The Belly of the Wolf Lens Of The World, Book 3 R.A. MacAvoy 1994 ISBN: 0-380-71018-8 Praise for R. A. MacAVOY’s LENS OF THE WORLD Trilogy: “SHEER ENTERTAINMENT ... THE ART OF STORYTELLING AT ITS BEST” Orson Scott Card, Fantasy & Science Fiction “A STORY TOLD FLAWLESSLY, in prose that is still more flawless, and laid in a world that reminds one of a cut gem.” Chicago Sun-Times “Skillfully plays with some of the best known conventions of heroic fantasy ... MacAvoy succeeds in putting a fresh spin on all these familiar elements, bringing to her tale a sense of beauty and truth that lifts LENS OF THE WORLD well above the standard fantasy fare.” San Francisco Chronicle “A WORK OF SOARING IMAGINATION ... MacAvoy has always been a good writer; with this she becomes an outstanding one.” Morgan Llywelyn, author of Lion of Ireland “TRULY A WRITER OF TALENT AND PROMISE” Washington Post Book World “FASCINATING ... MacAvoy mingles past eras with a fantasist’s imagination and a historian’s mastery of the telling detail.” Locus “PROVOCATIVE, COMPLEX ... Where most fantasy adventures deal out magic in bold strokes, MacAvoy’s novels exhibit a more elusive quality.” Library Journal “COLORFUL, INVENTIVE, RICH IN DETAIL AND WELL-WRITTEN” James P. Blaylock, author of The Stone Giant “GRACEFUL, UNDERSTATED AND VIVID. Anyone who doubts that fantasy can be literary, artistic, thoughtful and genuinely moving need only follow Nazhuret’s adventures to learn otherwise.” Publishers Weekly. “ROBERTA MacAVOY IS ONE OF THE BEST AND MOST INNOVATIVE WRITERS TO COME OUT OF THE 80s ... The reader remains engrossed from the first few pages” OtherReahns “Its style, quite unlike that of the usual fantasy, rivets attention, and the story is one which remains in the mind.” Andre Norton, author of Mirror of Destiny “MacAVOY HAS JUST ABOUT EVERY SKILL OF THE ACCOMPLISHED FANTASIST AT HER COMMAND AND DISPLAYS THEM ALL” Booklist “AN APPEALING AND GRATIFYING TRILOGY ... Quiet, unpretentious, vivid” Kirkus Reviews “HER WRITING IS AS FINELY HONED AS EVER ... I eagerly await Ms. MacAvoy’s next.” The New York Times Book Review At that time we were living in Canton, my daugh-ter and I, in what is said to be the largest port in the world. The Carttoners justify this, claim by equating the Harbor with the entire country. Considering the shape of the land and water (mostly water) that makes up Canton, I will give them no argument. We were residing at the medical college, where I was translating manuscripts and she was pretending not to teach, when I read, in a newspaper that King Ru-dof of Velonya was dead. I remember I was in a coffee shop, and the paper I was reading (I have good vision for my age) was not mine, but belonged to my neighbor to the left. There was some small disagreement about the pos-session of the paper, which in my astonishment and shock I did not notice. When I became aware of my-self again, I was holding the owner, of the paper with his hand locked behind his back in violation of both his rights and his dignity. I remedied both of these slights with money, for the Cantoners have a very commercial sense of honor, and I took the paper out-side. I sat on a box, I think, and I am fairly certain there was a ship unloading only a hundred feet away, across the stone paving of Wharf Promenade. There were cries in the air: sailors’ or birds’, I don’t re-member. It was as though this news had ripped me out from the fabric of my life and set me down once more in a place of perfect quiet, perfect misery—ears ringing, sun too bright. I knew this place well since Arlin’s death. The article itself was short. It said the king had died in the capital, in his bed. In his bed, it said. I could see that bed behind my closed eyes: his fath-er’s bed and his father’s before that, too narrow and short for a man of Rudof s build and habits. I had been allowed to visit him of a morning in his royal rat’s nest, where half the covers were in a ball and the other half on the floor. He was a man who threw darts at the bedposts to punctuate his conversation. Whose feet poked holes in linen sheets. My king, my fellow student, closer than brother. I felt the back of my head strike the bricks of the wall, for I was rocking in place like a child with fe-ver. Huge man, quick and fiery, he had held my life in his hands, forfeit by law again and again, and he had let me fly free—he who could never himself be free. Words like these tumbled around my head, but they were only words, not real feeling. Not yet. Dr. Keighl found me there, I don’t know how long after. “I see I can bring you no news,” he said. I answered him. “You can tell me if it’s true.” The doctor sat down beside me on the crate, all in his frock coat and gabardine trousers. Even at the time I knew it a great condescension on his part “In over a year of running argument, Professor Na-zhuret, we have not been able to agree upon the na-ture of truth. What now do you expect of me? I will say I have heard it from sources other than this poor sheet.” He called me “professor” because the university here had deigned to grant me an honorary degree of Master of Arts some years since. I had no say in the matter. Knowing better, I had to ask, “Then, there is no chance ... ?” “There is always a chance.” I had asked for a platitude and had gotten one. “The news must be two weeks old, at least,” I thought aloud, and Keighl answered, “Three, I am told. The Velonyan government concealed the death for over a day, and then the winter winds make shipping slow.” It took some moments for his words to form meaning in my brain. I heard the gulls; they were very loud. “The government concealed the death?’ I looked into the doctor’s eyes, trying to be calm, to see clearly. “Does rumor say who killed him?” With this, Doctor Keighl’s figure seemed to open up, to gain movement and life, as though I had served up for him what was the real meat of the conversation. “Of course, it is bandied about that the Old Ve-lonyan faction did it.” “How? The paper gave no hint.” “Poison,” said the doctor diffidently. Poison could be a rending agony, or a mere falling asleep. Which had occurred meant a lot to me. I asked him what poison, and the question caused surprise. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “But I would bet money that it was the queen’s party that did it.” I sighed, thinking that Navvie must be told. I hoped she did not know already, had not heard off-handedly, as I had. “Isn’t it curious,” I said to the doctor, since he seemed so interested in the matter, “that it should be called the Old Velonyan Party, when the queen is not a Velonyan of any sort, old or new.” Then, with great sobriety, Doctor Keighl asked me what I planned to do in response to this atrocious deed. I glared at him in alarm. “Do! What on earth can I do, my dear doctor? Throw the government of Velonya into prison as a whole? Cut them to ribbons individually? What?” The look of expectation on his moderate, oval Cantoner face did not fade. “I don’t know. But I have heard about you. So much about you.” I was looking at my hands, which were clasped in front of me. Smaller hands than average, with skin slightly loosened by fifty-live years of life. I showed him those hands, as though they would communi-cate something to the man, and then I gave up on self composure and ran off to find my daughter. Canton is an easy town to run in, as all the streets are even and wide. There is poverty here, but not as much as elsewhere. There is aristocracy here, but it does not get in the burghers’ way. Most notably, Canton is dean. Though the colors of its flag stand for water, its true banner should represent a win-dowbox of flowers. When its citizens curse (as they cursed me smashing through them along the streets), they do it with moderation and without originality. I passed along Provot Street, which was all ware-houses, and across the Mariner’s Park and the Old Mariner’s Shelter, where one fellow passed a witty comment concerning the sight of a man my age pumping his short legs so energetically. (He, like me, a foreigner. ) The university has a large brick gate with no wall but only a short hedge surrounding it. Because the gate was clogged with dons in uniform, I did not attempt it but leaped the roses. Here the response was more outraged and less witty, because univer-sity instructors tend to