Miriam hadn’t appreciated before just how crude, small, and just plain smelly the city was. It stood on a low bluff overlooking what might, in a few hundred years, mutate into the Port Authority. Stone walls twenty feet high followed the contours of the ground for miles, bascules sprouting ominously every hundred yards. Long before they reached the walls, she found herself walking beside Olga in a cloud of smelly dust, passing rows of windowless tumbledown shacks. Scores of poor-looking countryfolk—many in clothes little better than layered rags—drove heavily laden donkeys or small herds of sheep toward the city gates. Miriam noticed that they were picking up a few odd looks, especially from the ragged mothers of the barefoot urchins who cast stones across the icy cobbles, but she avoided eye contact and nobody seemed interested in approaching two women who knew where they were going. Especially after Olga pointedly allowed the barrel of her gun to slip from under her cloak, in response to an importuning rascal who attempted to get too close. “Hmm, I see why you always travel by—” Miriam stopped and squinted at the gatehouse. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is, on the wall,” she said.

“Not what—oh, that.” Olga looked at her oddly. “What else would you have them do with bandits?”

“Um.” Miriam swallowed. “Not that.” The city gates were wide open and nobody seemed to be guarding them. “Is there meant to be anyone on watch?”

“Invasion comes from the sea, most often.”

“Um.” I’ve got to stop saying that, Miriam told herself. Her feet were beginning to hurt with all the walking, she was picking up dust and dirt, and she was profoundly regretting not making use of the dining carriage for breakfast. Or crossing all the way over, phoning for Paulie to pick them up, and driving all the way in the back of an air-conditioned car. “Which way to the castle?”

“Oh, that’s a way yet.” Olga beamed as a wagon laden with bales of hay clattered past. “Isn’t it grand? The largest city in the Gruinmarkt!”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Miriam said hollowly. She’d seen something like this before, she realized. Some of the museum reconstructions of medieval life back home were quite accurate, but nothing quite captured the reek—no, the overwhelming stench—of open sewers, of people who bathed twice a year and wore a single set of clothes all the time, of houses where the owners bedded down with their livestock to share warmth. Did I really say I was going to modernize this? she asked herself, aghast at her own hubris. Why yes, I think I did. Talk about jumping in with both feet…