Forerunner

Forerunnner

KUXORTAL HAD always been—any trader would have sworn by his guild oath to that. No one had the need to dig deep into the mouldering wet-season, dry-season records (many layers of which had long since become dust, and dust of dust) to know that. The sprawling city stood on its own past, now well above the sea wharves and river landings, raised high on the mount of its own beginnings as men had tirelessly built on the ruins of other men’s warehouses and dwellings, adding to the height of that mountain as the past leveled the holdings of their forebears.
The city had already been immeasurably old when the first needle ships of the space farers, those merchants of the stars who sewed together world upon world with their own trading ventures, had set down upon the plain beyond.
Kuxortal was old but it did not die. Its citizens had become an incredible mixture of races—sometimes of species—or mutations and new beginnings of life forms, springing out of old. Kuxortal had been favored ages ago by the fact that it had come to birth at the meeting of the river Kux (which drew upon the trade of a full continent, wafting boats and rafts to the western sea) with that same sea. The harbor was a safe one even during the worst of the wet-season gales, its natural protections added to by the ingenuity of generations of men who knew all the perils of sea and wind, of gale and raider attack.
Once more it was favored when the starmen came seeking not only trade but an open port where those who dealt in commodities which they dared not be subject to strict legal inspection might buy and sell in complete freedom—once the proper dues had been paid to the Guilds of the city. Now it had been well over tens of double seasons that rocket fire had scorched the plain beyond the town, and no one any longer marveled at the sight of an alien on the crooked streets which sometimes formed a deadly maze for the unwary.
For where there are traders and their riches, there are also predators. They also had their Guild, their standing in the hierarchy of Kuxortal, it being an old belief that if a man did not guard his own possessions, then he well deserved to lose them. Thus wily thieves and private guardsmen fought small secret battles, and the peacemen of the Guild kept safe by the rigor of their instant and bloody justice only those streets, those courtyarded homes, those trading depots which paid peace tax.

Just as there were thieves to prey upon the riches of Kuxortal, so were there also the small traders, those who lived like ver-rats in a grainery where there was no winged and clawed zorsal to go a-hunting, aided by dark-piercing eyesight. These, too, bought and sold, and perhaps some of them dreamed of making the big sale, the big find in the drift of strange merchandise, which would give them a chance to rise to greater profits.
From FORERUNNER by Andre Norton, copyright © 1981 by the Estate of Andre Norton, reprinted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.