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traveling with a band of Tinkerfolk, Dosh’s own people. Dosh had tired of the grinding poverty and run out on them. But before that…
    “No!”
    A dangerous silence…Kraanard said, “What does that mean?”
    Dosh himself did not know what that meant. He did not know what he was thinking. D’ward!
    “It means he wants money,” Bandrops growled in the background. “He’s a greedy, grasping scoundrel with the heart of a whore, but he’d sell his own mother for a few silver stars.”
    Mother certainly, but not D’ward!
    Why not D’ward? Dosh did not know. He needed time to think.
    Kraanard smiled. He closed a fist in Dosh’s hair and bent his head back. “How does thirty stars sound, boy? All you have to do is identify him for us. We’ll handle the rough stuff. You won’t be hurt.”
    Dosh uttered the plaintive cry he used to indicate pain or fear, but at the moment he was feeling neither. He was filled with an inexplicable fury. Thirty stars? That was too much. What sort of gullible fool did they think he was? Far too much! Thirty stars was more money than he’d ever owned in his life.
    “What’s the Liberator to you, boy?” Kraanard demanded. His breath stank of fish.
    Good question! “Sir, you’re hurting me!” Dosh wailed, but his mind was churning. What, indeed, was the Liberator to him? Betraying friends had always been one of his specialties, so why should he feel so different about D’ward? Was it because D’ward, although he had known exactly what Dosh was, had always treated him as an equal, another human being? He was almost the only person who ever had. Dosh slid the knife out from his belt.
    The trooper did not notice the movement. Snarling, he twisted Dosh’s hair harder. “Answer me!”
    Dosh gave him his answer. Flexible blades were tricky for stabbing, but he drove it expertly between Kraanard’s ribs. He had a very intimate knowledge of anatomy—he knew the way to a man’s heart. The knife came free easily as the body dropped. Bandrops gaped, then dived around the desk, heading for the door and opening his mouth to shout, but he should have done the shouting first. Dosh leaped, took him from behind, and cut his throat.
    He had wiped the blade clean on Bandrops’s tunic before the blood stopped pumping out of its owner. Meanwhile, he was thinking hard. Killing had never bothered him—nor excited him either. His heart was beating quite normally—but he had certainly behaved in a very uncharacteristic fashion. Why refuse an offer of thirty stars, however remote the chances of collecting?
    More to the point at the moment, how had the authorities known that Bandrops Advocate’s coachman could identify the Liberator? He could think of no reasonable explanation in mortal terms, which meant the gods must be meddling again. Dosh revered no god. He despised most of them—especially Tion, the Youth.
    Which god was mixed up in this? Many men and women affected special loyalty to a specific god, swearing allegiance to a mystery. Tion had the Tion Fellowship and probably several other cults also; Thargian warriors would belong to the Blood and Hammer, loyal to Karzon. Dosh knelt beside Kraanard and peered carefully under the neck of his tunic, looking for a chain. Not finding one, he undid the laces, but then he was forced to conclude that the late, unlamented Kraanard had not been wearing an amulet. He stripped the tunic off the corpse and began to inspect it—a nice, well-muscled body. He noted with approval how tiny the wound was and how little it had bled, like a deadly snakebite, he thought proudly.
    He did not find what he was looking for until he removed Kraanard’s breeches. High on the inside of the man’s right thigh he discovered a small red birthmark in the shape of an Ø. Dosh would bet his ears that the man had not been born with that birthmark.
    Well! He had expected a five-pointed star, symbol of the Maiden. Astina was presiding deity of Joalia, her resplendent temple