hed message within was in the
alphabet and language of the First Paratime Level:

Vall, darling:

Am I glad you got here; this time I really _am_ in the
middle, but good! The Assassin, Dirzed, who brings this, is
in my service. You can trust him implicitly; he's about the
only person in Darsh you can trust. He'll bring you to where I
am.

Dalla

P.S. I hope you're not still angry about that musician. I
told you, at the time, that he was just helping me with an
experiment in telepathy.

D.

Verkan Vall grinned at the postscript. That had been twenty years ago,
when he'd been eighty and she'd been seventy. He supposed she'd expect
him to take up his old relationship with her again. It probably
wouldn't last any longer than it had, the other time; he recalled a
Fourth Level proverb about the leopard and his spots. It certainly
wouldn't be boring, though.

"Tell the Assassin to come in," he directed. Then he tossed the
message down on a table. Outside of himself, nobody in Darsh could
read it but the woman who had sent it; if, as he thought highly
probable, the Statisticalists had spies among the hotel staff, it
might serve to reduce some cryptanalyst to gibbering insanity.

The Assassin entered, drawing off a cowllike mask. He was the man
whose arm Dalla had been holding in the visiplate picture; Verkan Vall
even recognized the extremely ornate pistol and knife on his belt.

"Dirzed the Assassin," he named himself. "If you wish, we can
visiphone Assassins' Hall for verification of my identity."

"Lord Virzal of Verkan. And my Assassins, Marnik and Olirzon." They
all hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with the newcomer. "That
won't be needed," Verkan Vall told Dirzed. "I know you from seeing you
with the Lady Dallona, on the visiplate; you're 'Dirzed, her faithful
Assassin.'"

Dirzed's face, normally the color of a good walnut gunstock, turned
almost black. He used shockingly bad language.

"And that's why I have to wear this abomination," he finished,
displaying the mask. "The Lady Dallona and I can't show our faces
anywhere; if we did, every Statisticalist and his six-year-old brat
would know us, and we'd be fighting off an army of them in five
minutes."

"Where's the Lady Dallona, now?"

"In hiding, Lord Virzal, at a private dwelling dome in the forest;