The Face of Chaos

VOTARY by David Drake

'Hai!' called the Beysib executioner as his left blade struck. The tip of his victim's index finger spun thirty feet across the Bazaar and pattered against Samlor's boot. 'Hai!' and the right sword lopped the ends off the fourth and middle fingers together, so that the victim's right hand ended in a straight line, the four fingers all the length of the least, the only one to which a fingernail remained for the moment. 'Hai!'

The auction block in the centre of the Bazaar had been used for punishment before, but this particular technique was new to Samlor hil Samt. It was new as well to many of the longer-term residents of Sanctuary, judging from the expressions on their faces as they watched. The victim had been spread-eagled, belly against a vertical wooden barrier. That gave the audience a view of the executioner's artistry, which an ordinary horizontal chopping block would have hidden. And the Beysib - Lord Tudhaliya, if Samlor had understood the crier was an artist, no doubt about that.

Tudhaliya held his swords each at its balance and twirled them as he himself pirouetted. The blades glittered like lightning in the rain. The Beysib bowed to the onlookers before he spun in another flurry of cuts. The gesture was a sardonic one, an acknowledgement of the audience's privilege of watching him work. Tudhaliya was not nodding to the locals as peers or even as humans. For his performance, the executioner had stripped to a clout that kept his genitals out of the way when he moved. His arrival had been in a palanquin, however, and the richly brocaded Beysib who stood by as a respectful backdrop to the activity were clearly subordinates. And at the moment, his lordship was slicing off the fingers of a screaming victim like so many bits of carrot.

Well, the governance of Sanctuary had never been Samlor's concern. Blood and balls! How the Cirdonian caravan-master wished that he had no other concern with this cursed city either.

The first link of the information he needed had come from an urchin for a copper piece, sold as blithely as the boy would have sold a stale bread twist from the tray balanced on his head. The name of a fortune-teller, a S'danzo whose protector was a blacksmith? Oh yes, Illyra was still in Sanctuary... and Dubro the smith, too, if the foreign master's business was with him.

Samlor's intended business was in no way with the blacksmith, but the information was none the less good to know. Before entering the booth, the Cirdonian set his thumbs on his waist belt and tugged the broad leather a fraction, to the side. That was less obtrusive than adjusting the belt-sheathed fighting knife directly.

'Welcome, master,' said the woman who had been reading the cards to herself on a stool. Samlor looped the sash across the doorway hangings. There were the usual paraphernalia and a table that could be slid between the S'danzo and the lower, cushioned seat for clients. The young woman's eyes were very sharp, however. The Cirdonian knew that her quick appraisal of him as he slid aside the curtain of pierced shells gave often as much information as a reading would require, when retailed back to the sitter over cards or his palms or through 'images' quivering in a dish of water.

'You came about the luck of your return -' and Samlor would have said that his face was impassive, but it was not, not to her. 'No, not a journey but a woman. Come, sit. The cards, I think?' Her left hand fanned the deck, the brilliant, complex signs that some said reflected the universe in a subtlety equal to that of the icy stars overhead.

'Lady,' said Samlor. He turned up his left palm and the silver in it. It was uncoined bullion, stamped each time it was assayed in a Beysib market. 'You gave a man I met true readings. I need a truth that you won't find in my face.'

The S'danzo looked at the caravan-master again, her smile still professional, but something new behind her eyes. Samlor's boot heels were high enough to grip stirrups, low enough for walking, and worn more by flints than by pavements. He was stocky and no longer young; but his waist still made a straight line with his rib cage, with none of the bulge that time brings to easy living. Samlor's tunic was of dull red cloth, nearly the shade of his face. His skin never seemed to tan in the sun and wind that beat it daily. His only touch of ornament was a silver medallion, its face hidden until the man moved to show the bullion in his calloused palm. Then toad-faced Heqt flashed upward, goddess ofCirdon and the Spring rains - and the S'danzo gasped, 'Samlor hil Samt!'

'No!' the man said sharply in answer to the way Illyra's eyes flicked towards the doorway, towards the ringing of hot iron heard through it. 'Only information, lady. I wish'you no harm.' And he did not touch the hilt of his belt knife, because if she remembered Samlor, she remembered the tale of his first visit to Sanctuary. No need to threaten what his reputation had already promised, wish it or not. 'I want to find a little girl, my niece. Nothing more.'

'Sit, then,' the S'danzo said in a guarded voice. This time the visitor obeyed. He held the silver out to her between thumb and forefinger, but she opened his palm and held it for her gaze a moment before taking her payment. 'There's blood on them,' she said abruptly.

'There's an execution in the square,' Samlor said, glancing at his cuff. But it was unmarked, and even his boot had been too dusty for overt sign where the severed fingertip had touched it. 'Oh,' he said in embarrassment. 'Oh.' He raised his eyes to the S'danzo's. 'Life can be hard, lady... and there are matters of honour. Not my honour since I went into trade -' his lip quirked in a wormwood grimace - 'but of the family, of the House ofKodrix, yes. I've found little enough that brings me pleasure. But not that, not slaughter. Life is hard, that's all.'

Illyra released his palm. The silver clung to her fingers in what was almost a sleight of hand, professional in that, though the reading was no longer simply professional or simple at all. 'Tell me about the child,' the S'danzo said.

'Yes,' the stocky man agreed slowly. Little enough of pleasure, and none at all in some memories. 'My sister Samlane was ...' he said, and he paused, 'not a slut, I suppose, because she didn't bed just anybody, and the decision was always hers. And not a whore, except as a lark, as little coin as there was to be had in our House ... She had a disdain for trade that did credit to the noble House of Kodrix. Our parents were proud of her, I think, as they never were of me after I found an honest way to buy their food - and replenish their wine cellar.' The grimace again, calling attention to a joke that bit the teller like a shark.

The woman was quiet, as cool as the shells that whispered in the door curtain.

'But she was very - experimental. So we shouldn't have been surprised,' Samlor continued, 'that she'd whelped a bastard before her marriage, while she still lived in Cirdon. Samlane's personal effects were sent back after she, she died ' Six inches of steel, her brother's boot knife, were buried in her womb, and vision as clear in Samlor's mind as the edge of the knife with which he had replaced that one. 'I think Regli wanted to pretend she'd never been born. Alum won't hide stretch marks, but she'd passed for a virgin with Regli. I guess Rankan nobles are even stupider than I'd thought. The tramp! Gods! The worthless tramp!'

'Go on,' Illyra said with unexpected gentleness, as if she heard the pain and tortured love beneath the curses.

