EARLIER
THE OUTRIDER says
“Reward? I don’t know if there’s any reward. Ask officials when you get to town.”
LATER, IN MONKSBLADE
"I would like to exchange some coins and I would like to inquire about an inn that could offer baths or, in the absence of that, directions to a nice but not too expensive inn and a bath house"
“The Firedagger Inn is a very nice place. It’s in the burg.”
The guard eyes Raen’s torn, bloodied, dusty garments, where the borrowed cloak doesn’t cover these.
“It is not the cheapest.”
He shrugs.
“There’s a warehouse that’s been converted to a stable with sleeping cribs in the loft, at the west end of town. That is cheap. And a widow keeps a boarding house near that.”
He gestures toward the burg of mid-town.
“When you’re in there, ask about the Moneychanger. All right, if you people could roll along now, I’d appreciate that. I see more traffic coming down the highway.”
If anyone looks back, he will indeed see a horse-drawn cart rolling toward town along the Way of the Manticore.
With business at the archway concluded, Dorn drives the party into town.
The place smells of horse-dung, stale urine, and dust, but that's nothing compared with the vile airs of some of the sewers and dungeons and slums several of the party have traversed in the last year--and a world away.
A short trip through the streets of the outer town—so narrow in places that the wagon wheels and side boards bump and scrape against buildings to either side, brings the party round to the shaded west face of the large, high-roofed northern section of the inner masonry burg. The green Door probes easy to find: a massive, green-painted wooden double door fitted with bronze hardware and a wicket built into the left panel.
Dorn dismounts the driver’s seat and leads the two horses round the North Abbey Corner to a small courtyard. He unharnesses both beasts, hitches each to an iron ring fixed to the stone wall and gives them more water and food.
With the party out of the wagon and the horses, Dorn goes around to the wicket-gate in the Green Door.
Your party hasn’t long to wait after Dorn knocks before a viewing grill opens in the wicket. Dorn whispers a password and thrusts his orders and Benn’s pass (from the Provost) through the grill.
After a couple of minutes, the wicket sings open and a man inside the Green Door waves for the party to enter.
In the entry hall, which is lighted by sunbeams falling through several small, iron barred windows set high in the walls, the doorman tells the adventurers,
“You must leave all weapons at the first guard station. Come on with me, then.”
The drably-clad serving-man leads the party down the hall to an interior guardroom where several armed guards wait.
Raen explains the situation in sketchy detail and shows the orders and the pass again.
The initial business about the supply wagon takes only a few minutes. A guard dispatches a messenger to see it’s loaded, and a guard officer tells Raen to return to where’d he’d left the wagon in an hour, and then dismisses him.
The guards check the travelers’ weapons--not Dorn's--, locking those in a big heavy chest on wooden wheels, and rolling that into another room. They don’t strip-search the party, but they do a pat-down (with murmured apologies to Katrin). Disarmed, the party is released from the guard room.
Walking through another hall, past some storerooms where men are inspecting supplies and a scriptorium where clerks work high chairs under a skylight, the party soon enters the inner wards of the burg.
Sunlight falls on the courtyard beyond the North Abbey, but all around the paved square the walls of offices, workshops, and private homes rise, with narrow alleys running between some buildings and others jammed right up against one another. Folk walk about, or stand in corners and talk.
The party sees two burghers strolling with fancy-hilted short swords at their belts.
Dorn pats his poniard and says.
“Soldiers and townsmen have different rules, ‘course. Hope you aren’t offended. Come along with me, guys, I told the guards we could find the Governor on our own.”
He grins.
“Shall we stop someplace with a tub of water, first? You don’t want to meet a high official with dirt and blood all over you, right? And we need to fix up Raen’s clothes, yeah? Get a quick drink?”
Delight is to him- a far, far upward, and inward delight- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
-from Moby Dick (Hermann Melville)