ht
disguise myself so that my own sister, or the mother who bore me, would
not know me. But I had no illusions about my ability to disguise myself
from Rakhal. He had created the disguise that was me.

When the second sun set, red and burning, behind the salt cliffs, I knew
he was not in Shainsa, but I stayed on, waiting for something to happen.
At night I slept in a cubbyhole behind a wineshop, paying an inordinate
price for that very dubious privilege. And every day in the sleepy
silence of the blood-red noon I paced the public square of Shainsa.

This went on for four days. No one took the slightest notice of another
nameless man in a shabby shirtcloak, without name or identity or known
business. No one appeared to see me except the dusty children, with pale
fleecy hair, who played their patient games on the windswept curbing of
the square. They surveyed my scarred face with neither curiosity or
fear, and it occurred to me that Rindy might be such another as these.

If I had still been thinking like an Earthman, I might have tried to
question one of the children, or win their confidence. But I had a
deeper game in hand.

On the fifth day I was so much a fixture that my pacing went unnoticed
even by the children. On the gray moss of the square, a few
dried-looking old men, their faces as faded as their shirtcloaks and
bearing the knife scars of a hundred forgotten fights, drowsed on the
stone benches. And along the flagged walk at the edge of the square, as
suddenly as an autumn storm in the salt flats, a woman came walking.

She was tall, with a proud swinging walk, and a metallic clashing kept
rhythm to her swift steps. Her arms were fettered, each wrist bound with
a jeweled bracelet and the bracelets linked together by a long,
silver-gilt chain passed through a silken loop at her waist. From the
loop swung a tiny golden padlock, but in the lock stood an even tinier
key, signifying that she was a higher caste than her husband or consort,
that her fettering was by choice and not command.

She stopped directly before me and raised her arm in formal greeting
like a man. The chain made a tinkling sound in the hushed square as her
other hand was pulled up tight against the silken loop at her waist. She
stood surveying me for some moments, and finally I raised my head and
returned her gaze. I don't know why I had expected her to have hair like
spun black glass and eyes that burned with a red reflection of the
burnin