The child had not wanted to see. The child had wailed and fled inland. Broth shy;ers and sisters pursued, laughing maybe, not understanding her fear, her despair. Someone pursued, anyway. Laughing, unless it was the river that laughed, and it was the herd of caribou that surged up from the bank and lunged forward, driving the watchers to scatter, shouting their surprise. Perhaps that was what had made her run. She wasn’t sure.
The memory ended with her panic, her cries, her confusion.
Lying on the crossbeam, the wood sweating beneath her, Apsal’ara felt like that child once again. The season was coming. The river awaited her, in fullest flood, and she was but one among many, praying for fate’s confusion.
A hundred stones flung into a pond will shatter the smooth surface, will launch a clash of ripples and waves until the eye loses all sense of order in what it sees. And this discordant moment perturbs the self, awakens unease in the spirit and leaves one restive. So it was that morning in Darujhistan. Surfaces had been shat shy;tered. People moved and every move betrayed agitation. People spoke and they were abrupt in their speech and they were short with others, strangers and dear ones alike.
A squall of rumours rode the turgid currents, and some held more truth than others, but all of them hinted of something unpleasant, something unwelcome and disorderly. Such sensibilities can grip a city and hold tight for days, some shy;times weeks, sometimes for ever. Such sensibilities could spread like a plague to infect an entire nation, an entire people, leaving them habituated in their anger, perpetually belligerent, inclined to cruelty and miserly with their com shy;passion.
Blood had been spilled in the night. More corpses than usual had been found in the morning, a score or more of them in the Estates District, delivering a thun shy;derous shock to the coddled highborn citizens in their walled homes. Spurred by frantic demands for investigation, the City Guard brought in court mages to con shy;duct magical examinations. Before long a new detail was whispered that widened eyes, that made citizens gasp.
Some then grew somewhat more thoughtful — oh, they were rare enough to make one, well, depressed. None the less, for these there followed a rather ominous question:
As chaotic as that morning was, what with official carriages and corpse-wagons rattling this way and that; with squads of guards and crowds of gawping onlookers and the hawkers who descended among them with sweetened drinks and sticky candies and whatnot; with all this, none made note of the closed, boarded-up K’rul’s Bar with its freshly washed walls and flushed gutters.
It was just as well.
Krute of Talient stepped into his squalid room and saw Rallick Nom slouched in a chair. Grunting, Krute walked over to the niche that passed for a kitchen and set down the burlap sack with its load of vegetables, fruit and wrapped fish. ‘Not seen you much of late,’ he said.
