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this was a mask the poor woman wouldn’t ever be able to shed, unless the torment became too much and she put steel to her wrist some cold night.
    The priest reached a crescendo, or at least I thought he had. I still couldn’t hear anything, but his grandiloquent gestures and the mumbled beatitudes from the crowd seemed to indicate some sort of a climax. I tried to light a cigarette but the wind kept taking my flame, and I exhausted half a dozen matches before giving up. It was that kind of afternoon.
    Then it was over, the oration completed and the invocationsoffered. The priest held the gilded icon of Prachetas aloft and descended from the dais, the pallbearers following behind with the coffin. Some of the crowd left with the procession. Most did not. It was getting cold after all, and the cemetery was a long walk.
    I waited for the crowd to filter out from the square, then pushed myself up from my seat. At some point during the speech I hadn’t heard I’d decided to violate my self-imposed exile and return to the Aerie to speak with the Blue Crane.
    Fucking funerals. Fucking mother. Fucking kid.

The Aerie reigns above Low Town like Śakra the Firstborn over Chinvat. A perfectly straight pillar, dark blue against the gray of the tenements and warehouses, stretching up endlessly. With the exception of the Royal Palace, with its crystalline fortifications and wide thoroughfares, it is the single most extraordinary building in the city. For near on thirty years it has subjugated the skyline, offering glorious contrast to the surrounding slums. It was a comfort, as a youth, to have visible evidence that the remainder of what you saw was not everything there was to see—that some portion of existence prevailed unpolluted by stench and piss.
    The hope had proved false, of course, but that was my fault and no one else’s. It had been a long time since I’d seen the tower as anything but a reminder of squandered promise and the foolish hopes of a foolish boy.
    They had leveled an entire city block to make room for the Square of Exultation, as the courtyard surrounding the Aerie was called, but no one had minded. This was in the dark times after the great plague, when the population of Low Town had shrunk to a fraction of what it was in years prior. In place of the tenements was built a maze of white stone enclosing the tower itself, intricately complex but barely waisthigh, allowing anyone willing to look foolish to hop over the walls. As a child I had spent countless hours here playing rat-in-a-hole or bowley pegs, stalking through the rows of granite or running tiptoe along the fortifications.
    The square was likely the only portion of Low Town that the populace had not actively worked to dilapidate. No doubt the Crane’s reputation as being among the most skilled practitioners of magic in the nation had some part in cutting down on vandalism, but the truth was that, almost to a man, the people of Low Town idolized their patron and would accept no desecration of his home. To speak ill of the Crane was to call for a beating in any tavern between the docks and the canal, and a shiv to the gut in some of the harder ones. He was our most beloved figure, more highly esteemed than the Queen and the Patriarch combined, his charity funding a half-dozen orphanages and his alms joyfully received by a grateful public.
    I stood in front of the house of my oldest friend and lit a cigarette, the wind having died down enough to allow me my petty pleasures. There were very good reasons why I hadn’t visited my mentor in five years, and I blew tobacco smoke in the chilly air and piled one atop another till they loomed over the whim that had carried me this far. I could still call an end to this idiocy, return to the Earl, light some dreamvine, and sleep until tomorrow. The mental impression of soft sheets and colored smoke faded as I stepped through the first archway, my feet threading their way forward against my better instincts,