Gildmirth stepped close to Kamin, whose eyes alone could move. Those eyes blazed-they all but clawed-at the hideous face that had usurped the face of the boy.

"I am heartily sorry for you, Rod-Master." The bloody pools of his sad eyes looked more than deep enough to contain the Kamin's outrage. "Your son was rescued in good faith, and brought halfway back to you. And then an accident endowed him with a large quantity of what he had been seeking all along-the Elixir of Sazmazm.

Rise if you can for an instant above the terrible pain I know you feel. Fight for the detachment to ask yourself: would you bring the Great Plague to the cities of your fellow men? Would you be the man to do this, even supposing that this deed purchased the freedom of someone dear to you-of a son? Would you make such a fool's bargain, and buy his release into a world universally blighted by your act? Liberate him into a raging inferno of catastrophe that has been enkindled solely by your loving emancipation of him?"

The father's eyes wavered, seeming dazed by these words. They sharpened again. They explored the face of the Privateer, wonder and loathing shining from them. They said, as plain as words: "You are not my son. You stole his chance of escape from him. You are here in his stead." Gildmirth sighed, and patted his shoulder. He turned away and, his eyes rediscovering the moon, forgot Kamin-instantly and completely.

I roused my mount, and came around where Kamin and I might look eye to eye. I said, "I'm sorry, Rod-- Master. Truly I am. We got him out for you-and we only did it through the Privateer's help, which be gave us gratis-we got him out, and all but got him back to you. And then, in an evil moment, your son became something which-listen. If Wimfort had simply resided in your city, undertaking none of the cataclysmic things he planned-if he had simply stayed here for the space of a day,

possessing what he possessed, then your precious Kine-Gather, by the second day of his residence, would have been nothing but a smoking blister, a black death-scab on the face of a total desert. Such are the powers of those whom your son's booty must inevitably have brought down upon himself and all near him."

I faltered, searching the magnate's eyes for some way to break through his hate to his dispassion. Barnar geed his mount up the slope, and into Darkvent. Kamin's eyes followed him, and so I watched with him, as all the rest of us save Gildmirth were doing-fettered and free-and so fixedly there was nothing to choose between the two groups.

A grinding noise began to swell from the shaft. Barnar emerged, a line stretched taut behind him, his mount's legs etched with effort. He spurred the beast down the slope. Just as the cart he was towing came plunging from the shaft, he cleared his pommel of the line, tossed it free and wheeled leftward from its line of fall. The big steel box turned turtle as it dove. It crashed just above us and settled crazily on the glittering heap of its vomited cargo: a hillock of barbarous splendors-subworld artifacts of wrought gold and everbright, weapons scabbed with jeweled onlays, gear and gauds of rarest demon-work.

I sighed, mortified by the inadequacy of the gesture. Unwillingly, I met Kamin's eyes again: "It's yours.

Twenty times the worth of what we take from you on these beasts. Your bullion is enough for us, and its portability is a convenience, for which we thank you. This doesn't buy your son back, I know. Take heart at least in the fact that, though he is a thrall, he suffers no torment. He lies like a . . . wine bottle in the cellar of a minor demon, a reclusive weft. This keeper of his hides and secures the boy with fanatical care, you may be sure.

Wimfort suffers at worst an endless ennui, as a jar for his master's most treasured potation. Meanwhile the boy, who couldn't safely be returned to the sunlight, has at least restored to it a man of great and deserving spirit. He's one whose liberation will surely bring men more good than harm."

"Some day," the Privateer said, "I'll bring him back for you, Rod-Master. But when-forgive me-I cannot say."

In facing round to say this, Gildmirth turned his eyes from the moon for the first time since it captured them.

His cheeks were wet. The red of his eyes had a terrible, vivid purity I had not seen before, and, in some subtle way, his body was quieter. "Master Charnall," he said with a slight bow, "I have spoken with your friends of you.

There is a certain post which, before very long, I will be seeking a man to fill-that of scribe-apprentice. It requires a mastery of High and Paleo-Archaic, as well as the five primary branches of Runic scripture. Would you perhaps be a man of latent ambition? The post involves a great deal of work, but is handsomely paid both in gold and in advanced instruction in major thaumaturgies. Do you have some spit left, honest Charnall, for grueling and chancy work if it offers you the power to walk the sky and the ocean's floor as easily as you could these hills we stand in?"

"Yes, Privateer. And again, yes."

