If you are any to judge - which you very well might not be, considering all of the trouble you have been walking into lately - you would take a stake that it will prove harder to talk yourself out of the Gatehouse than it was to talk yourself in to it. But ... while you imagine that just looking at the under-over, running would have better odds than talking for springing yourself out of this, you know full well if you do run, then you will be on the run. You won't be able to be out in this dress, not without risk - especially in tightly held spots, like Gatehouses and the Lifts. In fact, given your remarkable height, you doubt that you would be safe in any dress - you might not even be safe dressed as a man with a hooded or otherwise obscured face ... though you imagine that suspicion might not fall so readily on a Leper known to other Lepers and the Middenguard as it might some obfuscated who-body. Unfortunate as all of this may be though, it cannot be gainsaid that running is sure in ways that talking is not. Moreover, by choosing to run, you have the initiative, and with it, hopefully the advantage. And as difficult as it may prove to run in this dress, you cannot imagine than running in harness is much easier. Is any easier, really ... though they will be much fresher than you are. And the Guards here have guns.

Though on that point, there might be a stroke of white luck for you. Only one of the Guards down here is so armed, the other - the one who is to escort you to the Watch-Serjant - was simply holding his awl-pike as one might a gun, at waist height, and so it was that you mistook it at first and even second glance. As the Guard on top of the Gatehouse has not reappeared, you cannot say for sure how he may be armed - though you feel as though you should assume he has a gun as well. Given that he was placed on high, you also imagine that of the two of them, he'd be the better shot.

Swallowing in a throat that feels as if it had never been anything but dry, you start towards the Gatehouse, which sits mostly dark and entirely still. As you feel the stones of the street change to the planks of the lift-gate, you ruefully find that you are in fact not too tired and too care-worn to feel fear. To tell it truly, you now feel as if you have made a serious mistake; you are not ready nor fit to start running, knowing that you cannot stop, not truly, until you are off of the Mount. And yet ... how can you possibly commit yourself to talking your way out of here? Surely, this Watch-Serjant you are being taken to is going to want you to open up this bundle, even if you suggest that it is something ... private and unfortunate. And he is going to want names as well. Your name, your father's name, the names of the distant family you are fleeing from, and most important of all he name of the Public House you are heading to. The thought of all of this lying you must wade through is enough to make head and heart achingly pound.