In the Realm of the Midnight Gardener
Chapter 1: The Tavern

The fat one was still going on. He’d been going on for some time now, expounding, explaining, waving his fat, ring-covered fingers in the air, twisting the tavern smoke into gloomy caricatures to embellish his tale. Through three tall mugs of cold wine he’d rambled, furrowing the air with his deep-voiced jabber and bravado. His was the litany of a dimwit more full of drink than sense. Sadly, unless there was to be a mysterious change to come over this corpulent blabbermouth, the tall tales would continue unabated.

As was so often the case, the one with the shortest knowledge was the one with the longest tongue. The fat one was chuckling now, his face ruddy and flushed, his brain deep down in a fourth mug of wine. And yet the wine wasn’t slowing him down one bit. Oh, quite the opposite. He was enjoying himself and the attention his cluckery was garnering. Around the table, those listening hung on his every word. He was dripping drivel, and they were duly lapping it up. They nodded; they goggled; they asked for details which he gladly invented, dizzying them even further.

Domingo Ladrón, he was the only one not impressed. He sat at the other end of the table, furthest from the fat one. He was listening only in so much as it served to further exacerbate his irritation and a growing urge to strangle the fat talker. One could, after all, endure only so much dull babble before it edged one’s reason.

“He has a good baritone, though,” his master, old Juan Polino said with approval. Domingo Ladrón shrugged begrudgingly. He had to give the yakker that much; he did have a good voice for narrative. “So what of it?” Domingo sniffed. “He’s still a blowhard, and a stupid one at that.”

One of those listening, the one sitting next to Domingo gave him a hard look. “What you on about, mate?” the listener snarled. “Tryin’ ta’ hear the fella’s story.” He gave Domingo the once up and down for his troubles.

Domingo was only too glad to return the hard stare. “How can you listen with your lips flapping?” Domingo growled, eyes sharp and undeterred. The listener, a grizzled, muscled fellow with perhaps half a hand in height and three stone of weight on his adversary, knew that look. He’d tangled with such fellows before. Nasty, wiry characters who fought to the death if provoked too far. The listener wasn’t going to chance that altercation. He shook his head and returned to listening to the fat one’s tale. Domingo grunted and returned to his mug of wine. Old Juan chuckled, always a great lover of mischief.

Domingo stifled a profound and heartfelt yawn. He too was well into his fourth mug of wine, but unlike the fat one, he wasn’t exhilarated or growing more garrulous by the sloshy mouthful. He was bored, and irritated, and ready for this endless night to be done.

It was quite late, though to see the tavern, you’d not have known it. The Umnya bar (Umnya, a mispronunciation of the word ‘human’ by the Ixtapodan when the two species had first met, had stuck as the nom-de-plume of humanity across the living worlds. Now only humans used the word ‘human’. To the other four of the five species, they were the Umnya) was packed to stinking. It was the usual riffraff in a place like this, being the nearest tavern to a jungle or forest passward from the Garden Path.

From every living world these scum had come, and to whatever world or wood they would haunt next, they would go. All of them would eventually take the trails out of town, back to the woods, back to the passward, and then follow the Garden Path to where next they were bound. Domingo had seen it a hundred times in a hundred places before. Taverns like this were a perfect meeting spot for every sleazy trader, black-marketeer and smuggler who needed to keep clear of the law. And, of course, this was a favorite haunt of dusters.

Domingo counted himself amongst the latter. He had been trained to it since his threadbare youth on the streets of Nueva Bogotá. Having been caught by old Juan Polino while trying to pick the old man’s pocket for some quick coin, he’d received a sound thrashing and a boot up the rear for good measure. After that, old Juan took him as a student. Strange, but despite his initial derisive snorts and snide comments of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, in short order Domingo found himself more at home in the traditions and trials of a duster than he’d ever been as a sneak thief or would-be mugger.

Old Juan Polino, who’d learned the secrets of dusting from his master, was a mercurial and nasty teacher, imparting fact with fiction, tricking Domingo more often than not, then demanding extra chores or diminished meals from the boy for failing to see the difference. It was a difficult and taxing relationship, and more than once Domingo’s old cronies convinced him to leave the old man behind, to return to his old ways on the dirty streets and back alleys. The old man never complained when Domingo disappeared, never followed him, never said a word, or beat him, or even set him to extra chores when he returned. Things simply picked up where they’d left off. In due time, Domingo just stopped sneaking away.

Juan Polino was proud (and told Domingo he too should be proud) in that they could trace their tradition of dusting back to the days when humans still inhabited Gaia, to the ancient duster Carlos Castanyada, a wizard from the ancient times. Very little was known of the Gaian wizard; only scraps and bits of information floated in scrolls, old books, legends, myths and songs. What Juan Polino knew was scant, and he told Domingo even less, filling his queries with farts, belches, worthless riddles and hard pokes to Domingo’s ribs with his walking stick.

