Beneath an Opal Moon [antikvár]

t 'PREFIGURE:On Green Dolphin StreetThe scarred man enters Sha'angh'sei at sunset. He pauses before the towering cinnabar escarpment of the western gate and turns in his dusty saddle. Above him, a pair of ebon carrion birds spread their grotesquely long wings, hovering, startlingly set off by the flare of the sky. Piled clouds riding like chariots of crimson fire obscure for long moments the bloated oblate of the sun as it sinks slothfully towards the heights of the city already lost within the thickening haze. It is a unique mark of the sunsets in Sha'angh'sei that the city itself and the land all around it is first engulfed by the purest crimson, sliding, as the sun disappears behind the man-made façade, into the amethyst and violet which heralds the night.But the scarred man's deep-set eyes, slit and as opaque as dry stones, study only the winding, much-travelled highway behind him and the steady lines of jumbled traffic - ox-carts piled high with raw rice and silk, horsemen, soldiers, and travelling merchants, businessmen, farmers on foot -moving towards him and the city; the outbound flow is of no import to him.His horse snorts, shaking its head. Gently, the scarred man strokes its neck below the short mane with a thin red hand. The stallion's coat is lustreless, matted with the mingled dust of the highway, the caked mud of narrow back roads and the grease of many a hasty meal.The scarred man pulls at his hat, a floppy felt affair which,_ constructed unaesthetically, does little more than conceal his long and haggard face. Satisfied at last, he turns and, slouched in his high and dusty saddle, presses against his mount with his heels, riding through the gate. He raises his eyes as he moves, watching the perspective changing,11ysm 11 .1 'i'Ir , I ' I iil' ; i lü ' t' Ij Iif