Read Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia) Page 4
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None, as it turned out. When he arrived for the meeting at the Merchant’s Guild in the morning, he found a squad of city guards awaiting him, tasked with his arrest. The fortunate placement of a window nearby allowed him to flee, and through a combination of luck and wit he managed to evade the ensuing manhunt and escape the city hidden inside a barrel of pickled herring in the hold of a ship bound for Vatch, five hundred miles south…
The next time he found himself in Drell—in 1112—he decided to swing by the Database building, just to see, just in case. Not only was the building gone, but so was the whole neighborhood. In its place stood an array of warehouses. Inquiries revealed that over fifty years earlier half of Drell, including the area in question, had been leveled in a massive conflagration after the city’s stockpiles of Phlogiston-22 mysteriously combusted.