omething
at me, and I caught it in midair. It was a stone incised with Kyral's
name in the ideographs of Shainsa. "You can sleep with the caravan if
you care to. Show that token to Cuinn."

* * * * *

Kyral's caravan was encamped in a barred field past the furthest gates
of the Kharsa. About a dozen men were busy loading the pack
animals--horses shipped in from Darkover, mostly. I asked the first man
I met for Cuinn. He pointed out a burly fellow in a shiny red
shirtcloak, who was busy at chewing out one of the young men for the way
he'd put a packsaddle on his beast.

Shainsa is a good language for cursing, but Cuinn had a special talent
at it. I blinked in admiration while I waited for him to get his breath
so I could hand him Kyral's token.

In the light of the fire I saw what I'd half expected: he was the second
of the Dry-towners who'd tried to rough me up in the spaceport cafe.
Cuinn barely glanced at the cut stone and tossed it back, pointing out
one of the packhorses. "Load your personal gear on that one, then get
busy and show this mush-headed wearer of sandals"--an insult carrying
particularly filthy implications in Shainsa--"how to fasten a
packstrap."

He drew breath and began to swear at the luckless youngster again, and I
relaxed. He evidently hadn't recognized me, either. I took the strap in
my hand, guiding it through the saddle loop. "Like that," I told the
kid, and Cuinn stopped swearing long enough to give me a curt nod of
acknowledgment and point out a heap of boxed and crated objects.

"Help him load up. We want to get clear of the city by daybreak," he
ordered, and went off to swear at someone else.

Kyral turned up at dawn, and a few minutes later the camp had vanished
into a small scattering of litter and we were on our way.

Kyral's caravan, in spite of Cuinn's cursing, was well-managed and
well-handled. The men were Dry-towners, eleven of them, silent and
capable and most of them very young. They were cheerful on the trail,
handled the pack animals competently, during the day, and spent most of
the nights grouped around the fire, gambling silently on the fall of the
cut-crystal prisms they used for dice.

Three days out of the Kharsa I began to worry about Cuinn.

It was of course a spectacular piece of bad luck to find all three of
the men from the spaceport cafe in Kyral's caravan. Kyral had obviously
not known me, and even by daylight he paid no att