The Conscientious Citizen Is Encouraged To Learn The Techniques To Conduct Such
His feet wandered as much as his mind and took him around the town, under bridge and over, past townsfolk who had to be assured there was nothing the Stanops's guest and a sajaitin beside needed from them. If Dirant's meandering took him around the empty guest houses, and if he happened to see where the servants deposited Helsodenk and Keiminops, by no means was he preparing to ambush them in their rooms and exact justice for their crimes or even convinced they had committed any worth punishing. It was only that collecting information came before understanding, he imagined the author of I Was A Captain-Inspector for Thirty Years wrote in there somewhere. Dirant's Usse (Basic) stumbled when it came to both technical terms and slang, for which reason he had not studied the contents quite so thoroughly as Takki had hoped he would.
Some passages had been clear enough, such as the tip that the person who looks to be up to something most often is. Dirant remembered that when he saw the uninspiring youth from before watching the northeastern gate from a narrow gap between two houses, a position suitable only for dishonest deeds. Furthermore, that born henchman retreated from the road when Poiskops and Keiminops passed by with their informal entourage, an action which amounted to ending a letter with “or else” as far as signaling nefarious intent.
The situation, it seemed to Dirant, called for Stansolt, or failing that Takki, but actually him on account of their absence. Unfortunate, given his class, but nevertheless it fell to him to observe the questionable fellow. If caught, he would not lie if he said he wanted to know where the man had bought his jacket. It included pockets on the sides and even the back. Since a Ritualist's many tools need not be readily accessible so long as they were close by, the design attracted him.
Dirant circled around the other side of that clump of houses. He had never tried to shadow anyone since childhood when at times he stalked his brothers around a park, but he supposed that to be the first step. Even the initial step demonstrated why the professionals earned however much they did, as it took much longer than he expected to find the alley's other mouth among the closely placed houses.
He sidled along the path's gentle curve, careful that his first sight of his man should not be mutual while all the time imagining he had left already. But no, there he was, still endeavoring to be inconspicuous with such aggression that passersby paused to ask if he needed directions to certain facilities.
“I must remember,” Dirant concluded, “that if becoming invisible to the Drastlifan public is my objective, the best way is to hire people with knives to chase me. Ah, and there is another warning to leave off from this course.”
The sky, already far more white than blue when Dirant first conceived his plan, had grown gray and then darker gray. The roofs shielded Dirant when it started, but the gurgling sounds from the pipes running overhead let him know what was happening. Because he had left his umbrella in his room, another consequence of a life without back pockets, he tested the theory proposed by optimists that humanity would one day surpass language and deliver mental impressions to one another directly. “Stay under the eaves,” he thought at his quarry as hard as he could. As for the outcome, he preferred to believe the failure came from the shady character's poor Receptivity rather than any insufficiency of mental force on his part.
As it was, the man walked to the gate and right on out. To follow a strange man likely bent on unscrupulous behavior outside town while alone, in the rain, would have been a bit much for Dirant even if there were someone around he wanted to impress. Obedient to the nudges of caution, he followed the target only a short way outside town, swerved aside, and waited to see if his backup would disappoint him.
It did not. Two men strolled out as if the weather invited such nonchalance, one a blond Dvanjchtliv wearing an impressive Adaban-style hat which covered up his half-shaved head but did nothing about his mustache, the other a Drastlifar at a glance but really another Dvanjchtliv disguised by a country-appropriate beard and a masterful tan. Then his head turned and he looked like a Drastlifar again. No doubt that agent's superiors thought his evident Drastlifarness was an advantage in operations, but in the field, his ambiguous heritage made him stand out all the more.
That took care of security, and at a price impossible to better. Dirant therefore continued. The captain-inspector's book had not yet instructed him in the best methods for shadowing someone out in the open, and so he devised his own technique of ambling in an arc to keep his man in sight without staying behind someone both shifty and a layman. As a mostly honest Ritualist, such unmerited deference would have been hard to bear.
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For better viewing, Dirant kept as much as possible to the higher areas impossible for the most ecstatic poets to call hills on footpaths created by Koshat's laborers through repeated use rather than artifice. The advantages of height went against the hindrances of rain, and for the time being it was an even contest. The mere drizzle was well within the capacity of a good Adaban hat to handle, although the increasing amount of mud impeded Dirant a trifle.
