Heading back to the Neumarket, Seth stopped at a corner – the beggar who sat leaning against the damp wall here was clearly advanced in years, a matted grey beard stretching down to his waist. He was asleep, an empty bottle of some rotgut stuff lying by his hand – slow snores rumbled over his lips, picking up a resonant growl in the man’s surprisingly broad chest. His cap lay empty at his feet, picked clean of others’ charity by the gutter children of the lower town.
“Excuse me,” said Seth, looking warily down at the slumbering beggar. The man continued to snore.
“
Excuse me,” he repeated, crouching down and gently shaking the man by the shoulder. He started awake with an alarmed snort.
“Sorry to disturb you, but I want to ask if you’ve seen a man with a burned face –“
The beggar sat bolt upright, grabbing two fistfuls of Seth’s mail shirt and pulling the squire’s face down until the tips of their noses were a mere inch apart. The man’s boozy breath gusted in Seth’s nostrils, wide, wild eyes staring unblinkingly into his own.
“I’ve seen things,” breathed the beggar. “I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. Men wi’ daemons in their eyes. A man wi’ eyes in his beard! I’ve seen the things what wait down in the dark!
Hungry things! I’ve seen a dog what could talk! A naked tail! A grave in a box! Evil it is, the stink of evil on this town!”
“Yes,” said Seth, struggling to extricate himself politely from the man’s vice-like grip, “but – have you seen a man with a burned face?”
The beggar blinked, letting go his hold.
“...Nope,” he said, with a calm shrug, and fell directly back to sleep.
Continuing in the same vein, he found the burned man frustratingly elusive – while there were a multitude of beggars plaguing the streets around the Neumarket, their powers of observation left something to be desired, and their numbers trailed off sharply towards the more affluent old town. Only two had anything useful to say: the beggar-woman Ithelus had found the previous day, and another, a one-legged man who sat on the corner of Neumarket and Trough Street.
The woman watched Seth suspiciously, as if she feared he might attempt to arrest her – when Ithelus put the question to her, however, she answered.
“Burned face? There was a cove like that hangin’ about Karlsen’s powder store a couple o’ days ago. ‘Im an’ ‘is mates ‘ad a little cart – headed off t’ward the old town.”
The one-legged man, meanwhile, looked cynically up at them from his seat on the ground, listening with a knowing expression as Seth recounted Puderbrand’s description.
“Yeah,” he said. “I seen ‘im.”
Stretching out his arm, he pointed at the green-painted roofed wagon that sat in the corner of the market.
“He just went in there.”