'The story was there in a diary, enough of it,' Samlor continued. He was deliberately opening his hands, which had clenched in fury at nothing material. 'The child was a girl, fostered with a maid of Samlane's, Reia. I probably saw her myself -' he swallowed '-playing in the halls with the other servants' brats. You could get lost in the house, a whole wing could crumble over you and you'd never be found.' The hands clenched again. 'My parents tell me they never knew about the child, about Samlane, in that big house. Pray god I never learn otherwise, or I'll have their hearts out though they are my parents.'

The S'danzo touched his hands, relaxing them again. He continued, 'She's four years old by now. She has a birthmark on the front of her scalp, so the hair is streaked white on the black curls. They called her Star, my sister did and the maid. And I came back to Sanctuary -' Samlor raised his eyes and his voice, neither angry but as hard and certain as a sword's edge'- to this hell-hole, to find my niece. Reia had married here, a guardsman, and she'd stayed after the after what happened when my sister died. And she'd kept Star like one of her own, she told me, until a month ago, and the child disappeared, no one to say where.

'That's how late I was, lady,' the Cirdonian went on in a wondering voice. 'Just a month. But I will find Star. And I'll find any one or any thing that's harmed the child before then.'

'You've brought something of the girl's for me to touch, then?' said Illyra. Professional calm had reasserted itself in her voice as she approached her task. This was the crystalline core on which all the mummery, all the 'dark strangers' and 'far journeys' were based.

'Yes,' said Samlor, calm again himself. With his right hand, his knife hand, he held out a medallion like the one around his own neck. 'It's a custom with us in Cirdon, the birth-token consecrating the newborn to Heqt's bounty. This was Star's. It was found in the mews of the barracks where she lived. Another child picked it up, a friend, so she brought it to Reia instead of keeping it herself.'

Illyra's hand cupped the grinning face of Heqt, but her eyes glanced over the ends of the thong that had suspended the medallion. The surface of the leather was dark with years of sweat and body oils, but its core at the ends was a clear yellow. 'Yes,' Samlor said, 'it had been cut off her, not stretched and broken. Help me find Star, lady.'

The S'danzo nodded. Her eyes had slipped .off into a waking trance already.

Illyra's gaze stayed empty for seconds that seemed minutes. Her • fingers were brown and capable and heavy with rings. They worked the surface of the medallion they held, reporting the sensations not to the woman's mind but to her soul.

Then, like a castaway flailing herself up from the sea, the S'danzo spluttered again to conscious alertness. Her thin lips formed a brief rictus, not a smile, at the memory of things she had just seen. Samlor had let his own breath out in a rush that reminded him that he had not breathed since Illyra entered her trance.

'I wish,' said the woman softly, 'that I had better news for you, or at least more. No -' for Samlor's face had stiffened to the preternatural calmness of a grave stele'- not dead. And I can't tell you who, master -' the honorific professional as habit reasserted itself'- or even where. But I think I have seen why.'

With one hand Illyra returned the medal as carefully as if it were the child herself. With the fingers of the other hand, she touched her own kerchief-bound hair. 'The mark that you call the "star" is the "porta" to some of the Beysib. A sea-beast with tentacles ... a god, to some of them.'

Samlor turned his eyes towards the curtain that hid the execution, as within him his heart turned to murder. 'That one?' Nodding, his voice as neutral as if all the fury at Lord Tudhaliya were not foaming over his mind as he spoke.

'No, not the rulers,' Illyra said positively. 'Not the Burek clan at all, the horsemen. But the fisher-folk and boatwrights who brought the Burek here, the Setmur - and not all of them.' The woman smiled at the trace of a memory so grim that its fullness wiped her face with loathing an instant later. 'There was,' she explained, looking away from the caravan-master, 'a cult of Dyareela in Sanctuary in the - recent past. The Porta cult is like that. Only a few, and those hidden because it's sacrilege and treason to worship other than the Imperial gods.'

'The Beysib have closed the temples here?' Samlor asked. Her last statement had jarred him into the interjection.

'Only to human beings,' Illyra said. 'And the Setmur are human, even to the Burek.' She smiled again and this time held the expression. 'We S'danzo are accustomed to being animals, master. Even in cities Ranke conquered as long ago as she did Cirdon.'

'Go on,' said Samlor evenly. 'Do these Beysib think to sacrifice Star to their ' he shrugged '- octopus, their squid?'

The S'danzo woman laughed. 'Master - Samlor,' she demanded, 'is Heqt a giant toad that you might find near the right pond?' The man touched his medallion, and his eyes narrowed at the blasphemy. Illyra went on, 'Porta is a god, or an idea - if there's a difference. A fisher-folk idea. Some of them have always had images, little carvings on stone or shells, hidden deep in their ships where the nobles never venture for the stink ... And now they have something else to bring them closer to their god. They have -' and she looked from the child's medal, which had told her much, to the Cirdonian's eyes, which in this had told her even more '- the girl you call your niece.'

Samlor hil Samt stood with the controlled power of a derrick shifting a cargo of swords. The booth was suddenly very cold. 'Lady,' he said as he paused in the doorway. 'I thank you for your service. But one thing. I know that the Rankans say their storm-god bedded his sister. But we don't talk about that in Cirdon. We don't even think about it!'

Except when we 're drunk, the stocky man's mind whispered as his hand flung down the sash. His legs thrust him through the pattering curtain and again into the square. Except when we're very drunk, but not incapable ... may Samlane burn in the Hell she earned so richly!

Amazingly, the execution was still going on. Lord Tudhaliya's breechclout was black with sweat. His body gleamed as it moved through its intricate dance. His swords shone as they spun, and the air was jewelled with garnet drops of blood.

The victim's forearm was gone. Tudhaliya's blades were sharp, but they were too light to shear with a single blow the thick bone of a human upper arm. Right sword, left sword - placing cuts only, notching ... Tudhaliya pivoted, his back to his victim, and the blades lashed out behind him, perfectly directed. The stump of the victim's elbow bounded away from the block. She moaned, a bestial sound... but she had never been human to Tudhaliya, had she? The Beysib entourage gave well-bred applause to the pass. Their left fingertips pattered on their right palms.

Samlor strode out of the Bazaar. He was thinking about a child. And he was thinking that murder might not always be without pleasure, even for him.

In the years since Samlor's first visit to Sanctuary, the tavern's sign had been refurbished. The unicorn's horn had been gilded, and his engorged penis was picked out with red paint, lest any passerby miss the joke. The common room stank as before, though it was too early to add the smoky reek of lamp flames. There were a few soldiers present, throwing knucklebones and wrangling over who owed for the next round. There were also two women who would have looked slatternly even by worse light than what now streamed through the grimy windows; and, by the wall, a man who watched them, and watched the soldiers, and - very sharply - watched" Samlor as he entered the tavern.

