It was a pleasant enough day, sunny with no more than the thinnest of cloud-cover, and Tal took his time about reaching his goal. The only thing on his mind was the book that he'd just started, and a vague wish that he'd brought it with him to read if there was going to be a queue.
As he arrived, it was obvious that he had come to the right address by the crowd just outside the door, and he resigned himself to a wait. He was only one among a throng of customers at the dockside warehouse, and was met at the door by a man who looked him over with an appraising eye and sent him to stand in a particular queue, one of six altogether. The warehouse was only dimly illuminated by light coming in at some upper-story windows and by skylights in the roof. Enough of the people here felt compelled to chatter at the tops of their lungs that a confusing din echoed and reechoed through the warehouse, adding to the confusion, as Tal inched forward in his queue.
Never having been here before, he was a little bewildered about why the fellow had directed him into this line, until he arrived at the head of the queue and found himself confronting four piles of neatly folded shirts, each pile being shirts of the same size but a different color. His choices were brown, gray, blue, and white, apparently, and the man at the door was evidently practiced in sorting people's sizes out by eye.
Tal took two each of the brown and the gray, on the grounds that they would show dirt and wear less than the white, and fade less than the blue, and moved to one side quickly, for the man behind him seemed very impatient.
He shook out one of the gray shirts and held it against himself, then examined it carefully. Aside from the fact that the stitching was mathematically even—which was entirely possible even when sewn by a human rather than a machine, if the shirt was of high quality—he saw nothing wrong with it. It was just a trifle large, perhaps, but no few of his secondhand purchases were also oversized. There was no real "style" to it, and the pattern it had been made to was a very simple one, but a city constable hardly needed "style." Surprised and pleased, he took his prizes to the front of the warehouse where he paid about the same as he would have for four secondhand garments, even though there was no haggling permitted. The clerk wrapped his purchases into a packet with brown paper and string, and gave them back to him. Given that these should last longer than secondhand shirts which already had a great deal of wear on them, he had gotten quite a bargain, and left the warehouse with a feeling of minor euphoria.
In fact, he had enough left over for a decent lunch, so he decided to treat himself. He seldom got to see the wharfs in daylight; by night, they were dirty, dangerous places to walk, but by day it was no worse than any other mercantile area. There were several warehouses here where individuals were buying things directly; this was something new to the city, and he wondered how the merchants were going to take it.
It probably isn't going to bother them too much, he decided. Nobody with any significant money is going to come down here and stand in lines when they can go to a fine, warm shop and be waited on, even fawned over. There might be some loss of secondhand trade, but that would even itself out eventually. Those who bought secondhand garments would rightly point out that the market value of such goods had decreased and be able to buy them at a lower value than heretofore, and the very poor, who could not afford even cheap goods like these, would then be able to afford the second-hand goods. The merchandise leaving those warehouses wasn't what he would call luxury goods, either. Most of those who were buying these new items were those who would bargain fiercely, leaving a secondhand merchant with less of a profit anyway.
Taking advantage of the crowds, other vendors had set up shop along the street. There were no entertainers, probably because there was no room for them. Performing on the docks would be dangerous, with wagonloads of heavy goods going in both directions, and the wharfs on one side. Not only that, but the wheels of those wagons, rumbling on the wooden planks of the wharf, made it too noisy for anyone to hear an entertainer. But there were other peddlers and vendors, anyone who could set himself up in a small space. A flash of color caught Tal's eye, and he wormed his way through the press of people to a ribbon-seller. Midwinter Festival was coming up, and he liked to get small things for people who were decent to him.
He bought a bit of scarlet for the black hair of the little wench who cleaned his room, and the little blonde who usually waited on him in the tavern would receive a streamer of blue. Farther along, there was a candy-monger, an orange-girl, a man selling feathers, and a knife-sharpener with his grinder in a barrow. The candy-monger had a clean-looking cart and display, and little bags of candy would make appropriate gifts to the tavern errand-boys; Tal's mind was entirely on the complicated problem of different-but-equal bags of sweets as he wormed his way towards the cart, when suddenly the noisy but relatively peaceful scene changed dramatically.
He had looked down long enough to tuck his bits of coiled ribbon into his belt-pouch and make certain the antipickpocket flap was in place, when the crowd surged into him, knocking him off-balance. People screamed and surged into him again as they tried to escape from something just ahead.
Training went into effect as people tried to move, surged back and forth mindlessly, and generally made things worse all the way around. Reacting as a constable and not as a man in the crowd, he fought free of them with a few precisely placed kicks and elbow-jabs, and broke out into an open space for a moment, looking for the source of the trouble.
He didn't take long to spot it. Ahead of him, the knife-sharpener brandished a bloody blade in one hand, a woman covered in blood lying motionless at his feet. Tal's eyes went immediately to the knife and not the man, for it was obviouswho the attacker was, and in this press of bodies, he would not be able to get away.
Though he only saw it for a moment, he knew he would be able to draw a picture of it from memory alone at any time in the next year. It was unusually long, with a wicked point; the cross-guard was minimal, the hilt undecorated, and the blade itself was exactly like a triangular file, except that it was polished to a satin-gleam on all three flat sides, and glinted razor-sharp on all three edges.
Tal dropped his package of shirts at the feet of the candy-monger and launched himself at the murderer. In spite of the fact that he wasnot frozen with shock or surprise, and in fact was already moving towards the man as his eyes and mind took in every detail of the murder-weapon, he was not fast enough to prevent the next scene of the tragedy. With the speed of the weasel he resembled, the knife-sharpener flung the blade wildly into the crowd, turned, and plunged off the dock into the murky, icy water of the river. And since he was wearing a belt encumbered with several pounds-worth of metal tools, even if hecould swim, it wasn't likely he was going to come up again. Tal knew that even before the man hit the water and sank without a sound.
Tal ran to the edge of the dock anyway, but there was no sign of the murderer but a trail of bubbles. He debated plunging in after him—and even teetered on the brink for a moment—when one of the dockworkers grabbed his elbow.
"Don't," the man said shortly. "The bastard's a goner. Won't last a minute in that water, and neither will you."