"Then, after a time, I'll come seeking you in Shormuth Gate. This gold will maintain you opulently until I come. In the interval, you can do no better than to read-anything and everything, though always bearing in mind that neither Ninefingers nor the immortal Pandector ever fails to repay a thoroughgoing review."

The Privateer turned now to Barnar and me. "So now it's time to part ways," he said. As he smiled into our eyes he raised his right hand as for oath-taking. "Let it be witnessed, by all the powers that bind men to their vows, that I salute as my saviour this Nifft, called 'the Lean'

(and justly so as anyone will swear who's seen what a weasely, gaunt oddity he is); and that I likewise most feelingly salute this Chilite hulk, Barnar his name, whose measure of ungreedy goodwill is more than great-who is a cask, a very vat of that . . . Elixir. And also let my promise to them be witnessed, that my life will never be worth more to me than their salvation, whatsoever danger I might chance to find them in."

As he turned away he paused by Kamin, but whatever he meant to say could be seen to die on his tongue, and he murmured only: "Be of good heart. You'll find yourselves free to move at sunrise."

The Privateer walked away from us now, out onto the open slope. As he walked, his back swelled, and his legs wasted and shriveled under him. But instead of falling, he thrust from the slits he had made in his doublet two broad, tar-black wings. The wings bowed, then pressed down powerfully on the night air. His legs-talons now-tucked themselves up under his chest. He half-turned his griffon's head and sent back to us a brazen hiss of farewell. And then the Privateer rose up against the moon, and sped from our sight in its direction, as if its silver hugeness were the home he had for so long been denied.

Part 4.

SHAG MARGOLD'S Preface to The Goddess in Glass.

PERHAPS THE ONLY pertinent information I can offer about the source of this document is that I am not its author-for some of my acquaintance have charged this, on the grounds, I suppose, of my own brief appearance in it. Who its author was, or even when and how it came among my papers, I do not know. Nifft himself could have secreted it in my (securely locked) files, but so could a number of our mutual friends. Certainly none of them lacked the particular skills requisite for such chicanery, and neither the manuscript's style, nor its hand- some scribe's of indeterminate nationality-offers any clues to its authorship.

As to what it reports, there must by now be few who have not caught wind of Anvil Pastures' misfortunes, and many will doubtless find here much to render comprehensible what must have seemed an utterly fantastic and unaccountable rumor. Perhaps it will seem callous in me to say that I do not grieve for that city. My feelings about merchants of war are made plain enough, I think, by my prefatory remarks to The Pearls of the Vampire Queen. Even granting this prejudice in me, I doubt any informed person would deny that, among purveyors of arms, Anvil Pastures' commercial history has been the most shameful of the century. So decayed are the morals governing the professional activities of merchants of arms, that the mere simultaneous sale of arms to both belligerents in an ongoing war is such a matter as only the ignorant or naive would take the trouble to deplore in print. Witness the offhandedness with which Anvil Pastures served Hallam and Baskin-Sharpz. But the records of Anvil's activities afford more than one instance of what even the most cynical cosmopolite would blush to countenance. I will presume only so far as to remind the reader of the most publicized of these travesties to occur in recent decades. The occasion I refer to was Pythna's "crusade" against the city of Taarg.

Pythna's posture in the conflict was undeniably laughable. She is an Astrygal, but one of the chain's cluster of small islands that is often called the Seven Little Sisters. The wizardry that prevails on Pythna-as on any of the Little Sisters-is by no means comparable to that of Strega, Shamna or Hagia, for it is the thaumaturgy of the three mountainous Big Sisters that gives the Astrygals their deserved name as the world's great nursery of the lore of Power. Indeed, little Pythna is quite aptly described by Deenwary the Traveler in his otherwise sensationalized and distorted (though, admittedly, highly diverting) account of his experiences in the seas off southern Kolodria. "The inhabitants of Pythnia," he says, "are a motley, half-wise, half-crackpot lot."

Pythna's much-trumpeted causus belli was also laughable. An edition of an obscure Pythnan philosopher's summa (all four volumes of which I have read, and which piracy of any kind could only flatter) was pirated by an equally obscure publisher in Taarg, to what end I have not been able to discover. And perhaps most laughable of all was the ambition which Pythna's seizure upon this pretext was meant to mask: to snatch some thaumaturgic renown and status by crushing a power so wormholed and rotten with invasive demon influences as Taarg.

Pythnans, every half-wise crackpot of them, were tired of being little sister to Strega, Shamna, and Hagia.

