The Man From Nowhere

The City Of Nowhere

The City of Nowhere was the smallest of the three cities, lying on the hills to the north of the great river known as Waterflow, through which also most commerce in Noplace flowed.

To the north of Nowhere lay the Sandrock Desert, just south of it lay the huge  forest of Jungle, and beyond that the cities of Somewhere and Anywhere separated from each other by the Waterflow river.

Nowhere was a curse of a city, spread across hills and slopes. It was no great commercial centre in the land of Noplace, that honour falling to its brother cities on the river and to the oasis town of Sandrock further north in the desert. It was no great agricultural settlement, in fact there was no one who would mistake Nowhere as a producer of food.

Its lands were bare, its streets filthy, its walls cursed, its sky dark and foreboding, so much so that one could hardly tell when it was about to rain, because it always looked like a storm was coming above this city.

Its poor were numerous, its  wretched even more so, and the few members of the nobility and the gentry that were so unlucky to make Nowhere their home, lived on a hill quarter to the western part of the city, behind a high wall that separated them from the accursed swarm of scum outside.

Nowhere's claim to being a city was that it was the headquarters of crime in the entire land. You could find all kinds of criminals here. Swindlers,pickpockets, murder for hire, prostitutes of the male and female persuasion,  bandits returning home after a hard day's work of waylaying travellers,  sex circuses, fraudsters, liars of every stripe, impersonators. Whatever your poison, Nowhere surely had someone somewhere within its extensive space that was a professional at it.

It is in this city, our tale begins. The tale for whose sake we are gathered here to read.

Historians say Nowhere was founded in year 300, by the reckoning of the time of the Kings, when an aspiring crime lord was rewarded with the grant of this hard land to establish a settlement for his ilk, by King Wilderone Fifth Of His Name, founder of the ruling House of Wilderone, for his service to the king during the War of Usurpation when His Majesty defeated the then royal House of Jabbaverk to seize the throne for himself and his descendants after him.

The founder of Nowhere, by name Genro Thes, established his new hold, envisioning it to be a sanctuary for thieves and knaves and crooks of every kind. A city without law save the Code of The Honour Of Crime, which he had drawn up himself. The sleaziest of the then twenty cities.

As part of the royal charter granted to him to found Nowhere, Genro Thes had asked that the King decree that anyone in the land of the twenty cities guilty or accused of committing crime will be free of  any repercussions from the law whatsoever, so long as he fled to Nowhere and remained within its walls. This wish was granted.

And thus it became that Nowhere was not only a city of lowly born criminals, it was also the city of sanctuary for all kinds of people accused or guilty of any crime.

In the 2,700 years since it's founding, Nowhere has provided refuge for rebels against the monarchy, kings slayers, adulterers of all stripes, traitors, deserters from the armies and their like.

It was in this city our hero was born, but unlike the vast majority of people here, his parents were not quite criminals not were they accused of any crime.

But it was clear to anyone who saw them that they were fleeing from something worse than the hangman's noose, something from which they needed to disappear in the human cesspool of Nowhere.