I do recall the first few weeks as a vivid, sick sort of game. The Metropolitan Ward was summoned. Word found a way of trickling back to my ears that during their searches for me, many homes of former tutors and childhood friends whom I hadn’t seen in years were ransacked as frustrations increased. My old laboratory had to eventually be discovered. I could too easily envision the laughing gaggle of mailed Wardsmen pilfering through it all.

As heavy hooves approached in brutish unison, I would scurry into the sewers or hide behind the wheel of a cart. With a crude sketch of me in hand, orphanages were scoured. I guess they thought a boy from Templeton would frighten after a night or two under the care of the Nilghorde streets. Little did they know me.

I was resolve, colder than rain on the mountain. I wasn’t going back. Every time I eluded their patrols, it only bolstered my lost but freed heart.

Finally, after weeks of hide and seek, it all ended. The Prime Marshall had probably told Father in careful terms that I’d most likely been abducted and was already chained inside some galley far out at sea.

Other than a book I’d stowed and an armful of anatomy works procured from the rear door of an unaware bookstore, my youthful education had met its terminus. But this only, I’d told myself, was good reason to revisit my favorites. I read my third volume of Poems of the Classics so many times that its pages became frail with a sort of rot and rub. Reciting the voyage of Omiel the doomed Mariner and the poetry of Denom Vandahl were regular occurrences in my bleak obscurities.

For food, I started out by using all of my trapping skills. Hundreds of rats and several pigeons later, I took to joining those who haunted the crooked bricked jungle in search of money. If I wasn’t able to find work—maybe a cheap laborer on some city project or sweeping the rubble left from all the statues being chiseled on Do-Gooder’s Row—I learned through painful trial and error the grim arts of the street.

IV: The Caress

Despite the battles with food deprivation that came with having run away, I grew well in frame. Shoulders stretched outward. My chest grew slabs of beef. I had limbs of vein and sinew, and my lower legs were as thick as my upper arms. A boyish face melted away. By the time the Do-Gooder’s Row statues looked like men trying to free their lower halves out of blocks of stone, my summer-field hair had taken to looking like that of my late mother’s, both in its darkness and its length. I fit well with the orgy of maliciousness that populated the haunts of Nilghorde, which I’d come to call home.