"Where are you going?" Santana asked, not looking up. It was a mechanical question asked out of mere courtesy, and Kesley ignored it.
"Saddle my horse," he told one of the men. "I won't need any of you to go with me."
The morning air was already steaming as he rode out into the city. The market was crowded with sleepy-eyed Chicagoans haggling for the fruit and vegetables that had been brought in while they slept. Kesley traversed the marketplace in a wide circuit and struck out along the broad cobbled road that led to Duke Winslow's palace.
About halfway there, he cut sharply and veered to the right, guiding his horse down a steep hill and off onto a narrow, red-brown unpaved road. Looking ahead, he could see his destination: the impossibly untidy bramble of shanties that was the ghetto of the mutants.
Even at this distance, he could see bizarre creatures moving idly back and forth down below, wandering from porch to porch in the isolated colony. He whitened at the sight of some of them.
There was one round, orange, doughy mass of a man that looked like some sort of giant fruit, except for the enlarged features and the tiny, stick-like legs and arms that projected from it; nearby, walking in confused circles, was a mutant with a pair of dissimilar writhing heads and an uncountable number of busy legs.
Lazy curlicues of smoke hung wavering in the air above the shacks. Kesley looked around.
Great God, he thought suddenly. They're people!
He rode down into the ghetto, feeling ashamed of his own bodily symmetry and genetic heritage, which seemed abnormal here. He, alone, of all the human beings within a half-mile radius, was untainted, and the thought made him feel strangely humble.
"Who is it you want?" a man asked. The toll-keeper, Kesley thought with sudden weird irony.