regard their institution with the sobriety others reserve for cemeteries. I seem to be making this whole incident into a joke, and I can-not say why. By this time I was in pain enough, The lecture halls were closed for the midday meal, so I ran on to the herb museum, where Nahvah had employment “arranging” the exhibits. In truth, her job was to take a large library of specimens, which over the years had been labeled and glassed by the methods of superstition and pure chance, and to match the correct plant to its Allec and vernacular names. Among my daughter’s gifts is a power of memory. She was not in the display hall; few students were. I found her in the less impressive but more useful drying houses on the building’s flat roof. She was seated on a simple wooden chair, her hands in her lap and her feet folded under her skirts. I had not succeeded in finding her first. “I am so sorry, Papa,” she said. By her voice she had been crying. She was not crying now. “I know how you must hurt.” The smell of the fresh herbs around us was intox-icating. There was anise and coriander seed, giving a festive, sweet-biscuit note to the air, and beneath that odor something of the feeling of the forest floor in autumn. I knelt beside the chair to look at her closely. “But you, little academician. You are all right?” Navvie’s hair is black and thick and her eyelashes so profuse as to make her eyes seem smudged. Set within these ovals of darkness are eyes of a blue as pale as my own. Her glance is like clear sky glimpsed through black weather. My own mother I saw only once that I remember, and that time was in a dream of some sort. Yet Nahvah looks remark-ably like that dream-image, even to her littleness. “I am reasonably all right,” she said. “But— though he was your friend, Papa, he was my own godfather. I knew him all my life.” Godfathers can be important relations, or trivial ones. Rudof took his godfatherhood very seriously. We had many arguments over the matter of gifts. Sometimes I won, but there was a closet of rich dresses at the statehouse in Velonya that Navvie wore only to visit the king. They embarrassed her. She would not have to wear them again. I sat at her feet, my chin on my knees, slightly faint from the odor of the herbs and the exhaustion of sorrow. From this level I could see that Navvie was wearing her pistol in her waistband. Usually she stuffed it in her purse. “He told me to call him ‘uncle.’ I was six years old, but already I knew that was dangerous, because the other children in the court grew jealous.” “Children were not exactly the problem, but you were right, dear. It was dangerous.” “So I never called him that when there were other people in the room, and he didn’t correct me. So he must have known, too. That it wasn’t a good idea. After a year or so, I pretended to forget.” “So did he,” I answered her, though Rudof had never told me of this. “But he would have liked to have a daughter. Or a son that loved him.” Navvie sighed and her hand sought out the pis-tol’s butt. “I think he was easier to love as a godfa-ther than, he would have been as a father. So. What are we to do now?” It was Arlin’s gift to change mood so smoothly from the painful to the practical that my mind would stumble, trying to keep up. Navvie has taken , on a lot of her mother’s traits, now that she is grown. I still—stumble to keep up.— I pointed at the pistol. “Do you think Rudofs death affects our security, girl? Down here in Can-ton?” “There is no security,” she replied, quoting Powl, whom she can barely remember. “Not anywhere on this earth. But I am carrying this because the new barrel is promised for today. I am to be at the smith’s this afternoon.” As I stood up I slipped the pistol away from her and looked it over. “Were you planning to exchange the barrels with a shot in the chamber?” Navvie put out her hand and I gave the thing back to her. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Navvie. If the day feels like that to you, keep the pistol loaded. My own feelings are too discorded for use.” — We took our midday at one of Canton’s coffee and pastry shops, which are far superior to the inns of my home, except that they serve a bad beer., Until Navvie mentioned the fact, I did not notice I had not eaten my dinner at all. I remember being amazed at this, and wondering whether somehow the waiter had changed my plate for a joke. I wrapped the pie in a clean handkerchief, and if I recall correctly, threw it out two days later when I encountered it in my coat pocket. The day’s inertia took us to the smithy afterward. Gunsmithery is another aspect in which Canton leaves the North behind. I am old enough to have no feeling for guns. The two-man harquebus of my youth was as like to blow off the head of the wielder as that of his opponent. And also, back at Sordaling School, we were taught a gun was no weapon for an officer, let alone gentry or knight. But the rough tools of my youth bear little resemblance to Navvie’s pistols. She has had always an affinity for powder-weapons, which she got neither from Arlin nor my-self. Perhaps it is her slightness and lack of reach that makes a, pistol more appealing to Navvie than a sword, or brawling hand-to-hand. Perhaps the noise, speed, and violence of the things make a bal-ance with the labor and compassion she exerts in her medical work. She herself says it is only the future catching up with us, and I try to catch up with Nav-vie as she studies with one gunmaker after another. Four countries’ worth, so far. The state of the craft in Canton was formidable. From J. Sninden of the Parade Wharf came the first pistols of standardized bore caliber, and the first presses that created leads that would fit them. It was to Sninden’s we went now, but what Nav-vie had in mind was , a few steps in advance of the common pistol. She had seen a weapon in Bologhini that could be loaded, like a fine cannon, from the rear of the bar—rel. This would add rapidity to the firing and make it possible for the user to see his packing directly, we were told. It did not work; in fact, the barrel-slide flew farther than the bullet and in a very dif-ferent direction. Nonetheless, the idea stole my daughter’s fancy, and she had been thinking about it for two years. In an attempt to prolong her life, so had I. The workshop smelled so of burned powder that it reminded me of a battlefield, and the tragedy of the day made that association more vivid. Navvie had never seen a battlefield, though, and she had the resilience of youth, so she strode across the room with anticipation, kicking her long skirts with every step. “Jonshen, did you do it? Is it ready?” Jonshen Sninden is half-deaf, for obvious reasons, but like many another he could hear what he wanted to hear. He came out of the back room, his hands blackened and his leather apron brightened with shavings of steel. “I didn’t know if you’d be here, little girl,” he said, and then he saw me and bowed, touching his forehead as though I were somebody. “Yes, I have a barrel to try, and it fits your daddy’s slug-casket. No more than that can I say.” My “slug-casket” was simply a barrel within the barrel to direct the explosion forward and away from the opening on the top and back, so near to the shooter’s (my daughter’s) face. It held the powder and the wad and was topped with the pellet. It was to be made of steel, but I had no tools that would bore steel and no fire to melt steel, so the experi-mental type was of brass. Despite the fact that the presence of the casing meant the volume of powder and weight of shot had to be small, my own hand-iwork terrified me, and I was glad to see that Snin-den had set up a vise to hold the butt of the pistol, and a target backed by a sandbox to receive the pel-let. At my encouragement, he added bags of sand around the barrel and a string, the latter to pull the trigger at a distance. I think both Sninden and Nav-vie thought me a spoilsport. We stood in the doorway to the room behind, and had I my way, we would have closed the door and run the string through the keyhole. Sninden offered the pull to Navvie, as she was instigator of this experiment, but she told him she was not attached to the moment, and I heard foot-steps coming up the stairs behind us as he pulled the string. The reverberation was sharper than I expected, and accompanied