No one was paying any attention to the fellow in the corner with the sword, the lute, and a sneer of disgust at the empty tankard before him. 'Ho, friend,' Samlor called to the slope-shouldered bartender. 'Wine for me, and whatever my friend with the lute is drinking.' The instrument had inlays of ivory and mother-of-pearl, but Samlor had noticed the empty sockets, which must recently have been garnished with gems.

The women were already in motion, lurching from their stools - remoras thrashing towards the shark they hoped would find their next meal. It was to the pimp against the wall that Samlor turned with a bright smile, however. 'And for you, sir -' he said. His thumb spun a coin through the air. Its arc would have dropped it in the pimp's lap if the fellow had not snatched it in with fingers like eagle's talons. The coin was silver, minted in Ranke, a day's wage for a man and as much as these blowsy whores together could expect for a night. 'If you keep them away from me. Otherwise, I take back the coin, even if you've swallowed it.' Samlor wore a smile again, but it was not the same smile. The women were backing off even before the pimp snarled at them.

The minstrel had risen to take the cup Samlor handed him from the bar. It was wine, though poverty had drunk ale on the previous round. 'I thank you, good sir,' the man said as he took the cup. 'And how may Cappen Varra serve you?'

Samlor passed his left hand over the sound box of the lute. The coin he dropped sang on the strings as it passed. 'A copper for a song from home,' he said. He knew, and from the sound the minstrel knew also, that the coin had not been copper or even silver. 'And another like it if you'll sing to me out on the bench, where the air has less - sawdust in it.'

Cappen Varra followed with a careful expression. He gave the lute a gentle toss in his hand, just enough to make the gold whisper again in the sound chamber. 'So, what sort of a song did you have in mind, good sir?' he asked as he seated himself facing Samlor. The minstrel had set his wine cup down. His left leg was cocked under him on the bench; and his right hand, on the lute's belly, was not far from the serviceable hilt of his dagger.

'A little girl's missing,' said Samlor. 'I need a name, or the name of someone who might know a name.'

'And how little a girl?' asked Varra, even more guarded. He set down the lute, ostensibly to take the cup in his left hand. 'Sixteen, would she be?'

'Four,' said Samlor.

Cappen Varra spat out the wine as he stood. 'It shouldn't offend me, good sir,' said the minstrel as he up-ended the lute, 'there's folk enough in this city who traffic in such goods. But I do not, and I'll leave your "copper" here in the gutter with your suggestion!'

'Friend,' said Samlor. His hand shot out and caught the falling coin in the air before the sun winked on the metal. 'Not you, but the name of a name. For the child's sake. Please.'

Cappen Varra took a deep breath and seated himself again. 'Your pardon,' he said simply. 'One lives in Sanctuary, and one assumes that everyone takes one for a thief and worse ... because everyone else is a thief and worse, I sometimes fear. So. You want the name of someone who might buy and sell young children? Not a short list in this city, sir.'

'That's not quite what I want,' the Cirdonian explained. 'There is - reason to think that she was taken by the Beysib.'

The minstrel blinked. 'Then I really can't help you, much as I'd like to, good sir. My songs give me no entree to those folk.'

Samlor nodded. 'Yes,' he agreed. 'But it might be that you knew who in the local community - fenced goods for Beysib thieves. Somebody must, they can't deal among themselves, a closed group like theirs.'

'Oh,' said Cappen Varra. 'Oh,' and his right hand drummed a nervous riff on the belly of his instrument. When he looked up again, his face was troubled. 'This could be very dangerous,' he said. 'For you, and for anyone who sent you to this man, if he took it amiss.'

'I was serious about the payment,' Samlor said. He thumbed a second crown of Rankan gold from his left hand into the right to join the piece already there.

'No, not that,' said the minstrel, 'not for this. But... I'll give you directions. Go after dark. And if I thought you might mention my name, I wouldn't tell you a thing. Even for a child.'

Samlor smiled wanly. 'It's possible,' the caravan-master said, 'that there are two honourable men in Sanctuary this day. Though I wouldn't expect anyone to believe it, even the two of us.'

Cappen Varra began fingering an intricate sequence of chords from his lute. 'There's a temple of Ils in the Mercer's Quarter,' he began in a rhythmic delivery. It would have suited the love lyrics his face was miming. 'Just a neighbourhood chapel. Go through it and turn right in the alley behind ...'

It had been three hours to sundown when Samlor left the Vulgar Unicorn, but it took him most of the remaining daylight to shop for what he would require during the interview. Nothing illicit, but the city was unfamiliar; and the major purchase was uncommon enough to take some searching. He found what he needed at last at an apothecary's.

The streets of Sanctuary had a different smell after dark, a serpent-cage miasma that was more of the psychic atmosphere than the physical. Under the circumstances, Samlor did not feel it would be politic to carry his dagger free in his hand as he might otherwise have done. He kept a careful watch, however, for the casual footpads who might waylay him for his purse, or even for the wine bottle whose neck projected from his scrip.

The chapel of Ils had once had a gate. It had been stolen for the weight of its wrought iron. There was nothing pertaining to the cult in the sanctuary except a niche in which the deity was painted. There might at one time have been a statue in the niche instead; but if so, it had gone the way of the gate. Samlor slipped through unobtrusively, though he was by no means sure that the drunk asleep in the corner was only what he seemed.

The alley behind the chapel was black as a politician's soul, but by now the Cirdonian was close enough to operate by feel. A set of rickety stairs against the left wall. A second staircase. The things that squelched and crunched underfoot did not matter. There were other, stealthy sounds; but the guards Samlor expected would not attack without orders, and they would fend away less organized criminals as the Watch could not dream of doing.

A ladder was pinned against the wall. It had ten rungs, straight up into a trap door in the overhanging story. Samlor climbed two rungs up and rapped on the door. He was well aware of how extended his body was if he had misjudged the guard's instructions.

'Yes?' grunted a voice from above.

'Tarragon,' Samlor whispered. If the password had been changed, the next sound would be steel grating through his ribs.

The door flopped open. A pair of men reached down and heaved Samlor inside with scant ceremony. Both of them were masked, as was the third man in the room. The third was the obvious leader, seated behind the oil lamp and the account books on a desk. The men who held Samlor were bravos; more perhaps than their muscles alone, but certainly there for their muscles in part. The leader was a black. The mask obscuring his face was battered from age and neglect, but the eyes that glittered behind it were as bright as those of the hawk it counterfeited.

