I spent the next few days hanging out in the bad parts of the lower town looking for the late Tom Minnow's pals. For his part, Sesh continued his nightly rounds and returned home in the early morning to collapse on his bed with large under-eye circles. On the first evening of our temporary cohabitation, he set up a thick mat for me by the fireplace and even got me a woollen blanket from the garrison quartermaster. Our different schedules meant that we didn't see each other much and most of our exchanges took place at noon. After the stew that made up the majority of our diet (and which he also picked up at the garrison), I provided the soldier with concise reports, because there was little to say, before going back to looking for informations in the early afternoon. I would meet him again briefly on his way back in the evening, while he would go out again to skim the nocturnal campaign.

Sesh didn't seem to have any friends, or any real life outside of work. "Few passions, few vices," as the saying goes. The soldier was completely absorbed in his investigations and his blazon, and generally never spoke of himself. I had heard that he was the bastard son of a southern winemaker and a whore; others claimed that Sesh had ceran blood, because of his red hair. In reality, no one really knew. At the age of fifteen, he was enrolled in the Brown-Horn civil guard. He quickly became sergeant-at-arms and first-blade after that.

I was under the impression that Sesh saw Brown-Horn as a kind of somewhat complex mechanism, in which he was both a cog and a grease. His job was to make sure that the mechanism worked properly and to rattle in the direction his oaths dictated. He sometimes had a melancholic temperament and I don't think he was often happy, but in a somewhat doloristic way it seems to me that this is how things suited him.

It was strange to move so suddenly from a bohemian existence to Sesh's strict and regular everyday life, but I knew it was temporary, so I set myself to experience it as an educational intrusion into the curious world of adults. It took me a while to adjust to the regular meal times, but this initial imbalance was more than compensated for by a delicious and permanent feeling of satiety. As I I didn't have to worry about finding food, my mind had time to wander, and Brindy occupied my thoughts, as did my friends from the farm, from whom I received no news. I hoped that at least my absence would provide them with more soup for everyone.

In my research, as Sesh told me, I mainly focused on the Stream district, where - among others - Trap street and Seven-Steps street, two of the city's dirtiest mazes, meandered through. The guards hardly ventured into the Stream district.

In most cases this was simply a matter of prudence, but it was also common knowledge that the brown-hornian soldiers were taking bribes.

It was customary to say that the business of the Stream was the concern of the residents of the Stream, and as long as the business of the Stream did not overflow into other neighborhoods, then the majority of the guards would let it happen. They certainly remembered that, ten years before I was born, an ambitious captain had sworn an oath to "clean up" the neighborhood, but before he could carry out his threats, he had simply disappeared. Rather than engage in a costly war against an unidentified enemy on his own territory, it was more convenient for the guard to turn a blind eye in exchange for a few coins.

However, the Stream was not a dead neighborhood, nor was it a bloody mess.

On the contrary, some of the busiest taverns in the city were there, as well as most of the brothels. The customers, mostly rough men like only the frontier can create - though sometimes a few of the upper class citizens who had come would come here to spend their hard-earned money, and if they sometimes left without a purse, well, that was all part of the game. For some it even added excitement, a risk to be taken against the pleasures of the Stream. So it was a place animated, not by the inhabitants themselves, but rather by a fluctuating population in search of thrills.

What is certain is that, as Sesh assumed, I was predisposed to evolve in this environment. My appearance and my age were a foretaste that I had nothing to steal, and I blended in perfectly with the miserable surroundings.

No more attention was paid to me than to the other dirty and idle children who were wandering the neighborhood alleys. I quickly adopted the habits of the people of the Stream: I walked quickly, my head down and my eyes hidden under the hood of my cloak, avoiding dark corners that I was insecure about, and hiding in the alleys I knew when I felt the need to do so.

The approximate architecture of the neighborhood, composed of loose shacks imbricated one inside the other and sometimes even on top of each other, resulted in a veritable maze if you moved a few yards away from the two main streets, Trap street and Seven-Steps street. But the real business was done elsewhere, out of sight and away from the few patrols that dared to cross the neighbourhood. The adjacent alleys were tiny and tortuous, and most of them reeked of urine and mould. Although the layout was not the most pleasant, it was ideal for listening to conversations with complete impunity: the echoes of the alleys carried the sound well, provided there were enough stones, and if I was careful I could be very close to those I was spying on, without risking my presence being detected. I had a malicious pleasure in hiding in the most unlikely places, shivering with excitement, as if it had been a gigantic game of hide-and-seek that only I knew was being played. I lived for those brief moments of euphoria, which refocused me so intensely in the present that I forgot about Brindy and all my other worries.

The inhabitants of the Stream were mostly poor workers, mostly seasonal, who engaged in all sorts of degrading activities the rest of the year to make ends meet: charcoal burning, street or sewer cleaning, prostitution. Broken men and women abounded in the neighborhood, and they were moody and aggressive. I avoided their children because they were of a different temperament than I was, brawlers and fiercely territorial. It was the latter who caused me the most trouble, especially when they were in gangs. Luckily for me, many of them were already working here and there, so I didn't meet many of them and, over time, I learned to dodge them.

