3: City Life

Thaddius hadn’t known a broken nose could bleed so much, but being chased through most of Corak was probably making it worse. Tad had followed the trail of red drops through a mile of crowded streets, letting his quarry run far enough ahead so he could barely see the older boy’s black curly hair. He caught sight of his target, holding a bloody rag to his face, entering a large wooden building labeled Loggins & Smitts Drayage. Tad hesitated for a moment, deciding. The business was a way station for goods, with a few desks in one corner for the clerks who arranged the transportation and storage. The rear of the building adjoined the Black Rose inn, whose front opened onto another street. So much was well-known. Less well-known was the door that the two businesses shared, and that one might be allowed to pass between them for a small fee.

Tad broke into a sprint, dodging a train of six carts pulled by oxen headed Uphill. The brass medallion he wore around his neck kept flying up and knocking him in the face, but he kept moving while keeping as many people as he could between himself and the front door of Loggins & Smitts, just in case someone was watching. Tad tore around the corner, collided with three of the Duke’s men, sketched a hasty apology, then resumed his run.

With the coronation of the new Duke just days away the streets had become nearly impassible with the sheer quantity of stuff being moved through the city, nearly all of it going Uphill. It wasn’t just the official functions that demanded victuals and spirits, it was the entire city. Every room for miles around was rented, every stable was full, and the parties would would doubtless last for days. The street passing by the Black Rose was especially crowded, since it was also the home of eight large inns and five drayage firms.

Tad staked out a spot across the street from the Black Rose, where he could watch the multitude going by without being seen from the inn. After a few minutes he dropped his medallion under his shirt where it would be out of sight, then negotiated with a street vendor for one of her meat pies. If the other boy decided to dull his pain with drink, Tad could be waiting for a while, and he didn’t want to be distracted.

On their first day in town, Mr. Brightstar had given Tad the conspicuous medalion to wear attached to a thin iron chain, an insignia that let people know for whom he worked. At least twice a day someone asked Tad what it was like working for the fabulous Mr. Brightstar ("Mostly uncomfortable, sir. We're always out-of-doors."), or if he had seen the ruins of Old Nychanter ("That was before he took me in."), or the Dwarven caves of the Great Stair ("Yes mam, but Mr. Brightstar isn't so sure they were made by Dwarves. He's writing a book on the subject.")

In the mornings, Tad fetched breakfast and bought a news sheet from the girl around the corner. He and Nolan Brightstar would eat together in their chambers while Tad gave a full reciting of the previous day's activities. Mr. Brightstar wanted to know the name of every person Tad had met, what they were wearing, what they had been doing, what had been discuseed. Mr. Brightstar asked the names of the streets Tad had walked along the day before, what houses and shops were there, and even small details like the presence (or lack thereof) of footmen or carriages or horses in front of the larger residences. When Tad ran errands that took him indoors, his master wanted detailed floorplans and a count of how many people were inside, their descriptions, and where they had stood.

Every day was like a contest to see how much more information he could cram into an increasingly crowded skull. Mr. Brightstar had paid for Tad to attend a fighting school every morning, where he learned alongside boys near his own age. Afterwards he exercised the horses, then got himself cleaned up for his book lessons. Those were either numbers at the local Arcanist academy, or histories taught by a priest, or drawing taught by a nice lady who was related to a Baron, depending on the day. In the early evenings, if there weren’t many errands to run, there was time to sit in the nearly-empty common room and listen to the musicians practice before the Dog & Peonie began to fill up. If the day's troubadour was friendly, Tad could even pick up a free music lesson.

At night he would attend his master's table, feeling conspicuous in his black jacket and brass insignia. Sometimes they dined in the Dog & Peonie, but often they were guests at some great house in the palace district, or a gambling hall, or in far less savory inns in the lower city. His master alternately plied his hosts and fellow guests with wine and stories, and then pried them with questions about anything they were willing to talk about.

The other article Mr. Brightstar had given Tad on their arrival in Corak was a purse of coins, just coppers of course, and told him that however much he had left at the end of the day, he could keep for himself. This had proved to be much, much harder than it sounded. On the first day, Tad didn't even make it two blocks from the inn before realizing his purse was gone. Every day his master gave him a new purse, and every day Tad tried to guard it while he went about the city.

After a few days in the city Tad decided that every pickpocket in Corak was intent on taking his scant few coppers. They bumped him at street corners, snuck up behind him when he was watching parades, slipped their hands into his jacket at fighting school, and followed him into shops when he ran errands. It was a contest that ran from dawn to dawn, eight bells a day, and it only got worse as Tad got better. Girls who were pretty were especially suspect. More often than not a strange girl who needed help lifting something heavy had nearby a partner with a knife who would try to cut Tad's purse away while his hands were occupied.

On his first day of success Tad bought two things with his winnings. The first was a handful of candied nuts he had seen in the market and secretly wanted to try. The other was a second-hand money-belt. Every morning thereafter, when Mr. Brightstar gave him his daily allowance, Tad would transfer most of it to the belt which he wore close to the skin underneath his clothes, and put just enough coins into the more obvious purse to make it jingle. Then he added some sharp bits of crockery.

Soon after that first heady day of success, things got even more difficult for Tad on the streets of Corak. People weren’t just trying to gently lift his purse without him knowing, they were nearly mugging him. Tad started walking with one hand on his purse all the time. On one errand to the stationer’s, Tad barely escaped being pulled into an alleyway by a man with dirty hands and putrid breath. So a few minutes later, inside the stationer’s, when a hand strayed too close to his purse, Thaddius reacted violently and without thinking: he backfisted an older curly-haired boy so hard that his nose instantly sprayed blood all over the stationer’s samples.

