merchants-the few shops, graffiti scarred, marked with the Permissions of
Jubal’s gangs that ruled the sector-spread few goods. Merchants had few goods.
Took few chances. Many doors stayed shut; shop-shutters were boarded over.
Uptown did not see this danger-signal; there the shops hired more guards; there
the rich doubled the locks on their doors. Walegrin of the Garrison knew: the
meres the prince hired knew, and both prepared as best they could-to hold the
other long street open, hill to harbor.
Straton lifted his eyes, blinking in the day. He let the horse carry him in that
lassitude his mornings-after had; let his mind carry him in crazed thoughts that
darted this way and that, through the streets, to the detail of a graffiti’d
wall that informed him of some death squad active in the night-to the beggar on
the curb that withdrew from his horse’s skittish hooves. A cart of empty jars
passed him. A handbarrow groaned past under a load of rags and junk. A sewer
opening afflicted his nostrils with its sweet-ugly stench. And a blue sky shone
down on Ranke’s slow death.
He blinked again, looked uptown through the haze of morning-smokes from
Sanctuary’s thousand fires, up the winding of one of the long streets.
And it seemed there was a line drawn in the world, with fools on one side and
the other of it, and himself one of the few who could see himself as a fool. The
high shining fine houses where Ranke frittered away its last hours barriered
themselves in vain against the tide that was about to come uptown. Walegrin