She walked past traders setting their stalls and dodged people slumped in the gutters, drunkenness having negated prejudice to collapse them all together. The streets were coming slowly to life, and most people walked slowly, like apathetic blood through the veins of the aging city. Hope stepped aside to let an old fodder pass by, the woman’s flabby stomach and breasts almost reaching her thighs. She wondered whether a woman from a race once bred for food could ever truly hope for anything more. If magic returned, would it help? Nobody really knew. Nobody alive now had known magic. It was a mystery, and evidence of its previous existence had been melting away. Those dead machines she could see around her had merged into buildings, many of the machines put to disrespectful use: a toilet; a water trough for horses; the frame of a brothel doorway. These things that generations ago had performed miracles were now merely building blocks of today’s degradation.

She arrived at her destination and stood by while Mogart opened his shop. He was an old man, a coal miner whose stockiness had long since gone to fat, and Hope was used to him being slow.

“Morning, Mogart.”

“Eh? Oh, Hope, you damn witch! What brings you here so early? I thought you preferred the dark.”

“I’m hungry, you old fool.” She clapped him on the shoulder and grimaced at the puff of dust from his clothes. “Anything tasty this morning?”

“Help me with this and I’ll tell you.” Mogart was shoving a timber shutter from his shop doorway, and Hope added her strength and guided it into its housing. Mogart huffed and puffed, turned to his cart and began uncovering boxes. Hope saw vegetables, a few wrinkled fruits and some pale fish, probably caught from the river last night. He would claim they were from fisheries on the Western Shores, of course, but Hope knew the difference. Fish from the Shores did not taste of shit.

“Anything nice?” she asked again.

“What?”

“Anything nice?”

“It’s all nice, whore!”

Hope laughed and shoved Mogart into the shop ahead of her. The place stank as if it had not been cleaned out for many moons—which was probably the case—and Mogart was not the most hygienic of people, but Hope liked him. He had traveled some in his youth, working from mine to mine in the Widow’s Peaks and the mountains of Long Marrakash. He had stories, most of which she had heard many times before, but he was also adept at keeping his ear to the ground. His feigned deafness served him well, as did his age and unkempt appearance. People with secrets never seemed to consider him a threat, and they often talked freely before him, in his shop or huddled in corners of the Dead Sea Tavern, where he spent his evenings.