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To gain the full measure of any city in a single day simply start with one of its libraries, move on to a market or cathedral, either works equally well, and let the evening find you a tavern, public house, or speakeasy. By the second day the streets will hold little that surprises you.

The Traveller’s Guide to Krathe , by Mallory Schultz

Evar

Starval pushed through the tavern doorway. Evar hesitated for a moment, eyeing the street. It felt as if every shadow looming in the mist might be someone he knew, Mayland, Arpix, Clovis…even Livira. The damp air muffled smells as readily as sounds, but for a moment it almost seemed he’d caught her scent.

“Come on!” Starval leaned back out and dragged him in. “They have food!”

The tavern’s interior was warm, lantern lit, and crowded. To Evar’s surprise, the place was mixed. Canith drank and ate alongside humans. Even some of the groups at the tables were mixed, canith dwarfing their fellow drinkers.

“This is like the poisoned city.” Evar shuddered at the memory. “The city you and Mayland— Tell me you didn’t know they were going to die.”

Starval frowned and twisted his mouth. “I have…regrets.”

Evar had expected a denial. One that he wouldn’t be able to identify as a lie. “Brother! A city…a whole city.”

“Do the numbers matter? Is there an arithmetic of murder? Are five innocents less of a crime than five hundred or fifty thousand?”

Evar became aware that two men close by were giving them alarmed looks. “We’ll talk about your book later. I’m hungry,” he said quickly, reframing the subject. And he was. Famished. Celcha’s generosity had hardly touched the sides. “How do we…?”

Starval laughed. “You have to kill your darlings, Evar. Fiction’s a bloody business.” Deploying his elbows with an assassin’s precision he began to forge a path to the bar.

Evar followed in his wake. “Don’t you need money?” He felt quite proud of himself for remembering the concept. He’d only spent a day ghosting through a city, but money, or at least talk of money, had been everywhere.

Starval held up a fat leather purse. “It grows on trees, brother.”

Two young human women were serving behind the bar, but as Starval and Evar arrived an older man rose into view from some task lower down and greeted them with a cheerful smile.

“Evening, gentlemen. You can call me King Oldo, or just Oldo if we’re friends, and if you’re buying then we’re friends!” He patted the sides of his large stomach which even a generous leather apron had no chance of hiding. “What can I get you? You look hungry. I do a wicked plate of ribs. More like a shield than a plate, if I’m honest. Covered in secret sauce.” He pressed his fingertips together, kissed them, and spread them as if to indicate some explosion of flavour. “My own recipe. Tangy, sweet, a touch of bitter spice out of the east. You’ll think angels are holding a party in your belly. And then there’s—”

“Sold! All of it.” Starval slapped the jingling purse on the counter. “Drinks too. The big ones! And that stuff as well!” He pointed to one of the steaming bowls a server was carrying past him to the tables.

Oldo’s grin broadened. He looked out across the crowded room, fixed his gaze on a group near the kitchen door, and bellowed, “Give that table up, Abra! And you, Gothon! Got some decent, paying customers here who need it.” Then, turning back to Starval, “Take a seat, young sirs. I’ll be over with your meals presently.”

“I hope ‘presently’ means ‘almost immediately,’?” Starval muttered, heading over to the table being vacated by the two older canith, both clutching their ale tankards to their chests as if reliant on them to keep afloat.

Evar nodded apologetically to one of the canith, who swayed drunkenly out of his way. “We can’t stay long. Livira might be out there. That’s what Mayland said. We find her book and if she’s not with it already, it’ll draw her to us.”

“You’ll learn a lot more here in the warm than wandering around in the fog, trust me.” Starval had somehow acquired a wooden goblet, complete with wine, leaning back against the wall, sipping contentedly as he watched the patrons.

“I’ll learn how long it takes for you to get arrested.” Evar shook his head. “Someone’s going to miss that…” He lowered his voice. “What you took.”

“I don’t think Oldo will care, as long as I empty it faster than the previous owner. That man’s a rogue. Takes one to know one.”

When Celcha had deployed her flask of library blood to create food for her half-starved followers, Evar hadn’t known what to ask for. In the end he’d requested sugar-cake, remembering a child badgering his mother for one in the market of another Krath. The little boy’s shriek of delight when the woman purchased one from a street vendor, and the look of bliss on his face when he consumed it in a shower of crumbs, had stayed with him. Sadness tempered the memory—the city had been ransacked by a human army that same night, the boy had probably died in one of the great fires. But Evar had few memories not laced with sorrow. The sugar-cake had been more delicious than anything he’d ever tasted, something that nothing produced by the Assistant’s pool-garden had ever prepared him for or even let him dream of. His bliss had not, perhaps, matched that of the small, doomed child, but it had been considerable.

If the situation were revisited though, Evar would now ask for beef stew with root vegetables and a hunk of black bread.

“Ribs’ll come along in a bit.” Oldo set two platters before them and laughed as Evar bent to scoop the steaming mess into his mouth, careless of the heat.

“One of these might help?” He reached into his apron, producing two large wooden spoons.

“I apologize for my brother, sir.” Starval slapped at Evar’s arm. “He was raised by wolves.”

Embarrassed, but still chewing and suffused in an ecstasy of flavour, Evar fumbled for the offered spoon.

“Chef’ll take it as a compliment. Both you boys look like you need a few good meals inside you. Thin as rakes. I’ll send Kella out with more bread when she brings the ales.” Oldo paused. “You’re not from around here.” It wasn’t a question.

“No sir.” Starval licked his teeth but resisted diving into the food. Evar continued to shovel stew into his mouth, using the spoon and finding it a fine invention if a little awkward at first.