by the thunk of the lead into the target and a short screech from the tall, well-dressed man behind us. He recovered himself. “Doctor Na-zhuret?” The gunsmith and my daughter deserted me. “Mr. Kavenen,” I said, to be difficult. “The doc-torate is honorary.” He had recovered himself. He sniffed around ap-preciatively as he crossed the room to me. “Powder. What a masculine smell. Well, need we be strangers to honor, Mister Doctor Nazhuret Kavenen?” He was very tall, and enjoyed standing close. Feeling even more difficult now, I wanted to tell him that only the name Timet went with the name Kavenen, whereas “Nazhuret” was fitted with the suffix “aid’Nahvah: aminsanaur.” I escaped making myself such a fool, for I recognized the gentleman. He was Lord Damish: aristocrat functionary of the burgher-driven Cantoner Council. I had hung over that council in the visitor’s gallery, where every hu-man being had the right to watch proceedings, and heard the seventy-six councilors in their flat, Can-toner voices debate their infinite question of tariffs. The house of Damish is like the skin of the totemic lion: powerless but kept around to flourish when real authority lacks color. “My lord, what can I do for you?” I asked, to cut through the politesse. I wanted to be left alone today. I wanted to see what the explosion had done. I feared Sninden and my daughter would be carried away by enthusiasm and do it again, this time with-out me. He bowed, leaning over my head. “I come to offer you the sympathies of the state, sir. In your loss.” I almost laughed at the idea of a state having sym-pathies. Most nations seem to have only the most selfish of emotions, and Canton had none at all, only rates and tariffs. I asked the man how he had chosen me for his condolences, and he said, “It’s common knowledge you were one of King Rudof’s dosest friends. That you knew him from school.” “No, I didn’t,” I answered, and I crooked a finger for him to follow me into the dim, armored room where Sninden and Nahvah were bent over the bar-rel of the breechloader. “It worked splendidly,” said the gunsmith. “We can’t get the casing out now,” added Navvie, who has no more courtesy than I have. “I’m working on it with a pry.” I approached the steel barrel and felt it. I put my hand on the flange of brass at the bottom of the slug-casket. “Watch, Papa. It’s still hot,” she said, and I re-turned that I believed her. I blew down the barrel, forcefully, getting a faceful of stink and oily dirt, and I heard her say the thing was coming out. The little casing looked sound, except for the dis-coloration where the primer had struck powder and the smears of brightness where it had been forced from the barrel. Sninden was magnificent at ignoring the lordship in his gallery. “The idea is sound, girl. Only the slug-casket needs to be reduced in size a trifle.” “Then it won’t block the backfire, and we’ll be where we started, with blown breeches and split bar-rels.” The council lord plucked my sleeve and I was led again into the display room. “You subject your daughter to that stench and noise, sir?” He was ready to make a joke about it. A friendly joke. “No, I abhor guns. She subjects me,” I answered, and once again I asked the state’s man—the stately man—what he wanted of me. Lord Damish stared at me a long moment and then asked very plainly what I was planning to do about the death of King Rudof. I had resented the man’s, artificiality, but I re-sented more his pointed honesty. “He is dead, I’m told,” I answered, “and it’s too late to do’ anything at all about it.” Dead. “If it is dead, then it had better pass out,” had said Arlin, about a miscarriage. Arlin, too, was dead. Could one word stop so much? “Are you planning to return home?” I told him I had no plans. That was true enough. I might have as perfectly told him that I had no home. “I ask because Canton is concerned. Canton is con-cerned because Lowcanton is concerned. It’s not vul-gar curiosity on my part.” I shrugged. “I’m sure it is nothing vulgar, on any-one’s part but, my lord, I still have no plans.” The tall lord sighed. “I obviously came too soon. Please send for me when you have thought.” He stalked the length of the room and then bowed. “Duke Timet.” Then he bowed again. “Arninsan-aur.” I heard him going down the stairs. Navvie was at my back, as was Sninden. “Papa, you have more sets of names than anyone I know.” “He certainly put me in my place with them,” I said, and Si ‘linden dropped the cooled brass casing in my hand. That evening the port of Canton was more beautiful than I had ever seen it. The quiet water, deep enough not to be muddied by traffic, lapped at the multitude of piers. The wavelets were bright and the piers were black, in a pattern like winter branches against the sky. The real sky was washed in flesh colors: pink, ivory, and sallow, and someone hidden was playing, a reed box with tinny, lonely sounds. I sat on the upper floor balcony of our little house, halfway between grief and sulking, for there was nothing in this landscape to remind me of my dead friend and king, and it seemed unfair to have no tools for my mourning. Lights came on in the streets below, because Can-ton is too busy to close down at sunset; its commerce goes daily until exhaustion. It seemed to me I had never given Rudof half enough in recompense for all he had done for me. I remembered all the times I had paraded my refusal of the simplest duties a subject owes his king. I would not war for him; I would not accept his au-thority over me nor the authority he wished me to take up over others. What was it I had said to my king, on our first meeting, on the southern marches of Zaquashlon? “Let us not stop here like fools dis-cussing my accent ...” Why was I still alive and free after all that? He had been known as a touchy man. A redhead. His only surviving son was a redhead also, and the boy had never appreciated my qualities. The boy was now a man: the king of Velonya. I was not en-tirely unhappy to be away from Velonya as he as-cended the throne. Navvie was standing at the balcony with me. Her hands gripped the balustrade and she allowed her feet to swing between the uprights. There were green stains on her fingers and she bore a smell of crushed grass. “I don’t know if the railing is safe,” I said. “It will hold my weight,” she answered, with the complacency of the very small. “Or do you think I should be acting my age?” This was so ridiculous I didn’t respond. Nothing I have taught Nahvah has had anything to do with acting one’s age. “By my age,” she continued dreamily, looking at the thirty-foot drop beneath her, “I am really a hope-less old spinster.” My daughter is twenty-seven, though she looks fourteen. I asked her if she even knew how to spin, with the idea she would turn—a toe-pirouette on the wooden slats and then laugh, and maybe then I could laugh, too. But Navvie did not give me that laugh. She just shook her head. “No. Mother did not remember how, so she could not teach me. Unless you mean spinning a blade.” “Still, that’s a form, of spinning. I suppose you qualify as a spinster—and will even if you marry.” “Marriage doesn’t run in my family,” Navvie said calmly. “Neither my mother nor my father ever mar-ried. “That was just a joke,” she added, after staring at my face. “Please, Papa. Just a joke,” There was very little light outdoors by now, and I left the piers and the ocean for lamp-lit rooms and dinner. I was thinking of young Jeram as much as I was Rudof that evening, wondering what effect the po-litical turmoil would have on his troublesome little philosophy, which the boy called a religion and which he blamed on me. Of ttimes I have wanted to hang Jeram, for his enthusiasm was only matched by his ability to miss the essence of things. I did not want anyone else to hang Jeram, though. What a miserable shame it would be if he died for a teaching he didn’t even understand. Navvie opened a bottle of wine. I did not know when she had purchased this luxury; I was too de-pressed at the moment to ask. In retrospect I guess she had the bottle ready to celebrate the success of her breech pistol, and instead it went to help us drown the sorrow of Rudof’s death. Navvie’s mother used to while away the time put-ting dagger holes in rented furniture. Navvie herself always leaves things in better condition than when she