Free Gangs of Antares by Alan Burt Akers

the numims I had two options. Tiri or Byrom. Ranaj was happy to provide an escort for the temple dancer and Dimpy stoutly declared his intention of going along. I excused myself, without explanation, and made the necessary preparations.
    Within the bur I was kitted up and off into the devil’s kitchens of the stews between the hills.

Chapter seven
    An arrow chinked off the wall a handbreadth from my head. I slid into the shadow of an ale barrel like a ferret down a rabbit hole.
    Across the intersection of roads running at right angles through two valleys a crude barricade had been thrown up. Tables, wardrobes, barrels, upended carts, all jumbled together to make an obstacle to Nagzalla’s Nasty Neemus. They shot at the defenders of the dismal street at my back and tried a charge which carried some of the barricade. The Raging Volcanoes fell back, slashing axes about in desperation.
    These two gangs at each other’s throats were damned inconvenient, by Krun. A girl staggered into my ale barrel and collapsed, an arrow through her throat. She gargled blood. Her grimy face carried a look of profound shock and her ripped-open tunic revealed a pallid body smothered in blood. She toppled and fell close by my side.
    More arrows skimmed in, to chingle against the wall and tumble uselessly to the muddy ground. The girl twitched, dark blood pulsing with the last force of her heartbeats past the shaft. Her eyes glazed. The noise and confusion hammered on unheedingly.
    What waste! What nonsense! Destruction, horror and death, and all for a measly hundred paces or so of tumbledown houses, filthy dopa dens and a muddle of ramshackle shacks. A spotted strowger with a broken arrow in his flank yip-yip-yipped across the road. I felt sorry for the little fellow; but — what could aid him now?
    Mind you, I’d known a fat queen whose pet spotted strowgers loved nothing better than to chew on the bodies of her victims. The opposite cliff face glowed high up with the opaline radiance of the Suns; down here in the slot the shadows crawled as torches flared. The battle continued in mayhem and carnage. The Raging Volcanoes mustered a reserve and smashed back at Nagzalla’s Nasty Neemus. Weapons clashed all along the barricade. Men and women screamed. Bodies tumbled to fall in red ruin and be trampled on by the blood lusting combatants.
    Well, by Vox! The sharper I got out of this mess the sooner I’d be on my way to finding young Byrom.
    Crouching behind an ale barrel as a fight erupted in front of me seemed to me, Dray Prescot, Vovedeer, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, to be the most sensible course of action in two worlds, too right, by the diseased and pendulous nether parts of Makki-Grodno!
    The sides of the hills here were capable of being climbed with great difficulty so this is where I’d been led down, for where I wanted to go was hemmed in by practically vertical cliffs. There’d been no difficulty in contacting Naghan Raerdu through one of his men, for we’d arranged to have a reliable person on watch. Milsi the Slinky had given me no recognition; but at my jerk of the head she’d led off to where Naghan the Barrel could be found at this time. He moved around the city, logically enough. After that he simply detailed a party to escort me down, grumbling at the danger I insisted on placing myself in, and I sent them off long before reaching the bottom. Now I found myself embroiled in this infuriating fracas. By the hairy and infested nostrils of the Divine Lady of Belschutz! It was enough to make a fellow mad clean through!
    A move had to be made soon if I was to succeed.
    Nagzalla’s Nasty Neemus held three arms of the crossroads and they wanted the fourth arm, currently in the possession of the Raging Volcanoes. Whatever treaty had been agreed in the past had fallen through, as was the way down in the warrens of Oxonium as up on the hills. I was on the Nasty’s side of the barricade and my target lay somewhere down at the