Momen ran eastward through the slums, keeping to narrow gaps between shanties where the morning light didn't reach. He ducked behind broken crates when a man stepped out of a doorway ahead, waiting until he turned away before slipping past. He avoided the main mud tracks.
The image of Brann sat behind his eyes. Twisted limbs every time he blinked. They'd hunt him for that. City guards with polished breastplates. A dead enforcer meant a broken order.
His ribs throbbed with each step. The Magic Sickness wrapped its familiar fatigue around the pain, making his legs feel heavy. He pushed through it anyway.
He was heading for a section of the outer wall by the tannery district. The smell reached him first: chemicals and rotting flesh. He remembered a tunnel from years ago when he was maybe eight or nine and desperate after his father left. He'd heard stories later that it led to a forgotten space under an inner-city building.
It was his only way in.
He found the opening at the base of the wall where it met the tannery yard. It was smaller than he remembered—a jagged mouth barely two feet high with weeds clinging to its edges.
Momen crouched, peering into the blackness. Nothing moved inside. He couldn't see more than a few feet before the tunnel curved and swallowed the light.
A tightness started in his chest, something separate from the pain in his ribs. The dark space seemed to press outward at him, an invitation that felt more like a threat.
*They'll find you if you stay here,* a voice muttered in his head.
He got down and crawled into the hole.
The tunnel was colder inside, the air damp and still. His knees sank into a soft layer of muck on the floor-a mixture of silt, decayed leaves, and things he didn't want to identify. The ceiling pressed down on his back almost immediately, forcing him to hunch lower, then to crawl flat on his belly as the passage narrowed further.
Darkness closed around him completely as he crawled forward by feel alone.
Something skittered away from his hand in the muck—something with too many legs.
He froze, his heart hammering against his ribs hard enough to make him gasp from the fresh spike of pain.
*Keep moving,* a voice grumbled.
He kept moving.
The tunnel seemed to go on forever in the dark.
Then his hand met empty space ahead.
He pulled himself out into wider space and stood up slowly in pitch dark.
The darkness was total. It was a thick, velvet black that felt like it had physical weight. He couldn't see his own hand in front of his face.
At least he was His limbs felt impossibly heavy, as if someone had filled them with wet sand while he wasn't looking.
His ribs were He found himself taking shallow sips of air just to avoid triggering
He had killed someone.
The thought arrived fully formed this time instead of skittering at the edges of his mind.
Maybe not with his hands or a knife or anything he could remember doing consciously—he couldn't recall raising a weapon or throwing a punch after Brann knocked him down. But something inside him had reached out and turned Brann into ruin.
He didn't know how long he sat there.
The slums would be awake now.
Someone would have found Brann.
He felt
a faint draft from above,
somewhere to
his left.
He got up and moved toward it,
his hands outstretched.
His fingers found wooden planking—the remains of stairs maybe—and stronger air trickling down from between broken boards above.
With it came
a hint of light.
Momen moved closer and stood under it carefully as if afraid it might vanish if he made too much noise about it.
They were still streaked with dark brown stains that looked black in this weak light but which he knew were Brann's blood mixed with alley dirt and whatever else had been on the ground when he fell. He'd wiped them on his rags already but that only smeared things around, now blood had dried deep in the creases of his knuckles and under his nails where no casual wiping would reach.
His clothes were just as bad: a mess of older filth from weeks of slum living layered with newer darker smears from today's work.
He looked like exactly what he was: someone who had crawled out of a slaughterhouse ditch after fighting whatever animals lived there.
Anyone inside these walls would spot him in a heartbeat. They'd smell him from ten paces away too.
He knelt down beside the broken stairs, where the light just barely reached the floor. The cellar floor wasn't just wet, it was a mixture of ancient mud, soot from a long-collapsed chimney flue, and general decay. He scooped up a handful of the cold, gritty muck.
He started with his hands, working the dark mud into every crevice, covering the bloodstains completely. The mud was blackish-gray, perfect for the job. He moved to his arms, smearing it over his skin until his pale flesh was just another patch of grime. He did his neck, his face, rubbing the sooty filth into his hairline and behind his ears. He used more to daub over the worst stains on his tunic and pants, turning the distinctive dark splotches into part of a general, uniform coating of filth.
It wasn't really a disguise so much as camouflage—just making what he already was anyway into such an overwhelming feature that people wouldn't look past it to see anything else.
When he was done, he examined his hands again in the sliver of light. They were black to the wrist, caked with drying mud. No blood visible at all. He rubbed his palms together, a fine grit rained down. Good enough.
The stairs leading up from what used to be a proper cellar entrance were treacherous now after decades of neglect and damp rot probably caused by whatever leak created this whole forgotten space anyway . The bottom three steps were completely missing entirely , leaving a gap about chest-high that he had to haul himself up into using crumbling bricks set into wall . The remaining steps above groaned loudly under even careful testing weight , sagging visibly middle like old men's backs . He took them one at a time, testing each board before committing his full weight.
At the top was a door, or what was left of one. It hung crooked on one rusted hinge, warped and swollen shut by decades of damp. He put his shoulder against it and pushed, the wood protesting with a sound like a dying animal. It gave suddenly, swinging inward with a shower of dust and splinters.
