ath the stars.

Thal rode almost underneath the cressets and shouted upward. A voice
answered. Presently a gate clanked open and a black, cavelike opening
appeared behind it. Thal rode grandly in, and Hoddan followed. Now that
the ride seemed over, he let himself realize where he ached from the
unaccustomed exercise. Everywhere. He also guessed at the area of his
skin first rubbed to blisters and then to the discomfort of raw flesh
underneath.

The gate clanked shut. Torches waved overhead. Hoddan found that he and
Thal had ridden into a very tiny courtyard. Twenty feet above them, an
inner battlemented wall offered excellent opportunities for the
inhabitants of the castle to throw things down at visitors who after
admission turned out to be undesired.

Thal shouted further identifications, including a boastful and entirely
untruthful declaration that he and Hoddan, together, had slaughtered
twenty men in one place and thirty in another, and left them lying in
their gore.

The voices that replied sounded derisive. Somebody came down a rope and
fastened the gate from the inside. With an extreme amount of creaking,
an inner gate swung wide. Men came out of it and took the horses. Hoddan
dismounted, and it seemed to him that he creaked as loudly as the gate.
Thal swaggered, displaying coins he had picked from the pockets of the
men the stun-pistols had disabled. He said splendidly to Hoddan:

"I go to announce your coming to Don Loris. These are his retainers.
They will give you to drink." He added amiably, "If you were given food,
it would be disgraceful to cut your throat."

He disappeared. Hoddan carried his ship bag and followed a man in a
dirty pink shirt to a stone-walled room containing a table and a chair.
He sat down, relieved to have a rest for his back. The man in the pink
shirt brought him a flagon of wine. He disappeared again.

Hoddan drank sour wine and brooded. He was very hungry and very tired,
and it seemed to him that he had been disillusioned in a new dimension.
Morbidly, he remembered a frequently given lecture from his grandfather
on Zan.

"It's no use!" it was the custom of his grandfather to say. "There's not
a bit o' use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A
lucky idiot's ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him!
A smart man starts thinkin', and he thinks himself into a jail cell if
his luck is bad, and good luck's wasted on him because it ain't
reasona