The line for Cajin's northern gate wound for hundreds of yards along the cobblestone road, a slow river of carts, pack animals, and people of every shape and size Simon had ever seen all together in one place. Caravans loaded with sacks and crates advanced in fits and starts, their drivers trading good-natured curses with anyone who tried to cut past them without waiting their turn. Children ran between the cart wheels under the distracted gaze of parents too tired to chase after them. A street vendor moved along the line loudly offering loaves of bread and waterskins to anyone who still had a spare Penny in their pocket, while a bit further ahead a group of Beastman children staged a mock hunt among the cart wheels, blithely ignoring their parents' increasingly tired calls. The noise was constant, a murmur of voices in dozens of different languages, overlapping in a chaos that, paradoxically, seemed to have its own internal logic.
Simon looked around with a mix of exhaustion and renewed fascination. After days spent between an isolated island, a bureaucratic port, and a corrupt village, that mass of moving people had something almost reassuring in its chaotic normalcy — people waiting, people complaining about the wait, people trying to jump the line with more or less plausible excuses. It was the kind of scene he could have seen outside a crowded post office, if it weren't for the pointed ears, scales, and dark cloaks scattered everywhere throughout the crowd.
"Look at all the races," he said, his eyes running from one group to another along the line — pointed ears, furs, scales, a pair of Dwarves dragging a cart loaded with metal crates, a group of Beastmen arguing animatedly in a language made of growls and short syllables.
"That's Cajin for you," Corin said, in a tone that betrayed the habit of someone who's seen that scene dozens of times. "Humans never had much military or magical power, compared to the other races. No innate calling, no armies of dragons or infernal legions. So they did the one sensible thing they could do: they turned themselves into commerce. If you can't fight, become the place everyone still has to pass through to get what they want."
"Very typical of humans," Simon said, with a half smile. "Being functional parasites. We grab an entire ecosystem and build a shopping mall on top of it."
Corin chuckled, but didn't have time to answer, because at that moment a sudden jolt pushed Simon sideways, making him lose his balance for an instant.
He'd bumped into a tall figure, wrapped in a dark cloak with a deep hood that almost entirely hid its face, standing a bit further ahead in the line.
"Sorry," Simon said instinctively, reaching out a hand to steady himself, his fingers brushing for a fraction of a second against the heavy fabric of the cloak.
The figure didn't respond. Didn't even turn. It simply took a step forward, closing the gap that had opened up in the line, as if Simon had never existed.
"Let it go," Corin whispered, grabbing his arm and pulling him slightly back. "That was a demon. Not the kind of person you want to strike up a conversation with in the middle of a crowded line."
Simon stayed still, his eyes still fixed on the hooded back moving a few steps away. Something, inside him, had lit up in that exact same instant as that fleeting contact — a small click, a new warmth running behind his eyes, different from any other sensation he'd felt so far.
"Now that's cool," he said, quietly, a smile slowly spreading across his face.
Corin looked at him, confused. "What?"
"Nothing," Simon said, shaking his head, unable to fully hide the excitement from his voice. "You'll find out in due time. Maybe. If it works the way it should."
He didn't explain anything more — he didn't even know, exactly, what had just happened, only that that casual contact had lit up something new inside him, a switch that hadn't been there before. He didn't know it was Infernal Heat, one of the most basic skills in the demonic magic family — he had no way of knowing, not yet — but he knew, with an instinctive certainty, that whatever it was, he'd taken it from that hooded demon with a simple, accidental brush of contact.
And if a casual touch could give him something new, how many other switches might be hiding in a line hundreds of yards long, full of people of every imaginable race?
He spent the next hour testing it.
Not blatantly, obviously — he didn't want to get noticed as the lunatic groping strangers in a line to get into the city — but with small, apparently casual contacts: a hand brushing a shoulder while apologizing for squeezing past, an elbow bumping someone's side with a murmured "excuse me," a handshake offered to a merchant loudly complaining about the wait.
He touched a pair of Dwarves, whose carts loaded with metal crates forced him to pass by them several times anyway to "fix" a supposedly untied shoelace — nothing. He tried with a group of Beastmen, offering unsolicited help to lift a sack that had fallen off a cart — one of them thanked him with a grunt, but no new sensation ran behind his eyes. He even tried with an irritated-looking Elf, making up a silly question about the direction of the line just to have an excuse to briefly grip his arm while talking — the Elf shot him an icy glare before walking off muttering something about the rudeness of visitors, and still nothing.
He tried with a human dressed as a merchant, with a child laughing while chasing something down the line, even — with a burst of boldness he later scolded himself for — with a dog dozing in the shade of a cart, receiving in return only a sleepy growl and a dirty look from its owner.
Ten attempts. Ten failures.
After about an hour, when the line had finally brought them a few steps from the actual entrance through the city walls, Corin stopped him with a firm hand on his arm.
"Okay, now you need to explain," she said, in a tone that was half amused and half genuinely confused. "What the hell were you doing for the last hour? I saw you touch at least a dozen different people with the most absurd excuses I've ever heard."
