Lights flared in my eyes.
I was standing solidly on my feet in the street-shrine, but the street
was gone. Coils of incense still smudged the air. The God squatted
toadlike in his recess. The girl was hanging limp, locked in my clenched
arms. As the floor straightened under my feet I staggered, thrown off
balance by the sudden return of the girl's weight, and grabbed blindly
for support.
"Give her to me," said a voice, and the girl's sagging body was lifted
from my arms. A strong hand grasped my elbow. I found a chair beneath my
knees and sank gratefully into it.
"The transmission isn't smooth yet between such distant terminals," the
voice remarked. "I see Miellyn has fainted again. A weakling, the girl,
but useful."
I spat blood, trying to get the room in focus. For I was inside a room,
a room of some translucent substance, windowless, a skylight high above
me, through which pink daylight streamed. Daylight--and it had been
midnight in Charin! I'd come halfway around the planet in a few seconds!
From somewhere I heard the sound of hammering, tiny, bell-like
hammering, the chiming of a fairy anvil. I looked up and saw a man--a
man?--watching me.
On Wolf you see all kinds of human, half-human and nonhuman life, and I
consider myself something of an expert on all three. But I had never
seen anyone, or anything, who so closely resembled the human and so
obviously wasn't. He, or it, was tall and lean, man-shaped but oddly
muscled, a vague suggestion of something less than human in the lean
hunch of his posture.
Manlike, he wore green tight-fitting trunks and a shirt of green fur
that revealed bulging biceps where they shouldn't be, and angular planes
where there should have been swelling muscles. The shoulders were high,
the neck unpleasantly sinuous, and the face, a little narrower than
human, was handsomely arrogant, with a kind of wary alert mischief that
was the least human thing about him.
He bent, tilted the girl's inert body on to a divan of some sort, and
turned his back on her, lifting his hand in an impatient, and
unpleasantly reminiscent, gesture.
The tinkling of the little hammers stopped as if a switch had been
disconnected.
"Now," said the nonhuman, "we can talk."
Like the waif, he spoke Shainsan, and spoke it with a better accent than
any nonhuman I had ever known--so well that I looked again to be
certain. I wasn't too dazed to answer in the same tongue, but I couldn't
keep back a spate of questions:
"What happened? Who are you? What is this place?"
The nonhuman waited, crossing his hands--quite passable hands, if you
didn't look too closely at what should have been nails--and bent forward
in a sketchy gesture.
"Do not blame Miellyn. She acted under orders. It was imperative you be
brought here tonight, and we had reason to believe you might ignore an
ordinary summons. You were clever at evading our surveillance, for a
time. But there would not be two Dry-towners in Charin tonight who would
dare the Ghost Wind. Your reputation does you justice, Rakhal Sensar."
_Rakhal Sensar!_ Once again Rakhal!
Shaken, I pulled a rag from my pocket and wiped blood from my mouth. I'd
figured out, in Shainsa, why the mistake was logical. And here in Charin
I'd been hanging around in Rakhal's old haunts, covering his old trails.
Once again, mistaken identity was natural.
Natural or not, I wasn't going to deny it. If these were Rakhal's
enemies, my real identity should be kept as an ace in reserve which
might--just might--get me out alive again. If they were his friends ...
well, I could only hope that no one who knew him well by sight would
walk in on me.
"We knew," the nonhuman continued, "that if you remained where you
were, the _Terranan_ Cargill would have made his arrest. We know about
your quarrel with Cargill, among other things, but we did not consider
it necessary that you should fall into his hands at present."