-

It was late afternoon when he stopped, after scouring more than half the city.

He reached an elevated cliff adjacent to the dock where he had met the golden-haired girl on the day of docking and from where he had reluctantly seen the depart od the Tiburon.

He sat down on the edge of the precipice. Almost fifteen toises below stood tall, sharp rocks more than proud, against which the yellow and orange-tinged waves crashed foamy and brilliant. The sun was not as strong as at noon, but he could still feel it warming his skin to the limit of pleasantness.

He lifted his right leg bringing his knee to his chin, one forearm resting on it. With his thumb he pushed his lower lip almost maniacally against his front teeth. It was a posture he assumed when something in his mind was struggling in confusion, something he could not understand or something that made him ask himself question after question.

In that moment, he couldn’t stop thinking about how much Shinji had been raving.

He felt a sensation similar to worry. What’s wrong with him? he wondered as his lip began to go numb. He talked about unfounded things, things that go even beyond fictional stories.

He remembered perfectly that the respectful Ramashi teacher Shinji, friend, and brother, was different from this. Surely, Ethan would never have imagined him afraid of magic, extinct for centuries by the way. Perhaps, in the silence, the Nionreian did not share the knowledge that the merchant transmitted to him, although he seemed to listen to Ethan interested.

In that hold and on the deck itself, the Nionreian instructed him as best he could about Ramashi, explained its secrets and repercussions for those who transgressed the laws while Ethan, for his part, taught him as much as he could about those Six Kingdoms of the Continent of which Shinji did not knew even the slightest customs. They drank together, laughing and joking, as if they had grown up under the same roof. That the forgetful Shinji who arrived on the Tiburon was different from the real Shinji?

The cadenced chirp of the white and grey seagulls that intertwined gliding and circling free, stole his mind for a few moments which, without being able to realize it, turned into hours.

Where have you got to by now, old man? he asked himself, giving in to the hypnosis of birds.

-

The sky was tinged with purple, ripped open by the last rays of the sun waning. The clouds looked like soft raw balls of pink cotton.

Ethan of Morven got to his feet and, rummaging in his pockets, thanked the Compassion of Divine Gwenaelle when he touched a dozen florins survived from the previous day, which had wiped out his already tight finances. He had enough for a couple of nights at Drunk Tuna or for one night, a meal and a bottle of rum.

He knew that he could stay with Shinji in case of a need, but he also needed to respond to that inner need to take time to reflect and get used to the separation from the sailors who had accompanied him for fifteen years, the need to realize that from that moment on, the path would be uphill.

He began to travel and only reached his destination when the sun had completely set.

He went in and sat down at the counter on one of the tripod stools. “Sweet Ronda, a bottle of rum, a fish soup and some bread. Please, baby” he ordered. “And, if possible, I’d like to stay overnight. Take” he concluded, yielding the dozen florins to the little innkeeper.

He couldn’t help but wonder if she was the only one running that tavern, given that in the days he had spent at Drunk Tuna he hadn’t seen anyone other than her behind the counter running the business. A few waitresses helped her at the tables, but the bulk of the work seemed to be done by little Ronda.

The girl, not saying a word, nodded nimbly and took an old and dusty bottle of white rum with the inscription DISTILLERY CERVINA from under the bench of lightly polished fir.

Ethan snorted at the thought of having to pay several florins for a similar bottle. Everything could be said of the people of Northern Trust, except that they were skilled distillers of rum. That was a variety of alcohol universally recognized as low quality despite coming from the best distillery in the Kingdom, that of Cervina, on the west shore of the White Lake. This said a lot about how bad the finished products of the other distilleries in the Northern part of the Trust must be.

Ronda, quick but delicate, handed the bottle to Ethan and rushed to fill a bowl with what had been ordered. Set down the bowl of cod soup, cherry tomatoes and onion, and the four-grain bread, cut into thick slices, he took a rusty iron key from the dozen hanging behind her and gave it to Ethan. Her freckled childish face flared up for no apparent reason. Was it because their hands touched?

Strange she gets so embarrassed. She should already be old enough to marry, Ethan thought disinterestedly and, first, almost instinctively, uncorked the bottle and began to swallow some of the content in large gulps. A cough and a shiver down his spine were obvious signs that it was time to start eating.

To Ronda, Ethan must surely had seemed in a hurry, as he finished the soup and bread in no more than three minutes. Was the little girl staring at him waiting for an occasion? One in which the crew was no longer present, to speak to him freely.

The merchant averted the danger by getting up almost immediately, gave her a fleeting glance of appreciation, and bottle in hand, hurried to the room. It was the same one in which he had stayed the night before, on the third floor of the building.

Without knowing why, once he closed the door behind him, he felt much better. Perhaps it was the clear sign of how his body was reacting positively to the satisfaction of the momentary need for absolute solitude.

