"What are you telling me?" Eir asked.
"The doors of my lodge are closed to you," he said simply.
"What?"
"You and your wolf and your companions."
Tears rolled down her face. "How long?"
"Until you can return with real warriors, not clockwork toys."
"We got further-"
"You failed," Knut said plainly, "and we have paid the price."
"But I will succeed. I will stop him! I'll bring better warriors."
Knut did not answer, but only turned to leave.
Snaff looked down at his feet. "Where are we supposed to find warriors?"
"We'll go where they gather," Eir said with a bleak smile. "We'll go to Lion's Arch."
PART II
Names?" growled the Lion's Arch gate guard-a norn holding a quill the size of an arrow.
"Logan Thackeray of Kryta, and this is Rytlock Brimstone of the Blood Legion, and Caithe, one of the Firstborn of the sylvari."
If the guard was impressed, he showed no sign, scrawling the names in a gigantic book on a stand. "What's your reason for visiting Lion's Arch?"
Rytlock muttered, "Just looking for an asura gate."
"Where to?"
"The Black Citadel."
The norn snorted, then wrote, En route to the Black Citadel.
"Not us," Logan said, pointing between himself and Caithe.
The guard looked at them. "What are you here for?"
"I'm a scout," Logan said.
"What kind? Seraph?"
"Um, no. My brother's in the Seraph, but I'm, well… freelance. Work for merchant caravans."
"I see," the norn said, arching an eyebrow and writing, Unemployed. "And what about the sylvari?"
"I joined them," Caithe said.
"Would you just let us in?" Rytlock pressed.
The norn glared at him. "What about the sylvari? Why does she want to enter Lion's Arch?"
Caithe's eyebrows rose thoughtfully. "Is it interesting?"
"What?"
"The city. Is it interesting?"
The guard scowled. "Of course."
"Then put that down," Caithe replied.
The norn wrote, Not applicable, snatched up a wooden stamp, and pounded it down on the entry. "In you go! Just don't break anything."
Logan, Rytlock, and Caithe shuffled into the vaulted city gate, passing beneath an iron portcullis that dripped rusty water down their backs.
"Why did he think I was 'not applicable'?" Caithe wondered.
"Ha!" Rytlock barked, but then frowned and shook his head. "I don't know."
The vault above them echoed with the clatter and tumult of the city ahead. As the three stepped out of the entryway, they caught their first real glimpse of Lion's Arch.
"Wow," said Rytlock.
The city was huge and a hodgepodge. To the left gleamed a wide bay full of great galleons. Their masts and rigging made a patchwork of the sky. A water gate guarded the entrance to this sheltered harbor, and pennants flew all down the docks. The docks teemed with longshoremen hauling skids from ships to warehouses. These warehouses themselves were former galleons, overturned on land. Many of the city's other buildings were also fashioned of ships washed ashore by the great flood. More than a few vessels had even been upturned to become strange towers, jutting skyward.
"A market!" Caithe noted eagerly.
Logan and Rytlock turned to see a manifold market spread beneath billowing blue sails. Stalls and tents crowded against each other, forming narrow lanes that thronged with people.
"They say everything's for sale in Lion's Arch," Logan noted.
Rytlock laughed. "Everything and everyone."
"Let's see," said Caithe, striding into the marketplace.
"Wait," Rytlock called, "we're looking for an asura gate!" But already the sylvari was approaching one of the outer stalls.
Within it, an ancient-looking asura sat surrounded by buckets into which he flung bits of a machine he was dismantling. Each bucket was marked with a coin amount-1g, 2g, 3g. Without looking up, the asura said, "What sort of mechanism are you building?"
Caithe's brow furrowed. "I'm not building a mechanism."
"Then you're blocking my light."
"What sort of mechanism are you building?"
He looked up, eyes annoyed under linty brows. "Something that had no right getting built in the first place."
"What was it?"
"A washing machine."
"Sounds helpful."
"Would've been if I had dirty friends like yours," the asura noted as Rytlock and Logan strode up. "Not that they would've used it. Nobody did."
"Why not?"
The asura sighed. "You wore it over your body, like a yoke. It washed the clothes while you walked in them-sprayed them, sudsed them, wrenched them, rinsed them." He pantomimed the machine squirting and snatching at his clothes. "People didn't like it. Got them wet."
"You should've called it a shower washer. People like getting wet in the shower."
The asura's hands stopped on the device. His face went pale, and he glanced regretfully at the buckets all around him.
Rytlock butted in. "Where's the nearest asura gate?"
"It was a problem with marketing, not design," the asura said despondently. "A shower washer!"
"Excuse me-the nearest gate?"
The asura scowled. "Did Master Drup put you up to this? Is he taunting me again?"
"Come on," Logan said to Caithe, taking her arm and leading her away.
The three companions strolled onward through the wonderland of strange goods-silken scarves, pewter chalices, clockwork toys, rundlets and hogsheads of ale, sheaves of spice, parchment, linens, fish, nails. Every needful thing and needless thing piled on tabletops beneath the luffing blue canvas. Here was a cart selling sausages and there a booth filled with blades. A stall selling ice cream stood beside a stall selling torture implements. And these varied wares were hawked by a varied group of merchants-humans and sylvari, charr and norn, asura and ogre.
"Why aren't they killing each other?" Rytlock wondered sourly.
"That's Lion's Arch for you. Live and let live," replied Logan. "Just don't mention the E-word."
"What E-word?"
"The place I was leading a caravan to. The place you wish didn't exist."
Rytlock hawked and spit. "That E-word."
"I don't feel well," Caithe murmured, leaning against Logan.
He caught her. "You look white."
"That's her color."
"All except your neck. There are little black lines-"
"I'm fine," Caithe interrupted, straightening. "Just a little out of breath."
Logan guided her to a half-wall out of the traffic of the main road and helped her sit. "Here. Just take a moment."
Caithe nodded, staring emptily ahead.
"What is it?" Rytlock rumbled.
Caithe shook her head weakly. "All these lives-all intersecting."
"Just ignore them," Logan advised. "You can be alone in a big city. Loneliest place in the world."
"That young man there." Caithe pointed to a teenage boy leaning sullenly beside a set of wooden stairs.
"Yeah? What about him?" Rytlock asked.
"He's trying to get up the courage to go upstairs and knock on the door and see if the girl is home."
The man and the charr looked at the nondescript kid, long hair veiling his eyes. Rytlock said, "How could you possibly know that?"
Caithe stared at them, amazed. "Don't you see the rose behind him?"
As she pointed it out, the flower seemed obvious.
"Good luck to him," Logan said.
"He needs more than luck. Look in the window." Caithe pointed to the head of the stairs, where a curtain waved in the breeze.
Rytlock stared. "So what? A curtain."
"See the hand on the sill beneath the curtain? The young man's hand?"
"What about it?"
"Why would a curtain be drawn at this time of day? And why would a young man be sitting beside it, watching another young man in the street?"
Rytlock's jaw dropped. "Seriously? Is this what you do? You watch, put things together, figure them out?"
"That man in the marketplace," Caithe said, nodding toward a swaggering fellow in a red greatcoat and black boots, "he's pretending to be a pirate for fear that he will be robbed, and the man beside him in the sackcloth shirt is pretending not to be a pirate so that he can pick his pocket."