I scuttled through the crowd and found a small shrub near the gate where I could hide out and observe the guards and the crowd, and not get trampled or run over by an ox cart. There were dozens of heavily-armored guards inside and outside the gates, while above the gates, crossbowmen lined people up in their sights, their fingers on the triggers of their crossbows. The guards were certainly expecting trouble, and were ready to react with lethal force at the slightest hint of it.
Guards with spears formed a barrier in front of the crowd, and they were only letting a few people through at a time.
“Farmers first!” the head guard yelled. “If you’re bringing produce for the market, get to the front. Everyone else, make way and let them through or you’ll get a good clobbering. Move, make way!”
Through the rat’s eyes, I watched as a gnarled old peasant farmer pulling a handcart full of cabbages pushed his way through to the front of the crowd. The head guard interrogated him while two other guards got busy with stabbing their spears repeatedly through the load of cabbages in the cart. Anyone who might have been hoping to sneak into the city hiding under a pile of cabbages or tomatoes in a cart was going to end up skewered.
They eventually let the old man and his cabbages through, then repeated the procedure with the next cart, which was filled with potatoes and manned by a chubby middle-aged peasant couple. During the interrogation and produce-stabbing, I turned my rat’s attention to the beggars gathered in a packed throng behind the farmers and peasants, and listened to their conversation.
“I can’t bloody believe we’ve been locked out of the city for a week now,” one toothless beggar muttered. “How does that prick Elandriel expect us to survive outside the city walls?! What does he think we can eat out here? Grass and dead rats?”
“They have to let us in today,” said another beggar, a hunch-backed cripple. “And the bastards have to feed us today too! It’s Saint Suncred’s Moon! The Church has to bloody well let us in and feed us!”
“What’s going on there?” Yumo-Rezu’s voice broke my concentration, and I pulled my spirit out of the rat and back into my body.
“They’re checking every cart that comes into the city, and the gate’s heavily guarded. We could take them, of course, but there are thousands more troops inside the city. But I think there’s a way we can get in without anyone noticing us.”
“How?”
“I heard one of the beggars say that it’s Saint Suncred’s Moon today,” I answered.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a Church of Light doctrine,” I said. “Once every lunar cycle, on the day of the dead moon, the Church is required to feed the poor and beggars for free, in honor of some old asshole called Saint Suncred. It’s become a very important tradition, especially here in Luminescent Spires. If the Church refuses to do this, they’ll have full-scale riots on their hands. And from what I could hear, the poor and the beggars have been without food for a week now, so tensions are high. I think they’ll let the beggars in once they’ve finished checking the farmers and their carts.”
“So we’re going to disguise ourselves as beggars to get in?”
It was then that the words of Elandriel’s prophecy sprang back into my mind. I would end up in the rags of a beggar on the streets of Luminescent Spires, he had said with such venomous spite and scorn all those years ago. And his prophecy was about to come true, but not in the way he had thought. I would indeed walk the streets of Luminescent Spires dressed in a beggar’s rags, but under this disguise, I would be a vengeful god, here with the sole purpose of destroying him and his Blood God.
“Damn right we’re disguising ourselves as beggars.” I slowly clenched my fist with grim determination.
“How?” Friya asked.
“It would be a lot easier if I had the Beauty Mirror,” I answered, “but deception and the art of disguise were some of the things I was trained extensively in when I studied under the great assassin masters. There’s a fine art to it, but I haven’t forgotten my lessons. First, we need to get ourselves some rags; that’ll be the easy part. When it comes to acting, you’ll have to follow my lead. Just do what I do, and we’ll all get through.”
The first order of business was finding some rags to wear. This proved easy enough, for many peasants had not yet awoken, and plenty of them had left washing out to dry overnight. I headed over to a group of peasant houses that lay within a stone’s throw of the city walls and crept through the huts, snatching garments off lines. Soon, I had gathered enough clothes for myself and the two women. I also took a few blankets; these would be needed for the disguises too.
“Before we put these on, we need to make them look as filthy and ragged as possible,” I said, “so stomp them in the dirt, rip holes in them, tear the stitching out. Just beat the shit out of these clothes until they look just like beggars’ rags.”
We got busy, and soon enough, the clothes had been beaten into a state that made them look as if they’d been worn by some street urchin for a few years without being changed.
“Put them on, ladies. Let’s see how you look.”
We pulled the rags over our armor, then the hoods over our faces to shroud our features in shadow.
“Convincing, but we’re not there yet,” I said to Friya and Yumo-Rezu as