The black watched during the silent, expert search. Samlor held himself relaxed in the double grip as the guards' free hands twitched away his knife, his purse, his scrip; snatched off his boots, the sheath in the left one empty already but noted; ran along his arms. his torso, his groin. The only weapon Samlor carried this night was the openly sheathed dagger. To leave it behind as well would in this city have been more suspicious than the weapon.

When the guards were finished, they stepped back a pace to either side. Samlor's gear lay in a pile at his feet, save for the dagger, slipped now through the belt of one of the burly men who watched him.

Unconcerned, the Cirdonian knelt and pulled on his left boot. The man behind the desk waited for the stranger to speak. Then. as Samlor reached for his other boot, the masked leader snarled, 'Well? You're from Balustrus, aren't you? What's his answer?'

'No, I'm not from Balustrus,' Samlor said. He straightened up. holding the wine bottle. He pulled the cork with his teeth and spat it on to the floor before he went on. 'I came to buy information from you,' Samlor said, and he slurped a mouthful from the bottle.

The mask did not move. An index finger lifted minusculely for the chopping motion that would have ended the interview. Samlor spat the fluid in his mouth across the desk, splattering the topmost ledger and the lap of the seated man.

The hawk-masked leader lunged upward, then froze as his motion made the lamp flame gutter. There was a dagger aimed at Samlor's ribs from one side and a long-bladed razor an inch from his throat on the other; but the Cirdonian knew, and the guards knew ... and the man across the desk most certainly knew that, dying or not, Samlor could not be prevented from hurling the bottle into the lamp past which he had spat so nearly.

'That's right,' said Samlor with the bottle poised. 'Naphtha. And all I want to do is talk to you nicely, sir, so send your men away.'

While the leader hesitated, Samlor hawked and spat. It would take days to clear the petroleum foulness from his mouth, and the fumes rising into his sinuses were already giving him a headache.

'All right,' said the leader at last. 'You can wait below, boys.' He settled himself carefully back on his stool, well aware of the stain on his tunic and the way the ink ran where the clear fluid splashed his ledgers.

'The knife,' said Samlor when the guard who had disarmed him started to follow his fellow through the trap. An exchange of eyes behind masks; a nod from the leader; and the weapon dropped on the floor before the guard slipped into the alley. When the door closed above the men, Samlor set the potential firebomb in a corner where it was not likely to be bumped.

'Sorry,' said the caravan-master with a nod towards the leader and the blotted page. 'I needed to talk to you, and there wasn't much choice. My niece was stolen last month, not by you, but by Beysibs. Some screwball cult of them fishermen.'

'Who told you where I was?' asked the black man in a voice whose mildness would not have deceived a child.

'A fellow in Ranke, one eye, limps,' Samlor lied with a shrug. 'He'd worked for you but ran when the roof fell in.'

The leader's fists clenched. 'The password - he didn't tell you that!'

'I just mumbled my name. Your boys heard what they expected.' Samlor deliberately turned his back on the outlaw to end the line of discussion. 'You won't have contacts with their religious loonies, not directly. But you'll know their thieves, and a thief wili've heard something, know something. Sell me a Beysib thief, leader. Sell me a thief from the Setmur clan.'

The other man laughed. 'Sell? What are you offering to pay?'

Samlor turned, shrugging. 'The price of a four year old girl? That'd run to about four coronations in Ranke, but you know the local market better. Or the profit on the thief you give me. Figure what he'll bring you in a lifetime ... Name a figure, leader. I don't expect you to realize what this giri means to n", but - name a figure.'

'I won't give you a thief,' said the masked man. He paused deliberately and raised a restraining finger, though the Cirdonian had not moved. 'And I won't charge you a copper. I'll give you a name: Hort.'

Samlor frowned. 'A Beysib?'

The mask trembled negation. 'Local boy. A fisherman's son. He and his father got picked up by Beysib patrols at sea before the invasion. He speaks their language pretty well - better than any of them I know speaks ours. And I think he'll help you if he can.' The mask hid the speaker's face, but the smile was in his voice as well as he added, 'You needn't tell him who sent you. He's not one of mine, you see.'

Samlor bowed. 'I couldn't tell him,' he said. 'I don't know who you are.' He reached for the latch of the trap door. 'I thank you. sir.'

'Wait a minute,' called the man behind the desk. Samlor straightened and met the hooded eyes. 'Why are you so sure I won't call down to have you spitted the moment you're through this door?'

The Cirdonian shrugged again. 'Business reasons,' he said. 'I'm a businessman too. I understand risks. You'll be out of this place-' he waved at the dingy room - 'before I'm clear of the alley. No need to kill me to save a bolt-hole that you've written off already. And there's not one chance in a thousand that I could get past what you have waiting below, but -' calloused palm up, another shrug- 'in the dark ... You have people looking for you, sir, that's obvious. But none of them so far would be willing to burn this city down block by block to flush you, if he had to.'

Samlor reached again for the latch, paused again. 'Sir,' he said earnestly, 'you may think I've lied to you tonight... and perhaps I have. But I'm not lying to you now. On the honour of my House.' He clenched his fist over the medallion of Heqt on his breast.

The mask nodded. As Samlor dropped through the trap into darkness, the harsh voice called from above, 'Let him go! Let him go, this time!'

There was nothing ugly about the harbour water with the noon sun on it. The froth was pearly, the fish-guts iridescent; and the water itself, whatever its admixture of sewage, was faceted into diamond and topaz across its surface. Samlor sipped his ale in the dockside cantina as he had done at noon on the past three days. As before, he was waiting for Hort to return with information or the certain lack of it. The Cirdonian wondered what Star saw when she looked around her; and whether she found beauty in it.

There was commotion on one of the quays, easily visible through the cantina's open front. A trio of Beysib had been stepping a new mast into a trawler. As they worked, a squad of cavalry - Beysib also, but richly caparisoned in metals and brocades - had clattered along the quay. The squad halted alongside the boat. The men on the trawler had seemed as surprised as other onlookers when the troopers dismounted and leaped aboard, waggling their long swords in visual emphasis of the orders they shouted.

Nine of the horsemen were involved either in trussing the startled fishermen or acting as horseholders for the rest. The tenth man watched coldly as the others worked. He wore a helmet, gilded or gold, with a feather-tipped triple crest. When he turned as if in disdain for the proceedings, Samlor saw and recognized his profile. The man was Lord Tudhaliya, the swordsman who had been demonstrating his skill on an Ilsig animal the other day.

