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The bells pealed across the lamentable city of Moll, clamouring along the crooked, narrow alleys, buffeting the dawn-risers hurriedly laying out their wares in the market rounds. The bells pealed, tumbling over the grimy cobblestones, down to the wharfs and out over the bay’s choppy, gray waves. Shrill iron, the bells pealed with the voice of hysteria.

The terrible, endless sound echoed deep inside the slate-covered barrows that humped the streets, tilted the houses and cramped the alleyways in every quarter of Moll. Barrows older than the Lamentable City itself, each long ago riven through and tunnelled in fruitless search for plunder, each now remaining like a pock, the scarring of some ancient plague. The bells reached through to the scattered, broken bones bedded down in hollowed-out logs, amidst rotted furs and stone tools and weapons, bone and shell beads and jewellery, the huddled forms of hunting dogs, the occasional horse with its head removed and placed at its master’s feet, the skull with the spike-hole gaping between the left eye and ear. Echoing among the dead, bestirring the shades in their centuries-long slumber.

A few of these dread shades rose in answer to that call, and in the darkness moments before dawn they’d lifted themselves clear of the slate and earth and potsherds, scenting the presence of… someone, something. They’d then returned to their dark abodes-and for those who saw them, for those who knew something of shades, their departure seemed more like flight.

In Temple Round, as the sun edged higher over the hills inland, the saving wells, fountains and bowl-stones overflowed with coin: silver and gold glinting among the beds of copper. Already crowds gathered outside the high-walled sanctuaries of Burn-relieved and safe under the steamy morning light-there to appease the passing over of sudden death, and to thank the Sleeping Goddess, who slept still. And many a manservant was seen exiting the side-postern of Hood’s Temple, for the rich were ever wont to bribe away the Lord of Death, so that they might awaken to yet another day, gentled of spirit in their soft beds.

It was the monks of the Queen of Dreams for whom the night just past was cause for mourning, with clanging dirge of iron, civilisation’s scarred, midnight face. For that face had a name, and it was Murder. And so the bells rang on, a shroud of fell sound descending upon the port of Moll, a sound cold and harsh that none could escape…

… while in an alley behind a small estate on Low Merchant Way, a diviner of the Deck of Dragons noisily emptied his breakfast of pomegranates, bread, prunes and watered wine, surrounded by a ring of dogs patiently awaiting theirs.