Heart's tale

Chapter 1 part 1

The fat man hurried after him. There was an echo of their argument for a long time, drowned in the noise of the market and the howling of the pipes. A mouse, which had barely crawled out onto the sidewalk and had been hiding in a holey boot next to the garbage pile, listened intently, twitching its whiskers.

The stray folds of fog floated by, and a paper ship hiding in them, made up of the debts of a mother of two children whose home was upstream.

That's when the red door at the corner of the embankment and the Alley of the Blind opened and creaked, arguing with the howls of a drawling male baritone that had wandered in from somewhere on the upper floors of the Magistrate's dormitory, rising to the very top tiers. And very few people in the Magistrate remembered that its moisture-fed roots were here, in the half-sleeping darkness of the canal.

A bird, rare in these parts, quacked, and the Magister, junior technician Galahad Wolfie, in a long gray raincoat with a hood and a canvas backpack on his back, struggled out of the spare parts-filled room where he lived, and carefully closed the door behind him. "It's dark and damp and nasty, and you forgot your knee ointment," he muttered to himself. "Give me a break, you'd better find me the key to the lock," the acerbic voice in his head asked tiredly.

He patted his pockets like a bird with wings and started to take off his backpack, but stumbled on a small staircase and hit the door with the wooden head of the doll with a metal visor sticking out of the backpack. Reaching into a side pocket, he pulled out a key, as well as a sturdy puzzle lock, and hung it on the door.

From around the corner, the messengers with fresh pastries whirled and frightened the old man, and with the crackle, rustle, and creak of ever-unlubricated propellers, flew cheerfully over the wooden bridge across the embankment and disappeared around the corner of the canal.

Wolfie exhaled, giving them a look full of sympathy and irritation.

"What an idiot lets them through the canal..."

Another passage of squeaky inner voice was interrupted by a drop that fell on the Magister's nose, barely sticking out from under the hood. The Magister looked up at the damp pipes of the second floor, hanging over his head, which smelled of swamp and moss. Wolfie rubbed his nose with his sleeve, mentally wishing the Magistrate's sewer service good health. Another drop of water separated from the pipe and fell into the dark puddle, where Galahad's foot immediately trod as he hurried past the garbage pile along the embankment toward the loading sector, in time with the baritone that continued to howl languidly somewhere in the air.

Galahad was at that advanced age when the vivacity of his body had not yet left him but made him extremely careful with his exertion. The smooth stones of the pavement, as if they were fished from the sea, still sang their simple rhythms under the wooden soles of Magister Wolfie, just as they had sung so many years before. Still, he picked up a long stick at the carver's house, even if it reminded him of his age. With it, Galahad could walk back and forth along the embankment without difficulty, as his inner voice gently whispered, even with his eyes closed and without slipping once.

Gliding under bridges and arches, Wolfie listened to the noise of the market. A stranger wouldn't have noticed, but something was different in the familiar crisp boil of human voices swearing at each other over thousands of the most important trifles. To the usual cacophony was added some tinkling flavor, almost indistinguishable in this monstrous opera, which only echoed to the back of the canal. Ducking under the Steam Bridge, Galahad saw a group of guards climbing the sooty stairs from the side of the pedestrian zone, where the Magister was frozen.

"Damn Culties, why do we have to do all the dirty work for them? Huh, Captain? I didn't sign up for this," hissed someone's broken, shrill voice.

"Shut up, you punk. Watch your mouth, got it?" the harsh bass voice answered.