The fishermen continued to babble until ropes with slip knots were dropped over their throats. Then they needed all their breath

to scramble after the cavalrymen. \ The troopers remounted with a burst of chirruping cross-chat which sounded undisciplined to the caravan-master, but which detracted nothing from the efficiency of the process. Three of the men tied off the nooses to their saddle pommels. Tudhaliya gave a sharp order and the squad rode at a canter back the way it had come. Citizens with business on the quay dodged hooves as best they might. The fishermen blubbered in terror as they tried to run with the horses. They knew that a misstep meant death, unless the rider to whom they were tethered reined up in time. Nothing Samlor had seen of Lord Tudhaliya suggested his lordship would permit such mercy.

There were half a dozen regulars in the bar, fishermen and fish-merchants. When Samlor looked away from the spectacle, he found the local men staring at him. He gave a scowl of surprise when he noticed them; but even as the locals retreated into their mugs in confusion, Samlor understood why they had looked at him the way they had. The Cirdonian had nothing to do with the arrests on the docks just now; but he had nothing to do with this tavern, either. He had sat here during three noons and drunk ale ... and on the third day, the Beysibs made an arrest on the dock below. To the vulnerable, no coincidence is chance. These fishermen were unusually vulnerable to all the powers of the physical world as well as those of the political one. No wonder the Beysib counterparts of these men had turned to a god their overlords would not recognize; a personification, perhaps, of mystery and of the typhoons that could sweep the ocean clear of small boats and simple sailors.

Hort slipped into the cantina. He was dressed a little on the gaudy side. Still, he wore his clothes with the self-assurance of a young man instead of a boy's nervous gibing at the world. He raised a finger. The bartender chalked the slate above him and began drawing a mug of ale for the newcomer.

'I'm not sure you want to be seen with me,' Hort muttered to Samlor as he took his ale. 'The fellows they just carried off -' he nodded, as he slurped the brew, towards the trawler bobbing high on its lines with the mast still swinging above it from the sheer legs. 'Kummanni, Anbarbi, Arnuwanda. I talked to them just last night. About what you needed to know.'

'That's why they were arrested?' the caravan-master asked. He tried to keep his voice as calm as if he were asking which tailor had sewn the younger man's jerkin.

'I would to god I knew,' Hort said with feeling. 'It could be anything. Tudhaliya is - Minister of Security, I suppose. But he likes to stay close to things. To keep his hand in.'

'And his swords,' Samlor agreed softly. His eyes traced the path the horsemen had taken as they rode off, towards the palace and the dungeons beneath it. 'Would enough money to let you travel be a help?'

Hort shrugged, shuddered. 'I don't know.' He drained his mug and slid it to the bartender for a refill.

'I'm not afraid to be seen with you,' Samlor said. 'But I'm not sure you want to tell me about the - cult - with so many other people around.' He smiled about the cantina. The men there had just furnished him with a tactful way to prod the frightened youth into his story.

Hort drank and shuddered again. He said, 'Oh, I was raised with everyone here. Omat's my godfather. They won't tell tales to the Beysib.'

It wasn't the time for Samlor to comment. He assumed it was obvious anyway. Anyone will talk if the questions are put with sufficient forcefulness. But Hort must have known that too. The local man was not a coward, and he was not the worse for never having asked questions the way Lord Tudhaliya would. The way Samlor hil Samt had done, when need arose, might Heqt wash him . with mercy when she gathered him in ...

'There's a boat went out last month at the new moon,' Hort said beneath a moustache of beer foam. 'A trawler, but not fishing. Do you know what Death's Harbour is?'

'No.' Samlor had poled a skiff as a boy, when he hunted ducks in the marshes south ofCirdon. He knew little of the sea, however, and nothing at all of the seas around Sanctury.

'Two currents meet,' Hort explained. 'Any flotsam in the sea gets swept into the eye of it. Wrecks, sometimes. And sometimes men on rafts, until the sun dries their skin to parchment shrouding their bones.' He laughed. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I forget what sort of story I meant to tell you.' The smile faded. 'Nobody fishes in Death's Harbour. The bottom is deeper than anyone here ever set a line. Scooped out by the currents, I suppose. The fish won't shoal there, so it's no use to us. But a Beysib trawler went there last month, and it's coming back now slower than there's any reason for. Except that it's going to arrive tonight, and the moon is new again tonight.'

'Star's aboard her, then?' Samlor asked and sipped more ale. The brew was bitter, but less bitter than the gall that flooded his mouth at the thought of Star in Beysib hands.

'I think so,' Hort agreed. 'Anbarbi didn't approve. Of any of it, I think, though none of them said what was really going on. We'd seen the boat at sea, my father, all of us from Sanctuary that go to sea ourselves. That's what we talked about, though they didn't much want to talk. But from what Anbarbi let drop, I think there was a child on the trawler. At least when it put out.'

'And it'll dock here this evening?' the Cirdonian said. He had set down his mug and was flexing his hands, open and shut, as if to work the stiffness out of them.

'Oh -' said Hort. He was embarrassed not to be telling his story more in the fashion of an intelligence summary than of an entertainment with the discursions which added body to the tale and coin to the teller's purse. 'No, not here. There's a cove west a league of Downwind. Smugglers used it until the Beysib came. There are ruins there, older than anybody's sure. A temple, some other buildings. Nobody much uses them now, though the Smugglers'11 be back when things settle down, I suppose. But the boat from Death's Harbour will put in there at midnight. I think, sir. I tell stories for a living, and I've learned to sew them together from this word and that word I hear. But it doesn't usually matter if my pattern is the same one that the gods wove to begin with.'

'Well,' Samlor said after consideration, 'I don't think my first look at this place had better be after dark. There'll be a watchman or the like, I suppose ... but we'll deal with that when we find it. I -' he paused and looked straight at the younger man instead of continuing to eye the harbour. 'We agreed that your pay would be the full story when I had it to tell ... and you'll have that. But it may be I won't be talking much after tonight, so take this,' his clenched hand brushed Hort's flexed to empty into the other's palm, 'and take my friendship. You've - acted as a man in this thing, and you have neither blood nor honour to drive you to it.'

'One thing more,' said the youth. 'The Beysib - the Setmur clan, I mean - are real sailors, and they know their fishing, too ... But there are things they don't know about the harbourages here, around Sanctuary. I don't think they know that there's a tunnel through the east headland of the cove they've chosen for whatever they're going to do.' Hort managed a tight smile. Sweat beaded on his forehead. The risk he was taking by getting involved with the stranger was very real, though most of the specific dangers were more nebulous to him than they were to Samlor. 'One end of the tunnel opens under the corniche of the headland. You can row right into it at high tide. And when you lift the slab at the other end, you're in the temple itself.'

Hort's coda had drawn from his listener all the awed pleasure that a story well told could bring. The local man stood up, strengthened by the respect of a strong man. 'May your gods lead you well, sir,' Hort said, squeezing the Cirdonian's hand in leave-taking. 'I look forward to hearing your story.'