found them. Our souls come out of a grab bag, I think, and our parents have limited power to en-dow or influence. Tonight Navvie seemed to be mending and freshening clothes. I watched her, scarcely seeing. “The church, Papa? Is that what’s bothering you? Your expression is more peeved than grieved.” “Rudof has certainly peeved me as well as grieved me, child. But you’re right. I am wondering whether your friend Jeram’s silliness has gotten him into final trouble.” Navvie sighed at me as I often have sighed at her. Or her mother at both of us. “It isn’t fair to blame Jeram on me, Zhurrie, just because we are both of an age. It’s you he reveres. Besides”—she stacked three folded blouses and pounded the pile flat-“‘The Belly of the Wolf’” is not entirely silly. If he hasn’t understood your practice very well, you haven’t spent much time teaching him.” I protested that I hadn’t wanted to teach him at all. It had not seemed appropriate. “But he refused to understand that. He broadcasts his own lessons like grass seed, come stone or soil. And he did not hesitate to set himself up as a teacher before anyone complimented him on his wisdom.” Navvie finally gave me the giggle I wanted. “Oh, poor man, if he had to wait for compliments, he’d be tripping on his beard before he could start to lec-ture. He waited so long to be taken seriously. Es-pecially by you.” The wine was bright and rough, probably produce of Canton itself. “I fear that the Norwess Provincial Assembly will be taking him more seriously than he’d like, from now on . “.. . If the crown party leans on them,” I con-cluded, and for a moment the wine was like blood in my throat. “I know,” said Navvie. The last veil of numbness ripped away, and I was no longer able to pretend this death—this assassi-nation—this murder had nothing to do with me, or with the people I touch. “We shall probably have to do something about all this,” I said. I looked at Nav-vie through the ruddy lens of the wineglass, and I saw what she was doing. “I know,” she said again. “That’s why I’ve been packing.” It was the middle of the night when I woke, out of a dream not about Rudof but concerning Arlin, who was explaining to me why she would not return with me on the wharfside horsecar. It had something to do with the weight the poor beasts could pull, I remember, and I was telling her she had grown so thin with the cough the horses wouldn’t feel her. She held out an omnibus card stub, saying, “One trip is all you get for your ticket,” and she walked out, an-kle-deep, into the sandy water. Her intransigence made me angry, but when I woke I was not angry but wet-eyed, and there was someone moving about on the downstairs floorboards. I had given up carrying my dowhee on the over-civilized streets of Canton, but had not lost the habit of putting it under my bed at night. At the top of the staircase was a shape, but I knew that shape; Navvie was not the source of this mid-night disturbance. From birth she moved without noise: an astonishment to her mother, her father, and their teacher as well. She also had the good ears of youth. In Navvie’s right hand was a pistol—not the ex-perimental weapon but a serviceable thing we kept loaded in the closet of her room. In her left hand was one of her mother’s beautiful, nasty throwing knives. “There are two,” she murmured in my ear. “They are looking for the staircase.” Incompetent. Or perhaps the intruders had not been given time by their employers to prepare for this—what? This kidnapping, murder? I made a quiet suggestion into Navvie’s ear as the first of the two found the stairs. We withdrew, she to the lav-atory doorway, and I to the shadows at the end of the hall. The men carried razors, which caught the slim light coming through the hall window. My dowhee’s gray blade did not. As the second of the assassins (for so I had to call them), came tiptoeing past the head of the stairs, I struck him hard with the pom-mel of the dowhee and the sound rang in the air like a spoon against a wooden bowl. He grunted and died thereby, for his companion spun around in re-flex with his razor out and slit half the man’s face and half his throat. .I think he died unconscious. There was a good opportunity to take the other one down while he stared at the work he had done, but I did not want to la him if I could avoid it. My dowhee had almost three times the reach of his blade, and I knew my house. He was soaked and spattered with blood, and it ran in his eyes. Blinking, he made a screaming charge for me and I struck at the razor with my heavy blade and deflected it. Then the assassin’s screaming was drowned out by a, huge report and his bloodstained face was orange-lit and I heard the small but distinct splat of his shoulder joint explod-ing. He screamed again. “You made it hard to get in a shot, Papa,” said Navvie. Methodically, she checked the barrel for wadding, tested its temperature, and stuck the pistol into the sash of her nightrobe. I went out to find a militiaman, leaving Navvie with one drained body and a bound, wounded man with a very foul mouth. Navvie had seen it all before, and sometimes her father felt very unhappy about this. When I said as much, she told me being a doctor was harder on the nerves than any scrape I’ve gotten her into. I would like to believe this. , The militiaman, as I recall, was an immigrant from Morquenie: a blond Velonyan. He charged up the staircase and was sick on the hallway carpet runner. After that, many other militiamen came, and we were made to tell our story a number of times, and our sullen prisoner was taken away. His shoulder was a ruin, because of the soft lead Navvie uses in her pistols, but it had been neatly cleaned and bound. The rug soaked in the blood of his fellow would never be usable again. “They were agents of Lowcanton,” said Navvie as we rolled the carpet up and pushed it out an upper window. “I-Iired in Boxan last week. They were sup— posed to do us in two days ago, but the weather made passage slow.” The best thing about our borrowed house was the water tank in the lavatory, which gave us water on demand both in the kitchen and upstairs. Navvie pumped for me and helped me try to remove blood-stains from my nightshirt. “He didn’t say a damn thing in front of the militia,” I said. “Nor in front of me,, unless you count his expletives.” She smiled. The expression was softened by her youth and by candlelight, but I suspected it was the predatory smile of Navvie’s mother that I was see-ing. I remembered my dream again. “Of course not. Assassins rarely betray their masters. But to me it wasn’t betrayal, but bragging. I didn’t count. Not a . . . a little thing like me.’ Now, there was no mistak-ing the quality of Navvie’s smile. “So, Papa. This answers the question of whether the king’s death was murder, doesn’t it?” I dried my hands and dabbed the towel against my cold, wet shirt. “We still can’t be certain about that.” She laughed. “All right. I will bet you ten tepels against your three tepels that we discover it was murder, and connected with this attempt upon us.” I told her I did not enjoy betting, and she laughed at me again. Her mother’s laugh. We were out of that house before sunrise. When I was young I had no difficulty parting with things. I had no things of my own, and it seemed the world was so cluttered with useful and curious objects that I would bang into all I needed, even if blindfolded, and that I would lose them, too. My teacher’s warnings about the impermanence of things in life seemed no more than attempts to con-vince me that snow was white. Now that I am past fifty, I know the pain of ad-mitting that. I can’t take things into tomorrow: not that mitered glass cutter, that single-spotted puppy, that perfectly balanced knife, that book of ephem-era, that shirt with double-turned seams (not too long in the sleeves, for once), that dear and closest friend, and that Nazhuret. To be accurate, the last of these I have lost so many times I’m never sure I have him. No grief there. The cutter, the knife, and the shirt were left behind in Canton. The puppy was left earlier—he found a home with a young lady at the Rezhmian court five years ago. The book of ephemera I still have by me, waiting its turn, but at this time Arlin was almost four years dead. 20  it A. MacAvoy So civilized was this city that we effected our