One might smile, but perhaps only moderately, and then, reflect. Taarg, so near the Vortex that bears its name (see The Fishing of the Demon-Sea) is, in the estimation of all informed commentators on the subject, and all those who have been there (and I am one of the latter, howbeit some might contest my being one of the former)-is, I say, eaten all but hollow by the demon influence that flows out with the rotten exhalations of the Vortex's ragged, spuming mouth. If crusades are to be mounted, whatever fools may mount them, let their blades be drawn against such a city Taarg was then, and to some extent continues to be. So I feel, at least, though the reader must, of course, side as he chooses.

Anvil Pastures entertained the embassies of both parties, exercising her traditional discretion, which spared either party the painful knowledge of its rival's entertainment. The Pythnans purchased from the Aristarchs a formidable weapon: a flock of spring-steel harpies, clockwork airborne carnivores guided by such basic spells as their field marshals could command, and able to scour the largest ramparts bare of defenders in mere moments.

The Taarg embassy, with its demon-augmented coffer-and all the world knew the subworld source of those coffers' content-purchased from Anvil Pastures a perfect defense against any aerial assault, for thus much had they divined of their enemy's tactical plans: a marvelously light, strong system of steel netting, erectable on a vast framework by spring-powered spreaders that could operate in mere seconds.

Taarg's fleet lay prepared for a counterassault, which it launched the moment the Pythnan assault had been crushed. The Pythnans reeled home with an armada quite large enough for a full-scale invasion scant miles astern. And indeed, the failure of its crusade against Taarg threatened to be followed directly by its homeland's invasion and conquest. Taarg's pursuing flotilla must, in truth, have offered a spec t a c l e o f g r i m m a j e s t y , f o r D a mi-ergs commanded the flagships, and a century of their Galgath Assaulters stood in every prow. Before this many-hulled marine juggernaut Pythna's broken navy fled, lacking even enough lead once they reached home to blockade their harbor before the Taargian fleet broke through. And, as is widely known, Pythna was not then saved by any powers of her own, but by powers that came down from Strega. These latter, incensed that demon-kind should presume to touch their keels to any shore in the Astrygals, bent upon those invaders such attentions as shortly sent them wheeling and bleeding straight back to the Vortex, and back down its clamorous throat.

But whatever one's views on these matters, and on the proper apportionment of blame between those who - resolve to make war and those who, by supplying the needs of the former, effectuate their sanguinary ambitions, I hope there are few who would dissent from calling one historical consequence of Anvil Pastures' fate a good one. Shortly after Anvil's catastrophe, the trade war between Hallam and Baskin-Sharpz ceased, and the belligerents achieved a composition of their differences that has endured until the day of this writing, and produced a number of cooperative ventures that promise to usher in a new era of collaboration between the two cities' economic spheres.

If it is anything, the story of Anvil's disaster is a poignant illustration of the tragic insularity of consciousness that mankind is so much a prey to. The extant information about Anvil Pastures' remote past, while not abundant, is such that any man who spent a few weeks researching the matter in the proper places would be sufficiently informed that he would have found many of Dame Lybis's oracular directives to her townsfellows most alarming, and would have deemed their fulfillment of those directives to be downright astonishing. Moreover, my own compilation of these data, of which Nifft carried an abstract on his errand for me, was and is not the only such scholarly treatment of the matter available in the world, if one but seeks diligently for other scholiasts' - productions.

The geography of Lulume's Southern spur, where Anvil Pastures is located, is worthy of notice. The highly metal-rich composition of that great massif has been noted by many writers. The troubled waters of the sea of Agon, for all the ceaseless power of their erosive assaults, manage only to emphasize the obdurate imperviousness to weathering of the Spur's majestic cliffs. These, as our nameless author tells us, are very little worn, for all the millennia of their endurance, and oppose an almost flawlessly vertical wall of more than five hundred miles' breadth to the ocean's futile siege. Several authors, the Learned Quall most reliable among them, report an ancient tradition that the Spur is not of earthly substance; that it is the remnant of a fireball which, in some immemorial era, fell from the stars upon Lulume's southern rim. There is at least a poetic felicity in this conception, for when, later, on Anvil's site that legendary foundry of star-vessels was built, it was said that the starry visitants seeking the services of the forge rained down upon the place in meteoric showers, lighting the night-buried ocean bright as day for hundreds of leagues in every direction. Fitting, that those cosmic mariners should have been refurbishing their craft with materials native to those trans-stellar gulfs it was their task-and triumph-to navigate.

