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sand of the bottom level of the Waste, dangerous with burrowing predators. The stocky vigil with the red headcloth was dead, the back of his robe rent into bloody fragments by shrapnel from the steamwagon. The other was the Patrician. He lay facedown, a crumpled bundle of cloth, but Khat could see from here that he was still breathing.
    Khat pushed himself up enough to see the wreck of the steam-wagon through a gap in the rock. Tattered figures swarmed over it, trying to get down into the housing and the small cargo bed beneath it but hampered by the superheated steam still escaping from the boiler. In moments they would realize the passengers had escaped and begin a search. Khat knew he should skirt around the dead and dying and keep moving, but the prospect of acquiring a painrod distracted him silly. Survival instinct warred with the thought of possessing so rare a relic, and temporarily lost. Khat started forward.
    His hand was on the painrod on the Patrician’s belt when movement in the corner of his eye alerted him. He turned just as a dark-clad figure knocked him backward over the corpse of the vigil. They rolled in the soft sand, struggling for the weapon.
    The pirate shoved his weight down on Khat’s arm, forcing the painrod toward the krismen’s side. Khat twisted frantically, but the painrod grazed his ribs, and the pirate shifted his grip enough to trigger it. Khat’s muscles spasmed as fire seemed to jolt through his body, and he cried out with the last breath of air in his lungs. He was helpless for an instant, unable to move, and the loss of control was terrifying. The pirate was straddling him, and he couldn’t see anything of the man’s face past the concealing hood and layers of dirty rags. The stinking robes were stained with old blood and sewn with whitened bone fragments and lengths of human hair, still attached to pieces of dried scalp.
    A figure loomed above the pirate suddenly, wrapping a wiry forearm around his throat. The pirate gasped for the breath so suddenly cut off and fell backward. Khat dug his hands into the gravelly sand and managed to sit up, panting desperately for air. As the pirate wrenched away from the slight form of the Patrician, Khat drew the knife from his boot sheath. The pirate flung himself at him, and he slashed sideways, catching him in the throat. The pirate recoiled and collapsed, twitching helplessly, his blood staining the sand.
    Khat was still trembling from reaction to the painrod. He looked around and saw the young Patrician had staggered to his feet again.
    His veil had been torn loose, and he … No, he corrected himself,
she
. The idle suspicion he had felt when he heard her speak hadn’t been so idle. The hair was blond and cropped close to the skull, the fashion Patrician women followed. The young features were well formed, if narrow, the eyes dusty blue and glazed with pain. Lifting a hand to her forehead, she sat down hard suddenly, and pulled her veil back over her face.
    Khat cursed, bitterly angry at himself, at fate, at the world in general. It didn’t help. The woman had saved his life and obviously wasn’t near enough to death to make abandonment feasible. He put the painrod into a sleeve of his robe and knotted it, then stood and hauled the young Patrician unceremoniously to her feet. Half dragging, half carrying her further into the sheltering rocks, he muttered, “If you had any common courtesy you’d die now and save me this trouble.”
    This deep into the Waste, traveling on the bottom level would only get them attacked by one of the myriad of poisonous predators living in the sandy hollows and the shade of the rocks. Hauling the dazed and injured woman with him, Khat scrambled up a fall of tumbled stone to the midlevel, where natural trails, tunnels, and caves honeycombed the rock. Faster still would be to climb to the very top, where the stone had been mostly smoothed into gentle waves by the wind, but up there they would be seen by the pirates as soon