17 and Walking with Fire (IX)

17. Walking with Fire (IX)

The wind was roaring, but perhaps it was not, because it had long since exceeded the scope of what that word could describe—screaming, howling, a little boy who could not see his mother and therefore shouted himself hoarse in the street.

Take your pick.

Choose one. It did not matter, but anyone who could truly hear this sound would not use any of those descriptions for the wind ringing in his ears.

A lament, Kael Lohars would have said.

He looked down at his feet.

Below, a dense black mass of people clogged the base of the white city walls like ants.

Most were indeed ants, arriving with the customs of their tribes, filled with unease and hoping to enter the city to save their lives.

But poisonous insects were mixed among them—and not the kind whose bite killed instantly, but the kind that tormented you slowly.

Their venom could inflict hundreds of diseases that made you desperately wish for death, yet denied you the mercy of dying at once. All you could do was drag your diseased body onward and wait for what came next. Abscesses, rotting skin, falling teeth, bones growing loose and soft, shriveling organs, pain too severe to sleep through every night.

Sadly, this was their nature, a way of survival beyond reproach.

Take the broad class of rodents collectively known as rats. They rummaged through garbage and slipped into other people's homes at night, furtively searching for something to eat. Perhaps they had not always lived this way, but after surviving for who knew how many centuries in the vast cities built by humanity, these creatures had changed.

Just like those poisonous insects.

Kael did not know what to call them—he knew many things, such as the conversation taking place