familiar rough wooden door for reassurance. Then, more relieved than he cared to admit, he growled into the fog, and wrapped his cloak tight about himself.
'Too much ale,’ he muttered. ‘I'll have less tomorrow.’ It was a ritual nightly utterance that, like most rituals, had long lost its true meaning.
He glanced up and down the street. In both directions the only things visible were the flames of the pitch torches, flickering, despite the stillness, and issuing coils of their own black smoke to add to the murk. The fog's clammy touch might have swept the people from the streets as effectively as any blustering winter storm, but the Guild of Torchlighters knew their duty. Antyr curled his lip unpleasantly.
Sanctimonious lot, he thought, as he tried without success to bring the shimmering corona around one of the wobbling lights into focus. He couldn't stand these pompous Sened-appointed Guild men with their unctuous self satisfaction. If it wasn't for them doing their jobs, you'd be staggering around lost all this night, wouldn't you? said a quieter, kinder, part of his mind.
He declined the offer of a debate and carefully made his way down the slippery steps. The iron handrail was cold and unpleasantly damp and he wiped his hand on his cloak as he reached the street.
Unhooking a torch from a nearby rack he offered it, a little unsteadily, to one of the street torches. It spluttered into life almost immediately and its warmth and light were welcoming. Its hefty weight comforted him too; he had stayed longer at the inn than he had intended and, even without the fog, the streets would be deserted and uncertain at this time of night.
Not that he was likely to be attacked around here, he thought hopefully, but the brief spark of optimism faded as soon as it appeared. He knew that despite the vigilance of the Watch, there was always a risk at night; carousing young bloods from one of the Sened Lords’ Houses, conscripts from the barracks, malcontents out of the Moras district. Certainly it would be no great feat for anyone so inclined to avoid the Watch and lie in wait for lone walkers such as himself.
Puffing out his cheeks, Antyr tightened his grip on the torch, loosed his weighted club in his belt, then strode out boldly, if a little erratically.
His footsteps echoed dully behind him in the torchlit gloom.
As various landmarks loomed out of the fog, identified themselves and passed on, Antyr's uneasiness faded a little. For all its unpleasantness, the fog held some comfort. After all, any lone street thief would be as unsighted as his victims.
Besides, he was hardly a defenceless old woman, he concluded as the evening's ale clouded his judgement further.
Dutifully, the street torches continued to light his way, each smoky flame seeming to hover in the air at an unfocusable distance. Occasionally some other late wanderer would hurry past him, head craning forward into the darkness. Sometimes, alarmingly, footsteps came and went nearby without their creator appearing.
The hasty purposefulness of such passers-by increased Antyr's feeling of isolation rather than eased it and his thoughts darkened again.
All of us fleeing, he thought. But from what? He gave himself no answer.
Eventually, he reached a street that ran alongside the high wall which surrounded the city. He looked up and saw its rough lichened stones disappearing damply into the torchlit canopy of fog. Built to keep out the city's enemies, the wall seemed to him now to be more like that of a prison; herding together the people like rats in an overcrowded lair.
Too much ale, he thought again, to excuse the gloomy vision, though licking his lips he found them damp and greasy from the fog, and the acrid taste of soot on his tongue effortlessly displaced that left by his evening's drinking. He spat.
'Ho there!'
The voice made him start and he groped awkwardly for his club. As it tangled incongruously in his belt and cloak, firefly lights appeared, floating some way ahead of him. They were followed by the muffled clatter of arms and before Antyr could decide what to do, a dark shadow formed beneath the lights. As he watched, it shifted and then broke into a group of individuals. One of them strode forward, holding a torch high. It was an old man, though he carried himself straight and tall.
'Oh, it's you, Antyr,’ he said, peering forward earnestly. ‘I might have known you'd be the only one around here wandering the streets on a night like this.'
There was a familiar reproach in the voice that irritated Antyr, but his relief at finding that he had been stopped by the local Watch, and not by the Liktors or some more sinister group, took the edge off his reply. Besides, under the older man's gaze, he could not argue against the truth.
'You wouldn't begrudge a man his evening's tipple with friends, would you, Avran?’ he managed to reply, with a noisy heartiness that failed to hide his sense of inadequacy.
Avran looked at him stonily. ‘Yes, I would,’ he said unequivocally. ‘When the man's the son of an old friend and is destroying himself and his gift with his antics.'
Antyr opened his mouth to speak, but no protest came, only a slow steaming breath which hovered yellow in the gloom like some listening spirit. Part of Antyr, blustering, uncaring, wanted to tell Avran that he was in no mood for one of his lectures, but the look in the old man's eye told him that he would just as soon lock him up in the Watch Pen for the night as restart an old debate in this fog-shrouded street.
Wiser counsels thus prevailed and Antyr held his peace, even managing a look of contrition.
Meeting no resistance, Avran's gaze softened. ‘The streets are quiet tonight, Antyr,’ he said. ‘But don't linger more than you have to, and…’ He hesitated. ‘…take more care of yourself. You're travelling down a road that's darker and more dangerous than this one by far, and one you may not be able to return along. I've seen it too often before. It's…'
A brief fit of coughing finished the sentence prematurely, and Avran made no attempt to restart it when he had recovered. Instead, striking his chest ruefully, he dismissed Antyr with an irritated flick of his head and rejoined his waiting companions.
Antyr spat again as the Watch disappeared into the swirling gloom. The taste of the fog still dominated, and the cold dampness now seemed to have entered into his very bones. His stomach felt leaden and ominously mobile.
As he walked on, he found that Avran's words had resurrected the memory of his father and with it the turmoil and the deep sense of failure that had pervaded him in the practice of his art since his father's death.
He paused for a moment and gazed around at the torchlit sphere of moving brown and yellow fog that he centred. His inability to see what he knew lay beyond seemed to mirror the blindness he had felt on so many occasions as he had searched through the dreams of his diminishing number of clients …
Damn the old buzzard, came a defensive thought, to save him from the grim voices of self-recrimination that were gathering in the outer darkness to bellow out his weakness and folly.
'Why doesn't he mind his own business?'
The spoken words, flat and strange in the soft silence, completed the rescue and goaded Antyr forward again.
He finished the rest of his journey in a mood as dark and formless as the fog itself and with the headiness he had brought from the inn mocking him where before it had seemed to uplift and sustain him.
Rapt in thought he found himself at his door almost without realizing how he had come there and, unthinkingly, he doused the torch in the pointed hood that hung by the door.
Plunged abruptly into darkness, Antyr swore and threw down the hood angrily. It bounced at the end of its chain with a clatter and then grated sullenly against the wall as it swung from side to side a few times before coming to rest.
While his eyes adjusted to the dim light offered by the street torches, Antyr groped irritably through his cluttered pockets in search of his key. Then, eventually finding it, he groped, equally irritably, to find and open the lock. It took much earnest squinting and several unsuccessful attempts before he succeeded.
Slowly he pushed the door open and stepped inside. Despite his caution, however, the door gave its familiar screech to remind him that he neglected other things than his calling. Then, despite further caution, it repeated the complaint as he closed it.
With a small but weary sigh, Antyr drove home the large bolts then reached up in the darkness to a familiar shelf and took down a flint box and a cracked earthenware candle-holder. The flint box flared up boisterously as he
