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Khambawe had been a city in crisis long before the Fidis’ ship appeared in its harbor. Like a fruit rotting from the inside, the Jewel City’s shining surface was pleasing to the eye, but masked the decay rotting at its core. And the corruption was spreading, slowly and inexorably.
Even at the height of its past splendors, Khambawe’s streets had been infested with thieves, and the honest people in its districts of destitution had labored, borrowed, and begged to maintain their existence, only to fall victim to those who preferred to pilfer what others worked hard to obtain.
Then, in the wake of the Storm Wars, much of Khambawe, as well as many other cities in the Matile Mala Empire, had quickly succumbed to ruin and neglect. Some of the areas torn apart by war had been repaired only indifferently; others, not at all. As the Empire’s decline accelerated, so did the advent of lawlessness in the crumbling inner precincts of its ravaged cities.
Children whose parents and other older relatives had died in the wars grew up unattended in an environment that rapidly become almost feral in its sheer harshness and brutality. For safety, the children banded together in gangs; for survival, they stole whatever they could find. They began to call themselves tsotsis – the unwanted ones. Their lives were short and fierce, and they were as deadly to each other as they were to outsiders.
At the time when the tsotsis had been most vulnerable – the time when the gangs were first forming even as the Matile as a whole were struggling to piece their society together again – the city’s authorities had been too weak and distracted to give the incipient problem the attention it needed. Now, it was much too late to begin such intervention. Even an army would have had difficulty in dislodging the tsotsis from their lairs. And Khambawe’s army was not available for such a task – not when there was still the danger of attacks from the Uloans.
Few were the outsiders who dared to enter the tsotsis’ grim realm without a specific purpose – usually one that involved dishonest intentions on their own part. Fewer still were those who returned alive to tell of their experiences. But the tsotsis themselves were far from confined to the parts of the city they claimed as their own. Like predators in the wilderness, the gangs prowled Khambawe with impunity, robbing individuals as well as mercantile establishments, abducting the rich and holding them for exorbitant ransoms, and trafficking in gambling, prostitution, and a narcotic leaf called khat. They had even managed to infiltrate elements of Khambawe’ society that would have been beyond their grasp had the tsotsis not become masters of disguise and deception.
If the tsotsis had ever become united, they, not the Emperor and the Degen Jassi, would have ruled the streets of all Khambawe, not just their own areas. But savage, long-term blood feuds among the various gangs, which called themselves “sets,” prevented even the contemplation of such a mutually beneficial alliance. The sets had long ago divided the core of Khambawe into warring fiefdoms with boundaries that shifted like sand in the wind. Their territorial wars were like those of the Thabas in the southern hill country, and every night, the hyenas and wild dogs that infested the streets fed on the tsotsis’ casualties.
And of all the bloody, blighted districts over which the tsotsi sets battled each other and reigned supreme, none was more violent and dangerous than the one called The Maim ...