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drew ahead gossamer-like, and the priest choked on a lungful, so that I laughed at his discomfiture. We must have presented a strange spectacle, half-demented with fear, stinking with leem-stench, half-burned, rushing through the decaying hulk of an upturned ship.
    Up to this time the priest appeared to have forgotten he wore a sword belted to his waist. Or, if he had not forgotten, he had made no attempt to draw the weapon.
    As I pushed up toward the jagged opening where the rim had long since fallen away and the planks had begun their last rotting decay into powder, the priest bethought himself of his sword. No doubt, at the same time, he bethought himself of his own congregation, that he was the chief priest, and of his own proper manhood.
    For whatever reason it may have been, he chose that moment, as I bent to peer out of the opening, to draw and essay the task of chopping off my head.
    The thraxter whispered its tiny chuckle of metal against metal as it hissed from the scabbard.
    The priest was no fighting man. I simply moved — sideways and down and around, the child shielded away — moved so that the priest’s blow, delivered with a panting, ferocious, desperate force, struck the timbers. The sword hit and stuck and he could not pull it free. He struggled with the thing, tugging on the hilt, and then he cast a look at me, such a look as would freeze the marrow in his own bones.
    I said: “Tell me, why should I not slay you now?”
    He blinked and swallowed, still tugging at the sword stuck fast in the timber. “You brought me here from the temple for some other reason than to kill me.”
    “So I did,” I said, as though suddenly remembering. “So I did. Now get through the hole —
Bratch!
”
    He jumped at that savage word of command, and hitched his robes up and swung a leg over the rotted opening. I gave him a push and he let out a yell and toppled away out of sight.
    The last of the sun’s radiance fell past the hole, deeply emerald and darkest ruby, twinned sky colors eternally orbiting each other, in love and in hate. Well, this night I’d have to skip and jump before I was free of the brown and silvers. I took a quick look back, past the waft of smoke and the leem’s area. Their racket kept up. It would take time for the Leem Lovers to draw back the chains. Time to be moving before they rushed out onto the beach to cut us off.
    A glint halfway up the bulkhead took my eye as I put my foot on the splintered coaming of the hole. I stopped and looked. The last of the suns, breaking for a moment free of cloudbanks low on the horizon and flooding the world with a rusty patina, pierced through the opening. The light fell on the three steel tines of a trident, still embedded in the wood.
    The leems were screaming and snarling, which indicated they were being drawn back on their chains; the chief priest was probably running like a drunk over the sands to escape by now; the child was crying harder and was soaking wet; the debased followers of an evil cult were after my blood and no doubt some of them were already out on the beach... I stepped away from the hole, crossed to the bulkhead and reaching up wrenched out that narrow three-tined trident.
    Then, and only then, I made for the hole and leaped through.
    As I had expected, the chief priest was running for it. He was a dark flapping shape against the sunset glow. My foot kicked something hard in the sands. It was the silver mask discarded by the priest. I picked it up, musing. Shouts lifted past the entranceway to the hull. Time to go. The chief priest had escaped. That was his good fortune. I’d not risk the child’s life chasing him — let alone my own.
    We set off together, the girl child and I, up the beach toward the trees.
    I carried the trident in my right hand, hefting it from time to time. Around the haft, just below the three long narrow and cruel tines, a ribbon of brown had been tied, a silken ribbon of brown with silver fringes.
    Once we’d