Mauls, Shadovane’s infantry, marched down the streets in the city. Their bronze-shod boots beat against the dirt roads, creating a harsh music as they roused the common folk. Dawn was still north of an hour off. The farmers who lived atop the cliffs would be about their errands on a normal day, but those errands had been postponed.

  “Line up!” A soldier roared. He was marked out by wooden badges dangling from his pauldron as their captain. .

  The common folk hustled out of their hovels. Bare boards clung to the eaves of those homes. They were bloated and bowed, and some were beginning to fray as downward shifts in the homes’ infrastructure increased tension against foundations. Whole sections of some dwellings had fallen through, leaving behind gaping holes in the walls and ceilings. Where roofs existed at all, they were a haphazard mess of old, chipped tile and rotten, straw thatch.

  Poverty hung on every man and woman here.

  The Mauls corralled them like cattle, herded them toward the main thoroughfare that led from the edge of the city, beyond the Third Turn, to the pace in all of its glory. They shoved or kicked the ones who moved too slowly. Some of those elves were rickety elders, hobbled and gnarled and bent, but they were few. Their juniors were mostly working age, and they were gaunt, emaciated, as often wearing repurposed gunnysacks as honest raiment, and where they could afford true dress, it was riddled with patches of cheaper materials, whatever they could get their hands on. Their skin was sallow and oily, their hair unkempt for they had not had time to piece themselves together, wash in waters dragged from the well or a nearby creek in the high passes, shake off recent sleep and bring the vigor back into their joints.

  The use of magic took energy from the body. They had so little of it to spare. Where disease was present it ravaged the body, and the elder among them were left with cancerous tumors, goiters, sores. What few did know a bit of the art were too feeble to conjure more than a candlefme, or the simple rite to soothe an itch. In their state, they could not defend themselves, nor heal their fellows of their more serious ailments, and so they were resigned to this life. What foodstuffs they could come by went to the children, to keep them healthy. What was left went firs to the rebels keeping them safe, then to the parents, and then to everyone else. There was never enough, and with the emperor’s arrival, they knew they would witness bitter days.

  Some of them remembered the rule of Queen Tania, when they could eat enough to live and be happy, and their children were healthy and pyful. In their memory, there was music in the streets, and there was strength enough in the people that the roofs remained in good repair, and clean water was never hard to come by.

  Those days died with the rise of Queen Meredith—a bitter irony for many still remembered her as a girl. With her came a shadow so deep and gluttonous it sucked the very spirit out of the city, and left its people to drift along, meaningless, forgotten until the moment they were needed.

  They arranged themselves along that thoroughfare and obediently dropped onto hands and knees, grinding their noses into the dirt, and when they were in position, it began.

  A brilliant light crested the horizon. The first trumpets sounded, and then the drums began to beat. The light filled the distant canyon passage on its way to the second turn, and those commoners brave enough to snatch a glimpse knew what it meant.

  It had been a decade since the emperor st visited, but he had come. He came with the dawn, as tradition demanded. When he left at the beginning of true winter, there would be little left for the common man. This would be a winter for starving. It would be a winter for dying.