sortie into Ilsig filth and Ilsig poverty. At the Alekeep, he managed to warn
the father of a girl he knew to keep his family home this evening lest the
killing mist diminish his house should it come again; at the Oasis, he found a
Hell-Hound and the Ilsig captain Walegrin gaming intently over a white-bladed
knife (a fine prize if it were the “hard steel” the blond-braided captain
claimed it was, a metal only fabled to exist), and so had gotten his message off
to both the palace and the garrison in good order.
Yet, in the Maze, it seemed that his luck deserted him as precipitately as his
sense of direction had fled. It should be easy to find the Serpentine-just head
south by southwest … unless the entelechy Askelon had hexed him! He rode
tight in his saddle under a soapy, scum-covered sky gone noncommittal, its sun
nowhere to be seen, doubling back from Wide-way and the gutted wharfside
warehouses where serendipity had taken his partner’s life as suddenly as their
charred remains loomed before him out of a pearly fog so thick he could barely
see his horse’s ears twitch. Rolling in off the water, it was rank and fetid and
his fingers slipped on his weeping reins. The chill it brought was numbing, and
lest it penetrate to his very soul, he fled into a light meditation, clearing
his mind and letting his body roll with his mount’s gait while its hoofbeats and
his own breathing grew loud and that mixed cadence lulled him.
In his expanded awareness, he could sense the folk behind their doors, just
wisps of passion and subterfuge leaking out beyond the featureless mudbrick