It was not until they had turned onto a narrower street that he got a true glimpse of this city’s residents. His gaze came to rest on a shirtless man’s back. He was heavily muscled, bulges that quivered as he heaved sacks into the back of a cart. The first strange thing about him was the uniformly dark gray of his skin. A greater shock came when the man turned to watch the passing strangers. Dariel drew back in horror, momentarily jerking his Ishtat handlers to a halt. The man’s face was barely a man’s face at all. Instead of eyebrows he had knobby ridges. Long black whiskers ran along his jawline, so stiff and straight they were like metal pins driven into the bone. Worse than that were the golden tusks that protruded from his jaw, just beside the corners of his mouth. They were thick and curved like a boar’s. The man betrayed no indication that he considered himself a horror. In fact, his eyes fixed on Dariel’s and studied him as if he were the oddity.

Perhaps Dariel was, for the next few minutes of stumbling progress through the streets brought one bizarre person after another: a woman whose face, neck, and arms were patterned like a leopard’s coat; two boys with jet-black faces and white whiskers jutting from their cheeks; a man whose arms and legs were striped like a zebra’s, though his face was that of a normal man, perhaps of Candovian origins. Another man seemed to have a snake coiled around one arm, starting at his palm and wrapping around the forearm, bicep, shoulder, up his neck until the head came to rest on his cheek, its tongue flicking out toward his eye. Dariel was near enough to see that the serpent was an elaborate tattoo. Dariel’s eyes shot around to take in others. Again and again, he found more strange patterns and accoutrements. Every human person was tattooed, pierced, or altered. He had seen some odd bodily decorations in his time as a Sea Island brigand, but nothing like this.

They marched through a thronging outdoor food market. The air carried a whirl of scents, sweet mixed with peppery, pungent enough to make his eyes water, with an underpresence of death. Food stuffs both familiar and new crowded the rows of stalls, monkeys hanging beside green-plumed birds, next to fruit he had never seen before and live lizards hung by their tails and writhing. One of the Ishtat overturned a vat of some chunk-filled liquid. The man jumped back from it, retched at what he saw, and hurried to rejoin the procession as one of the leaguemen called him an idiot and a bumbler. Though he tried to, Dariel could not get a glimpse of what the soldier had seen. They moved on too quickly. He was sure of so little and felt himself in a waking nightmare, as if in a dream where he was compelled to specific actions and powerless to change course, to stop, look up, or face the thing that pursued him.