-Shag Margold The Goddess in Glass I.

WHEN THE THIEF Nifft, of Karkmahn-Ra was near thirty (which side of it is not known), he had achieved the first plateau of mastery in his art. That is, his style had been defined but he still lacked certainty about the proper canvases for his efforts. He knocked around more than he worked.

And one summer when he was hunting hill-pig with Barnar Ox-back in the highlands of Chilia, a letter reached him from his friend Shag Margold, the Karkmahnite cartographer and historian. Margold, knowing that Nifft meant to strike out westward across the Sea of Agon when he left Chilia, entreated his friend to stop in Anvil Pastures on the Southern Spur of Lulume on his way out. Margold had an important treatise in hand, to which information on that city's primary religious cult would be highly pertinent, and he had enclosed a packet in inquiries he wished Nifft to give the oracle of the Flockwarden's shrine.

The most current news in the scholar's quarter of the world was that the city had for more than a year been enjoying a period of astonishing prosperity, resulting from a revelation made to the citizens by the Goddess through her Oracle. The city was supposed to have benefited throughout its history from similar benevolent theophanies on the part of the Flockwarden, and the present boom period in Anvil Pastures seemed an excellent time to make some respectful investigations of this matter.

So from Chilia Nifft took ship, some two weeks later, for Anvil Pastures. He had already been aware of its prosperity. Anvil's weaponry had dominated the Great Shallows markets for decades, and quite strikingly so during the last nine months. Blades, body-armor, arbalests, seige-machinery-everything from byrnies to scabbard-chapes, and all of a superlative quality of steel both impossibly flexible and all but unbreakable, had been pouring from its foundries and forges at such modest prices that all competition on both sides of the Sea of Agon was overwhelmed. Nifft expected no trouble finding ships bound for that port.

But it did surprise him that the most convenient option that he found was a big Gelidorian troop-shuttle bound for the city with no less than seven hundred mercenaries requisitioned by the Aristarchs of Anvil Pastures. These troops included a large contingent of pioneers and field-engineers. None of these troops knew the city's object in retaining them, but they had other news for him. Anvil Pastures' luck had just recently taken a very nasty turn.

One of the huge, contorted mountains flanking the city had suffered an uncanny form of collapse. Its peak had been fractured and the entire mass of it had for some weeks lain poised on the brink of a collapse that must utterly obliterate the city beneath it. The Aristarchs-the body of commercial oligarchs which governed the city-had beseeched the Oracle of the Flockwarden for some remedy to the civic anguish. The Goddess-in- Glass-for this she was called as often as Flockwarden by the mercenaries-had, through the oracle, declared that her aid in this crisis could be procured, but first the Aristarchs must, in pledge of earnest allegiance on their part, procure for the Goddess this sizable expeditionary force of first-quality professionals.

At the evening mess Nifft sought a seat by the First Captain of Pioneers, a man named Kandros, whom he had found the most concise and enlightening of his informants about Anvil Pastures' dilemma. By the time the grog ration went round the two men had exchanged a variety of anecdotes and philosophical perspectives, and had found that they rather liked each other. Kandros was a slight, leathery man, not quite forty, but with the eye- wrinkles of a desert tortoise, the wrinkles of eyes that had studied two eventful decades' worth of encampments, fortifications, seigeworks and battles. The hands that hung from his wiry arms were great knobbed and tendoned pincers. These big, hammer-knuckled paws which he seemed to move so seldom were uncommonly direct and neat in the movements they did make. Nifft sipped his aqua vitae and said: "Kandros. Am I right in feeling that this company of yours presents an unusually strong component of engineers and sappers and the like, given the number of combat forces?"

"Quite right. We've conjectured no end what place we might be hired to besiege, but we are too few to attack any city of real consequence. Besides this, it's hard to see what help for Anvil Pastures there'd be in the capture of some fortress or town."

"Though the Aristarkion has engaged you, I gather that august body is as much in the dark about your precise commission as you are."

"So I conceive it. The Aristarkion is not always piously prompt to fulfill a directive of the Flockwarden. For - instance, more than a year ago, the Goddess announced through her oracle that her flock had returned to the world of the sun, and that-I quote exactly now-she must have them by her, every one, for it's long and long that they have been gone. The oracle asked, in the Goddess' behalf, for an expedition to bring her flock back to her from somewhere on the southeast coast of Kairnheim, where apparently they had reemerged from some long burial under the earth. And the Aristarchs, after mature consideration, declined to undertake so great an expense for so vague a behest."

