rom my neck. A link of the chain caught on the clasp of my
shirtcloak, and again something snapped inside me. I grasped the chain
in my two hands and gave a mighty heave, bracing my foot against the
wall. The links snapped asunder. A flying end struck Juli under the eye.
I ripped at the seals of the jeweled cuffs, tore them from her arms,
find threw the whole assembly into a corner, where it fell with a
clash.

"Damn it," I roared, "that's over! You're never going to wear _those_
things again!" Maybe after six years in the Dry-towns, Juli was
beginning to guess what those six years behind a desk had meant to me.

"Juli, I'll find your Rindy for you, and I'll bring Rakhal in alive. But
don't ask more than that. Just _alive_. And don't ask me how."

He'd be alive when I got through with him. Sure, he'd be alive.

Just.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was getting dark when I slipped through a side gate, shabby and
inconspicuous, into the spaceport square. Beyond the yellow lamps, I
knew that the old city was beginning to take on life with the falling
night. Out of the chinked pebble-houses, men and woman, human and
nonhuman, came forth into the moonlit streets.

If anyone noticed me cross the square, which I doubted, they took me for
just another Dry-town vagabond, curious about the world of the strangers
from beyond the stars, and who, curiosity satisfied, was drifting back
where he belonged. I turned down one of the dark alleys that led away,
and soon was walking in the dark.

The Kharsa was not unfamiliar to me as a Terran, but for the last six
years I had seen only its daytime face. I doubted if there were a dozen
Earthmen in the Old Town tonight, though I saw one in the bazaar, dirty
and lurching drunk; one of those who run renegade and homeless between
worlds, belonging to neither. This was what I had nearly become.

I went further up the hill with the rising streets. Once I turned, and
saw below me the bright-lighted spaceport, the black many-windowed loom
of the skyscraper like a patch of alien shadow in the red-violet
moonlight. I turned my back on them and walked on.

At the fringe of the thieves market I paused outside a wineshop where
Dry-towners were made welcome. A golden nonhuman child murmured
something as she pattered by me in the street, and I stopped, gripped by
a spasm of stagefright. Had the dialect of Shainsa grown rusty on my
tongue? Spies were given short shrift on Wolf, and a mile from the
sp