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Athir was sore. His body was bruised. He was bleeding. But he was alive. And he was now a tsotsi of the Ashaki set.
Although he normally preferred to work alone, Athir had occasionally found himself pressed into affiliation with criminal gangs, just as, from time to time, he found it expedient to offer his services to the crew of a departing ship. Unlike ships’ crews, though, gangs required initiations. And wherever Athir had encountered gangs, their initiations were always the same: the prospective member was required to run through a brutal gauntlet, with the gang members striking blows with fist, feet and, sometimes, weapons.
The tsotsis’ “stepping over” had been a gauntlet like any other. The only difference Athir could discern was in the incredible quickness of the tsotsis. Athir himself was far from slow, and in previous gauntlets he had run, he had been able to minimize the injuries he suffered by dodging and rolling with the torrents of blows that had rained down on him.
But he had not escaped many of the blows the tsotsis sent his way. Their hands moved like dark blurs, darting toward him with the swiftness of a viper’s tongue. Only moments after he began to “step over,” Athir knew he would need all the skills he had gleaned from a lifetime in back alleys simply to survive this initiation into the tsotsi ranks.
When the ordeal ended, no one congratulated Athir. He believed he did detect a brief glint of approval in the eyes of Jass Mofo. Mofo had not participated in the gauntlet. Like all rulers, he left matters like that to his underlings.
A young tsotsi woman had led him to the room in which he would recover from the effects of his “stepping over.” Athir’s aches were not so debilitating that he could not appreciate the subtle sway of her slender hips as she walked in front of him, or the lithe play of muscles beneath her dark-brown, mostly bare, skin. However, he wasn’t yet aware of the connections and protocols of the tsotsi set; he didn’t know who among them might be willing to kill him if he so much as touched even one of his guide’s beaded braids.
Before she left him at the entrance of his room, the woman pressed a wad of khat into his hand.
“Chew this,” she advised. “It make you feel better.”
Then she departed without a backward glance.
Athir followed her counsel. The khat gave him a sharp jolt when he started chewing it; then it began to ease him out of his pain.
Khat wasn’t nearly as potent as other narcotics he had sampled, such as Dream Lotus or Firedust. But it was sufficient. Just as the Ashaki tsotsis were sufficient ... for now. He didn’t plan on remaining with them a moment longer than he had to ....
He was thinking of ways to escape when Jass Mofo came into the room.
When he saw Mofo, Athir started to rise. Mofo motioned him to stay where he was.
The tsotsi chief had shed most of his aristocratic trappings. He was clad only in black leather senafil studded with silver, along with several chains of silver and gold around his neck. And he still looked like a Jass.
“Fidi tsotsi,” he said, smiling as though he liked the way those words sounded.
Athir remained silent.
“How you feelin’?” Mofo asked.
“Fine. Yourself?”
Mofo ignored that question. Instead, he asked one of his own that caused fear to crawl once again in Athir’s stomach. The semi-stupor to which the khat had taken him vanished abruptly, and the pain from his injuries greeted him like an old friend.
“You thinkin’ about runnin’, Fidi tsotsi?”
“No,” Athir said quickly. “Not at all, Jass Mofo. I would never do that. I’m proud to be a part of your fine organization.”
Mofo snorted in disbelief.
“Best not be thinkin’ about runnin’,” he said. “Once you Ashaki, you always Ashaki. Till you die.”
“Heard.”
“Good.”
Then Mofo knelt next to Athir. The Ship’s Rat felt as though he were sitting next to a hungry leopard.
“Show me how you make the bones fall the way you want them to fall, Fidi tsotsi,” Mofo said.
“Sure,” Athir agreed, fishing his dice out of their hiding place in a fold of his garments.
“Here’s how you throw a seven.”
He flicked the dice against the room’s bare stone wall. They bounced once, twice, then lay still on the floor. One face showed three markings, the other four.
“It’s all in the way you move your wrist,” Athir explained. “Very subtle.”
Mofo nodded.
“Like killin’,” he said.
Athir tried to swallow his fear as he continued Jass Mofo’s first lesson in the art of throwing weighted dice. And all he could think about was running.