Accordingly, he saw nothing that he had not seen before and would not see again, until such time as death took him away, to shutter at last his weary witnessing of the rancorous, motley mess.

He opened the trap door and climbed up on to the tower’s heat-baked, shadowless roof. Even solitude was an illusion. Conversations in clamour, lives crowding now in the ghostly haunts of memory, his mind’s voice babbled without surcease and could torment him even in sleep. It was easy for him to imagine the Citadel below as but an extension of that chaos, with the priests hunting faith like rat-hunters in the grain, with liars tending their seeds under lurid candlelight in all the small rooms that so cramped their ambitions, and the foragers who plucked rumours from the draughts as if whipping nets through the air.

If history was naught but that which was lived in the present, then it was history’s very unruliness that doomed the players to this headlong plunge into confusion. None of the future’s promises ever quite drew within reach; none resolved into something solid or real; and none made bridges to be crossed.

He looked down at the river, winding its way through Kharkanas, and saw it as a metaphor of the present – hardly an original notion, of course – except that to his eyes it was crowded beyond measure, with the swimming and the drowning, the corpses and those barely holding on, all spun about and swirling on unpredictable currents. Those bridges that reached into the future, where dwelt equity, hope and cherished lives so warmly swathed in harmony, arced high overhead, beyond all mortal reach, and he could hear the wailing as the flow carried the masses past every one of those bridges, into and out of those cool shadows that were themselves as insubstantial as promises.

Such shadows could not be walked. Such shadows offered no grip for the hand, no hold for the foot. They were, in truth, nothing more than ongoing arguments between light and dark.

He could fling himself from this tower. He could shock innocent strangers upon the courtyard below, or the street, or even the bridge leading into the Citadel. Or he could vanish into the depths of Dorssan Ryl. A life’s end sent ripples through those that remained. They could be vast, or modest, but in the scheme of this living history, most were barely noticed.

We are all interludes in history, a drawn breath to make pause in the rush, and when we are gone, those breaths join the chorus of the wind.

But who listens to the wind?

Historians, he decided, were as deaf as anyone else.

A soul made weary longed for sordid ends. But a soul at its end longed for all that was past, and so remained trapped in a present filled with regrets. Of all the falls promised me by this vantage, I will take the river. Each and every time, I will take the river.