I was standing in a sewage culvert at the outskirts of one of Abaddon’s maze of settlements, staring up at a depressingly familiar piece of outer wall when it happened. I was exhausted and frustrated, because I had just realized I’d checked out this area the previous day. In other words, I’d got lost again. It seemed I’d have to hike the whole circumference of the place to find a way out, which might take years just on this level.

Something brushed against me and lingered longer than it should have. I didn’t hesitate—I didn’t want to be attacked or solicited—so I swung my arm hard at whatever was touching me. I heard a grunt and something tumbled to the ground at my feet, felled far more easily than I would have expected.

I looked down and saw a very small shape huddled below me in the churned, excremental mud of the street, a naked creature not much larger than an organ grinder’s monkey, hard to separate from the muck underneath. Passersby were stepping on it as often as over it, some of them huge, some of them with hard hooves. I could hear the little thing squeaking, not like something crying but like something desperately trying to catch a breath, so I steeled myself, reached down, and yanked the little bundle up onto its feet. It was only as I turned away again, this small humane act completed, that I saw that the little whatever-it-was held my weapon-stone in his long-fingered hands. The little fucker had picked my pocket, and I didn’t even have a pocket.

I snatched back the stone, then pulled the thief into an eddy of the crowd where I could look him over. He had big, round eyes but hardly any nose, his limbs were shrunken and bent with what in the normal world I would have taken for the aftereffects of scurvy, and he was matted all over with pale hair. He was surprisingly strong, though—I had to keep a tight grip on him to keep him from squirming away. The wide-mouthed, primate face betrayed an intelligence that was enough like my own to make my borrowed heart sink inside my borrowed breast.

“You stole my rock,” I said.

He tried to look innocent, but succeeded only in looking more than ever like something that was going to pee on your rug as soon as you turned away. “Nuh,” he said. “Didn’t. Lemme go. Bilgebark’s calling.” His voice was high-pitched, like a child’s.

“Who’s that? Who’s Bilgebark?”