Fear death from the air!
His name was Galen Hornwrack. He was a lord without a domain, an eagle without wings; and he did not fear the air, he loved it. The Way of the Two Queens had ended his boyhood without hope: and he had spent the slow years since hidden away in the mazy alleys of the Artists'Quarter, the better to regret an act of fate which (so it appeared to him) had robbed his existence of any promise or purpose before it was fairly begun. Out of spite against himself or against the world, he never knew which, he had not taken up a profession, learning to use the steel knife instead to cut a living from the streets, shunning his peers and watching himself turn from a young man full of dreams into an older one stuffed with emptiness and fear. Fear death from the air! He feared it at every corner – it yawned at him from every alley's mouth – but never from there, where he would willingly have burned or bled or hung like a corpse from the million-year gallows of his own pain!
Presently he shook himself, laughed harshly, and, certain that the Californium contained no obvious trap or enemy, abandoned the shadows like a viper. One hand hung visible by his side while the other, beneath his threadbare grey cloak, rested on the hilt of his good plain knife. In that manner he made his way through the notorious chromium portals behind which Rotgob Mungo, a Captain of the North, had in the last days of Canna Moidart's rule laid his vain and valiant plans to break the siege of the Artists'Quarter, only to bleed out his life – albeit more honourably than many of his kin – under the strange axe of Alstath Fulthor.