secret escape on an omnibus car, both of us carrying a dowdy bag made of carpeting and an odd-shaped canvas case filled with odd things: a survey tripod, two small telescopes, and an assortment of glass and swords. I had wanted Navvie to bring along her Cantonese collection of medical and surgical tools, but with the ruthlessness of youth she had pro-nounced them replaceable. I do not know now whether she noticed I had packed them all away with my clothing. My dream of the night before came very dearly to me as the four huge horses pulled the vehide over the flat, flat pavements toward the university. There were no hills in Canton: no reason to get out and walk. There was no one using this route but us and our luggage; not even the dawn colors were up for the day. I had a distinct feeling of farewell toward this-gray stone, the heavy blond horses, the dark and sensible driver, dressed so much better than a man of his station could dress in Velonya. I had liked the city. Navvie and I left our luggage in a heap blocking the stone walk by the arts quadrangle. She went to find the Medical Dean while I made my excuses to the Warden of Philosophy, by whose invitation we were in the university and in Canton. He was not surprised at my leaving. He said that in the last twenty-four hours I had become unusually popular, but that he could not venture to say whether that ought to make me stay or to hurry. Lord Damish, I thought, and said the name aloud. “Count Sibold,” the warden answered, astonish-ing Me. Sibold was not a count of Canton; the city-state has only vestigial nobility. He was Lowcantoner. Once he was ambassador to Velonya, and in Ves— tinglon I had met him and judged him dangerous. Now both he and I had come to Canton. There was a bird singing, though it was midwin-ter. I went to the warden’s deep window and sat on the sill. “The ambassador himself? Or do you mean one of his men?” “I mean Sibold. He came dressed like an honest burgher instead of a count.” “I knew an earl, once,” I said, still seeking the bird among the skeletal locust trees of the quad, “who dressed more like a burgher than the richest brewer ever born.” “I know,” said the warden, with a hint of warmth. read your book.” I felt a moment’s shock and leaned my forehead against the glass. “I didn’t publish that history,” I said, holding back a dozen sharper retorts. “A young idiot named Jeram did. Out of personal let-ters.’ This sullenness was not fair of me. The warden had invited us to his country, paid for a great deal, and now was put into political danger with us. I started to apologize, and he started to wave it aside when another thought occurred to me and I inter-rupted myself. I asked the warden when Count Sibold had been by—yesterday or today. He said yesterday, late. Af-ter the campus had begun to buzz with the news of King Rudof’s death. The warden was a large man, probably of north-ern heritage, like so many in the city. He came to sit next to me on the window seat, his academic robes of red and gray spilling over the open window and down the outer bricks. (In Canton only the univer-sity doesn’t dress like an honest burgher.) “I did not tell him where you were staying,” he said to me. “I told him you and your daughter had moved out of guest housings into your own estab-lishment.” I had to grin at this spark of conspiracy, coming from a man like the Warden of Philosophy. “But it was no secret: where we lived,” I said. “True. But Canton does not tell Lowcanton. Not for free,” he said. Among these honest burghers, it is more than a proverb. Navvie was not with the luggage, so I trotted over to the school of medicine, which being practical and useful is not permitted on the university proper. There, amidst the odors of blood and opium, I walked in upon her being embraced by the dean’s first assistant. Navvie did not appear either involved in or an-gered by the young man’s display, so I did not feel obliged to intervene or to withdraw. After a few mo-ments, during which he poured tearful entreaty into her ear, he noticed me and sprang back. “So,” he said. “I am told that we must bid fare-well. I am sorry to see your daughter go. Very sorry.” At his age, I could not have handled the situation half so well, but then, I would not likely have been embracing a girl in university chambers. Navvie led the way out again. “Old Dean Aulen could have;been more pleasant. He took the line that the college had invested time in me and that my walking out in midterm was a sort of theft. Can you imagine? When they never even accepted me as a student, let alone a Fellow.” “What sort of line was young Fepper taking?” My daughter groaned. “Just what you saw. Such an embarrassment! I had no idea he would do some-thing like that.” She walked out onto the sidewalk with the self-composure of a cat. “You never do have,” I said. The luggage was not on the pavement where we had left it, but a passing student told me it had not been stolen—nothing is ever stolen at Canton Old University—but picked up by the grounds keepers. The only thing the honest burghers hate worse than theft is untidiness. By the time we had picked up our bags and apologized in three separate offices, all hope of leaving early or leaving unnoticed had faded. We took another omnibus to the Embarc, hoping to catch the eastern packet boat, which left every day at noon. Yestereve’s bright sunset had rip-ened into rain. Travel in winter on the Morquen Sea is a misera-ble thing, but Canton’s regular service stops for no wind or wave. There is a certain basic humility in the arrogant Velonyan, engendered by the violence of his winters. The Cantoners lack arrogance, but also lack enough ice to make them humble. This is not to say they do not get sick in their barrel-bottomed, groaning ships. More than half the passengers heading east out of port lined the rail like so many balustrades—retching balustrades. By luck neither Navvie nor I is subject to seasickness, but the atmosphere was nonetheless unpleasant. Spray wet our clothing, but belowdecks smelled too much of vomit to make us want to retreat. She worried about her black powder in the damp; I worried about our health. The wind blew at a good angle, perhaps twenty degrees from the bow, and I sat myself there in the battering chill to clear my head. My teacher taught me, thirty-six years previously, to sit still. In an effort to distract a babbling nineteen-year-old from his babbling, he used the old story of the black wolf of Gelley, which had nothing in its belly. For the next thirty years, I called this process of self-collection ‘‘the belly of the wolf.” Arlin bor-rowed the phrase from me. Jeram Pagg stole it out-right and stamped it over his own philosophical baggage. Now I disliked the much-abused old fairy tale and the phrase itself, which had come to stand for some sort of dark magic, some mystery with se-cret words and secret gates of knowledge. I am sup-posed to be the father of this sect and in it I am much revered. Damn them all—I have only one child, and that not a religion but a girl: Nahvah, named after her grandmother whom she never met. Navvie’s daughterly reverence is minimal. All I had left of that aspect of my history was the sitting still. It is enough of a mystery and enough of a gate for me. I sat in the hollow of a rolled-up rope, under the clean wind of the ocean, and did not think about where we were going. The captain came by, holding to the rail. He was a Felonk; a heavy-built, russet-skinned man not much taller than I. He was not sick, I was glad to see. He recommended my moving to the center of the ship. He went away again. Clouds tumbled in the sky. In the moments when the sun shone through, the water around us was a cold blue. Most of the time it was a frozen gray, only slightly darker than the clouds. I did not particularly look at it, but when a long neck arched above the bow of the ship, I felt my balance shifting, and I went from the belly of the wolf to the orange eyes of an improbable sea monster. The deck rose four yards above the water, and the creature’s head hung well above the rail. That head was as large as I am, and shaped somewhat like that of a draft horse, though no horse has such a pair of ears, stiff and webbed and slightly iridescent, even under the diminished sun The gray skin, too, had an oily sheen. The apparition