Fragment 11

The cables didn't go dark after the sunset. The light inside them wasn't any dimmer at all. He patted the sticky gravel they used instead of paving stones back over the cable he'd cut to examine. He wondered what the source of their light was, even as the city lit up around him.

Some of the lights buzzed with well, lightning. Others held a much softer hum, but he wasn't going to assume anything at this point. Almost nothing in the vast hivelike city seemed to be burning. He hadn't noticed during the day, but while there were many scents of cooking, there were few scents of fire.

He was still kind of following the river, but it was difficult since they had built out into it in places, and every detour led him to something else that looked interesting. He could have moved out into the river as well, but he'd always preferred fire to water, and he knew what cities dumped into their waterways. Although to be fair, despite its size, this enormous hivelike city's river did not smell nearly as bad as he'd expected.

Perhaps the conquerors whose language had left its imprint here, had managed to learn something from the tribes who had held this land when he had gone to sleep. They had been almost un-plague-like in their lazy ways, always leaving part of what they took in place, and burying their wastes like cats. He really hadn't minded them too much, but they had been a rarity among the mankind, who seemed to grow dirtier and more destructive with every turning of the Earth around the sun.

Luck gifted him with gentle fortune, and he finally found an area that was recognizably a market. Most of the stalls and shops were dark and shuttered, despite the bright lights that felt like they would call to a crowd. Only the ones that carried foods were still lit and open for business. It was a bit of a pity, as it would have been more convenient for him if those had been left untended as well.

The shutters seemed to all be metal, and of a standardized design. The smithy that made them all must be a prosperous one. His dislike of the mankind and his decision to join the others in waiting them out had not been because he had not understood them. He studied every new race that his world presented, and each taught him something of his own.

He, like many others, had judged them to be near the end of their era. For tens of thousands of years, they had developed slowly, like many races before them. But then they seemed to have reached some kind of critical mass, and exploded in waves of war, wracked with plagues that spread through their own filth, while continuing to expand even beyond their capacity to feed their populations. They even developed methods that produced incredible harvests, but left barren land behind. It was not enough. They had turned into a voracious plague eating their way across the Earth.

The mankind were perhaps the closest thing that the Earth had ever produced to his own kind, in the capacity for learning at least. He didn't know if it was a pity or a blessing that all of them were half blind and short-lived. If they had been less destructive, to themselves as well as to the world, they would have been almost lovable. He was honestly surprised that they had not followed in the footsteps of thousands, millions, of creatures throughout history, and consumed themselves into extinction.

The two of their wise that he'd found over many centuries of study, that could see the strings of the world, seemed to lack physical sight. The more common, but still extremely rare, wise individuals who arose every generation or three, retained some physical sight but seemed able to hear, or perhaps feel, the sound of the world.

He looked at the market before him. He had regained enough energy to compress himself far enough to mimic their size more closely, so he altered himself once more. Smaller, softer, more fragrant, he adjusted until he matched more closely. He stepped out into the marketplace, and drew only a few glances.

He stopped and gazed at a sign upon one of the shuttered shops, and traced it with a curious claw… finger. Some of the characters used seemed familiar, but if he was not mistaken, they contained a mix of languages. Especially the number symbols, those did not belong to the same language of the conquerors that had known his kind as Drakon.

--

"It says they open at six in the morning, but they won't open again until the governor lifts the restrictions," Old Jose told the dark haired man in funny clothes.

He'd been drinking again. Well, when had he not anymore. But the stuff cost more than gold, nearly, and because he rationed it as hard as he could, he rarely felt drunk anymore. People these days treated the world's oldest medicine like it was something made for pleasure. Alcohol, it was a preservative, a painkiller, a medicine that let the broken ones sleep at night.

But he wondered a little if someone hadn't slipped a little something 'extra' into this bottle, because his old eyes claimed that something bigger than anything alive ought to be, had shifted in the darkness that this odd man had walked calmly out of.

The man turned and looked at him curiously. There was nothing obviously threatening in that gaze, and Old Jose had seen a lot of gazes to judge by, but it made his blood run cold anyway. No one had looked at him with such intense curiosity before in his life. Not even before he'd become one of the broken that most avoided looking at if they could.

--

The vampire drifted toward a quarter of the city that he'd avoided during his last half century of waking. He drifted toward the water. Toward the music.

Even before he got close enough to hear it, he somehow knew that it would still be playing. Even when everyone else was in hiding. Every city along the water, all across the world, had a place. A place that never really changed, even if the name on the door, or the entire building changed, the place didn't. The bartenders changed less often than the music, the music changed less often than the names of the drinks.

Sometimes a landlocked city would have a place. Sometimes a waterside city would have more than one. He took a deep breath of air that carried an unmistakably damp and decaying scent, tinted with old fuel, hints of fish, wastes, smoke and alcohol. It was a scent that had lingered where cities and water touched, since before humans harnessed the powers of combustion into engines.

It was familiar, comforting, and it reminded his fingers that he had no instrument. The strings that made the air hum despite being muted by layers of brick and other things whispered to him. They suggested that he could sing, if he dared.