For nearly twenty years, the city of Tressia had held dual identity in Josiri’s memory, his childhood recollections muddied and distorted by a man’s resentments. A place of alabaster towers, fluttering hawk-flags and gilded statues, it was also the place his father had come to die. Where hundreds – even thousands – of southwealders laboured in servitude, having committed no crime other than to have lost.

Strange, then, that the streets were neither so glorious as Josiri remembered, nor as horrifying as he’d feared. The white city of his dreams and nightmares had grown grey through neglectful years. The flags streamed not from proud towers, but from walls surrounded by rubble, brick-spoil and sweating labourers. Statues bore powdery stains that marked them as gull-roosts. But then nor did Josiri catch signs of the slavery he’d feared. The labourers worked unfettered, and the streets were empty of the shuffling columns of oppressed he’d conjured in his mind’s eye.

Tressia, bastion of glory and oppression, was merely a place, neither intrinsically good nor irredeemably evil. It simply . . . was.

It was also oddly empty. In the long walk from King’s Gate, Josiri and his five-man escort passed perhaps a thousand souls. The marketplaces, which should have been bustling even at that hour, were but sparsely attended. The church doors were sealed tight, their congregations and preachers cloistered inside, their hymns echoing out into the open air. The taverns and hostelries of the deeper streets, which should have been thick with drinkers celebrating the dying work day, played host to but a few huddled inebriates. But for all that, Josiri felt eyes upon him from every alley-mouth and window. Empty though the streets might have been, the people were still there.

Kraikons stood silent sentinel at the confluence of major thoroughfares. It took Josiri a moment to recognise them for what they were. Steel armour and polished bronze flesh gleamed in the waning daylight, giving them the aspect of gods, and not the broken-down old field-hulks Josiri knew. But their stance was familiar. Watchful. In this, if nothing else, Tressia reminded him of Eskavord, and he wondered why that should be so.

They began the curved descent towards the harbourside and the Silverway River. Battered kraikons loomed alongside silent, moored ships. Josiri spotted a woman dragging her child along. The girl, oblivious to her parent’s wishes, lingered at arm’s extent, gazing up at a kraikon in wonder. What was a familiar sight in Eskavord was apparently not so in Tressia.

“Is it always so quiet?” he asked.

Sergeant Brass pondered, as steadfastly laconic as a cow chewing cud. “No.”

Josiri waited for him to expand on the answer. After a dark, silent tavern fell away behind, he realised no such expansion was forthcoming.

“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked.

Brass quickened his pace. “No.”