Although I soon began to wander the alleys as skillfully as a small urban beast, I was nevertheless confronted with two major problems. The first one was that a few days of immersion were not enough to know the maze and to maneuver through it in all tranquility. If I learned quickly, I often found myself in dead ends or, worse, with my feet in an open sewer. The second, much more important concern was the nocturnal nature of the Stream. Since Sesh insisted that I return home shortly after sunset, I could only gather information from beggars and children, again according to Sesh's instructions, without asking them any questions myself. As a result, after a week's wandering between Trap street and Seven-Steps street, I knew for sure that the old Mireg was starting to shit blood again and that Annie Nod's sister was a real whore, but as far as the Tom Minnow affair was concerned I was having a bit of a hard time for the moment.

This intensive frequentation of the city bore other fruits, however.

I was learning how to move in silence, and also how to be patient and observant, skills that I had begun to use in my shoplifting. Above all, I gained a better understanding of the world around me. For example, I had always thought of Brown-Horn and the Basin as two absolutely distinct entities, whereas inside the walls, if one paid attention, things suddenly revealed themselves in all their complexity. Undeniably, there existed in the lower city a mixed, invisible and multiform culture, between the Brownian identity and that of the clans, which combined the rigor of the one with the resourcefulness of the other.

Strong of this observation, I also discovered that the city, of which I had made a monolithic entity, could be fragmented by different schools of thought.

Some of these problematics, perfectly understandable despite my young age, seemed to me particularly worrying. A part of the inhabitants of the Stream were beginning to mimic the contempt expressed by the old families towards everything that was " tinted ", and this behavior was spreading little by little, dividing the districts of the lower city. As far as I could judge, this attitude was rooted in envy and inequality.

Those of mixed blood had the best contacts with the clans and therefore made the most of the new barter bargain with the clans. Thus, while most of the "ethnic" Brown-Hornians found themselves victims of a hereditary social immobility - paradoxically imposed by the families of the upper class and their commercial monopole over traditional resources - some Métis women were able to extract themselves from their low status thanks to exchanges with the Basin.

Within a few decades, many small flourishing businesses had emerged in the lower town, merchants who made the link between the exotic goods that the clans brought back from the highlands and the boats from Wadd and Franlake. Other shops specialized in refining or transformation. The amber sculptors of Fang street, the furriers and ivory cutters, some of whom even acquired a favorable reputation in the south, in other primacies. I learned by chance that chitin jewelry, in particular, had become all the rage among the wealthy women of Sand-Port. Unsurprisingly, the emergence of these new "intermediate" citizens inherited as much from the upper class as from the lower class. Some perceived them as competitors, while others jealous of the enrichment of their former neighbors while they themselves broke their backs on merciless tasks, and envisioned the same future for their children.

"Mirabelle's" was one of the taverns where these disgruntled people met. It was a large, single-storey, grey granite building with a simple and rustic layout, with sawdust on the floor. The tavern already existed for several generations and served as an anchor point for a few more recent hovels in the back, enthroned between two narrow streets like a massive guardian. One could not miss the place because the roof was made of slate, not thatch, and its sheer size contrasted with the narrow and chaotic style of the surrounding buildings. As my day ended and I made my way back to Sesh, I usually lingered in Seven-Steps street, hidden in an empty rainwater barrel a few steps from the tavern. Nowhere was it openly displayed that half-breeds or those from clans were not welcome. This forced segregation was a kind of informal code that was believed to be known to all.

However, it was not known to me. I once committed the imprudence of entering the tavern, pretending to want a hot meal.

The manageress, a fat forty-year-old matron who could have been pretty if she had smiled more, immediately kicked me out with a kick on my ass. In the process, I was also described as "tinted vermin." I realized how lucky I was to have gotten in in the morning, because if there had been a few drunken customers or her muscular son in the evening, it could have gone worse. Nevertheless, the blow and the insult gave me the idea that "Mirabelle's" was usually a refuge for my "enemies", as Sesh used to say. I had a vindictive interest in the place, which I began to monitor daily in search of suspicious individuals. It was a difficult task, because at nightfall I saw mostly tired workers, trappers dressed in skins, and old fishermen coming in. Even though I didn't know them, this was not at all my idea of smugglers.

Instead, I imagined men with scars, wearing gold and swords under their black capes. Unfortunately, I did not see any individuals matching this description.

As the days went by, I was slowly starting to get into a routine.

The weather was cooling down considerably, so much so that Sesh offered me a second thick shirt to wear over the first one, but fortunately the rain was becoming rarer. I often asked the soldier to give me more freedom to investigate, letting me hang around in the Stream a little longer, but, inflexible, he wouldn't give an inch. I sometimes wanted to visit my friends on the farm, as well as Dera, who I knew would soon be leaving for the winter, but a nascent sense of duty forbade me to do so. I had to unmask the killers of the dead man. Somewhere along the way I figured that this was the price I would have to pay to return to a normal life.

