It was getting dark when I slipped through a side gate, shabby and
inconspicuous, into the spaceport square. Beyond the yellow lamps, I
knew that the old city was beginning to take on life with the falling
night. Out of the chinked pebble-houses, men and woman, human and
nonhuman, came forth into the moonlit streets.
If anyone noticed me cross the square, which I doubted, they took me for
just another Dry-town vagabond, curious about the world of the strangers
from beyond the stars, and who, curiosity satisfied, was drifting back
where he belonged. I turned down one of the dark alleys that led away,
and soon was walking in the dark.
The Kharsa was not unfamiliar to me as a Terran, but for the last six
years I had seen only its daytime face. I doubted if there were a dozen
Earthmen in the Old Town tonight, though I saw one in the bazaar, dirty
and lurching drunk; one of those who run renegade and homeless between
worlds, belonging to neither. This was what I had nearly become.
I went further up the hill with the rising streets. Once I turned, and
saw below me the bright-lighted spaceport, the black many-windowed loom
of the skyscraper like a patch of alien shadow in the red-violet
moonlight. I turned my back on them and walked on.
At the fringe of the thieves market I paused outside a wineshop where
Dry-towners were made welcome. A golden nonhuman child murmured
something as she pattered by me in the street, and I stopped, gripped by
a spasm of stagefright. Had the dialect of Shainsa grown rusty on my
tongue? Spies were given short shrift on Wolf, and a mile from the
spaceport, I might as well have been on one of those moons. There were
no spaceport shockers at my back now. And someone might remember the
tale of an Earthman with a scarred face who had gone to Shainsa in
disguise....
I shrugged the shirtcloak around my shoulders, pushed the door and went
in. I had remembered that Rakhal was waiting for me. Not beyond this
door, but at the end of the trail, behind some other door, somewhere.
And we have a byword in Shainsa: _A trail without beginning has no end_.
Right there I stopped thinking about Juli, Rindy, the Terran Empire, or
what Rakhal, who knew too many of Terra's secrets, might do if he had
turned renegade. My fingers went up and stroked, musingly, the ridge of
scar tissue along my mouth. At that moment I was thinking only of
Rakhal, of an unsettled blood-feud, and of my revenge.
Red lamps were burning inside the wineshop, where men reclined on frowsy
couches. I stumbled over one of them, found an empty place and let
myself sink down on it, arranging myself automatically in the sprawl of
Dry-towners indoors. In public they stood, rigid and formal, even to eat
and drink. Among themselves, anything less than a loose-limbed sprawl
betrayed insulting watchfulness; only a man who fears secret murder
keeps himself on guard.
A girl with a tangled rope of hair down her back came toward me. Her
hands were unchained, meaning she was a woman of the lowest class, not
worth safeguarding. Her fur smock was shabby and matted with filth. I
sent her for wine. When it came it was surprisingly good, the sweet and
treacherous wine of Ardcarran. I sipped it slowly, looking round.
If a caravan for Shainsa were leaving tomorrow, it would be known here.
A word dropped that I was returning there would bring me, by ironbound
custom, an invitation to travel in their company.
When I sent the woman for wine a second time, a man on a nearby couch
got up, and walked over to me.
He was tall even for a Dry-towner, and there was something vaguely
familiar about him. He was no riffraff of the Kharsa, either, for his
shirtcloak was of rich silk interwoven with metallic threads, and
crusted with heavy embroideries. The hilt of his skean was carved from a
single green gem. He stood looking down at me for some time before he
spoke.
"I never forget a voice, although I cannot bring your face to mind. Have
I a duty toward you?"
I had spoken a jargon to the girl, but he addressed me in the lilting,
sing-song speech of Shainsa. I made no answer, gesturing him to be
seated. On Wolf, formal courtesy requires a series of polite _non
sequiturs_, and while a direct question merely borders on rudeness, a
direct answer is the mark of a simpleton.
"A drink?"
"I joined you unasked," he retorted, and summoned the tangle-headed
girl. "Bring us better wine than this swill!"
With that word and gesture I recognized him and my teeth clamped hard on
my lip. This was the loudmouth who had shown fight in the spaceport
cafe, and run away before the dark girl with the sign of Nebran sprawled
on her breast.
But in this poor light he had not recognized me. I moved deliberately
into the full red glow. If he did not know me for the Terran he had
challenged last night in the spaceport cafe, it was unlikely that anyone
else would. He stared at me for some minutes, but in the end he only
shrugged and poured wine from the bottle he had ordered.
Three drinks later I knew that his name was Kyral and that he was a
trader in wire and fine steel tools through the nonhuman towns. And I
had given him the name I had chosen, Rascar.