rose above the rail and fell as a wave lifted the ship, and then it was back again. Its mouth was closed and it did not blink. I wanted very much to see the rest of it, and I wanted very much to be away from that spot in the hollow of the rope, within the stretch of that long, pillar-like neck. While I was still between these two impulses, the creature gravely sank into the water and did not rise again. It was another half-hour before I went to find Navvie, and in that time the wind subsided some-what, but I found the smell of the ship to have grown even worse. Navvie was busy treating the suffering—not with sophisticated medicine, but by the old wives’ remedy of squeezing the wrists. Her tiny hands are strong, and she has always had the proper touch. The captain was kind enough to praise her to me, and he suggested the shipping line hire her to ac-company all spring voyages. He laughed as he spoke, so that I would be sure it was only a joke. I said, “Captain, did you know there was some-thing in the water investigating your ship a little while ago?” “In the water? Oh, yes. He is Pilot Pol, an old friend to sailors on the Morquen. He keeps us com-pany, and he will guide a ship through the rocks of Sevech Harbor. Once he even indicated that the tide was too low for the approach to Morquenie. That was before the dredging, of course.” I have no great experience as a sailor myself, though I have been passenger on a number of long voyages. I stared at the complacent, square face of the Felonk and wondered how I could have missed knowing about such a beast. “Pilot Pol? Well, he cer-tainly does have the eyes of a parrot. I never heard of his kind, though.” “Why should you have heard of him? His world and yours are very different.” I agreed with the captain. “He is a great silverside, and their home is mostly in the East, and in warmer waters. I am glad you saw him, for we missed him in port, and I feared some scoundrel had taken a shot at him again. Once before it happened, and Pol left the ship lanes for months. Nor will he ever guide that ship again—The Worrel Provider. I wouldn’t hire on to her for my pen-sion, for I’m sure I wouldn’t live to enjoy it.” I leaned over the rail, letting spray batter my face, and I shouted back to the captain that I had heard stories like that about dolphins, from time to time. “Well, of course he is a dolphin and nothing else,” he answered, also shouting. “Only of a large kind, and unusually marked.” I straightened up. “Very large, Captain, and very unusual. I don’t think this was a dolphin I saw. It was more like a snake.” He nodded forcefully. “They can give that im-pression, to a landlubber.. You must not expect them to look like the statues: the carved candlesticks. In the water a dolphin looks like quicksilver with a fin.” Clapping me on the shoulder, he left me with my confusion intact. That evening the sun sank very bloody, and the water, too, sank—to a flat, twitching surface. I found salt crystals throughout my hair. Navvie was very tired and she was hungry, as was I. Had we been ravenous, we could not have made a dent in the food presented to us: good food in the usual heavy style of Velonya. No one else seemed to be eating at all. It was either the next day or the one after that when Navvie came and told me we had Count Di-naos on the ship. Until this time my only immediate worry had been our stopover at Kast, in Canton it-self. If the Cantoners were looking for us, we would then be in trouble, but as we were traveling under different names than our own, it would require real effort on the government’s part to inconvenience us. Dinaos, however, might be an inconvenience at ran-dom; he had the reputation of a quarrel-breeder and a duelist. Such as he have not existed in Velonya since Rudof’s father’s time. “Stay away from him,” I said to Navvie. “Even at the expense of remaining belowdecks until after Kast. Don’t let him know you exist.” My daughter sighed. She was polishing one of her mother’s knives. “Too late, Papa. He was sick as a crow yesterday and I treated him. I didn’t give him my name, either the true or the false, but he does know I exist. Besides, he is one of the finest portrait painters in the world. Why should I avoid him?” “Because he is known to paint portraits of the men he has slain: tombstone miniatures. Avoid him.” Though I reckoned that Navvie’s kindness might have softened the fellow’s scrappy heart, I watched her continue to dean the weapons, one after another, and I approved. That afternoon a tall, thin fellow in brocades accosted me at my position in the coiled hawser. He cleared his throat. He did look pale, de-spite the flat seas. “You, sir, do not have the face of a civilized man,” he said to me as he leaned against the wheelhouse wall. “No, sir, I do not” I answered wholeheartedly, showing no more resentment than I felt. He walked around me. His eyes were calculating. request the honor to paint you.” “Alive or dead?” I answered him, rising up and turning, so he would not be entirely at my back. He cleared his throat. He had the coldest stare I had ever seen. “By God, in motion, if I could. Why do you ask? Is there reason I would prefer you to be a corpse? Are we enemies?” I hopped out of the coil, which was constraining me. “I certainly do not desire to be your enemy, mi-lord. But you have been known to paint with ... an aggressive brush, shall we say?” He was dark and pock-faced. He came close. Though he wore a rapier, his right hand propped his chin and his left hand supported his other elbow. “I do not murder unarmed men,” he said. “I know who you are, Nazhuret, son of Velonya and Rezhmia. I had the honor to meet your beautiful daughter yesterday.” I could think of nothing to say. “As a noble of Lowcanton, I have no reason to feel friendship, or even tolerance for you. And further—you are known as the deadliest man in the northern world, and of course I find that dubious. No one man could do the things credited to you . , .” “Then obviously I have not done them.” “Be quiet. There is no need to placate me. Look at my hands.” I answered, “I see them. They are stained with various colors, most prominently madder and ultra-marine.” His mouth smiled, slightly. “They are not the hands of a civilized man. I am a painter before I am a nobleman, or anything else at all. I want to paint you. Now. On the ship.’ I felt a chill emanating from that long, elegant face. “As a clown, milord? Are you looking for a touch of comedy in the corner of some large narrative piece?” The smile climbed higher on his face, but did not reach the eyes. “As an exotic, sir. A beautiful exotic.” I couldn’t think what kind of game he was playing with me. I heard the water lap the sides of the ship. “You must be speaking of my daughter. She is beau-tiful, and to a Lowcantoner, exotic.” He looked past me at the ocean, just for a moment. “Yes. She is your daughter. But I have painted beau-tiful girls. I want to paint you.” “And then promote a duel, milord? Is this how you arrange your sport—with an appeal to your op-ponent’s vanity?” The smile died entirely. His eyes were onyx, and might have been without pupil. “I make no prom-ises. I want to paint you. Most of the world would consider that an honor. “And don’t call me ‘milord,’ fool. You outrank me in two separate nobilities.” He stalked away from me, with no regard to protecting his back. “In the morning,” he said. Navvie thought there could be no loss in giving the gentleman his way. She thought his odd request perfectly natural in a painter, and if he were bent on murdering me he would find it no easier with a pal-ette in his hand, she said. Besides, she could hover nearby with her mother’s little knives. In the end we compromised. I said I would be painted if she would deign not to guard me, but to stay at the other end of the ship. That night the wind came up, and I hoped the count’s malaise would recur and make the painting impossible. .I walked out on the deck under scud-ding clouds to find the captain leaning out in a med-itative manner. “Still no sign of him. Of Pol,” he said. “Not since you saw him this morning. Off the north coast of Canton he is usually with us. Because of the rocks.” I leaned with him. “If the creature I saw really was Pilot Pol. I never knew a dolphin to have such a long neck.” He sighed, like the groan of ship’s