Ch. 1
Little David clutched tight to his mother's hand as she hurried through the darkening streets of the Shambles, the oldest part of the ancient city of Kurfürstenburg. They had stayed for far too long at the old Asylum House which hosted the only unregulated market remaining in the old city, and the only place where David’s mother could ply her ancient trade amongst the people willing to pay for her services. The Watch didn’t bother with the Shambles, particularly the area around the old Asylum, where thieves and cutthroats mingled with the ragged crowds, each trying to pick up the necessities of life for the meagre pittance that each could scrape together by the end of the week. It was amongst this that young David played each week, scrapping in the dirt with the dogs and the other tattered children, casting bones on the floor and playing jack-a-mack amongst the blistered legs and feet of the people passing through the market. Being late out of the Asylum was not an unusual occurrence for David and his mother. The nature of his mother’s trade meant that she didn’t finish work until her client was done, and released her to stumble out of the bunkhouse adjusting her clothes and pulling down her skirts, usually with the spittle of whatever drunken sot she had been with that night still covering her face, and the few meagre pennies she had earned clutched tight in her hand. Before heading home, she would grab David by the arm from wherever he was playing, and drag him round the market stalls to find whatever food they could afford, and then begin the trek home through the filthy cobbled streets and tightly packed wooden buildings, in the race to make it home before night fell.
Usually, by the time they left the old Asylum, with its crooked spire and broken clock, permanently set to three-fifteen dusk had settled upon the city and the watch-bells were sounding for the Watch to clear the streets and return to their cosy barrack-rooms scattered through the old stone towers that still stood proud amongst the low buildings. David had been fortunate enough to climb one of the watchtowers once whilst his mother had been with one of the richer Watch-commanders who could afford to summon her to his room. Whilst she’d been on her back, she had left David outside at the fat old commanders demand, where one of the younger Watch members on a break had offered to take him to the top of the tower to look out at the city. The watchman had led him up the winding stone staircase inside the tower, and up the wooden ladder in the storage room at the top. They had emerged onto a broad flat rooftop, rough ramparts covered with scratched on graffiti, left there by generations of guardsmen. He had clambered onto a wooden crate left against one of the walls and peered out, for the first time, at the sprawling ramshackle city laid out before him. The guardsman clutched at the back of his ripped shirt as he leant out, trying to look down the length of the tower to see how high they were. It had all seemed so big, so wide, thousands of low buildings, crooked roofs and chimneys puffing smoke into the dim winter sky, casting a sooty pall over the city. To the east, he had seen the citadel district, home of the rich citizens, locked behind their iron gates and thick stone walls. To the west, the mass of hovels and slums that was the Shambles, leading in the distance to the smoky port, where the black waters of the Great Sea licked at the broken jetties and harbour walls that few ships dared pull up to anymore. One edifice caught his eye more than any other though. To the north, in the heart of the old commercial district, when one still existed, stood the immense gothic bulk of the old Cathedral, long abandoned by any worshippers. The people of Kurfürstenburg had long since abandoned the hope that any gods still existed to protect them. In this dark and pestilential city the people lived in constant fear of the night, and the horrors it brought.
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