Beyond was another darkness, but this one smelled different-dusty dry rot and old paper instead of stagnant water. A storage room, maybe, long abandoned. He could make out shapes now: stacked crates covered in thick blankets of dust, the skeletal frame of a broken chair. A sliver of brighter light showed under another door on the far side.
He crossed the room quietly, avoiding the debris on the floor. He pressed his ear to this second door. Silence from the other side.
He turned the handle slowly. It wasn't locked.
The door opened onto a narrow, grimy hallway. A single grime-encrusted window at one end provided the only light, illuminating floating dust motes and peeling wallpaper. The air here was still stale but breathable. He could hear distant sounds now-the unmistakable murmur of a city going about its business: voices calling out, the clatter of wheels on cobblestones, a dog barking somewhere.
This was it. The inner city.
He crept down the hall toward the sound, his feet making no noise on the worn floorboards. The hallway ended at a heavy curtain that smelled of old cooking grease and smoke. He parted it just enough to peer through.
He was looking into the back room of what seemed to be a tenement building's common kitchen, now empty and cold. A doorway on the opposite wall led out into a dim alley.
Momen slipped through the curtain and across the empty room. He paused at the outer door, took a deep breath that made his ribs twinge, and stepped outside.
The world changed.
The alley was narrow and still grimy, with refuse piled against one wall, but it was different from slum filth. This refuse was organized-broken furniture waiting for repair, empty ceramic jugs stacked neatly for collection. The cobblestones underfoot were uneven but mostly clear of sewage. The air… the air didn't have that constant underlying reek of rot and open waste. It smelled of woodsmoke from morning fires, baking bread from somewhere nearby, and something faintly herbal he couldn't name.
He pressed himself against the alley wall, staying in the deep shadow cast by the leaning buildings overhead. He needed to get off this main street-if you could call an alley that-and find his way to where he needed to go.
Peering cautiously around corner trying keep bulk body hidden shadow saw proper street beyond. Wider, paved with smoother stones. A cart drawn by a tired-looking horse clattered past, its driver hunched over the reins. Two women walked by carrying baskets of laundry, their conversation a low murmur about someone's unreasonable husband. They wore simple but clean dresses, their hair tied back neatly.
They didn't look rich or noble. These were commoners who lived inside the walls-the lower-tier district Kaelen had mentioned once in passing when Momen had overheard him talking to another scavenger about where to sell certain pilfered goods that weren't strictly legal.
Momen looked down at himself again. His mud-smeared rags had blended in with slum filth because everything there was some shade of brown and gray anyway. Here, against the cleaner backdrop of washed stone and undyed but intact wool clothing, he stood out like a fresh turd on a white sheet.
And then he saw them.
At the far end of the street, two figures rounded a corner. They moved with purpose, their pace steady and watchful. City guards. Their breastplates caught the morning light in dull gleams beneath their dark tabards. One carried a halberd casually over his shoulder, the other had a hand resting on the pommel of his sword as he scanned the street ahead.
Momen pulled back into the alley as if burned.
His heart hammered against his sore ribs again. They weren't searching for him specifically yet-they walked like men on a regular patrol route-but if they saw him like this…
He waited until he could no longer hear their bootsteps before risking another look. They were gone.
He had to move now while their patrol looped away.
The Leaning Loom was supposed to be near Tanner's Row.
He remembered fragments of directions from drunken slum talk: *"...past the chandler's with the blue door… look for the sign that looks like it's about to fall off completely… ask for the weaver if you need something stitched up special-like…"* It wasn't much to go on.
Keeping to side alleys and service lanes behind shops became an exercise in constant tension. The inner city wasn't a maze of random shanties, it had a layout he didn't know. Alleys sometimes dead-ended at high garden walls or locked gates he couldn't climb without being seen from an upper window where someone might be watching while eating their breakfast porridge maybe wondering why that filthy beggar is trying to scale their wall maybe they should call for guards yes definitely call for guards please do call for them right now thank you very much goodbye forever Momen go find another way go go go.
He saw more guards twice more from a distance, each time ducking behind a rain barrel or into a recessed doorway until they passed.
The cleaner air started to bother him after a while too, which seemed stupid.
Eventually he found Tanner's Row by following his nose again: a sharper version of the tannery stench from outside but mixed with lye soap and clean water runoff channeled into proper gutters.
He found it tucked between a cooper's workshop and a shop selling second-hand ironware. The building leaned noticeably to one side, its upper story sagging over the street as if tired of holding itself up. The sign hanging above the door was indeed a weathered painting of a loom, but one of its support chains had snapped, leaving it tilted at a steep angle. The Leaning Loom. It wasn't a joke so much as a literal description.
It looked like a boarding house, or had been one once. The ground floor had a few grimy windows, their panes too dirty to see through properly. A heavy wooden door stood slightly ajar.
Momen hesitated on the threshold. This was it, the point of no return. Going back to the slums meant capture, and staying out here in the open meant eventual capture too. This was the only thread he had to pull on.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
***