The youth strode out of the cantina with a flourish and a nod to the other patrons. Samlor shook his head. In a world that seemed filled with sharks and stonefish, Hort's bright courage was as admirable as it was rare.

To say that Samlor felt like an idiot was to understate matters. It was the only choice he could come up with at short notice, however, and which did not involve others. At this juncture, the Cirdonian was not willing to involve others.

He had rented a mule cart. It had provided a less noticeable method of scouting the cove than a horse would have done. The cart had also transported the punt he had bought to the nearest launching place to the headland that he could find. The roadstead on which Sanctuary was built was edged mostly by swamps, but the less-sheltered shore to the west had been carved away by storms. The limestone corniche rose ten to fifty feet above the sea, either sheer or with an outward batter. A lookout on the upper rim could often not see a vessel inshore but beneath him. That was to Samlor's advantage; but the punt, the only craft the Cirdonian felt competent to navigate, was utterly unsuited to the ocean.

Needs must when the devil drives. Samlor's great shoulders braced the pole against the cliff face, not the shelving bottom. Foam echoed back from the rocks and balanced the surge that had tried to sweep him inward with it. In that moment of stasis, Samlor shot the punt forward another twenty feet. Then the surf was on him again, his muscles flexing on the ten-foot pole as they transferred the sea's power to the rock, again and again.

Samlor had launched the punt at sunset. By now, he had no feeling for time nor for the distance he had yet to struggle across to his once-glimpsed goal. He had a pair of short oars lashed to the forward thwart, but they would have been totally useless for keeping him off this hungry shore. Samlor was a strong man, and determined; but the sea was stronger, and the fire in Samlor's shoulders was beginning to make him fear that the sea was more determined as well.

Instead of spewing back at him, the next wave continued to be drawn into the rock. It became a long tongue, glowing with microorganisms. Samlor had reached the tunnel mouth while he had barely enough consciousness to be aware of the fact.

Even that was not the end of the struggle. The softer parts ofth& rock had been worn away into edges that could have gobbled the skiff like a duckling caught by a turtle. Samlor let the next surge carry him in to the depth of his pole. The phosphorescence limned a line of bronze hand-holds set into the stone. The powerful Cirdonian dropped his pole into the boat to snatch a grip with both hands. He held it for three racking breaths before he could find the strength to drag the punt fully aground, further up the tunnel.

The tunnel was unlighted. Even the plankton cast up by the spray illuminated little more than the surfaces to which it clung. Samlor spent his first several minutes ashore striking a spark from flint and steel into the tinder he carried in a wax-plugged tube. At first his fingers seemed as little under his control as the fibres of the wooden pole they had clutched so fiercely. Conscious direction returned to them the fine motor control they would need later in the night.

By the time a spark brightened with yellow flame instead of cooling into oblivion, Samlor's mind was at work again as well. His shoulders still ached while the blood leached fatigue poisons out of his muscles. He had been more tired than this before, however. The very respite from wave-battering increased the Cirdonian's strength.

With the tinder aflame, Samlor lighted the candle of his dark lantern. Then, carrying a ten-gallon cask under one arm and the lantern in the other hand, he began to walk up the gently rising tunnel. The lantern's shutter was open, and its horn lens threw an oval of light before him.

The tunnel was not spacious, but a man of Samlor's modest height could walk safely in it by hunching only a little in his strides. He could not imagine who had cut the passage through the rock, or why. Scraps - a buckle, a broken knife; a boot even - suggested that the smugglers used it. Samlor could imagine few circumstances, however, in which it would pay smugglers to off-load beneath the surf-hammered corniche rather than in the shelter of the cove. For them, the tunnel might be useful storage; but the smugglers had not built it, and in all likelihood they had as little knowledge of its intended purpose as Samlor did, or Hort.

Samlor set down the cask at what he estimated was the halfway point along the tunnel. The cask had been an awkward burden in the narrow confines, and its weight of a talent or more was as much as a porter would be expected to carry for even a moderate distance. Because it used muscles in a way that the punt had not, however, the hundred yards Samlor had carried the cask were almost

relaxing.

The only thing certain about the escape he hoped to make in a few hours was that he would have very little time. Now the Cir-donian set the cask on end and drew his fighting knife. The blade was double-edged and a foot long. It was stout enough at the cross-hilt to take the shock of a sword and was sharpened to edges that would hold as they cut bronze, rather than something that its owner could shave with. Samlor had razors for shaving. The knife was a

different sort of tool.

He set the point at the centre of one of the end-staves, using his left hand to keep the weapon upright. The butt cap was bronze, flat on top, and a perfect surface for Samlor to hammer with the heel of his right hand. The blade hummed. The beechwood cracked and sagged away from the point. Working the knife loose, Samlor then punched across the grain of the other four end staves as well. The line of perforations did not quite open the cask, but they would permit him to smash his heel through the weakened boards quickly

when the need arose.

He was more aware than before of the lantern's hot shell as he paced the rest of the tunnel's length. He could hear someone above him when he reached the end of the tunnel. The susurrus could have been anything, wind-driven twigs as easily as the slippers of a guard on the floor above. There was a sharper sound to punctuate that whispering, however; a spear grounded as the man paused, or the tip of a bow. The stone conducted sounds very well, but it conducted them so well that Samlor could not get a precise fix on where the guard was in relation to the trap door. For that matter, the caravan-master had no idea of how well the upward-pivoting door was concealed. It might very well flop open in the centre of the room above.

The good news was that the sounds did not include speech. Either the guard was alone, or the party was more stolid than the random pacing seemed to suggest.

Samlor needed more information than he could get in the tunnel. There would be no better time to learn more. He shuttered his lantern and slid the worn bronze bolt from its socket in the door jamb. There were stone pegs set into the end wall as a sort of one-railed ladder. Samlor set his right foot on the midmost, where his leg was flexed just enough to give him its greatest thrust. His right hand held the dagger while his left readied itself on the trap door. Then the Cirdonian exploded upward like a spring toy.

As it chanced, the door was quite well hidden in an alcove, though the hangings that would once have completed the camouflage were long gone. There was no time to consider might-have-beens, no time for anything but the pantalooned Beysib who turned, membranes flicking in shock across his eyes. He was trying to raise his bow, but there was no time to fend Samlor away with the staff, much less to nock one of the bone-tipped arrows. Samlor punched the smaller man in the pit of the stomach, a rising blow, and the point of the long dagger grated on the Beysib's spine in exiting between his fourth and third ribs.