timbers. “It’s called a rostrum, really. The weather will be fair and fresh in the morning.” “Too bad.” I did not explain my remark, but stared into the sparkling, bow-broken water. “Tell me, Captain. Does Count Dinaos ride with you of-ten?” Abruptly the Felonk captain stood upright, his two legs braced on the deck. “Avoid that man,” he said. “He is deadly.” “I know,” I replied. “But your ship is very small and he does not want to be avoided. He slapped his hand against the gunwale, in evi-dent turmoil. “I’ll put you ashore: your lovely daughter and yourself. As soon as the rocks are be-hind us. send out a boat tomorrow evening.” “Tomorrow evening will be too late,” I said. “Our appointment is for the morning.” The captain gasped: a very frightening sound. “You can put my daughter ashore tomorrow eve-ning, if you need to, and I would be grateful,’’ I said, and the Felonk nodded to me, his eyes wide and black. Within the hour the wind began to die down and there was barely a stir in the sails by morning. Out of my ignorance, I brought a few props with me to the sitting—a glass blank, my battered journal and the old collapsing telescope I had carried all my years with Arlin. My noble painter informed me he was not doing a burgher’s portrait here, and sent me to pack them away and return again with my sword. The closest I have to a sword is my dowhee, which looks more like a hedge-blade than a dueler’s weapon, but he accepted that. He demanded I take off both jacket and shirt. We of Velonya are not raised to expose our pink skins to the world, and mine is especially “exotic,” having three different shades of suntan and more scars than is comely. I was determined not to allow the man an excuse to quarrel, however, so I stood in the sea breeze barefoot and bare-chested, first freezing and then smelling my skin burn under the open sunlight. He asked to see some of my practice forms, and the pose he chose was widespread and dose to the ground, with the dowhee about to rise into a sword lock. At least, that’s what I told the man it was. It is as easy to split a man from sternum to rectum from that position as to block a rapier, and either deed is easier than holding the damn position for forty minutes at a time. He held his brush in the left hand. I found that interesting; I have always wondered what it would be like to be left-handed. First all the ship turned out to watch, but painting is slow and the painter was surly, so soon we were alone but for the captain and (despite her promise to me) Navvie sitting on the opposite rail. When permitted to, I straightened up and almost fell flat from stiffness. She came and threw a shirt over me. “Are you cold or hot, poor Papa?” “Yes,” I answered and shuffled over to the tall, battered-looking, and many-colored easel. He was still working: blocking in the ship and whatever was visible behind her in the water. I begged permission to look. “Nothing to see,” he growled. “But please your-self.” Actually, the man worked very fast. The under-whiting had been laid before, but the crayon work for form had all taken shape in this first pose. All the lines were suggestions of movement, rather than anatomy, but they were superlatively correct move— ment. Already, by the broadness of the cheekbones and the slanted eyes, I could recognize myself, though I thought he had flattered me somewhat in terms of proportion. My mind filled with stupid remarks, which I rec-ognized as stupid. “Did you expect to see it all done?” the count asked, still scratching away at the texture of the deck. His nails were cracked and filthy. Something about him reminded me of Arlin: the pride, the dirt, the competence. And the severe tongue. “No,” I answered. “I am surprised to see it as far along as it is.” The bit about my face and the pro-portions I left unsaid. “No time to be slow. Also no time for mistakes. Drink water and get back there again. This sun won’t last forever.” The sun’s position lasted for two more sessions, and mine would not have lasted much longer. At the end I was shaking like a sapling, and had the man desired, he could have slain me with a paint-brush. Navvie was standing close behind him, I think not to be in position to defend her papa, but out of fas-cination. He was still at it, not scratching anymore, but daubing. He used a heavy brush and thick paint. It was a thing of splendid light; it made me catch my breath. I stared at the honey-gold deck, the busy sky, the glints of brass, the syrupy shadows, and lastly at the figure that almost filled it. That figure terrified me. It nearly brought me to tears, and de-spite all my resolutions to behave well I heard my-self say, “I wish I did look like that.” Count Dinaos shot me a look dirtier than his char-coal. “Do you have any reason to believe you know what you look like? Milord?” This criticism might have been from my own teacher. “No. That is exactly what I cannot know. Milord. Forgive me.” “Papa is convinced he looks like a gnome,” said Navvie into the man’s ear, for all the world as if he were her close friend. I pulled her aside, under the guise of needing support to stand. He made no return to her comment, but watched me getting my feet under me. “It’s not easy to take a pose like that. Actually, I had no expectation you would last. “When you are settled, Aminsanaur, you must send me your address, and I will paint you a sketch of this.” He screwed the canvas into an awkward box frame that would keep dirt from the wet surface. “Oh, and I had no intention of challenging you. I really don’t do that at random, whatever the gossips say.” He walked off, with a servant beside him lugging the equipment, and he left us there. It is Lowcanton’s misfortune that it has so few good harbors, and its great misfortune that it alienated its best to the point of revolution. After a stop to load at Kast (which is drear), we passed by mile after mile of picturesque black rocks breaking the surf into snow, and behind them rose green slopes and vine-yards without towns, for commerce was strangled by lack of transport. Lowcanton has an old culture—some would say too old—and it is the last nation in the Northwest to have bound peasants as well as foreign slaves. It also had gentry and a great number of aristoc-racy, but what was entirely missing from their so-ciety was Canton Harbor’s specialty: the decent burgher. ‘Papa—I saw something. In the water. It had a head like a horse and a neck like ...” “It’s actually called a rostrum,” I said to Navvie. “And the whole animal is called Pilot Pol. He helps ships through the rocks.” She stared at me, and at the now-empty sea. “Pilot Pol is a dolphin. This was no dolphin.” I joined her at the rail. The sun was going down again, and soon Lowcanton would be behind us, and Ighelun, which owes allegiance to Rezhmia but has a language related only to that of Sekret, would take its barren place. “I only know what I’m told. The captain said it was Pilot Pol.” She shook her head. “Amazing.” It was that night after dinner that the captain told me he had arranged our escape from the vessel. I remember I was, the first passenger’to leave the table, probably because most others were making up for yesterday’s lost time with the victuals. “I’ve prepared to drop one of the boats,” he spoke into my ear as I stood on the single deck, watching a calm sea. “We can have you and your daughter on land before the man knows you have left us.” I had almost forgotten his offer of help the night before. “Do you think it is still necessary, Captain?” I asked in surprise. “The count doesn’t seem to wish us any harm after all.” He shook his round Felonk head soberly. “That is not what my men say. And they have been talking to the nobleman’s own servant. He’means to murder you in your bed tonight.” I thought about this. “But the painting. And what about my daughter; does he plan to kill her, too?” The captain shrugged. “So he took your likeness. Now he will take your life. As far as your daugh-ter—I didn’t hear. He has no need to bother killing a young woman, has he?” “Yes, he has,” I said with some confidence. “If he is going to assault me, he has, But he might not know that. Still ...” I stared down at the darkening water. It was easier to see into the depths than into the motivations of men. “What’s that?” I asked. The captain also looked. “Oh, it’s Pilot Pol at