3
By the time he reached the Seatower district and the seedy neighborhood surrounding the docks, the fog was so thick that you could no longer cut it with a knife.
You’d need an axe at the very least. The lamps that marked the doorways of taverns shone like lighthouses above the street.
Voices echoed strangely off buildings, the words stretched and distorted, so that it was nearly impossible to tell where the speakers were or what exactly they were saying.
He paused across the street from the Rat’s Run.
In many ways, it was a marvelous place, full of drunken sailors no one would miss.
Perfect for picking up a stranger and luring them back to Cazador’s palace.
The owner was a very…interesting lady who owed him a favor and wasn’t above indicating when she would like someone killed.
He took out his glasses and put them on his nose, and the mist immediately turned them opaque.
“I am foiled at every turn, it seems,” he muttered to himself.
The glasses were exceedingly flattering, or so he had been told by numerous people, some of whom had even gone on to live out their natural lifespans.
Unable to check in a mirror himself, he had been more than a little worried.
But the glasses were also host to a very minor illusion, so small and harmless that anyone who sensed it would chalk it up to vanity.
Many people wore such charms—necklaces that magically disguised a double chin, earrings that smoothed a pocked complexion, that sort of thing.
(In one memorable case, it was underwear that corrected the spelling of a lower back tattoo, a fact Astarion learned when the underwear came off and he found himself gripping hips marked with the elven characters for bladder infection.
Fortunately, the human man underneath him had taken his shout of laughter for passion, and Astarion had excused himself afterward to go and laugh hysterically in private.)
In Astarion’s case, his glasses turned his eyes blue. It was all well and good to have red eyes when the lights were off, but when he went hunting somewhere well lit, the glasses made life rather easier.
He put the glasses away. The Rat’s Run would be there tomorrow and the next day and probably for the next hundred years after that. Tonight, he would find a victim in the fog.
* * *