Prologue
There is a world, toward the core of the galaxy, where the evening sky is so bright that most of the cities—outposts, really—have never bothered to install artificial illumination. The stellar configurations are all different, and sophisticated astronomy is extremely difficult, but if you look very carefully through a powerful telescope you can just barely see our sun, the tiny wart at the tip of a constellation known as the Witch’s Nose.
The name of the world is Northpoint, though it is neither north nor pointed. It consists of a lot of land, a little water, a pair of mountain ranges, one huge canyon, and seven Tradertowns, small outposts consisting of bars, restaurants, survey offices, banks, hotels, brothels, dope dens, and radio centers. The permanent populations of the Tradertowns consist of the employees and (infrequently) the owners of these establishments; the transient populations, which are occasionally nonexistent and sometimes enormous but usually somewhere in between, consist of traders, miners, explorers, prospectors, gamblers, cargo loaders, a few of the bolder and hardier scientists, and a handful of other wanderers, wayfarers, adventurers, and misfits. They hail from all across the galaxy, though their seed traces back to Earth, and they have very little in common other than a love of desolation and a continually receding vision of instant riches.
On Northpoint, the smallest, grubbiest, grimiest of the Tradertowns is Hellhaven, which makes sporadic efforts to live up to its name; and in Hellhaven, the only building capable of holding more than thirty people at once is Tchaka’s Emporium.
Tchaka’s is primarily a tavern, specializing in the most exotic concoctions of a thousand worlds, but depending on which level and room you are at in the unbelievable maze of levels and rooms it is also an opium den, a whorehouse, a currency exchange, and an antiquarian cartographic chart shop.
But it is the bar at Tchaka’s that is the social and financial center of Hellhaven. Here men and women of every background and color—including some that have never been seen on Earth—meet and bargain and occasionally battle; here traders speaking more than ten thousand tongues wheel and deal, more by signs and signals and grimaces than by words; here used-up old men live out their final pitifully short years, swapping lies about the Dreamwish Beast and other monsters of the rapidly growing mythology of the spaceways; here, in this strange-smelling, ill-lit marketplace, one can buy anything that possesses a cash value, from gold to flesh to virtue.
And it is here, in Tchaka’s bar, that we shall begin our story, since it is here, more than four millennia after Man first left his home system, that Nicobar Lane began his strange, haunted pursuit of the Soul Eater.