With the words of the conspirators still ringing in your ears, you get up and leave the inn, trying not to look too conspicuous. You ask a passer-by the quickest way to the palace, but she looks at you strangely, and simply points towards the centre of the town. The palace, in fact, is not difficult to find. The door is bound with metal strips, and it is a while before a guard emerges to answer your knocking. You tell of what you have heard in the inn, and he demands that you relinquish all your weapons, and place them on a table beside the doorway.
He leads you through the great hall, hung with tapestries, to the main throne-room where the king is entertaining some guests. The assembly falls silent, and the king demands to know who disturbs this feast.
You explain what you have heard, but the king laughs and does not believe you. He orders you to be seized and locked in the storeroom for the night, and to be whipped the following morning.
'No one,' he booms, 'would plot against me!'
Not only will this guy have only himself to blame if he gets assassinated, I won't feel even a little bad for him. Jerk.
The storeroom is cold and dank. In the corners you can hear the chittering of rats as they knaw away at the grain supply of Thebes. Soon you fall unconscious, asleep. Your sleep is troubled, and you awaken frequently, sweating and breathless, like a runner who has just finished last in a race, for whom there is no victor's wreath.
At dawn the door is opened, and you are pulled out from the heap of grain where you rested. The king has been wounded by an assassin, but will not die, so you are free to go.
Tired and terrified, you go quickly to the palace gates and collect your weapons, afraid lest the king die, when you would surely be executed.
With thankfulness in your heart you quit the city of Thebes. You carry on up the road, passed by farmers with their bullock-carts slowly making their way to Acharnae. The path is cracked and rutted and the fields to either side are flooded by the spring-swollen streams. A fallen tree blocks the way for a while but you quickly clamber over it. You soon reach the foothills of the range before Acharnae. The going is hard, but there is no snow. As you climb, the wind grows colder and you shiver slightly. Soon, however, you are over, and you come to the outskirts of Acharnae, barely visible in the dusk.
As you reach a minor crossroads at the start of the town itself, you see a group of men clustering around a low altar. One of them carries a dull iron sickle, another a squealing jet-black puppy. Two of the group hold it down while the officiating priest prepares to strike. The sun casts an elongated shadow, making the men seem from a distance like strange giants.
• Pass on quickly by?
• Intervene to save the animal?
But yeah, that's exactly my sentiment.