"It would seem that the Goddess is forgiving. It must have been shortly after that refusal that she pointed the city the way to its recent bonanza."

A certain watchfulness had entered Nifft's manner, as if Kandros' last remarks had a connotative undertone that he was not quite catching. The captain's reply was in a meditative voice.

"In religious matters, my understanding is that the city-fathers are somewhat inconsistent. When the Goddess gives them oracles that hint of profit, they are piously convinced of the deity's potency. There resides in her corpse a strange attunement to the earth, its deep and secret structures, and the oracles have preserved the secret of interpreting the Flockwarden's revelations, though their mysteries remain inviolate. You're right about the Goddess' generosity. Her revelation to the Aristarkion followed its rejection of her demand by little more than a week."

Nifft was smiling absently at his cup. "I get the feeling," he said, "that there is a certain irony in the city's state of affairs which you have yet to reveal to me."

Kandros nodded, conceding. "To s o m e o n e n ot intimately affected by the situation it might be amusing that it was the Aristarkion's intemperate haste to capitalize on the bonanza the Goddess revealed to them which, through an unforseeable fluke, created the deadly flaw in the structure of the mount a i n w h i c h now threatens the city."

Nifft and Kandros stood by the rail amidships. "You know," Nifft said, "no matter how I tried to imagine it, it all sounded preposterous." Gazing at the mountains surrounding the bay into which they sailed, and smiling, Nifft shook his head. Kandros nodded.

"Descriptions never convey it."

"What is that jetty made of?"

"Steel, or something like it. It's called Pastures' S t a f f . It is a relic of the age of the Flockwarden."

"Pastures' Staff . . . And how remote was that age?"

Kandros shrugged. "It was when this bay was formed, and these mountains gnawed from the coastal massif. It was when these mountains were almost twice as high as you see them now, and far more terrible in their form."

The Staff, jutting a quarter mile into the bay, was the spine of the harbor's system of docks. The gentle slope of the bay-floor submerged its seaward end, so that its full length was not determinable. Though entirely caged within the skeleton of masonry and timber that crowned and branched from it, the cyclopean axis immediately - engrossed the eye, as though all that encumbered it-not quite as real as its immemorial metal-lacked the necessary solidity to obscure it. It drew the viewer's gaze shoreward, to its inland end, which the city's architects had incorporated in the foundation of one of the towers of the imposing city-wall. But once there, the eye again neglected the nobly-proportioned masonry of Anvil Pastures, and was drawn upward to the mountains that em- bowered the city.

Kandros was not given to fanciful turns of speech, and he had called the mountains no more than what they were-terrible in form. The Southern Spur as a whole was essentially one vast block of extremely metal-rich stone two hundred leagues in length, opposing huge, blunt cliffs to the Sea of Agon's troublous waters. Erosion had flawed and featured those cliffs, but nowhere really breached the general smoothness of their mighty wall.

But at the site of Anvil Pastures something more powerful than the wind and tides had torn into it-had gouged the deep embayment that was the harbor, hewn the rocky niche that was the city's seat, and chewed the continental buttress into mountains stark as a rack of bones, and stretching sixty miles inland in all directions.

They reared up two miles and more with fearful steepness from the sea's threshold. They were gaunt, disjointed peaks. Something in their contorted multitude suggested pain and calamity.

Nifft said, "I remember a certain battlefield I saw some years ago. The war had moved on from it two weeks before, and many cavalry had died in that engagement. It was a fiercely hot mid-summer. I remember those acres of sun-hardened, leathery carcasses, their crooked legs sticking up from the earth at every angle."

Kandros made a mouth of wry assent, and nodded at the peaks. "Imagine them twice this stature, their carving not yet softened by eons of rain and wind."

The two men lounged on the rail absently watching the harbor as they approached their berth in it. They passed a pair of warships which, while ignoring in-bound craft, appeared to be stopping and boarding every outbound vessel, once it had cast off and pulled into the bay.

"Hallamese," Kandros said in answer to Nifft's look of inquiry. "Rather an amusing matter. Hallam is at war with Baskin-Sharpz, near the equator upcoast here on Lulume. I suppose you've heard of the conflict?"

"Yes. Hallam's on Moira, the next isle east of Chilia. A trade war, no?"