The Beysib collapsed backwards, his motion helping Samlor free the knife for another victim if one presented himself. None did. The nictitating membrane quivered over the Beysib's eyes. In better light, it would have shown colours like those on the skin of a dying albacore. The blow had paralysed the man's lungs, so that the only sound the guard made as he died was the scraping of his nails on the stone floor.

Samlor slid the body back through the trap door, from whence its death had sprung. He hoped the victim was not a friend of Hort; he sympathized with simple folk looking for solace apart from the establishment of such as Lord Tudhaliya. But they had made their bed when they stole a child from the House of Kodrix.

The temple had been a single, circular room. It was roofless now, and its girdle of fluted columns had fallen; but the curtain wall within those columns still stood to shoulder height or above. That wall had been constructed around only three-quarters of the circumference, however. A 90° arc looked out unimpeded on the waters of the cove, which lapped almost to the building's foundations.

And out at the mouth of the cove, its hull black upon the phosphorescence through which sweeps drove it languidly, was a trawler. The vessel's sail was furled because of the breeze that began to push against the rising ride when the land cooled faster than the sea.

There were sounds outside the temple. Mice, perhaps, or dogs; or even tramps looking for at least the semblance of shelter.

More likely not. Nothing Hort had said suggested that the ceremony planned for tonight would be limited to the boatload who had carried Star to Death's Harbour. Not all the Setmur would be involved, but at least a few others would slip in from the greater community. The tunnel was as good a hiding place as could be found; and if the guard had been placed in the temple, it was at least probable that Star would be brought to it by her captors.

Samlor slipped back the way he had come. He set the tip of the Beysib bow between the edge of the trap door and its jamb. That wedged the door open a crack, through which Samlor could hear better and see; and be seen, but the lights would be dim against discovery, and the alcove was some protection as well. Then Samlor waited, with a reptile's patience, and the chill certainty of a reptile as well.

The firstcomers were blurs bringing no illumination at all. Shawls, pantaloons like those the guard had worn, sweeping nervously through Samlor's field of vision. They chattered in undertones. Occasionally someone raised a voice to call what might have been a name: 'Shaushga!' The corpse stiffening at Samlor's feet made no reply.

Then a hull grated on the strand. There were more voices, and more of the voices were male. Water slopped between shore and hull as at least a dozen persons dropped over the trawler's gunwale. Then the temple floor rasped beneath the horn-hard soles of barefooted fishermen. A tiny oil lamp gleamed like the sun to light-starved eyes.

In the centre of the open room, a Beysib in red robes set down the burden he carried. It was Star, had to be Star. She was dressed also in red. Her hair had been plaited into short tendrils so that the blaze above her forehead seemed to have eight white arms.

'I don't want to,' the child cried distinctly. 'I want to go to bed.' She refused to support herself with her legs, curling to the pavement when the Beysib set her down.

The man in red and a woman as nondescript as the others in a brown and black shawl bent to the child. They spoke urgently and simultaneously in Beysib and a melange of local dialects. The latter were almost equally unintelligible to Samlor for the accent and poor acoustics. The man in red held Star by the shoulders, but he was coaxing rather than trying to force her to rise.

The trawler had been crabbed further into the cove so that Samlor could no longer see it from his vantage point. The Cir-donian held his body in a state of readiness, but at not quite the bowstring tautness of the instant before slaughter. There would be slaughter, nothing could be more certain than that; but for the moment, Samlor continued to wait. There were ten, perhaps twenty, Beysib within the temple wall at the moment. Some of them were between Star and the hidden door. That would not keep Samlor from striking if the need arose, but there was at least a chance that some of those now milling in the room would spread out if the ceremony began.

Star had gotten to her feet. She was pouting in the brief glimpse Samlor had of her face as she turned. He could not imagine how anyone had taken Star for the maid's daughter. Even the set other lips was a mirror of Samlane's.

The Beysib chattering ceased. Their feet brushed quickly to positions flanking the temple opening. It was much as Samlor had hoped. Star stretched her hands out, palms forward, towards the cove. The man in red was still with her, but the woman had joined the others just outside the building. Star began chanting in a bored voice. The syllables were not in any language with which Samlor was familiar. From the regularity of the sounds, it was possible that they were from no language at all, merely forming a pattern to concentrate nonverbal portions of the brain.

Samlor tensed. He had already chosen the spot through which his dagger would enter the kidneys of the man in red. Then, suddenly, Lord Tudhaliya's troopers swept into the gathering with cries of bloody triumph.

The security forces might have intended to take a few prisoners, but as Samlor bolted from his hiding place, he saw a woman cut in half. The trooper who killed her had a sword almost four feet long in the blade. His horizontal, two-handed cut took her in the small of the back and bisected her navel on the way out.

The troopers had approached dismounted, of course. Even so, they had shown abnormal skill for cavalrymen in creeping up among the ruins. There was no way of telling how many of them there were, but it was certainly more than the squad that had made the arrests that morning. Lights began to flare, dark lanterns like Samlor's own still hissing in the tunnel below.

The red-garbed Beysib bawled in horror and tried to enfold Star in his cloak, as if that would serve as any protection from what was about to happen. Samlor smashed the Beysib down with the dagger's hilt to his forehead, not from mercy, but because the point might have caught and held the weapon for moments the Cirdonian did not have to lose. Samlor grabbed the screaming child by the shoulder and spun for the tunnel mouth.

A Beysib cavalryman leaped from the crumbling wall. He was aiming a kick at Samlor's head.

The angle was different, but too many camels had launched feet at the caravan master for Samlor to be caught unprepared. The boot slashed by his ear as he pivoted. The Beysib's sword was cocked for a blow that the fellow had to hold until he landed, or he risked lopping off his own feet. The long weapon did nothing to keep the Beysib's momentum from impaling him on the Cirdonian dagger. Samlor slipped the hilt as it punched home. He tossed Star to the trap door and rammed her through as he jumped in himself.

When Samlor tried to bang the stone door to, a Beysib sword shot through the gap and kept the edges from meeting. Instead of tugging against the springy steel, Samlor let the Beysib's own pull open'the trap again. Samlor lunged upward through the opening. Before the sword could be transformed once more from a pry bar into a weapon, the Cirdonian had buried his boot knife in the trooper's throat.

The sword dropped into the tunnel as Samlor shot the bolt which closed the door. The last thing the caravan-master had seen before stone met stone was the face of Lord Tudhaliya turned to a fright mask by fury and speckles of blood. The Beysib noble was lunging to take the place of his dying trooper. His outstretched sword sang against the marble even as the bolt snicked home.

