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the street. Although the surface was pockmarked with potholes and rutted, this street for these people
would serve as their open-air gathering place. One would expect it to be filled with chaffering throngs,
and also one would be certain that we two, our expensive cloaks betraying us even though the armor was
concealed, would have been subjected to more than simple horseplay. In all probability as many attacks
as there were paces would have been launched against us.
So that meant just one thing.
You have to have the nose for authority if you wish to stay alive in many of the more raffish and
desperate places of Kregen.
Zair knows, I d kicked against authority enough in my time.
Just rest a moment in the shade of this awning, Tyfar.
But we must press on! Barkindrar
Watch.
He glared at me. Something in my manner showed him I did not counsel thus without reason. More
probably, although it pains me to report this, something about my manner must have told him I was in no
mood to be argued with. He was a prince; but he subsided and we stood in the shadows, looking keenly
out onto that doleful street.
A neighborhood gets to know when trouble is on its way.
In a tightly controlled voice, Tyfar said, We should have gone straight away to the magistrates. Or even
the king. His palace may be a moth-eaten dump; but he is a king and would have received me as a
prince.
About to find a diplomatic way of reminding Tyfar of his country of origin, I closed my mouth. The tramp
of iron-studded soles and the swish and clang of a party of soldiers kept us both stock still. I said in a
voice that just carried, This is the reason, Tyfar. Bide you still.
The soldiers were paktuns, clearly enough, a mixture of races, all clad in a semblance of uniform. They
were a hard-bitten lot. At their head marched their Jiktar, and I can say I did not care for him at first
glance. I would not like to serve as a paktun in his pastang. He had not brought his whole pastang, a
company which might be eighty strong; but only three audos, three sections of eight men each. The
iron-studded boots stomped the rutted road.
The mercenaries approached from the direction we had come, and I said to Tyfar, Quickly, now!
Around the back of the stables and in the rear window. Sharp!
We ran between the wooden wall of the stables and the sagging mud wall of the nearest store. At the
back a lumberyard showed with an adobe wall beyond. Thick trees cut off the view. At the back of the
hostelry an aromatic yard piled with dung and straw and a few broken carts gave us access to the back
of the building. There were a few calsanys in their stalls and a hirvel twitched his snout at us, his
cup-shaped ears flicking forward, his tall round neck curving. The air hung unnaturally quiet, and the buzz
of flies sounded like miniature ripsaws.
In this window quick and quiet!
The sill was rotten and I shoved the wooden leaves open cautiously. The interior of the place stank. The
floor was cumbered with shadow-shrouded impedimenta of the animal trade. Stalls lined both walls with
a ladder beyond. Most of the stalls were empty. In the one nearest to the ladder a freymul, the poor
man s zorca, suddenly looked splendid as he tossed his head in a shaft of the suns light breaking in
through a crack in the dilapidated walls. His fine chocolate-colored coat with those brave streaks of
tromp beneath gleamed, and he showed his teeth and neighed.
That s done it, I said. Up the ladder!
I sprang up the ladder four rungs at a time. If one of the treads snapped beneath my boots... But they
held. I reached the landing at the top and faced a half-open door in which the light of a mineral-oil lamp
glowed. Shadows moved.
In the hayloft, Quienyin had said.
Tyfar sprang up the ladder after me.
Three paces took me to the door.
My hand reached out to push the door open.
Abruptly, it was snatched back.
I stared into the oil lamp s radiance. Hay piled up to the pitch of the roof. A woman stood facing me, the
bow in her hand bent and the steel head of the arrow aimed directly at my breast. The man who had flung
the door open appeared. It was nicely done. In a single instant the bow could loose and the arrow drive
through me.
Hold still, dom, said the man. He was apim, strongly built and with a brown beard, trimmed to a point.
His eyes were dark and his face, big-boned, powerful, held a look of such savage anger I knew I would
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