He saw a signpost on the concrete road leading to the central district. Large orange lettering proclaimed this to be a wizarding settlement called "Ohrid Town." The buildings throughout the town were mainly constructed from pale yellow sandstone, with narrow windows and gently sloping roofs.
As he walked down the main street, he saw several taverns with smoke rising from their chimneys, signs for butcher shops, townspeople returning home after a day's work, and, of course, those persistent suspicious figures.
Those people stood beside the intersection at the end of the main street. They were not particularly close, but the grass snakes by the roadside told him there was something wrong with them. Silently, they formed an encirclement around him. Unlike the town's residents, their robes were made of thicker fabric. Some carried backpacks, some held parchment maps, and some had a narrow dark pattern on their collars.
He did not avoid their gazes. He continued forward, turned into a side street on his right, and stopped at a narrow alley, pressing himself sideways against the wall as he glanced toward the main street from beneath the cover of the eaves.
Those people were still where they had been. One was fiddling with his cuff while another looked toward the lake beyond the town entrance. Their movements were natural, as though they truly were tourists.
He found an inn. Its sign was a wind-worn iron plate, its lettering already blurred beyond recognition. When he entered and registered at the counter, he did not use his real name. Instead, he borrowed one from a missing-person poster he had seen outside the inn. But he soon discovered that he had worried too much. After taking his money and writing him down, the innkeeper handed him a key without asking a single question.