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pile of hides and rushes, sunlight streaming through a window very high up. He blinked. It was not a window, but a breach in the smooth black wall that went up and up and up…The room he was in was not quite a wall, but a partition of planks which scarcely reached higher than his head. He began to get up, stopped, with a sharp cry of pain.
    Every muscle seemed sore—including muscles the existence of which he had not known before. He thought that a hot bath might relieve the soreness in tendons and ligaments, as well as remove the grime and dried sweat—but he feared what it might do to the raw skin on the inside of his upper legs. And, at any rate, where in this place—half improvised camp, half ancient ruin—could he expect to find a hot bath?
    The answer came sooner than he expected. A fat, toothless old woman came bustling in with a bowl of hot water and a rag. “You’ll have to get up now,” she said. “I’m going to be needing this room to sort my potatoes. Wash up and get along.”
    If this were a prison, it was an odd and informal one. He winced, but was glad of the wash, such as it was. “I don’t know where to get along to,” he said, scrubbing gingerly. The old woman said that this wasn’t her problem. So, carrying the trousers he didn’t dare to try to put back on, he wandered out into the hall which sloped down between the partitions. Again the light coming through the hole far up caught his attention. He followed the shaft of sunlight to where it lit on the opposite wall, and it was there that something struck his attention.
    It appeared to be a frieze; high up as it was, and at a bad angle, obscured by dirt and cobwebs in places, he could not clearly make it out. But one figure seemed to leap into focus. It was not a human figure. With a blink and a shudder, he understood. He was in one of the ruined and abandoned castles of the noisome and chitin-mantled Kar-chee.
    But who the people were who had moved into it as a hermit-crab moves into an abandoned shell, he had yet to learn.
    At any rate, they took a friendly enough interest in him as he hobbled slowly along. Someone offered him a fried egg; someone offered him a boiled potato. Someone offered him a finespun tunic that had seen better days. And someone offered to apply another dressing of salve to his saddle-sores, and to bandage them as well. He accepted all these offers.
    After thanking the last donor, and finding that he could now walk much more comfortably, he said, “I am not complaining… but how is it that I’m not tied anymore?”
    The bandager, a middle-aged man with a broken nose, said, matter-of-factly, “Why, because you couldn’t get out of here until we were ready to let you. Other than that, it’s Liberty Hall.” He chuckled briefly.
    Jon-Joras said, “But I must get out of here. I have duties… outside.”
    The bandager gave a grim little nod. “We all have duties… outside. For the time being, though, some of us have our duties… inside… as well.”
    “Forgive me. But—you don’t talk like a Gentleman or like a Doghunter. I’m an outworlder, and easily confused.”
    “I’ll tell you. At one time I lived in the State. The town or city, I mean. Drogue. Never been there? Not much of anything. I liked it, though. I was a shopkeeper. Had a little house on the outskirts. A garden plot.” His sentences got shorter and his face grew redder. “My land bordered a Gentleman’s, you see. Oegorix. Rot his blood… One day I came home. Tired. Sit in my garden. I thought.
    “Garden? You see one here? That’s what I saw there. His High—”—the word he uttered was not “Nascence”—“had decided to extend his training grounds. So, rather than take a chunk out of his own grass or garden, he merely appropriated mine. Not a flower, not a plant did he leave me. His bloody musics were tramping up and down and under my window where the rosebeds had been.”
    In the fight that followed, the shopkeeper had gotten his