Of course the weather worsened. Not a great deal, but combined with the howls which were drifting over the fields at that hour, even a Ritualist who possessed infinite attention when inscribing squiggly lines or demanding to be paid for it struggled to keep focus on his target. Justifications for giving up the search formed on the spot. How many enthusiasts of ancient battles and contemporary monsters had their actions misconstrued by people unable to understand their interest? Perhaps the young man was one such. He saved his pay for months just as he saved those little whiskers he expected to transform one day into a beard. Finally he could afford to take a trip, or rather a pilgrimage, to Koshat Dreivis, the mine that held the one kind of silver he desired, only to have some Ritualist able to jaunt all over the continent at a big company's expense designate him as an undesirable character. Injustice had come to Drastlif along with the Adaban.
Surely that was possible. Dirant was inventing another intricate scenario when a particularly fierce eruption from the direction of the marsh, a crack like that which Chisops Dogai-Brein attributed to the marsh kings startled him into a soaked patch of the path. He scrambled up with every point of his 44 Coordination, a number universally agreed to be “not terrible,” and hurried to regain sight of his quarry in full expectation that he would succeed. Expectations play traitor every day. When he came near the trees between the marsh and the useful fields without finding the man, he at last accepted Ritualists ought never to act in secret.
Though already certain of his failure, Dirant recalled some of his father's advice and how successful was the man who gave it. He could not do better, he decided, than to give himself the opportunity to succeed by walking north to the main road at least before he threw over the whole thing and walked back to town while deliberating whether to tell anyone about the pointless outing. A better choice might be to look in on Sajaitin Igwodan-Tin and hear the hidden truths of Drastlifan Ritualists, if there were any, which he doubted.
Fences and other evidence of civilization annoying to the traveler, however useful to the cultivator, sent Dirant far off his northerly course at times, with the result that he had lost any idea of where he might be when shouts and sounds of struggle reached his ears. Despite the rain, the wind, and all the monsters to the east, there was no question of those troubling noises being anything but human.
Dirant arrested himself with a powerful step that splashed mud halfway up his leg, a circumstance which, if he were lucky, he would be able to complain about later. Off to the left, he concluded after listening. Heading right seemed then a much better idea than it had before. Already he heard a confused mess of splashing and cursing that must be caused by more than two people. The more that were involved in a tussle, the less a Ritualist mattered to it, and that from a low starting position. Moreover, was there even a party he wished to assist? He was ignorant of the participants, the controversy between them, and the lethality with which they pursued it.
The thing to do was escape and pray that he might run into a convenient Battler or Tiger Knight capable of imposing a resolution on the participants. Even that seemed fraught, since the closest might be a late participant on his way to the brouhaha and unwilling to leave anyone uninvolved. Perhaps to stand still in silence was his best option, much as when a manager asked who loved overtime the most.
The final recourse in such a mire of uncertainty and violence must be class abilities. Since Dirant retained in his Ritual Memory nothing so convenient as a Preserve Me from Danger Ritual, he dared for the first time to employ his Divine Guidance (Hunch) on purpose. A phrase to be subjected to the whole of his concentration formed in his mind, “Guide me whither it is best I go,” and if that did not trigger the ability, Holzd ought to have provided instructions.
The exercise confirmed one fact immediately. The terrible dread that had moved Dirant to pray for poor Delaosant Paspaklest had certainly issued from his Divine Guidance (Hunch), for though he did not have to endure a repetition, something quite unlike any regular feeling filled him as if a second body at all times overlapped his own but could not be detected until supernatural emanations caused it to vibrate and scrape against his material form.
His concentration almost broke because of the strange sensation, but he maintained it until he could make out the meaning or invent a plausible interpretation thereof. Certainly not terror or foreboding, and not the joy of salvation or relief of escape either, but rather an impression came upon him as if there were two theaters on opposite sides of a street, each bragging of a different play. The one bore a title crafted by an author charmed by his own wit and breadth of reading, and the other was called something which described the contents. Which way to go was consequently obvious.
The way indicated went left, straight toward the disorder he wanted to avoid. The epithets Dirant liked to devise for his god became for a moment less flattering. Even so, the theological treatises he had read since he first saw Holzd put forth excellent arguments that one ought to trust in the divine wholly or not at all. The management advice current in Fennizen advised the same, with certain terms replaced.