A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"Are you ready, my Lord?" Verdant asked. The others had already made their way into the carriages. Harmon and his family had climbed into one, and Verdant had climbed into the other, whilst Blackthorn stood waiting for Oliver to choose his own place. "As I said, my Lord, I will take the carriage behind us, and see it protected. I will entrust the protection of the Harmon's to you, and Lady Blackthorn.

That is, if you are in agreement?"

He seemed to take Oliver's lengthy silence for a criticism, and he tilted his head to check that he hadn't misread his Lord's intentions. Oliver waved him off, however. He collected himself, and placed a hand to reassure himself on the hilt of his sword. "No. That will do. Let's go."

He hefted himself up next to the driver. Blackthorn opened the door and let herself wordlessly into the carriage's cab. She would be protecting them from the inside, whilst Oliver kept an eye on the road from an outside. 'For all the good that will do,' Oliver thought. 'I don't have enough eyes to check through this all. Damn it, perhaps I should have brought more men?'

When the whip cracked, and the horses began to move with a hefty strain of their muscles, and the carriage wheels were finally set to trundle, Oliver had to admit his relief. The endless current of the crowd, in that small pocket of Ernest, had seemed like it would stretch on infinitely.

He saw the man with the thick moustache every time he looked for it, and he saw the beautiful, yet dead-eyed woman just as frequently. There were slight variations between them each time, but they weren't exactly enough to see Oliver's feeling of wrongness settled.

'An old city,' Oliver told himself, as if that fact could offer any sort of degree of comfort. 'Would be that the dead were watching, rather than the living.' It was the same jest that he had made to Verdant. For some reason, the idea of an entreaty happening with the ghostly ancestors seemed a good deal less foreboding than the actuality of a conspiracy in the present.

They rounded a corner, and they left that street behind. Oliver glanced to the right, checking the road that he had assumed, at first, the moustached man must have sprinted down. It would have been an even longer distance than he had imagined it to be, for the two streets did not exactly run parallel. The other road was more at a diagonal to the first.

The far faster route would have been the small alleyway that ran between them. That was as direct as one was likely to get.

'I could probably manage it,' Oliver thought to himself, eyeing the alleyway. 'But then, what sane man would bother to do that? What would the purpose be… And more importantly, why am I even considering it, when I know that is most certainly not what happened there?"

Just before he turned around, he caught sight of a bald butcher, carrying a sac, dripping blood from its bottom as he walked. His cleaver was bloody, and his white apron was just as bloody. But that made sense – he was a butcher, Oliver could tell that at a glance. He'd seen enough of them.

Though, he did wonder, why it was that he was allowed to place that bloody sac of his down right in the middle of a path, and why it was no one said anything, as blood leaked from it, all over the pavement, and the man left it where it was, in order to return to the shadows of the alley.

The strangeness of a city was not lost on Oliver. It seemed to him that all sorts of things could be hidden amongst that mass of people, all sorts of strange characters and events. If someone were to be stabbed, amid the walking wall that was the crowd, how long would it take to be noticed? Longer than it would in the likes of Solgrim, Oliver knew.

There was a strange phenomenon to it. The more people there were, the more aware they ought to have been. Yet numbers did not bring unity, and the butchers sack was left to bleed in the middle of the street. It was cursed, but no one moved to solve the problem. There was an anonymity to the number of them.

It was an act that would have not gone without mention in Solgrim, because they knew to solve it, they ought to solve it themselves. In the city, it was assumed, that it would be solved by another party, or else the governors of the city, or the guard. It was best not to get involved otherwise.

Harmon's home had just been on the edge of the city centre, and only now, in leaving that street, did they begin to near that centre. Here, everything was older. The bricks were darker from their age, almost black. Here was that history that Verdant was so fond of talking about.

Oliver spied the ancient keep that had been the home to the city Lord when Ernest had first been built – now it had been turned into an especially fine clothing store. "Fal's Fabrics", the sign read, and out in front of it, girls worked their looms as if it were a show.

They spun a white thread almost in synchronisation with each other. Though their looms were in no way connected, they had all the unity of a rowing team.

They spun their white thread, and tossed it, and then another girl, dressed in her working dress, with a white cap to secure her hair, just as the rest, hurried to pick up all that white thread, and she spun it in her hands, just as the others spun it from their looms.

With an act of magic, she threw it to the ledge of the next balcony. It wrapped its way around the edge – though it appeared far more like it had stuck to the railing instead – before the ball of thread fell down into her hand once more. She did the same again, another thread towards the balcony, and then another.

And then, she stole up the thread from the next loom along, and began to twist the two together.