s soon not have
heard those few. An older _chak_ grunted for silence and she subsided,
swaying and crooning.

There were cups and decanters on all the tables, and a woman tilted
pale, phosphorescent fluid into a cup and offered it to me. I took one
sip, then another. It was cold and pleasantly tart, and not until the
second swallow turned sweet on my tongue did I know what I tasted. I
pretended to swallow while the woman's eyes were fixed on me, then
somehow contrived to spill the filthy stuff down my shirt.

I was wary even of the fumes, but there was nothing else I could do. The
stuff was _shallavan_, outlawed on every planet in the Terran Empire and
every halfway decent planet outside it.

More and more figures, men and creatures, kept crowding into the cellar,
which was not very large. The place looked like the worst nightmare of a
drug-dreamer, ablaze with the colors of the smoking incense, the swaying
crowd, and their monotonous cries. Quite suddenly there was a blaze of
purple light and someone screamed in raving ecstasy: "_Na ki na Nebran
n'hai Kamaina!_"

"Kamayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena!" shrilled the tranced mob.

An old man jumped up and started haranguing the crowd. I could just
follow his dialect. He was talking about Terra. He was talking about
riots. He was jabbering mystical gibberish which I couldn't understand
and didn't want to understand, and rabble-rousing anti-Terran propaganda
which I understood much too well.

Another blaze of lights and another long scream in chorus:
"Kamayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena!"

Evarin stood in the blaze of the many-colored light.

The Toymaker, as I had seen him last, cat-smooth, gracefully alien,
shrouded in a ripple of giddy crimsons. Behind him was a blackness. I
waited till the painful blaze of lights abated, then, straining my eyes
to see past him, I got my worst shock.

A woman stood there, naked to the waist, her hands ritually fettered
with little chains that stirred and clashed musically as she moved
stiff-legged in a frozen dream. Hair like black grass banded her brow
and naked shoulders, and her eyes were crimson.

And the eyes lived in the dead dreaming face. They lived, and they were
mad with terror although the lips curved in a gently tranced smile.

Miellyn.

Evarin was speaking in that dialect I barely understood. His arms were
flung high and his cloak went spilling away from them, rippling like
something alive. The jammed humans and nonhumans swayed