and gotten the horses harnessed, the rising sun had barely lightened the tenebrous clouds to putrescent gray. Thunder rumbled like an empty barrel rolling down a cobbled street. Instead of forked streaks, lightning flashed in weak patches scattered randomly on the face of the thunderhead. The White Foal would overflow again and uncover the trench graves of the unnamed flood and fire victims.
Rain cascaded off their oilskins in icy torrents. Enkidu was prancing, ignoring the weather and enjoying his work. Eshi sulked, wanting to return to her nice warm dry stable. Aram was walking ahead because visibility was so poor. They had just turned onto Odd Birt's Dodge.
"I see one, back of Sly's."
Gray water splashed at every step of Aram's greased buskins.
"Father Us' beard! He's still bleeding!"
"Can we help him? Is he still alive?"
"No, Cholly. His head's nearly cut off."
"Do you see anybody? The killer may still be around close."
Aram drew his dagger. Cholly climbed down from the driver's seat and unsheathed the Ilbarsi long knife. There was no one to be found. The door to Sly's Place was securely barred and a search of the area revealed no one hiding. No one had gone past them-
"I don't understand. It would take a magician to get out of here without us seeing him," Aram said.
"Anything is possible," Cholly replied.
Aram jumped down and ran to open the stable doors, jumping over the bigger puddles. The double doors swung open easily. Cholly backed the wagon inside. Aram unhitched the team, wiped them down, covered them with dry blankets, and gave them food and water. Only then did he stop to remove his rain gear. He replaced his wet leather gloves and apron with dry ones.
Cholly was smoking a pipe while he inspected the pots Sambar had been left to clean and fill. It was a minor vice, but one to which his wife objected, "... because it stinks up the entire house. Even my hair smells like smoke,"
There was nothing in Sanctuary that he feared, that he was not married to. Neither wizard nor demon, man nor god, living or dead. When the night was filled with the undead of Ischade and Roxane, he had dispatched several of the poor wights, beheading them so they might return to the hell they had been called back from.
Not all of them were eager to go. One, a former Stepson, had argued for over an hour that it was not dead. It even had the gall to draw a shortsword and threaten the gluemaker. Fortunately the expression "the quick and the dead" was inappropriate. Cholly hacked the zombie to pieces with his axe to prove his point. Sure enough, the Stepson was dead.