❖ Turn 17

I pause and quietly take stock of my immediate surroundings.

Scene Six: The River-Steps — Dawn Stock-Taking

The market fringe at the river-steps is the city’s earliest hour made physical.

The stalls here are not the merchant quarter’s polished counters. They are trestles and upturned crates, manned by people who rose before the slug-lords’ factors and would rather sell two hours of perishables than compete at midday. The smell is river water, salt fish, woodsmoke, and the sharp green of something being boiled in the pot on a brazier to your left. A boy with a cockroach-switch leans against the river-wall, watching nothing in particular. Two crab-men — collared, house-marked, moving purposefully east — pass without looking at Krah-Moh. He does not look at them either.

        ┌────────────────────────────────────────┐
        │   RIVER-STEPS MARKET FRINGE            │
        │                                        │
        │  ≈≈≈≈ GOD RIVER (south of you) ≈≈≈≈≈  │
        │                                        │
        │  [STEPS] ← you stand here              │
        │   ·  Krah-Moh (left shoulder)          │
        │   ·  Pav (two paces back, pack)        │
        │                                        │
        │  [TEA STALL] ← woman on crate, 6 ft   │
        │  [BRAZIER]                             │
        │  [RIVER WALL] ← boy, cockroach-switch  │
        │                                        │
        │         ↑ Yellow City (north)          │
        └────────────────────────────────────────┘

Pav stands two paces back with the traveling pack across his shoulders, his dockworker’s hands loose at his sides. He is watching the woman on the crate with the particular wariness of someone who has learned that people who recognize things they shouldn’t often have complicated reasons for recognizing them.

Krah-Moh is to your left and slightly behind — his default position now, worn into habit over less than twenty-four hours. His compound eyes move across the market fringe in slow arcs, reading the crowd the way a man reads a tide. He is not tense. He is simply present.

The woman sits exactly as she was: quarter-staff across her knees, both hands resting on it, the circle-of-shells tattoo on her left forearm just visible below her rolled sleeve. She has the stillness of someone who has asked a question and genuinely does not know the answer she will receive. She is watching you take stock and she is letting you.

The river below the steps is brown-gold in the early light, running south. That is the direction you are going. The God River widens as it nears the sea, and somewhere along it — or past it, or at the edge of it — is wherever Krah-Moh came from before the Yellow City.

You have 49 gp. You have supplies for fourteen days. You have a miracle to choose before you walk out of this city. And you have a question still hanging in the salt-edged morning air.

Do you know what you’re walking into?

What do you do?

◆ Vothrog   HP 4/4   ·   Yellow City, river-steps market fringe   ·   Woman waiting; Pav ready; Krah-Moh at your shoulder; the river runs south

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