He threw the blades on the blue-bedded bed and took off his shirt and boots. After pulling aside the teal linen curtains, thin enough to appear almost transparent, he flung open the large window of the room and sat on the ebony sill, while with the molars he had already hurried to make the cork fly away from the bottle.

The nights before he hadn’t had a chance to stop and look at the city, drunk or sad as he was.

Even at that hour Garatier looked gorgeous. Maybe even more than it was during the day. Torch lights here and there illuminated it as far as the harbour, almost drawing its disordered outlines. Those closest to the shore created an elongated orange reflection effect on the black surface of the sea which, after the afternoon breeze, had returned incredibly flat, almost as if it had been levelled by hand. As if that were not enough, to create an even more magical and spiritual atmosphere were the large luminous fireflies which, distributed without criteria, created a starry sky of yellow-green stars on the earth.

Between one sip and the others he was able to see that even at night the city was teeming with life: gigolettes tried to grab the wealthiest customers and the latter, drunk, shouted carelessly in response and groped them amid the laughter of the same girls, greedy of the riches they could have stolen from him.

You’ll still be spending the night with someone, either the wealthy or the sailors who landed at the dock today. The only difference is in the payment you get, isn’t it? Not that I care that much, Ethan thought. He had had the opportunity to discover, from reading the small manual of Uses and Customs of the West by the audacious Gregor Fitz-Chrysold of Blauerberg, that the gigolettes, as well as their male counterparts, of the Kingdom of Waterby were almost all nymphomaniacs and nine out of ten they held the oldest profession in the world for the sake of pure pleasure. It seems that King Theophane the White Stag had granted assent to prostitution only to those who felt the vocation. In reality the merchant did not know how accurate those speeches were.

What he knew for sure, however, was that the faces those girls in the streets of the district weren’t lying: they were having fun.

Beyond them, he saw much more from there but concentrated only on a few precise scenes: a father held a child on his shoulders and the little one was trying in vain to grab the bright fireflies of a chroma perfectly halfway between yellow and green. The man was walking towards the Popular District in the company of a plump woman with a splendid face, looking at her and smiling; a black and grey wolf-dog wandered in search of food and, evidently, the activity had brought him excellent results in recent times, given the considerable fleshiness of the beast; a group of orange, black and white cats, probably street brothers, leaped furtively from ledges very close to each other in search of a nice place from which to dominate the whole District from above; some white owls rested on the branches of the lime trees, while two of them, the bravest or perhaps the most in love, flew higher, up to the solitary branches at the top of the mammoth ash trees of the Boulevard d’Arbres, the tree-lined avenue.

Ethan assumed the posture he used to assume when thinking about certain dilemmas. He pounded his poor lower lip against his front teeth. In fact, he had almost completely removed Shinji’s strange words, but his mind was traveling away from Garatier, on the Tiburon first, to the Disputed City of Geteville then.

The lights of the district and the fireflies seemed to reflect the millions of stars that stormed the sky that night, creating a frame for an equally resplendent golden crescent. That shape and colour were the same as the brooch given to him two years earlier, well placed in his pocket.

He took a few more sips to dispel the sweet thoughts that cause painful desires. By now almost half a bottle was gone and the effects of the rum were starting to be felt. Sniffing the breeze, he seemed for a moment, and only for a moment, perceive a familiar and warm floral perfume, like jasmine, like the best perfume in the world. He must have imagined it.

Vision began to blur and the world to spin. He left the bottle there on the window frame, which like a wooden frame, it framed the splendid city, and surrendered to the embrace of the bed.

His face sank into the pillow and he with it in the murky sleep. Maeve… was, as always, his last thought.

-

“Ethan! Wake up, Ethan!” He heard a nearby voice scream. “Ethan, wake up!” He heard again. Strong calloused hands tugged at him violently.

The merchant tried to open his eyes, so to speak. He was blinded by a blade of light that penetrated through the window, making the bottle of cheap rum shine with the sun’s rays projected all over the room.

“Wake up, you idiot!” he heard in conjunction with a dry slap.

First, instinctively, he put his hands to his face, which burned as if it were scalded. Then he looked up. “Who did it? Who the hell hit me?” he asked, coming to his senses. He quickly placed his forearms up to his palms on the bed and, with strength, jumped as far back as possible, but found the hard resistance of the backrest. Before grabbing the swords, he noticed who was in front of him. “Shinji! What? What do you want? For Gwenaelle, you don't have to wake up a man like this, I could have hurt you! I’m too sleepy, let me rest.”

“Get dressed, you must come with me. Right away” he said coldly, turning around and starting to approach the door to go out.

“May Aedan lighten me. Calmly” He didn’t have time to finish the sentence.

