n violet moonlight into the crimson
dusk.

The shadows were blue and purple in the empty square as I walked across
the stones and stood looking down one of the side streets.

A few steps, and I was in an untidy slum which might have been on
another world from the neat bright Trade City which lay west of the
spaceport. The Kharsa was alive and reeking with the sounds and smells
of human and half-human life. A naked child, diminutive and
golden-furred, darted between two of the chinked pebble-houses, and
disappeared, spilling fragile laughter like breaking glass.

A little beast, half snake and half cat, crawled across a roof, spread
leathery wings, and flapped to the ground. The sour pungent reek of
incense from the open street-shrine made my nostrils twitch, and a
hulked form inside, not human, cast me a surly green glare as I passed.

I turned, retracing my steps. There was no danger, of course, so close
to the Trade City. Even on such planets as Wolf, Terra's laws are
respected within earshot of their gates. But there had been rioting here
and in Charin during the last month. After the display of mob violence
this afternoon, a lone Terran, unarmed, might turn up as a solitary
corpse flung on the steps of the HQ building.

There had been a time when I had walked alone from Shainsa to the Polar
Colony. I had known how to melt into this kind of night, shabby and
inconspicuous, a worn shirtcloak hunched round my shoulders, weaponless
except for the razor-sharp skean in the clasp of the cloak; walking on
the balls of my feet like a Dry-towner, not looking or sounding or
smelling like an Earthman.

That rabbit in the Traffic office had stirred up things I'd be wiser to
forget. It had been six years; six years of slow death behind a desk,
since the day when Rakhal Sensar had left me a marked man; death-warrant
written on my scarred face anywhere outside the narrow confines of the
Terran law on Wolf.

Rakhal Sensar--my fists clenched with the old impotent hate. _If I could
get my hands on him!_

It had been Rakhal who first led me through the byways of the Kharsa,
teaching me the jargon of a dozen tribes, the chirping call of the
Ya-men, the way of the catmen of the rain-forests, the argot of thieves
markets, the walk and step of the Dry-towners from Shainsa and Daillon
and Ardcarran--the parched cities of dusty, salt stone which spread out
in the bottoms of Wolf's vanished oceans. Rakhal was from Shainsa,
human, ta