Simon sighed, his shoulders slumping slightly in an expression of pure disappointment. "I thought it worked on contact," he said. "I touched that demon by accident, and right after I felt something new light up inside me — a skill, I guess, though I have no idea which one. So I thought: why not try with others? Maybe every contact gives you something. Instead, nothing. A whole hour, ten different people, and I learned absolutely nothing."
Corin burst out laughing, a full sound that shook her shoulders. "Of course you didn't learn anything," she said, once she'd calmed down enough to speak. "Skills have to be learned, Simon. They're not candy handed out at random by touching people in line. What happened to you with the demon is already extraordinary and inexplicable on its own — thinking it repeats every time you touch someone is pure statistical madness."
"Well, it was worth a shot," Simon said, with a shrug that tried to mask the disappointment. "And anyway, technically, one out of eleven attempts worked. That's not a bad success rate, if you think about it. In my old job, a nine percent conversion rate would've been considered almost a miracle."
"I have no idea what any of that meant," Corin said, shaking her head, "but you're incorrigible." The smile, though, stayed on her lips as they finally approached the officials' desk at the entrance, the line thinning rapidly ahead of them.
A bored-looking man checked Simon's provisional document with a quick glance, compared it against a thick register bound in dark leather, and gave a nod of approval without really even looking up at him. "Name?" he asked, pen already poised over the register.
"Simon Hans," he said, the improvised surname coming out almost naturally now, as if he'd carried it his whole life instead of just a couple of days.
"Registration to be completed within three days at the Trade Council office," the official said, jotting something down with a quick, mechanical hand, his voice flat with the tone of someone who's repeated the same phrase thousands of times to thousands of different visitors, all equally insignificant in his tired eyes. "Next."
And then they were inside.
Simon stopped dead the moment he crossed the threshold of the walls, unable for a long moment to do anything but stand still, his mouth slightly open, while his mind desperately tried to process everything laid out before him.
Cajin stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see, a living labyrinth of buildings piled on top of one another without any real apparent order — pale stone houses next to dark wooden structures, thin towers rising among low, crowded roofs, rope bridges stretched between buildings too close together not to connect them somehow. Every street he could make out teemed with people — humans in clothes of every style and quality, Dwarves with carts overflowing with goods, a group of Fish-Men advancing with a swaying gait along a canal cutting through the main road, even what looked like a small procession of Desert Hermits wrapped in their sand-colored robes, utterly out of place amid so much stone and wood.
Deeper into the city, beyond the first row of buildings, Simon managed to spot what must have been the districts Corin had mentioned during the trip — a golden sign catching the sunlight in what could be the legal market district, and further off, barely visible among the roofs, an imposing structure that seemed built specifically to command respect, maybe the headquarters of one of the guilds he'd heard about. Flags of different colors flew from towers and poles scattered across the city, each probably the symbol of a merchant family, a guild, or a district claiming its own identity amid that seemingly endless chaos.
The air itself was different — a dense mix of smells overlapping without pause: unfamiliar spices, freshly baked bread, hot metal from some distant forge, sweat, manure, and underneath it all, a constant hum of voices, hammers, cart wheels on cobblestones, street vendors calling out their prices from every corner.
And everyone, absolutely everyone, seemed to be in a devilish hurry to be somewhere else.
No one walked calmly. Every single person in Simon's field of view moved at a brisk pace, almost running, dodging obstacles and people with the ease of someone who does it every single day of their life, carrying packages, pushing carts, dragging children by the wrist while simultaneously checking the contents of a bag. A man ran past him carrying a tray full of still-steaming loaves, shouting something to a colleague nowhere in sight. Two Dwarves argued animatedly over the price of a load of raw metal, gesturing with a fervor that seemed on the verge of erupting into a brawl, only to shake hands a moment later with a satisfied smile. Somewhere, not too far off, a bell rang three sharp times, and the entire flow of people around them seemed to accelerate imperceptibly, as if that sound had kicked off a new wave of collective urgency.
"You know," Simon said, still motionless, his eyes continuing to jump from one detail to another without managing to settle on anything for more than a second, "on the Isle I thought I'd seen the peak of possible confusion. Then Tidecrest Haven already seemed bigger than I could handle. This looks like another planet."
"Wait till you see the Grand Market on a festival day," Corin said, with a smile that betrayed an almost personal pride in that organized confusion. "This is still Cajin slowly waking up."
"Welcome to Cajin," she added, spreading her arms toward the city stretching before them.
Simon stood staring at that swarming chaos a moment longer, then slowly shook his head, an incredulous smile forming on his lips.
"You know," he said, "I miss Milan at rush hour. At least there people just honked their horns."
Corin looked at him, confused by the reference she obviously couldn't grasp, but chose to let it go, too used by now to his incomprehensible jokes to demand an explanation every time.
"So," she said instead, setting off down the main road with a determined stride, "first stop: a place to sleep that won't cost us an arm and a leg. Then tomorrow we handle your official registration, before the three days run out. And after that—" she paused, a look settling on him that resembled something like a promise "—after that I'll show you what it really means to live in this city."
Simon followed her, still shaking his head in disbelief, letting himself be swallowed up along with her by the ceaseless flow of that crowd, one more small piece in an enormous mechanism that never stopped.