The would-be pickpocket stumbled backwards until he fell flat on his behind, and the two boys stared at each other in mutual shock. Tad didn’t know what to make of the fact that he had so casually hurt another person, and the older boy couldn’t believe he’d been hurt by someone so much smaller. Then the kid with the broken nose was up and out of the shop in a blink, with Tad close behind him.

The curly-haired boy, or just Curly as Tad decided to think of him, sprinted along the promenade between the upper city and the wall around the Palace district. The avenue was clear this time of day, and Curly’s longer legs took him far ahead of Tad. When he neared one of the heavily guarded gates, Curly suddenly turned Downhill and raced towards the pricey Overlook, the part of the upper city that afforded wealthy denizens a view of the distant Yeron river. The two of them had to dodge carriages and carts and hordes of people, but Curly was attracting too much attention. A teenage boy in coarse laborer’s garb bleeding profusely from the face stood out, while Tad’s silk shirt and good boots marked him as someone who might belong there. A cry went out as men recognized him for someone dangerous and swept their women and children into the nearest doorways of the neatly packed stone buildings. Tad slowed down his pursuit, to see if someone would show up in the Silver and Black livery of the Duke’s men, but Curly must have been thinking the same thing. He turned West again and headed back towards the Market, taking every other street Downhill.

Tad nearly lost him when he took to the rooftops. Close to the wall that separates the Upper city from the Lower city, Curly ducked into a four-story residence building and didn’t come out again. After a few agonizing minutes circling the block, Tad realized where his prey must have gone, and sprinted for the nearest gate through the wall. He lost more precious minutes looking for a trail, but he found it: several drops of blood on a line of white linen hung out to dry, two stories above the ground. Curly had used the rooftops and the top of the defensive wall to cross from the Upper city to the Lower. Hoping Curly was feeling confident and slowing down, Tad moved two blocks Downhill and repeated his search, only this time he found a trail of fresh blood at ground level.

From there, Curly had made an almost straight line Downhill until he reached the Depths, a district surrounded by a twenty-foot wall and sunk in a blue haze from the Duke’s smeltworks. Silver ore went into the Depths, and the Throne’s coinage came out, so that section of the city had its own impressive defenses and alert guards. Curly wisely skirted it until he could head further West into the Bottom proper.

Tad followed Curly through neighborhoods of overcrowded tenement buildings that might fall down at any moment, which butted up against the hundreds of untidy places where people did the dirtiest work of the city. At the west end of the Bottom they entered the caravan district, where gods and travelers first entered the city from the River Road. And that was where Thaddius Poole, sweating through his good silk shirt, cooled his heels across the street from the Black Rose for over an hour.

From his vantage point in the shadow of the pie-seller’s stall, he could see all the races and of Aspera on display. Aside from the mostly human population of Corak there were half-sized humans, like Mr. Brightstar, trying hard not to be trampled or mistaken for children. Even smaller than the half-sized were the gnomish, who claimed their own distinct heritage, and who invariably carried books wherever they went. Impossibly broad dwarves, most of them miners or builders sporting their famously complex beards, shouldered their way through the throngs in the street. Tad wondered why, for about the dozenth time, he never saw dwarven women. He saw only one elf, whom he knew to be a jewel trader, enter a boarding house of the cheapest possible variety. The elf emerged several minutes later with another, very dirty and besotten-looking, elf in tow. The gem merchant poured the less fourtunate elf into a carriage and directed the driver to head Uphill.

A small knot of arcanists in expensive robes and wide-brimmed hats emerged from a warehouse down the street and stood in a close circle, conferring. Something about Academy training taught people not to emote much, so Tad couldn’t tell if it was a friendly “where do we eat dinner” huddle, or an anxious “our shipment didn’t arrive on time” huddle. The one with the staff would be a Magi, and certainly the ranking member of the group. Thaddius committed the man’s face to memory, and kept an eye on the group until they sauntered out of sight as if they owned the whole street.

By the time Curly left the Black Rose he wasn’t bleeding, but he was weaving slightly as he headed west for a few blocks and then turned Uphill. Curly might be less than sober, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t paying attention. Tad flagged down a carriage and spent too many of his hard-earned coppers to have the driver follow him. Well into the upper city, the driver pulled his horse to a sudden stop and rapped on the hood.

And there, across the street, was the boy Tad had punched, face to face with Mr. Brightstar. They were apparently acquainted enough to argue. Curly was pointing angrily at his own nose, then slapped the back of one hand into the palm of another -- the local handspeak for payment. Nolan said something Tad couldn’t hear, but made a brushing motion with his right hand over his hip which, loosely translated, meant “you’re asking for too much money”. The boy gestured emphatically at his nose, which spoke for itself. Even from across the street it was clearly crooked.

Mr. Brightstar reached up to the Curly’s nose and, under guise of examining it, suddenly grabbed hold of it with the heels of both hands and straightened it with a merciless jerk. Tad winced in sympathy and Curly screamed so loud that the entire street came to complete standstill. Everyone looked towards the well-dressed halfsie and the human boy kneeling at his feet in misery. “Here’s two silver for your trouble,” said Mr. Brightstar, tossing a couple of shiny coins at the boy’s feet, “and your nose is straight again. Consider that a bonus.”

Tad resolved two things. First, he wasn’t going to feel bad about hurting his tormentors if they were being paid for their trouble. Second, he would have to be more suspicious of his master.