The cheeseman

Chapter Three:
The Artist

Many people thought they knew who Bors was. Some thought he was an artist, others a merchant, and even a palace servant. Though, they never seemed quite certain if he were a servant in the royal palace or in the governors palace. And they were not wrong; throughout his life, Bors had been all of those things. He had painted murals for kings and emperors, he had traded in silks and fine books, and had served as a lowly culinary scullion in the grandest of palaces and the most majestic of estates.
But those had never been his true employ. Bors was a man of secrets, a man who excelled in the gathering of information. And as he walked out of the palace gates and into Delcaerë, he thought back on the conversation that he had listened in on, and of the information he had gathered there. Several things; firstly, Ceshmir Gerpen means to have the throne, as obviously evidenced by the talk of being stood for. Every word he thought was being filed away for a written report when he was back at his safe house. Secondly, Hildor is not happy about the Lyes’alan being redeployed without his permission, as evidenced by his hand-talk. Thirdly, their plan to take the throne, presumably once Maelon dies, is not yet fully formed, as evidenced by the hole of not knowing who to put as the Eyes of Dan’entor. Fourthly, it is presumable that they mean the crown-heir to die.
The draft of his report broiled in his head as he pushed through the crowds of the upper city, through the flocking masses of thousands of people going to different merchants, popping into inns for a quick drink or meal, or just out for a stroll in the bright summer sun. Bors brushed shoulders with merchants, bankers, scholars, priests, and soldiers dressed in a range of clothes; from sturdy cottons to fine silks, there were people from all across the known world in the city. People from Thalann, from Ossétia, from Bæryvun, and even from Avahar in the distant south.
Bors remembered every face, every cut of dress or doublet, every manner of walking, talking, and pointing as he slowly meandered through the crowds of Delcaerë. It wasn’t anything he consciously did, it was just how he was. The young woman with a rosebud mouth and a ready smile, wearing a deep red linen dress and bright blond hair in a crown braid; he remembered her. The old man with a sorrow-etched face and a distant look painted in his eyes, making idle conversation with a baker; he remembered him. The small boy with big brown eyes and bigger ears, crying as his mother berated him for a reason that went unheard in Bors’s ears; he remembered him.
But none of it was what he focused on. He was nearing the edge of the upper city, nearing his safe house close to the temple district. One might expect that the crowds would thin as he approached the inner wall of the city, a third as high and half as thick as the outer wall, but one would be wrong to make that assumption. The crowds thickened as Bors drew closer to his safe house, and here the inhabitants of the lower city mixed with those of the upper.
Grumbling about the size of the crowds, Bors started to force his way along the edge of a group of around a dozen soldiers. Then he stopped. That’s odd...