'Come on. Star, I'm your uncle!' Samlor shouted as he grabbed the nearest handful of the child. He did not particularly care whether she obeyed or even understood, for there was no time now to wait on a four-year-old's legs. He let the Beysib sword lie, because he needed his right hand for the lantern. Its unshuttered light seemed shockingly bright in the closeness. Samlor ran bent over, the girl under his arm as the cask had been when he came from the punt.

Even as Samlor's heels hit the floor on his second stride, hands and sword blades wrenched the bronze latch into fragments. A file of Beysib troopers with lamps and swords plunged into the tunnel behind Lord Tudhaliya.

Samlor's plan had been based on the assumption that his sudden assault would startle the gathering of fisher-folk and give him the thirty seconds or so that he needed to block his escape route. This security troop was as well-trained as any force the Cirdonian had encountered, and they were already primed to rip open hiding places. Presumably Tudhaliya thought he was after fugitives from the ceremony, but that mattered as little to him as it did to Samlor.

The Cirdonian smashed open the cask and kicked it over. The naphtha gushed across the stone, darkening it, and began to flow sluggishly back in the direction Samlor was fleeing. Samlor dared not ignite the fluid until he was clear of it. He took a stride and another stride, ignoring Star's wailing as her shoulder brushed the tunnel wall. The Cirdonian turned and flung his lantern towards the naphtha. Lord Tudhaliya batted the light back past the fugitives with the flat of his sword.

Then the second Beysib trooper stumbled over the cask and banged his own lamp down into the naphtha. The tunnel boomed into red life. It singed Samlor's eyebrows, even though Lord Tud-haliya shielded the Cirdonian from the worst of it.

The Beysib noble pitched forward. Samlor ran for the boat, clutching the child now in both arms. The capering fire threw their shadows down the tunnel ahead of them.

Samlor set Star in the stern of the punt and began shoving the vessel back towards the water. The sea had retreated since he dragged the punt out of it. While Samlor thrust at the boat, he glanced back over his shoulder. The blazing petroleum was creeping down the slope of the tunnel. Just ahead of it, his clothes afire but a sword gripped still in either hand, came Lord Tudhaliya. The swordsman's hair and flesh stank as they burned, but there are men whom no degree of pain will turn from a task. Samlor recognized the mind-set very well.

The Cirdonian still had a push dagger sheathed on his left wrist, but it was as useless against this opponent as the knives he had left in bodies cooling on the temple floor. Samlor snatched up the punt pole, sliding it forward in his grip. As Tudhaliya feinted with his left sword, Samlor thrust the pole into the centre of the Beysib's chest. With enough room to manoeuvre, Tudhaliya would have avoided the clumsy attack. Instead, his sluggish reflexes bounced him against the tunnel wall, and the end of the pole knocked him back into the spreading flames.

The Beysib stood up. Samlor poked at his groin, missed, but caught his opponent in the ribs with enough force to topple him again. Tudhaliya's swords snicked from either side, inches short of where Samlor gripped the pole. Chips flew, but the pole was seasoned ash and as thick as a man's wrist. Samlor thrust himself away, and the Beysib recoiled on to his back in the fire.

The naphtha sucked a fierce breeze from the tunnel to feed its flames. The glare flickered now around Tudhaliya's face, as instinct forced him to breathe. There was no help in that influx, only red tendrils that shrank lung tissues and blazed back out of Tudhaliya's mouth as he finally screamed.

'My sweet, my love,' Samlor whispered as he turned back to the girl. 'I'm going to take you home, now.' The punt's flat bottom jounced easily over the stone as if the executioner's death had doubled the rescuer's strength.

'Are you taking me back to Mama Reia?' Star asked. She had watched Tudhaliya die with great eyes, which she now focused on Samlor.

The man splashed beside the boat for a few paces while the shingle foamed. Then he hopped aboard and thrust outwards for the length of the pole. Since the tide had turned, there was no longer need to fend off from the corniche. When they were thirty feet out, the Cirdonian set down the pole and worried loose the lashings of his oars with his spike-bladed push dagger. 'Star,' he said, now that he had leisure for an answer, 'Maybe we'll send for Reia. But we're going back to your real home - Cirdon. Do you remember Cirdon?' Inexpertly, the caravan-master began to fit the looms through the rope bights that served the punt for oarlocks.

Star nodded with solemn enthusiasm. She said, 'Are you really my uncle?'

Poling had raised and burst blisters on both Samlor's hands. The salt-crusted oar handles ground like acid-tipped glass as he began the unfamiliar task of rowing. 'Yes,' he said. 'I promised your mother - your real mother. Star, my sister ... I promised her -' and this was true, though Samlane was two years dead when her brother shouted the words to the sky - 'that I'd take care of oh. Oh, Mother Heqt. Oh, to have brought us so close.'

Lord Tudhaliya had not trusted his men on the shore to sweep up the cultists. Someone in the boat Tudhaliya had stationed off the headland had seen the man and child. The Beysib craft was a ten-oared cutter. It began to close the distance from the first strokes that roiled the phosphorescence and brought the cutter to Samlor's attention.

An archer stood upright in the cutter's bow. His first shot was' wobbly and short by fifty of the two hundred yards. He nocked another shaft, and the cutter pulled closer.

Samlor dropped his oars. He knelt and raised his hands. He did not trust his balance to standing up. 'Star,' he said, 'I'm afraid that these men have caught us after all. If I try to get away, something bad may happen to you by accident. And I can't fight them, I don't have any way to fight so many.'

Star peered over her shoulder at the Beysib cutter, then turned back to Samlor. 'I don't want to go with them. Uncle,' she said pettishly. 'I want to go back to Cirdon. I want to play in the big house.'

'Honey,' Samlor said, 'sweetest ... I'm sorry. But we can't do that now, because of that boat.' The cutter was too big to overturn, the caravan-master was thinking. But perhaps if he jumped into the larger boat with his push dagger, in the confusion they might -

The Beysib archer pitched into the water.

It was a moment before Samlor realized that the man had fallen forward because the cutter had come to an abrupt halt beneath him. The swift craft had thrown up a bone of glowing spray. Now the spray's remnant curled forward and away from the cutwater as a diminishing furrow on the sea.

'Now can we go to Cirdon, Uncle?' the little girl asked. She lowered the hands she had turned towards the cutter. Either her voice had dropped an octave, or the caravan-master's mind was freezing down in sudden terror. The white tendrils of Star's hair blazed and seemed to writhe.

The cutter's bow lifted. The boat disappeared stern-first with a rush and a roar and the screams of her crew. A huge, sucker-blotched tentacle uncoiled a hundred feet skyward, then plunged back into the glowing sea.

Samlor's hands found the oars again. His mind was ice, and his muscles moved like flows of ice. 'Yes, Star,' he heard his voice say. 'We can go back to Cirdon now.'