"Correct. You'd think the Sea of Agon big enough to share between them. Anyway, it turns out they only went to war because both had discreetly sent diplomats to Anvil Pastures and both sets of diplomats negotiated what they thought were exclusively advantageous arms contracts with the Aristarkion. So they find themselves at each others' throats, and each finds the other t w i c e a s w e l l - a r m e d a s he had been gambling on. If their war wasn't going so hot and heavy the dis c o v e r y w o u l d ' v e made a truce between them and they'd have joined forces to enslave Anvil here, despite her mighty walls. Even as it is, this harbor is now a zone of truce for both belligerents. In a few days two Baskinon warships will probably arrive here to relieve these Hallamese vessels. There are to be no emigrants from Anvil, you see. They intend that the inhabitants of the Pastures will stay here to fulfill those arms contracts they so doubly s o l d . N a t u r a l ly both belligerents h a v e s t a f f s of diplomats obligatorily hosted by the Aristarchs in the comfort of their own homes, and these diplomats keep a daily roll-count of all the city's rich and powerful men and of their - liquid assets, to ensure that both remain at h o m e . I t ' s t h e o n l y r e a s on that splendid - metropolis there isn't a ghost town."

They regarded the ramparts under which they were now docking. Wealth and power radiantly incarnate- such were the hugeness and the resplendent masonry of the walls, as well as of the great buildings which, farther upslope within the city, overtopped them. Nifft, musingly, said, "Pastures' Staff. Is that the name of that thing in the water, precisely? I mean, I have the impression I've heard it referred to, but pronounced differently."

"No, Pastures' Staff is what I've always heard it called."

"Well. Shall we share a maxim of wine while we're waiting to go to the temple?"

"I'll take you to the Hammerside Inn, but I insist on the privilege of buying the maxim."

"That is kindly spoken, and gladly accepted."

II.

The wiry captain was to join the rest of the mercenary commanders when they reported to the oracle of the Flockwarden to learn their commssion. Kandros was of the opinion that Nifft's interview with the oracle stood a better chance of success i f she f i rst met him in company with the military gentlemen whose services her Goddess had enjoined her to procure, and Nifft thought this very likely.

"We probably have time for another of these before we must leave," Kandros said, hefting the empty maxim.

He signaled the ostler of the Hammerside.

"Only if it comes from my purse this time," Nifft said.

"Absolutely not. If you are obssessed with repaying me, you can do so on some other occasion."

Nifft smiled thoughtfully. "Very well. On some other occasion."

"Your eye dwells on the fireplace," Kandros said a bit after the fresh wine had been brought.

"Its odd to see one whose inner wall is of iron rather than brick." Indeed, the wall glowed with the heat of the blaze. Kandros nodded with the satisfied smile of one who has achieved a calculated effect. "It is in fact a far larger piece of iron than the little fragment of it visible there. That whole wall of the inn is built against it."

"The Hammerside Inn. . . ."

"I will show you when we go out."

"So be it, oh thou military man of mystery."

A large, sleek man in a fur-hemmed robe came into the common-room, his manner one of dignity in haste. He stood in the entryway, simultaneously clapping to summon the ostler, and scanning the room for him. The ostler was not overly quick to terminate his conversation with some patrons at a corner table, and when he came, - exhibited only a perfunctory deference. Kandros nudged his friend and said, "I think this fellow is from the temple." Indeed, the ostler directed the stranger's eyes to their table. The smooth-faced could be seen to consider summoning them to him from their table, but something in their aspect decided the stranger to approach their table.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. Which of you is Captain Kandros?"

"That's me. And you are Sexton Minor, are you not?"

The man nodded, looking both pleased and vaguely miffed, as if announcing his identity were one of his - habitual pleasures. "The shrine-mistress would have her interview with you a trifle earlier than she indicated. I told your fellow officers of this, and they asked me to bring you to the shrine. My conveyance waits outside."

"Will you have a glass with us?" Nifft asked. "It seems shameful to waste so much good wine."

The Sexton's oily black eyes, resting on the maxim, plainly agreed. "Dame Lybis bade me hurry. . . ." He hesitated. His own words decided him. "Bah! I'm her Sexton, not her lackey. Thank you, gentlemen." He took a chair and signaled the ostler for a cup. With evident relish he decanted and sampled the wine. Kandros said, "I heard from one of the other captains, friend Minor, that your shrine-mistress is an irascible sort. I hope she doesn't make the honor of your office a burdensome one."

This sally visibly warmed the Sexton. He grimaced confidingly and leaned nearer his hosts, regaling them more liberally with the scent of his pomade.