Hand gripping the door handle, Shinji turned and with a look that Ethan would never have imagined the Nionreian could have, thanks to his anomalous eyes, he yelled hoarsely: “Now!”

As fast as he could, Ethan slipped his boots and shirt and the blades into the belt straps.

He ran down the stairs.

He did not have time to tie his hair which, rebellious, was scattering in the air and on his face, compromising his sight. “Where are you taking me?” he asked still confused.

No reply.

Arriving at the ground floor, the merchant stole a sweet pear cream sandwich still warm from the table of an absent-minded diner and headed, following the Nionreiano, towards an unknown destination. “Where are you taking me? Answer me, Shinji!”

No answer, once again.

It took five minutes of frantic running for them to reach the shore that ended, a few dozen fathoms further on, to the cliff on which he had found himself thinking the afternoon before, the one adjacent to the city pier.

Chaos. People fled, others screamed, others cursed the fate by spitting on the ground and still others vomited.

For over three hundred feet lay thick wooden boards, sail rags, barrels, half a mast, part of the green hull of what had surely once been a proud ship, and above all… corpses. Some were missing a limb, others were missing parts of the face, eyes and cartilage of the nose and ears, others still had their chest torn with smashed ribs in sight, part of the entrails spilled on the shore. Many of them had burned or charred body parts. Not a drop of blood, the sea had cleaned them all out. Before beaching they had fed the fishes and, after having run aground, they had remained scattered on the coast as easy prey for birds for several hours. With almost absolute certainty, they had been brought ashore by the high night tide.

Nobody made a move among the onlookers disgusted by the scene.

Ethan was the first to approach. He did so quickly he leaved Shinji behind and cursed himself for having eaten that pear-bread which, due to the terrible stench, he was about to regurgitate. He headed for the body of a man, randomly chosen from the fifteen stranded corpses. He held the golden handle of a sabre, the shattered blade. He turned it around. His face was covered in wet sand, but it was clear he was a big moustachioed man. Ethan started to wipe the man’s face with the hand.

He never wanted to see him. It was Ilker, Tiburon’s boatswain.

It was then that Ethan understood.

In the midst of all that slaughter Ethan looked for him. He saw the battered bodies of some of those who had been members of his family. He kept searching. His eyes moved swift but precise. Nothing. He did not find his corpse, and together with his were also missing those Zuganio, Egill, Son, Pwikke, Doffre and another dozen men.

He knelt in front of the boatswain. He was lost. He thought confusedly, he did not speak but his mouth was open and trembling. He felt his heart fall apart. He had lost everything in an instant and he didn’t even know how or why.

I should’ve been with them, was what he said himself, to deal with whatever they went through. To do it together. It was my fault. Maybe if I listened to Deniz and got on the ship this wouldn’t have happened, we could’ve avoided it. They should’ve been a long way off the coast by now. Even due to the strongest of storms they couldn’t have gotten this far. What happened?

He felt a tug. “Let’s move, Ethan”, Shinji said.

Then a shove. “Dick, get away from those wretched bastards! They didn't even know how to go to sea, and the lousy dogs have run aground and who’s got to clean up now? Look what a mess, sons of a bitch in heat! Sons of bitches!” made a fat one, in the company of another slender and tall one.

Above the black iron-ringed hauberk, they wore a loose, wide-necked sleeveless tunic, half blue and half white, the colours of the Kingdom of Waterby. On the chest of both city guards was Garatier’s emblem sewn: the sword wrapped in the sharp coils of a rose. The taller of the two mocked the dead in a contemptuous tone. Ethan hated her pockmarked face and slimy grey hair. The fat man, on the other hand, laughed and spat on the lifeless body of the old boatswain. He was dishonouring Ilker.

The merchant no longer had a clear memory of what happened in the following moments, only disordered fragments. The only thing he later distinctly remembered was that, enraptured by a visceral ardour that was not new to him to perceive, he lost control in a way he no longer wanted to happen.

With a quick swipe he pulled Shinji’s arm away and pulled out both blades from his side. The cerulean glint of the sapphires with which the steel had been tempered and folded, dazzled half of those present and created an optical illusion in the eyes of the other half as if a blue aura was expanding from the swords and therefore a trail of water. Spinning in the manner the Nionreian had taught him, he aimed them at the fat guard’s throat, forming a pair of scissors. He was ready to behead him.

A stream of blood began to descend and make its way down the guard’s neck folded on many rolls.

Not a word, just anger that devoured Ethan inside and that had taken over.

In the end, a dull ache stopped Ethan. The blades dropped to the sand. There was a ferrous taste in his mouth. Blood.

He looked down and saw the tip of the other guard’s spear, the slender, tall one, through his own chest.

The sand, the sea, the bodies, the screams of the commoners, the chirping of the seagulls full of human flesh and the words of Shinji. Everything became a confused swirl studded with stars, until it was dark.