last. I was worried about him.” The spearhead shape of the dolphin was a good fathom under the waves, and so it was hard to make out specifics, but I knew without doubt I was not looking at the creature I had seen yesterday. This was no time to share this information with the cap-tain, however. “If you send us to shore, we’ll be in Lowcanton. The reason I came on this ship was to avoid Lowcanton.” “You are within twenty miles of the border, and dose to the only navigable shoreline we will reach before midnight. And, Sir Nazhuret, if we wait until Ighelun, we will have waited too long.” I did not move from my position at the rail. “If you send us to shore, the count will know you con-spired with us. He is a murderer. Does that not frighten you, Captain?” The captain hit the wooden rail in irritation. “What do I have to be afraid of? I have eight men, and the ship is mine. If he killed me, could he sail it? Could he even row to shore? He’d be a dead man in five minutes, once my crew discovered.” The light was failing, slowly, but the wind was very gentle. “Then, Captain, why don’t we just clap the man in irons now and avoid any inconven-ience?” He met my eyes only for a moment. “I have no proof. My men—they would fight for me like tigers, but in a court of law I would be abandoned.” Now his pale brown eyes were stern and fixed. “I want very much to avoid murder on my own ship. You know what it means to have unlawful death on a Felonk vessel; some would demand we burn her.” “To sink my spirit. I know. But there is one thing I don’t believe you know, Captain, and that is, in a duel between the count and me, it is not certain he would win.” “I agree,” said the count, standing at the open doorway of the main cabin. His arms were folded over his chest, and he smiled. He was armed with a rapier. “It is not certain I would lose, either.” The captain snagged my left arm and began to haul me over the deck. “I don’t want bloodshed on my ship!” he shouted. ‘ “I’m sure you don’t,” said Dinaos agreeably. He stepped forward. I released myself from the captain’s grasp and pushed the man away from me. I stared at the Low-cantoner noble and could think of nothing to say. The captain ran to the other rail, where two sets of cranes held the lifeboats, and it seemed he was planning an escape of his own, for he leaped head-first into the first one. Out of it came sailing my own inelegant dowhee, which clattered across the boards and skidded to a stop five feet in front of me. I let it lie. “You were in my cabin, Captain? You loaded our belongings?” Dinaos, from his central vantage point, could see over the gunwale of the boat. If so, Amhisanaur, you and your lovely daughter have very few be-longings.” Casually he strolled over and peered over the rocking edge of the lifeboat. “Two canvas bags, a. long roll, and what looks like a telescope. How interesting: a telescope.” He stood between me and the boat. The captain, pressed warily against the bow of the lifeboat, drew a flageolet and blew on it. I heard hurrying foot-steps. Now the count drew his rapier and I picked up my dowhee. I had not fought many left-handed du-elists, for there are not so many. I wondered if that was part of his strength as a swordsman. There appeared from the stern four men, three of them barefoot Felonks. Two had clubs in their hands, but one carried the islanders’ famous sling and one held a small throwing net. They approached together, like beaters on a hunt. A sword of any kind outreaches a club, but is no defense against lead shot from a sling. Most swords, such as the rapier, are worse than useless against a netsman, but not the broad-bladed, handy dowhee. A Felonk weapon after all. I watched them come and I watched Dinaos. “You don’t really have any friends here,” he said lightly, and he cut the air in a pattern that made the attackers pause. “I know,” I answered and moved toward the nets-man. “Kwaff a rudet-el!” shouted the captain from his perch in the rocking boat. Translated from the. Fe-lonk, that means “Kill the blond.” The net whirled at my face, but I hit the deck, skidding forward, and cut it out of the sailor’s hands. He screamed; my cut wasn’t clean. I heard a thud as a round of shot hit someone—Dinaos—and I heard the captain scrambling out of the boat. A wooden truncheon was descending toward my head. It rang against my blade, and then I cut the throat of the man who held it, dousing myself in sickening blood. I heard an explosion, and a second later a weak scream, full of breath and quickly over. I pulled my feet under me on the slippery red deck. The captain had a hole in his forehead. It was very neat and without powder. The back of his head was less neat. He lay spread on the deck almost behind Dinaos. Also on the deck was another dowhee: one I had never seen before. The count was braced as well as could be against the side of the lifeboat. His right arm was Qat against his body and he was working, his hand tentatively. The rapier in his left hand had a slight tinge of red along its length, and the sailor gasping on the deck before him had a small red hole in his chest. The man whose hands I had sliced knelt in his own blood and cried, while another lay on his stomach with the jeweled hilt of a little dagger just below and to the right of the junction of neck and shoulders. There was no blood to be seen around it. Navvie came up to us on tiptoe, feeling the barrel of her pistol for heat. She looked at the weeping sailor, and then at the one she had killed. “I was off in aim, here, Papa. The pistol makes me overconfi-dent, and ...” She glanced at the gory deck like a housewife in dismay. “...Enemies rarely come sin-gly.” Count Dinaos wiped his rapier on the shirt of his dead man and with awkward care, put it into its scabbard. “I am in your debt, my lady. I have never been in such debt to a woman before.” Navvie sighed and produced from her bag her lit-tle powder funnel. In the same calm manner in which she mixed tinctures for medical use, she filled the gun with powder, wadding, and shot. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. She took the arms of the man with sliced hands and looked at the injuries. “Clean,” she said. The rapier-impaled man she looked at, but said nothing. Neither did she try to move him. She hopped over the body of the one she had killed, pulled out her mother’s dagger, and with no modesty, took the count’s right hand in hers and started an examination. She had difficulty, being less than his shoulder in height, and she pulled him down by the other shoulder. He met my gaze in astonishment, and then he laughed. It was an un-certain laugh. “I don’t think we have time for this, Navvie,” I said. “There are other crewmen here—at least four of them, and then the passengers. I don’t know what they’ll think.” Dinaos slipped his right hand into his belt and drew swagger over him like a cloak. “By God, my reputation is foul enough already, my duke, my lady. All will believe I slaughtered these men as a postprandial.” Navvie leaped up and looked into the lifeboat. “Are we going somewhere, Papa? You should tell me things.” Now the rest of the crew began appearing, and one Cantoner burgher—a silk trader, if memory serves me—appeared from the cabin, stared, and vanished again. The crewmen did not seem disposed to violence, but hugged the outer , wall of the main cabin, mouths open. “How so, when nobody tells me anything? But whether or not I planned this flight, I think we’d better take it, or spend the next few days where we stand, like aurochs in a circle, waiting to be attacked by wolves.” “Another reason for leaving,” added the count. “We’ve killed the captain and half the crew. Who is going to manage the ship? Are you nautical? I am not.” I shook my head. “I can only handle a small sailboat,” said Navvie. “More than ten square feet of sail and I’m lost.” Count Dinaos laughed once more, as though my daughter had made a joke. He laughed very often when Navvie was being serious. “So, my new friends. I suggest we take this boat and go, as the so-kind captain intended for you to do. Only perhaps we should not sail into the most convenient harbor, eh?” “You think he has an ambush waiting?” I asked, and at the same time Navvie said, “But what about the other passengers?” “I think that was his:intention from the beginning, my duke. These Felonl