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You wrestle with the choices before you - and your lingering doubts and growing fears besides - as gamely as you can, but it seems that you aren't able to get your arms around any of them. Instead, you beat a retreat to the nearest seat, a surprisingly comfortable wooden bench, which you avail yourself of - setting your candelabra to one side, your bundle to another, then sitting between them, careful of the flames. Looking for virgin ground to work, you will your mind clear as if you were about to cast - but once your stomach starts roiling again, you give up on that as well, and pop what few pieces of bread you broke in your mouth instead. Feeling at least marginally better, you square yourself once again with the increasingly daunting question of your next few steps.
It simply cannot be gainsaid, you just don't have enough time. The Hour of Change is nearly spent, if it isn't spent already. If you were in the Belfry - right now - and everything was packed up, your affairs out on the Mount in order, then you'd say you'd have enough time to win your way through the sewers tonight. But you are far away from the Belfry, and there are still things that need to - or at least, should be - attended to out on the Mount. And you cannot lighten the proverbial load for your schedule any further, like you did earlier when you quit the Clerking House without actually completing and planting a forgery, as you had initially intended to do. By the Heights of Hell, at one point, you were even considering breaking into the Forum, to properly plant the Patents. Madness it seems like now; madness and tragedy. Where did the time go? More to the point, where can you find it? You rack your brain, but you cannot see any quicker way to deal with your cart - save for abandoning it. And that ... oh, no, no you couldn't. There is so much on that cart that you cannot buy; that you would either have to steal or just go without as it is irreplaceable. Where else are you to find a beautifully kept, presumably operational, hopefully complete Wall-Wand? Or those bizarre Nut-Nodules? Even things that you might be able to buy - like those pistols, for example - are going to be indispensable out on the road. No, these are losses that cannot just be cut.
