As we were covering the last stretch on our way to Neamov, Olivia went over the rules of the city once more. While she had touched on some of their customs before, now she wanted to make sure we really knew what we were getting into. The biggest, other than the obvious laws about assault, arson, property-damage, theft and so on, was that unless one party was a registered merchant with the required permits, any commerce was a big no-no. That was how the city financed itself, taxation on goods and services sold within its walls and they made sure to get their share.

For once, there was no humor in Olivia’s voice as she described the tactics employed by the city-guard to catch people trying to circumvent the merchant’s fee. Undercover-agents trying to trap people by offering to buy or sell to them, magical scrying to find clandestine transactions and a whole lot of patrols. If you got caught, they didn’t imprison or kill you, they gave you a fine. Those fines were quite harsh and if you were unable to pay, you had two options. Run and pray that you managed to leave the city and region with your little life, after which the local merchant’s guild would put a general bounty on your head, turned in at any Adventurer's Guild or if you were wise, the locals generously gave you a job to work off your fee. Namely, slaving away in the mines or doing some other heavy labour. Needless to say, you didn’t want to break their rules and apparently, people had long since learned to either play by them or be very cautious.

By the time we were close to the gates, Olivia had repeated the advice not to trade anything unless the trade-partner was an established store, just to be on the safe side. So, no buying from some street-vendor with a cart and certainly not in some shady side-allies. That was a quick path to the mines.

Even while listening to Olivia’s warnings, I kept practising the Shadow Decoys, luckily, it was something that I could easily do, without making things too obvious, unlike the mist-cover that I had tried out the day before. The difficulty about it was to keep the movement of all decoys constant, smooth and unpredictable, the actual size of the decoys was irrelevant for training. Instead of using full-sized blobs of Darkness, I had reduced the size to little more than a sliver of Darkness and kept them orbiting around my hand, constantly changing their movements without falling into a pattern. So far, I mostly realised just how much more practise I needed, if my attention was diverted from my decoys, my mind seemed to almost instantly slip into forming them into a consistent pattern, which was exactly what I didn’t want.

When we got to the gate, we luckily didn’t have to wait in a line, instead, we could directly proceed. The procedure was quite simple, if you had identification and a bit of coin. You simply had to show the identification, we used our Adventurer's Guild Cards, and pay a small fee, which we could easily afford thanks to the Ashenforge Dwarves, and we could go in.

Olivia had warned us that the guards had ways to detect beings, even while they were in special spaces, like a Spirit Beast’s Hallow, so Lenore had taken up position on my shoulder and Ylva was tagging along next to Sigmir. That way, the two of them were visible and registered to Sigmir and me, respectively, with us being responsible if something bad happened. Lenore was a little amused at the idea that she had no agency of her own, but apparently, the locals had no desire to try having a bird work off a fee in the mines, so they simply designated it as somebody else’s problem. In this case, it would be my problem.

In trade for the fee we paid, we got a small brass token that we were asked to return when we were leaving, getting part of the fee refunded in turn. It allowed us to stay for up to a week in the city, afterwards, we would have to either get a longer-term permit or leave.

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Failure to produce a permit during controls would get you a quick but lengthy trip to the mines, something the city seemed to be rather fond of. It made me wonder just why Olivia liked this place, it sounded like the locals were quite happy if you followed their rules but just as content if you didn’t in that case, they got what amounted to slave-labour.

Once inside, I quickly noticed a few things. The first thing was the smell. It wasn’t as bad as it had been in some of the frontier-towns further north but it was far from pleasant. Too many people of various races, all sweating, working and not washing often enough in too close proximity and to top it off, there was a cloying scent of magic in the air, making it difficult to breathe.

Another thing I noticed was that all four of us seemed to instinctively tense up as we tried to keep an eye on everything going on, likely both out of vigilance and curiosity. We had grown used to being in the wilds, where a slight movement might indicate a sudden attack, a predator lurking somewhere nearby, but in the city, there was too much movement, too many people all moving and bustling around. That didn’t mean that there were no predators nearby, just that the normal indicators of predators weren’t the ones we had to watch.

“Come, I can show you a nice inn.” Olivia suggested, as she looked at us who had subconsciously moved into a defensive formation where we could guard each other's back. She seemed rather amused at it and I noticed that one of the guards at the gate was watching us and had a similarly amused grin on his bearded face. Pushing down the anxiety I felt due to the bustle around us, I mentally asked Lenore to watch my back before taking Sigmir’s arm, trying to make it appear casual. Simply holding her hand helped me a great deal and I noticed some tension leaving her body as well.

“Certainly, I would be grateful. Adra, Rai, why don’t you go ahead?” I asked, wanting them to move to the front so that Sigmir and I could watch their backs, while Lenore and Ylva did the same for us. The two of them nodded and in a slightly strange, rather tense, manner we began to move through the cobbled streets.

The architecture around us was interesting, it reminded me strongly of the angular style we had seen at the Ashenforge-Clan but where their buildings were obviously built for their squat size, Neamov was most certainly not. The buildings around us, at least if going by the sizes of their doors, seemed to be made with beings the size of Sigmir or even a little larger, in mind. But, as I kept looking around, I quickly realised why that was the case, it was for travellers. While a plurality of people were dwarves, they were not a majority.

Just in the streets around us, I could see a variety of body-shapes and sizes, from the obvious centaurs, they were easy to pick out, to the more difficult to identify. If a being had a simple, humanoid body-plan, concealing clothes and maybe a hood, they could be from a variety of races. Unless their body-size made it obvious, with giantbloods and trolls on one end of the spectrum and dwarves, halflings and gnomes on the other side, it was nigh impossible to determine just what race you were dealing with. Not that it really mattered, it might just be my personal curiosity that made me want to know. Luckily, I was no cat.

Thanks to Olivia’s guidance, we quickly got to the inn she had mentioned, even if the city was on the complicated side. I had a vague idea of the map, thanks to the look Lenore had taken from above, but that had been from a long distance. Without obvious features to compare that image to what we could see on a street-level it was almost impossible to get your bearings.

“This is the Pan’s Flute. Don’t mind the name, the owner has a strange sense of humor but they run a tight ship. I’ve stayed here a few times already and the service is excellent for their price.” Olivia told us, as she stepped up to the entrance. Above it was a brightly painted sign-board that made me blink for a moment as my mind boggled, wondering if I was seeing things. The sign was showing an obviously male, humanoid figure, with goat’s horns and legs kneeling on the ground, his hands in a rather suggestive position around a rather phallic object. Looking closely, I realised that the object was supposed to be some sort of wind-instrument, not what it had made me think first.

“Seriously?!” I asked Olivia, not quite believing what my eyes were seeing. The only answer I got was laughter, as Olivia opened the door to the inn.