Quoted By:
The way you search out a Humie (or near anyfin else) when you carnt see im is by earen n smellen.
Plenty of tells against Fighty Ones: the jingle and brush of buckles against mail or plate (Front Melee), or baked leather thumping baked leather, horse n baccy n 'erbs n Dog (Second Melee; Rangers, Druids), kushkush perfume n wood or brass polish (fuggen Bards), and whatever spicerack chemmy-set of fuggen weird shid Wizzies always packen. (Rogues and Sorcerors are trickier; they don't have strict types or tools)
Normie folks is even easier, more obvious and careless than Fighty Ones: smell for soap, cooking, shit; listen for creaky floors, doors, flat clumsy stompstomps as heavy as a Knight tryna sneek.
You've had a run of empty houses on Main the last time, but that's just because you were unlucky: deep at night there aren't a lot of smells or lights or whatsits, and the folks on Main aren't real homesteaders; theyre businesses, just pay to get what they need done. So there, hit n miss.
But here in the Skirts everyone does what needs doing themselves. Woodchoppen, green growen, cooken, smitten, everfen. In real Humie hours you'd see all kindsa activity; even right now at night you can taste the gravel a liddle on the dirt roads and find them sweat-salty.
You follow a likely patch of traces like these and get lucky: a clump of cottages each a short yard away from each other, wiv a deep trench and a tall stockade fence over the trench, and a wooden trench-bridge,
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that could be handily hoisted in by a rope pulley on the front and back of the waterless moat.
These folk had ganged up to make their clump o cottages defensible and met the Plague as a Mob. Looks like they held out goodish too, whatever the Plague threw at them.
Too bad yer not the Plague, henh henh henh.
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The first thing Lenne'rach heard was a thump on a neighboring wall. The first thing he thought was
>Henier and 'Bayah are at it again
>Cuthbert's cule what the hell is that old man on
When the thumping didn't continue in duet with the moans of a muffled cow his eyes snapped open, and his hand went under the pillow. Maggy's still there (picrel), hail Cuthbert. Good ol Maggy.
Barely thinking he threw on the hooded rainer coat with the improvised bite-collar (a wide tin barn-latch beaten round), slipped on his tall swamp boots next the bed, and got out the Convincer, the stout head of a thresh (peasant's flailstaff; agritool) with a knotted clap of lead, leaning against the night table.
His movements moved with practiced hurry, his peasant panoply ready. He slept in two layers of clothes now, for reasons. Long thick collars on all his shirts, even if he had to sew them out of sacking.
He listened and smelled in the dark, out his window, out his door. For the groans of dead air out of gray lungs. For the stink of meat in rot.
For <span class="mu-i">them</span>.
