Chapter 1

NOW in all the world there were above a hundred cities; which was a good deal better world than the Ancestors had left. There was the heptapolis of the Chattalen strung up and down the Black Sea like a line of black pearls; and there was the prosperous river-land of Nev Hettek, which sent its boats chugging down the great Det to the Sundance Sea. There were settlements near the strange ruins of Nex. Wherever human stubbornness could find a toehold, trade went; and the world, which was named Merovin on the charts, got along as best it could, poised between the sure knowledge that outworld humanity had no interest in it and the eternal hope that the inhuman sharrh had no use for it, present or future. Certainly the sharrh had no intention of letting Merovin's scattered inhabitants off the planet and into space.

So the world—it was only in the religious context the inhabitants ever called it Merovin—managed for itself, these hundred cities descended from humans too stubborn to quit the world when the human-sharrh treaty demanded the removal of the colony; descended from colonists clever enough to have hidden out from the search teams; and tough enough to have survived the Scouring which took out the tech. The sharrh ignored Merovin's inhabitants thereafter. (Though there were rumors that there were sharrh onworld who had not kept theirside of the treaty.) The uproar and the commotion died down; the human fugitives came out of the hills, rebuilt their ruins and begat offspring. And twenty generations of descendants cursed them for absolute fools.

Twenty generations of descendants built the hundred cities, and lived in them; and knew of a heartdeep certainty that elsewhere in the universe humankind fared a great deal better than humankind did anywhere on Merovin. The stars shone overhead like paradise unattainable and Merovans lived and died under them with the knowledge that the heavens were as wide as their own lives were limited. Thanks be to the Ancestors. Who were fools

Now there werewonders on Merovin. Even the most sullen and despairing soul admitted a certain majesty in the Misty Mountains and the green rolling Sundance; in the fabled Desert of Gems or (with a shudder) the remote sharrh ruins of Kevogi and Nex. There was a moon to inspire romantics— theMoon, it was called, and two more bits of moon, which Merovans named the Dogs, that chased the Moon through the heavens. There were cities tike Susain, where mines made wealth. There were trading centers like Kasparl, that teemed with strangers from rivers and from caravans. Merovin had its bright spots.

But in all the world of a hundred human cities there was likely no worse place than Merovingen of the thousand bridges, which was six hundred fifty years old and still working on its decay.

Of all the ill luck of the Ancestors, Merovingen had been the worst. First city in the world. The spaceport-well, the Ancestors knew what had come of that. And, in the Ancestors' ineffable wisdom, Merovingen had been situated on the Det, for the anticipated trade that would come down the river on cheap barges to be lifted offworld from the spaceport.

Well, trade did come down the Det, though the spaceport grew up with grass and brush. But the earthquake that had leveled luckless Soghon upriver (which was to be Merovingen's main contact-point with the interior) also shifted the course of the Det so that it largely inundated Merovingen. Merovingen thrust itself up desperately on pilings and built bridges and went on growing up and up and sideways on the flooded ruin of former buildings, despite fever and the slow rising of the river (or the inexorable sinking of Merovingen's pilings, there was de bate which was the case). Merovingen lived, which was its own misfortune, just well enough not to die.

It was a wonder of sorts itself from a distance, like a ruined gray-board pier all built up with towers, a fanciful profusion of windowed wooden spires as if it were all one building. (It nearly was, so closely it crouched over the canals which had replaced other modes of transportation.) It truly had a thousand bridges—a mad three-tiered web of catwalks and air-bridges, bridges joining balconies, bridges joining bridges, stairs joining level to level, so that houses and shops and manufactories jostled one another for the least hour of sunlight, excepting the lofts and towers which were theplace to live if one were doomed to live in Merovingen. The towers caught the breezes (and the storms); while the lowermost inhabitants lived in perpetual readiness to move their belongings out come flood. And the whole creaked and groaned in the winds, or to the push of the tide up the shallow harbor and into the canals; or (one feared) the settling of the whole mass of the city another fraction into oblivion. That was Merovingen-above.

Belowthe city moved a dark demimonde of barges and bargemen, skips and poleboats and whatever craft could negotiate the web of canals and the largely unregulated overhang of Merovingen's bridges. Down in the watery depth of the city existed the lowest of levels, the foundations of buildings in the last stages of shoring-up before they too sank and became part of the underbracings below the mud—little nooks of shops and taverns that catered to the desperate, who would add their bones someday to the underbracings. It was a place of disappearances. Lives came and went transitory as the boats which flitted like black ghosts in and out among the bridge pilings, through some sunlit patch open all the way to the sky, then gone again, silent and untraceable in the web. A life went out, a body slid beneath the water, and no one noticed. Or if someone did, there was nowhere to file the complaint. There was a governor: Iosef Alesandr Kalugin was his name; but no one got that far, and mostly it meant there was a rich somebody who sat atop the pile along with other rich somebodies, who could buy a lot of deaths, and cared little for one more.

So Merovingen got along as the world did. Its marvelous appearance was best appreciated at distance, say, the upwind side of the present bay. Or from the sea beyond the Rim. Closer and one could smell the wind as it rotted there, old Merovingen building its mazy bridgeways with the disdain of latter-day Merovingians for coherent plans of all sorts. It festered on its shallow sidestream and failed harbor, praise the Ancestors for their foresight. It stank. It was the haven of pirates and the desperate and outcast of other cities.

But the majority of unfortunates just happened to be born there.

Altair Jones was one such—poling along through Merovingen's black waterways and under its bridges and along its rare open canals for whatever small freight she could run on her patched-together skip, much of which had been deck-planking on the old Del Startill her boilers blew and sent her fifty two crew and eight hundred nine passengers to their reward. Altair Jones was a lanky, long-limbed seventeen-odd; or sixteen: she forgot, and her mother had left her nothing but a battered boat, the clothes on her back and an Adventist name, the latter of which did her no great service in a city mostly Revenantist. Barefoot, in ragged breeches and a river-runner's cap drawn low on black hair above a dusky tanned face, she was beyond looking like the boy she had pretended to be before she filled out; but you would know if you ever caught her eyes that you were looking at someone who would hole your boat or your barrels if you gave her reason; and that years after the offense; and with you sleeping sound aboard and all unsuspecting. There were easier pickings on the river than Jones. People got that impression early-on. You dealt with Jones business-like and you knew your cargo might get where it was going if you had a barrel or two to carry. And if you were an honest canaler you'd ask Jones to watch your boat and goods while you took a stint ashore. And it would stay unbothered. When she went ashore, her skip left under someone's guard, she carried a knife and a barrel-hook, which were only the tools of her trade, but river-rats and canalers had ways of using the latter that made the townsfolk of the bridges shiver and the ruffians of the mazy walkways think twice: canalmen were never rich pickings and one shout of Ware, hey! would bring every water-rat within earshot into the melee, with their hooks and their knives unsheathed.