For a few minutes, Vell remained where he was, looking at Seroti's castle. Then he moved on.
Some time later, he found himself standing on a rooftop.
From there, he could see a considerable portion of Seroti, its streets and rooftops stretching away beneath the dark sky.
The snowfall had grown a little heavier.
He looked out across the rooftops.
From up here, he could confirm something he had noticed while walking through the streets.
Part of the city seemed newer than the rest.
It wasn't simply that the buildings were better maintained. There were entire stretches of houses and other structures that looked as though they had been built much more recently.
Their walls were cleaner, their roofs less worn, and their arrangement, style, and architecture seemed somewhat different from those in the older parts of Seroti.
Perhaps the city had expanded in that direction at some point. That would be perfectly ordinary. Cities grew, and people built new houses wherever there was room for them.
But the more he looked, the less convinced he became that this was the case.
Some of the buildings looked almost too new. There were few signs of the gradual wear that came with years of use, and the streets seemed to have been laid out with a consistency that the older districts lacked.
It gave him the impression that this part of the city had been rebuilt.
Not renovated, but rebuilt.
Vell turned his head and studied the area more carefully. He tried to make out where the older buildings ended and the newer ones began. The distinction was not perfectly clear, but in places, there was a noticeable boundary, as though the city had once been damaged and someone had later decided to rebuild it from the ground up.
Something must have happened here.
Perhaps a fire had swept through the district. Perhaps there had been a war or some other disaster. It was difficult to tell from a distance. Could it have been the weather?
Some sort of natural disaster, perhaps.
According to the innkeeper, the strange weather had been going on for weeks. It had started with rain, then grown worse, bringing stronger winds, fog, thunder, and lightning. Now there was snow, too.
It was a rather broad range of conditions for a single spell of bad weather.
Perhaps Seroti was simply experiencing an unusually severe season. He had seen stranger things happen naturally.
For a moment, he imagined what might happen if the weather continued to worsen.
A tornado could tear through the city, ripping roofs from houses and reducing entire streets to rubble. A flood might sweep through the lower districts, leaving homes submerged beneath the water. With enough rain, perhaps even the river would overflow its banks.
At least Seroti was not near the sea. Whatever else might happen, a tsunami was unlikely to be a concern.
He paused.
Those were rather unpleasant thoughts to have while standing on a rooftop in the middle of the night.
He didn't know whether any of those things would happen. He had no reason to believe they would.
If the city had been rebuilt after some earlier disaster, perhaps there were records of it. Someone might know what had happened and whether it bore any resemblance to what was happening now.
The scholar, Meli's master, might know something about it.
Vell looked once more at the newer district, then at the dark shape of the castle beyond it.
He decided that, for tonight, he had seen enough.