I woke up, as usual, because Gaudiguch's distinctive stench was assaulting my nose. It is a uniquely awful odor. I'll grant you that every city has its own smell, and most of them are foul. Celest reeks of fish and false faith. Magnagora smells of corpses, and Hallifax has the scent of a thousand different teas. Gaudiguch is the worst of them, full of incense and harlotry and pretentiously fake wisdom.

I did my best to ignore the smell. There was work to be done! The sooner I did it, the sooner I could get out of the city and return to the sky. Loyalty may be its own reward, but I found the thought of going home much more motivating than any thoughts of duty.

You see, I was a thief, a spy, a swindler, and a rogue, and a scion of the Skylarks. I am still am many of those things. I've largely given up on stealing, on account of its poor returns, but I remain an excellent swindler and a habitual scoundrel. A man of my talents must often take long trips away from home to exercise those skills without adding treachery to his portfolio. 

I planned to devote the day to poisoning, perhaps with a little bit of theft and murder in the mix. There was a certain religious sect in the city in those days, one that Hallifax saw fit to purge. On the surface, it seemed much like any other of the thousands of ale-addled dreams of enlightenment. It would die out in a little while, but a little while was too long to wait. You see, this little sect threatened to spread. I had already seen the signs of merger with other faiths, in particular that it might produce someone that they could pass off as a saint to the light-lovers. That would give them too much influence.

The good news is that cults are easy enough to disrupt. You can't just kill their leader, tempting as it may seem. Martyrs are better than living founders, after all. Martyrs never get caught with young ladies and never steal from the tithes. No, it's far better to humiliate them, so that their followers leave them. Murder is, at best, an added bonus. In this case, I hoped that the foreign followers would be that added bonus.

It was a struggle to drag myself out of my excessively soft bed. I will confess that I rented a room with the harlots. I advise you to do the same, if you ever go to Gaudiguch. It may cost a little more than staying at an inn, but you won't have to smell nearly as much vomit during your stay.

I made my way out into the streets. They were heady with incense and debauchery, so I tried to ignore the sights and move quickly. I paid no attention to the fire-breather that performed right outside my door. She would have been more impressive had she not been a dracnari, anyway. I ignore the short fellow on the corner with an interesting collection of pus and boils. Even if I was fool enough to listen, I had no need of any enlightenment that would give me those.

No, I had another purveyor of enlightenment in mind. I ducked off of the sun-baked streets and made my way down a shady alley to find his tent. It was all silk and ribbon in a dozen different colors, with no sense of rhyme or reason or any kind of cohesion. I stepped into the tent without even announcing myself. I would have liked to knock, but my man had not seen fit to bother with a door.

He was very old, and very wrinkled, with a great white beard that made him look very wise. He had grubby robes and a little begging bowl. I would have been impressed, and perhaps mistaken him for a real ascetic, if not for the fact that I knew the size of his bank account. I suppose that we all keep up appearances in our own ways when it suits us.

We puffed a pipe before getting down to business. I inhaled lightly. He did not. I asked him for the extract of a certain cactus, which gives mild hallucinations in small doses. When taken in larger doses, it gives a wide variety of embarrassing excretions and the occasional nightmare. That naturally made it quite holy, especially when taken in imprecise doses. Those who took the low dose were clearly wise and on the path to enlightenment. Those who got the excessive dose had overstepped their bounds and were punished for their presumptions. At least, that is how the mystics seemed to take it. Frankly, I think it all comes down to the cold, unrelenting laws of probability and chemistry.

The honorable mystic offered to try it with me, so that he could guide me on my first steps toward wisdom. He took a little sip of the mixture, and I did the same. He swallowed, and I quietly spat it out into his fire. A little bit of misdirection can be a wonderful thing, especially when the viewer is already on his way to intoxication.

He was soon in the depths of his visions. I don't doubt that he saw many enlightening things, for a certain value of enlightening. I didn't wait to find out. I simply took my leave, making sure to very carefully move his brazier out of my way instead of walking around it. I am told that he fell into it and burned to death. I'm sure it was a very unfortunate accident and my involvement was a complete coincidence.

Now, the good thing about cults is that they are always recruiting. You would think that they would have some sort of security check, but that is rarely the case! Most people can just walk up to a recruiter, express interest, and get invited to sermons. In the case of small cults, that can be enough to meet with the leader. That is exactly what I did, and exactly what happened. 

The sermonizing was dull, and full of logical contradictions and generic platitudes. I paid very little attention to it. I paid more attention to the buffet. I will give credit where credit is due. The food looked delicious. They probably relied on it to attract new members. It almost seemed a shame to slip the cactus extract into it, especially because that meant that I had to abstain from enjoying it.

The rest of the visitors were quite intemperate in their enjoyment of the feast. They ate, they drank, they made merry. I will spare you the details of the scene. I'm not sure that anyone can imagine the sheer horror of the stench, so take my word for it when I say that you should never have to inhale the unwashed musk of a few dozen mystics and their leavings.

That would be the end of it for the mystic-in-chief. A single failed aspirant with bad visions is one thing, but an entire sect? Clearly, that marks the teacher of a false doctrine, at least to anyone with experience in these matters. The foreigners did not have that experience. They might think that they had experienced the normal sort of visions, and that their terror was a sign that they simply needed more enlightenment to understand them!

I could not have that. Fortunately, there were only a few foreigners in the crowd. It only took a few moments to deal with them. It seems that they imbibed too much wine and fell asleep in the communal bowls. Such a shame that all of their friends were too busy having visions to save them from drowning.

And that was that. My mission was finally over and I could start heading home. I may have been a thief, a spy, a swindler, and a rogue, but that did not mean that I could bring myself to feel at home in their city. I had a very long journey ahead of me, but I still looked forward to it. Far better to sleep under the open sky than in a house of harlots. Besides, I was looking forward to drinking tea in a place where I could be reasonably sure that nobody had poisoned it.