I returned one evening to discover Sesh prostrated on the coffee table, frantically scribbling on a piece of parchment, his hands engulfed in a thick pair of grey woollen mittens. Outside the wind was blowing, a cold and piercing wind from the east, as we had in Brown-Horn every winter. If the lower town was vaguely protected by its walls, at this time of the year Horn-Hill was swept by waves of icy gusts. I had had to fight the biting gusts all the way from the Stream and, as the cold seized the old stones of the upper town like nowhere else, I was freezing. My appearance didn't even raise an eyebrow, and Sesh simply put down his pen and poured me the traditional herbal tea as a welcome. The soldier had been staring at me strangely for a few days, his eyes wet, his wrinkled forehead, and his nervous manner. When I surprised him like that, he managed to avoid my gaze by pretending to have something to do, but I was not fooled. His speeches, which he already gave sparingly, had been reduced to a simple evasive gesture. I had thought I had discerned on several occasions some of the deep inspirations that announced his usual tirades, but when I looked up, he was often already gone.

I clumsily hung my cloak at the entrance and rushed to the hearth to warm my barely sensitive hands. After a while, confident in my ability to hold my bowl without breaking it, I drank my herbal tea in one gulp. With the arrival of the cold, my opinion of Sesh's beverages had changed completely. Exhausted as I was by my day and soothed by the heat radiating from the hearth, the absorption of the burning liquid left me in a state of near drowsiness. I quickly lied on my mat and closed my eyes, without paying attention to anything else, neither to Sesh nor to my grumbling belly. I don't know whether I'm sleeping or not. I heard the soldier gird himself with his sword (which he refused to let me touch), put on his heavy cloak, and walk to the door for his night watch. I did not envy him. A frosty whistle and a loud bang announced his departure, and the noise took me out of my torpor a little. I yawned for a long time before I was able to make the effort of putting a log back into the fire. My belly growled louder and, after hesitating, I hung the heavy pot on its hook in the fireplace. I think I was beginning to get used to what was - for me - comfort.

I wandered idle in the hovel, cracking the floor under my feet, watching for the skirmishes of the rats between the interstices. I had already searched the few pieces of furniture on the first floor for a long time without finding much of interest, and when Sesh left, he would lock the door so that I wouldn't make a mess of his papers. My tattoo was healing, a process I liked to watch, but its location meant that I could only see it for a while before my neck started to hurt. I went back to the fire, stirred the stew a little so that it would warm up more quickly, and then went back to my mat again where I played spitting into the embers, which was a lot of fun.

Dazzled by the flames and absorbed by my task, I was startled when someone knocked on the door.

At that moment, I didn't move a muscle, because Sesh hadn't given me any instructions that could apply to this case: indeed, nobody ever visited him. Nevertheless, as the drumming kept repeating itself, I decided to act, with the fear that I might be taken for a thief. After all, this was not my home. I cautiously left the comfort of the mat to get closer to the heavy door. After further hesitation, as the frantic knocking continued, I raised the latch. The wind opened the door more than I did. I even had to take a step backwards, to avoid having my hand crushed by the door. In front of me, in the twilight chaos of the storm, stood Brindy.

She stared at me for a few moments, the wind wildly whipping her long black hair and I shyly smiled at her. It did not have the desired effect.

Brindy jumped on me in a tumult of twirling skirts and without a word, she began to inflict on me the same treatment that she had inflicted earlier at the door. I retreated and in the light of the lantern I saw the shining trail of tears running down her cheeks. Brindy hit me several times while crying silently. I tried to protect my face with my arms.

She pursued me relentlessly to a corner of the shack where, pale and trembling, I confronted her.

The wind rushed in through the door and made the ashes fly and the scrolls that Sesh had not put away. The crackling embers of the fire threatened to set my mat on fire. Brindy terrified me. Her white face deformed by tears, but above all her clumsy blows, given with the intention of really hurting me. Suddenly, at the paroxysm of her silent gesticulation, at the moment when I had no more ground to give up, she collapsed before me like a disarticulated puppet and pushed a long quivering rattle, imbued with such despair that I feared for a moment that she would die :

"Why didn't you come, Fyss? Why didn't you come?"

I hesitated for a moment, without being able to understand why so much violence was unleashed against me for a simple prolonged absence.

"But... But... Sesh told me that he talked to you."

My answer only caused Brindy's shoulders to collapse, and more complaints. It was the first time I had ever seen anything like this coming from her. Usually it was Brindy who comforted us, who lulled our sorrows with a whispered song, and who reassured Ucar by smoothing his hair when he woke up screaming about his father. I couldn't see how I could stop her flood of tears. I ended up putting a hesitant hand on her shoulder and, hoping that the blows wouldn't start again, I leaned towards Brindy, my heart beating. "It's no use crying like that," I whispered, "I wasn't far away. I was right here."

Brindy looked up at me with her big eyes. An expression of painful incomprehension deformed her face. The scrolls were flying all around us, like night birds in the shadows of the shack, and the fire in the hearth was convulsing and roaring. "But it's not you, silly," she said between two sobs. "It's been three days since Robin disappeared."