The manservant leaned on a merlon and watched the Edur army approach down the west road. An occasional glance to his left allowed him to monitor the closing of the fleet, and the vast, deadly demon beneath it – a presence spanning the width of the river and stretching back downstream almost half a league. A terrible, brutal creature straining at its sorcerous chains.
The west gate was open and unguarded. The lead elements of the Edur army had closed to within a thousand paces, advancing with caution. Ranging to either side of the column, in the ditches and across the fields, the first of the Soletaken wolves came into view.
Bugg sighed, looked over at the other occupant along the wall. ‘You will have to work fast, I think.’
The artist was a well-known and easily recognized figure in Letheras. A mass of hair that began on his head and swept down to join with the wild beard covering jaw and neck, his nub of a nose and small blue eyes the only visible features on his face. He was short and wiry, and painted with agitated capering – often perched on one leg – smearing paint on surfaces that always seemed too small for the image he was seeking to capture. This failing of perspective had long since been elevated into a technique, then a legitimate style, in so far as artistic styles could be legitimate. At Bugg’s comment he scowled and rose up on one leg, the foot of the other against the knee. ‘The scene, you fool! It is burned into my mind, here behind this eye, the left one. I forget nothing. Every detail. Historians will praise my work this day, you’ll see. Praise!’
‘Are you done, then?’
‘Very nearly, very very nearly, yes, nearly done. Every detail. I have done it again. That’s what they will say. Yes, I have done it again.’
‘May I see?’
Sudden suspicion.
Bugg added, ‘I am something of an historian myself.’
‘You are? Have I read you? Are you famous?’
‘Famous? Probably. But I doubt you’ve read me, since I’ve yet to write anything down.’
‘Ah, a lecturer!’
‘A scholar, swimming across the ocean of history.’
‘I like that. I could paint that.’
‘So, may I see your painting?’
A grand gesture with a multicoloured hand. ‘Come along, then, old friend. See my genius for yourself.’
The board perched on its easel was wider than it was high, in the manner of a landscape painting or, indeed, a record of some momentous vista of history. At least two arm-lengths wide. Bugg walked round for a look at the image captured on the surface.