Bruce did not say anything. He was watching the street as they walked, mapping it. Where the foot traffic thinned. Where the stalls sold things, and there were stalls, plenty of them, selling skinning knives and small jars of glowing salve and tightly bound bundles of pale herbs and strips of cured beast-leather.
He memorized prices where he could overhear them. He noticed which sellers looked tired and which looked sharp. He filed all of it. The instincts of an old man in a new city did not need to be told what to do.
They reached the third street east. Green lanterns hung from the corner.
A wide square opened ahead of them, and at the center of it was the portal.
Bruce had been imagining a doorway, some kind of arch, a frame, a defined opening with another place visible on the other side.
The portal was not that.
