Haraccus returns to the modest clerk-residence on the 10th anniversary of his previous visit.
In the old Rassidun’s face there was no note of anything very special to his character—it was much like the face of many another wizened man of empire, save that his heavy eyes were not yet grown dull, but twinkled under his knotted brows like the eyes of young mice when, with attentive ears and sensitive whiskers, they snuff the air and stare forth from their holes to see whether a cat may or may not be nearby.
No, the easiest noticed feature about the man was the clothing he had arrived wearing. In no way could it have been guessed of what his coat was truly sewn of, for both its sleeves and its skirts were so ragged and filthy as to defy the description of a sheltered clerk, while instead of the silken robes of the foppish magister-prince he wore a beggar’s shawl, the man stood armoured in the oversized platelegs of a long-dead brigand, with, projecting from them, matted bundles of straw.
In short, had the clerk chanced to encounter him at a monastery door, he would have bestowed upon him a mina or two, but in the present case there was standing before him, not a mendicant of financial need but of a far more metaphysical ilk.
The former magistrate stood in other words, as no longer the sort of embroidered fine farfolk who dispenses justice to the poor, lives in comfort and luxury of palatial estates, and is destined to leave his property to heirs who are purposing to squander the same on foreign wines but as the simulacra of a man better found in an alms-house .
“I have not heard back yet. Is something wrong?” is the man’s laconic greeting to the clerk, punctuated by a fit of coughs, each such cough met with a subsequent signing of the cross of Lorraine over his heaving chest.