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Right.” Haft reached his arm down the hole. “Grab hold, I’ll pull you up.” There was a splash as Spinner jumped up. Haft’s hand didn’t stretch far enough to reach Spinner. “Wait,” he said, and twisted around to grab one of the cloaks. He knelt by the side of the hole, got a solid grip on the sturdy material, and dropped one end through the opening. The cloak went taut when Spinner grabbed it, then Haft felt his companion climbing. A hand suddenly grabbed the side of the hole and Haft let go of the cloak with one hand to grasp Spinner’s wrist. In another second they were both inside.
    “You left me down there!” Spinner said. “You had to stand on my shoulders to reach the hole, and you expected me to reach it by myself. If we weren’t surrounded—”
    “I’m sorry,” Haft said, abashed. “I didn’t think of you needing help. I forgot.”
    “You’d forget your head if it wasn’t nailed on.”
    “No I wouldn’t.” Haft spoke sharply, but he looked away. “Anyway, I remembered, and I got you out of the water.”
    But Spinner was already dressing and arranging weapons on his person. Haft silently finished doing the same.
    Dressed and armed, Spinner put his eye to a crack in the door of the shed. “We’ve got a problem,” he said. In his brief look outside, he saw Jokapcul soldiers crawling over the ships and other soldiers using pikes to probe the water along the edge of the dock. They didn’t bother him; two soldiers were walking toward the shed. Clearly junior men, they wore no armor. One carried a sword scabbarded on his back, and the other held a pike in his hands. The one with the sword had a round buckler strapped to his left forearm.
    “Hide.”
    Haft ducked down behind the cask, his axe in his hand. Spinner stood against the wall on the hinge side of the door; he held his staff ready. They didn’t have to wait long.
    The door creaked open and one of the soldiers poked his head in to look around. He said something then turned back to scan the docks for a sergeant watching him. Evidently nobody was watching them. The soldier said something urgent and came in all the way. The second soldier dashed in behind him. The first one pushed the door shut and leaned against it. They weren’t looking in Spinner’s direction, so they didn’t see him even though he was standing an arm’s reach away. They laughed and said something that probably meant “We’re out of this worthless search now. Let’s rest here for a while and let the other men look for the intruders, who must be far gone.” Spinner and Haft didn’t understand a word the two men used, but under similar circumstances soldiers of all armies say the same things no matter what language they speak.
    But Spinner and Haft didn’t want to share their hiding place with two enemy soldiers. And they didn’t think the two Jokapcul would want to share with them either.
    “Now,” Spinner said, and rose to spin his staff at the pikeman.
    Haft was already on his feet, swinging his blade in a horizontal arc at the neck of the swordsman, who was closer to him.
    The two Jokapcul didn’t have time to react before one had his head cracked open by Spinner’s staff and the other one’s head flew off his shoulders.
    Haft sidestepped the falling corpse of the man he’d killed and strode to the door to peer out. “No one’s looking, let’s go.” He started to open the door.
    “Wait,” Spinner said. He knelt by the bodies and stripped off their shirts. The shoulders of the shirt of the man Haft had decapitated were saturated with blood, but the shirt of the man Spinner had killed was clean. Spinner tied a sleeve of the bloody shirt around the end of his staff and stuck it down the hole to swish around in the water. He pulled it back up at an angle so it wouldn’t slip off. He wrung the water from the shirt and held it open to see how much blood still showed on it. He couldn’t tell in the dim light inside the shed. “It’s wet. Any