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