“From the west, are you?” Oldo ventured. “Kelso way, or maybe the Cronnin shore? I can normally place an accent but you fellows sound like you were born around the corner and raised next door.”

“We’ve come a long way.” Starval kept a smile in place and popped a chunk of bread into his mouth. “But yes, from the west of late. Through the passes.”

“Bad over there now, is it?” The landlord frowned, rubbing a hand absently through his thinning grey curls.

“Bad.” Starval nodded and looked down as if it might be too bad to speak of.

Oldo took the hint. “Enjoy your meal. Bread and ale coming soon. And those ribs. Kella! Where are you, Kella? Thirsty travellers over here!” And off he went.

Starval, with enormous restraint, merely tapped his spoon on the table rather than joining Evar in the race to clean his plate.

“Gothon, was it?” He hailed one of the elderly canith they’d displaced. “Apologies for stealing your table. Join us? I’ll stand you a beer.”

Mention of beer had both canith drawing up stools and squeezing alongside Evar at the small table. Gothon’s greying mane was braided into thick, matted cords through which carved wooden pegs had been pushed, giving them a spiky appearance. The other one, Abra, wasn’t quite so old and his mane was as dark as soot, his skin too, and his eyes, the whites bloodshot. He twitched from time to time, and when he spoke it was in short bursts so rapid that the listener had to divide the string of sound into words on their own time.

Starval, good as his word, supplied both old-timers with ale, and in return extracted far more information about the city than Evar could have discovered in a week of wandering the streets. After cleaning his plate and devouring the bread, Evar sat back with one of the newly arrived ribs.

He let Starval do the talking, interjecting only once to announce, “I’ve got a new favourite now. Spicy ribs.” The ale was rather foul stuff and he wondered at its appeal. Even so, he drank it down, and by the second flagon it didn’t seem as bad. He was gnawing on his seventh rib and quite content with the world. Taverns, Evar decided, were an excellent invention. To his great surprise, he found himself unable to manage even one more bite and discovered that his jaw was aching from overuse. Admitting defeat, he rocked his chair back against the wall and watched Starval work, admiring the way in which he got the answers to flow without ever seeming to ask a question.

New Kraff City was, it seemed, contrary to the good food and convivial atmosphere in the Stained Page tavern, between a rock and a hard place and under a heel. The potentate had come from humble beginnings, borne to power through the bloody end of the royal line of Hosten. Under the Hostens’ benevolent but largely ineffectual rule the empire had been reduced to a shadow of its former glory, nibbled at by insurrection, humbled by wars, rotted by corruption.

The potentate’s masterstroke had been to point out that the empire’s misfortune, at each and every level, both on the battlefield and off it, was the fault of the Amacar. These demons in human and canith flesh formed a small minority who still followed an older religion, one from which the current, state-approved, faith sprang centuries before the Hostens came to power.

“So, you all worship the same god?” Evar had managed between mouthfuls as his stomach began to protest.

Gothon who, although drunk, had seemed until that point a reasonable enough person, with both a sense of humour and of fair play, now spat on the floorboards. “The Amacar exiled the prophet. I don’t care what god they pretend to worship, they’re all in the grand demon’s pockets.”

“So, you’re a religious man?” Starval asked gently.

Abra spluttered out his beer, artfully recapturing most of it in his tankard. “Gothon? He’s not been to temple since the priest sealed his name onto him. You’ll hear the Lord’s name in his mouth when he stubs his toe, or if a woman ever takes pity on him, that’s it.”

“Doesn’t change a thing.” Gothon’s own tankard muffled the rest of his muttering, but Evar caught snippets: “…damn thieving Amacars…giving babies to the…”

It seemed to Evar that these Amacars, less than one-twentieth of the population, must be working very hard to have managed all the evildoing laid at their feet. But whatever the truth of it, hate had proved to be sufficient glue to weld New Kraff and the wider population into a weapon of war for the potentate. Thus armed, he had set off variously reconquering territories the Hostens had lost or conquering new ones wherever a monarch looked unsteady on their throne.

For the best part of a decade everything had been going swimmingly, provided you liked swimming in blood. The Amacar were being rooted out of society and sent to camps on an island in Lake Cantoo or executed for their crimes. The borders of empire were being pushed outwards, welcoming “liberated” populations into the potentate’s care. New Kraff had never seen so much wealth or glory.

“Then they came.” Gothon shook his head. “Everyone says they’re in league with the Amacar.”

“I can’t see it.” Abra rubbed his forehead furiously, glancing around before continuing in a lower voice, “I mean, maybe the Amacar were sucking the blood out of us, maybe they did pull the Hostens’ strings. But the insects? They’ll turn an Amacar into blood and guts quick as they will anyone else.”

“Skeer?” Evar asked.

Gothon shot him a suspicious look. “Not an Iccrah are you?”

“Does he look like a fucking Iccrah?” Abra smacked his tankard down on the table. He continued in a hushed voice, “The Iccrahs are all that’s standing between us and the insects. ‘Skeer’ is what the Iccrah call them. Iccrah has better guns than we do. Famed for them. And forts. So many forts and castles.” He jabbed a finger here and there as if pointing them out. “Our armies never went there, no sir. But the insects are on their east border and the stories…well…if I hadn’t been a drinkin’ man to start with, the shit I’ve heard about what’s happening in Iccrah would have been enough to push me into the barrel.” He swilled his ale around, staring into his tankard. “I’m planning to drown in this stuff before the bugs get here. That’s my plan.”