Asking the Way

Wednesday 7 October, 23:33. The Rogues’ Quarter

The Undercity is built in rings, and I have been walking the wrong one all evening. Every passage in the Rogues’ Quarter is the same wet green, lit by the same lamp. I do not tire, which is the worst of it. A living man would have sat down by now and been found.

We have passed that lamp twice, said Mezzlos. I have counted.

I did not tell him I had counted too.

There was a guard at the end of the third passage that I had not yet rejected. It stood against the wall as if it had been leaned there. It was enormous, grey-blue where it was not grey-green, and it had been put together with the loose and generous stitching of someone who ran out of time and then ran out of thread. Where its hands should have been there were hooks. One of them was larger than my head.

Twelve places were offered. I wanted the inn. [Picture description: Percy in a yellow and purple robe stands before a huge pale stitched figure with hooks for hands, a directions menu open at the left and a blue voidwalker behind him.]

It is a thing I know without having been told, that one asks the way of a Guardian. The question it puts is the only one it has. What are you looking for? I looked down the list. The bank, the bat handler, the mailbox, the inn. Nobody had put out on it.

I do not breathe, as far as I can tell, and I could still smell it. A slaughterhouse in a wet cellar, and under that something sweeter that I decided not to follow. It stood in a faint haze, as though the air around it had been left to go off. I took the inn, and I held a sleeve to a face that did not need one.

It smells, said Mezzlos, a long way behind me. I did not know that I could mind.

The Guardian pointed with one hook toward the tunnel I had already rejected. It never looked at me. I thanked it anyway. It is polite to thank the dead, and I was not sure which kind it was.

The Guardians are abominations, and the Forsaken make them in the Apothecarium. Many corpses are stitched into one body and kept whole with blood and embalming fluid. The builders choose the brain with care and take away the parts that think, so that nothing in it can grow a conscience. What is left is slow, loyal and hungry, and it guards the city and gives directions to those who ask.

I walked the tunnel. It was the right one, and I resented that.

I have been lost among the living, and I have been lost among the dead, and tonight I found a third kind, which is to be lost among those who were made. In the book I wrote left, and underlined it. Below it, smaller, Do not stand downwind.

Percy has stood under the hooks of the Apothecarium and has not asked what they are for. It is a short walk from his question to this answer, and nobody has yet offered to take it with him.

Set down in the Undercity, Wednesday 7 October 2026, 23:33.