Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #19 October 2015 | Page 5

City Under Glass

Evening cooled with the promise of night.
Around him, the younger of the city’s guardsmen
stretched and rustled, chain mail clinking. The last
day, Mikkel thought.

By M.L. John

dered.

The leper’s eyes glinted with suspicion. “Just
put on the clothes,” Mikkel insisted, offering the armful of velvet again. “By order of the emperor.”

“All right, men, back in the wagon,” he or-

The people they passed as the horse clomped
through the city streets were all dressed in the clothing
of courtiers. A woman carrying a bucket of water on
her head and one in each of her hands tripped over a
hem of pastel silk and sloshed her liquid burden into
the dirt. The butcher’s lad, with his oafish face and
haystack hair, wore a tunic lined with crystals as he
swung a hatchet down—thwack!—through a chicken’s
neck and handed the still-squirming corpse to a girl in
brocade. They were ridiculous clothes to wear during a
working day. The emperor, and by extension, Mikkel,
had insisted on it, so the peasants wore jewels while
they slopped their pigs and emptied their chamber pots
out the windows.

Ivor was clean, and for the first time in Mikkel’s memory, he had shaved. The sores on his cheeks,
unobscured now by his usual m