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just bruised, I think, nothing broken.”
    “Good. Those vile...” She left the remainder of her thoughts unspoken.
    “What happened to Atavalens?”
    Raknia stood up, fetching my crutch then handing it over. I stood up. “It seems we have the remains of the night,” she said. “What will you do?”
    I shrugged. “Go back to Blackguards’ Passage I suppose, maybe see if Musseler has any special instructions for us.”
    “My room is close by,” Raknia said. “Come and see me later.”
    “Your room? ”
    Raknia grinned, a gleam in her eyes. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
    I said nothing. I did not understand what she meant.
    Raknia fumbled at her waist to produce a steel flask, which she handed over. “I want to see you neat and clean,” she said.
    “What’s this?”
    “Fresh water. Use it.” She glanced down at my clothes, then, taking a pace closer, looked into my eyes. “Tidy, neat and clean,” she said.
    I saw something in her expression that I did not recognise: a face both coy and vicious, intriguing yet repulsive in a way I could not grasp. Her black eyes shone, her hair hung in damp ringlets about her face, and she was beautiful. Yet she was something else, something far deeper.
    Inspiration came as I caught a glimpse of these depths. She reminded me of myself. “You’re a shaman too,” I said.
    She studied at me, her expression remote, but then she grinned, showing white teeth. “I am a shaman,” she admitted.
    I looked down the street towards the Forum of Tauri, then returned my gaze to her. “What animal do you have as your totem?”
    She turned to stroll away, smoothing her hands down her waist and thighs, then glancing over her shoulder to reply, “The widowspider.”

12.1.583
    It seems an age since I last wrote on this grey paper—that I suppose must be impregnated with the vile soot that so spoils the air—and yet only a few days have passed by. Such days!
    I was correct before. All my thoughts were correct. This is good, for it means that the storm in my head has not sunk down to the place where my real mind cogitates.
    There is a test that a nogoth may take in order to be accepted by the Mavrosopolis into the citidenizenry. My intention is to put myself forward for such a test.
    I have looked at myself in the cracked mirror that my mother gave me. I am pale, haggard, and my eyes are dull. My skin is prematurely aged, and stained with soot. My parasol is a mongrel, composed of oddments that I found in the gutter. Citidenizens, I notice, carry nice parasols, some of them with lamps underneath to illuminate their way. I imagine these parasols acting both in the physical street, lighting the way, but also as illuminating the philosophical street—the bright path that I have become so fond of. If I could acquire such a parasol, I keep telling myself, then I would not stumble.
    Today I went for the first time into the Tower of the Thawers. It is a remarkable place: a marvel of white marble, a spectacle, that left me aghast, that left me agog. It is a place whose occupants—a grim band of people with worry-lined faces and shoulders bowed under the responsibility that I dream of receiving—are devoted to the elimination of frost. Frost, it turns out, is an anti-Mavrosopolitan entity, a schema from outside that must not be allowed to disrupt the existence of the conurbation in which we all live. Such was news to me. There have been frosts on clear winter nights, that is for sure, and yet I am reminded of bustling people carrying what at the time seemed absurd implements, devices that I now know to be part of the equipment of the thawer. These people—who I managed to ignore in recent years, perhaps because I was too busy denying the existence of everything around me in my rage of anguish—live to protect the Mavrosopolis from frost, which they do by thawing out frozen parts. For frost is an agent of erasure, and erasure is the great enemy.
    I must devise a mantra. I must not