What was known was that the traditions of Castanyada extended back to the meso american antiquity of humanity, to the time before the europeans came (whatever those were). Dusting began in earnest for humanity when the Iztac and the Myans had met and learned what their primitive human minds could comprehend only as wisdom from the gods. This was a justifiable mistake when simple humanity had faced the Ixtapodan centuries before modern man began to ruin the world with its technology, but a mistake nonetheless. The Ixtapodan had come through the Garden Path to Gaia, had met the Myans and Iztacs, and had begun imparting what knowledge these early humans could absorb. First contact quickly turned religious zealotry. The Ixtapodan came and went many times, but eventually left the dull little Umnya to their own devices. Domingo heard that the Iztacs practiced human sacrifice to the aliens long after the Ixtapodan had come and gone.

Domingo learned these facts despite (or in fact because of) Juan Polino’s nature and nasty character, and yes, in spite of himself, he was proud to be called Dhystara, a duster.

The word Dhystara was an Ixtapodan phrase/symbol which could be translated a number of ways, the most likely interpretation being “the moulder of nature’s unwilled destiny”, whatever that meant. The Ixtapodan were a very strange, very complex species, far in advance of any of the other four in the art of Dhystara and traveling the Garden Path. Humans had returned the favor for Umnya by misinterpreting the Ixtapodan word Dhystara centuries later, when humanity once more encountered the ancient species as they fled Gaia. Humans began calling the folk who practiced the art of Dhystara dusters. As with Umnya, the name stuck.

Now, Domingo was proud to be a duster, but he wasn’t idiotic enough to announce it in a tavern. That was foolhardy, bordering on suicidal and even blasphemous. Many humans, even after two millennia lost from Gaia, considered dusters a fancy name for splicers, those humans who’d caused mankind’s downfall and forced them to become refugees from their home world. Announcing you were a duster could get you lynched in some human settlements. Yet the fat, bombastic troubadour at the head of the table was belching and guffawing on and on, oblivious to who might overhear him. The tall tales coming out of this blowhard were only growing taller. Would the simp never shut his loose-lipped kisser?

“An’ thar me n’ Boogler was, face-ter-face with the devil,” the corpulent gasbag bellowed, sloshing wine everywhere as he gesticulated. His crony, a scrawny, bone-faced imp of a man, was most likely this Boogler, as he was nodding and grinning along with the tale. “Thar we was, face-ter-face with a Proterion. Ten meters tall it was, all slaverin’ fangs and bloodthirsty eyes, and we was down ta’ our last scraps and seeds. We had no olf flower ta’ subdue the beast, notta bit a’ fresh Chunga flesh ta’ give us the speed ta’ flee! Notta thing on us. We’d used it all like I said ‘gainst them thieving Faers back at the mines. We figgered us fer’ done for!”

Domingo sighed again. How much longer did he have to endure this? He’d been sitting, waiting for his contact to arrive, for the last three hours. He’d picked this table at the back of the tavern, away from the hustle and bustle, so their conversation would be private. An hour in, and this lot turned up, the fat one, Boogler and their drinking goons, had sat down at the table without so much as a how-do-you-do, and got to gabbing. What was Domingo to do? Tell them they had to piss off, because he had a clandestine meeting planned and he needed some quiet spot to conduct business? Not now that it mattered much. At this point, he didn’t care much about the meeting. He just wanted to get away from these dolts. He’d have switched tables, gone to the bar even, if there was room. The damnable tavern was crammed like a chicken coop.

The blather continued unabated. “When all hope was lost, whaddaya know but Boogler here fished out a stash of Pouri seed!” Screeching, belching laughter rose up from the table and briefly silenced the rest of the place with the uproar. The fat one clapped Boogler three good wallops on the back, sending the drunk little man off his seat to the floor. “Hawhaw! I always says ol’ Boogler was a sneaky one, I did.”

Boogler righted himself in his chair, smiling in snaggle-toothed self-deprecation. “That

Proterion beast caught one whiff of them Pouri seed and was runnin’ for the hills!

Hawhawhaw!”

More idiotic laughter resounded; more sloshing of beverages and pointless cursing.

Domingo was at a rolling boil by now. Wasn’t it insult to injury enough to himself and his profession that this puss-head was belching out lies on subjects he clearly knew nothing about? Now to make up some nonsense about their having Pouri seeds. How would that little troglodyte Boogler (what kind of name was that?!) have gotten his hands on something so precious? Not to mention the scent of Pouri seeds would have killed the both of them the moment they opened the sack.

Enough was enough. Domingo finished his wine, and was about to vent his bile on the lot of them. “Now look,” he said, turning to the blowhard and staring him dead in the eye. “There’s only so much drivel a man can take--”

But Domingo stopped short. The fat one was dead silent, as were the rest of the table, and the rest of the tavern for that matter. The fat one had a look of abject fear shining in his red-rimmed eyes as he stared at the entrance to the place. Domingo turned about, and saw immediately why the place had dropped to silence.

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