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back of the neck.
    “Did you follow all that rigmarole of the love lives of these folk?” Pompino spoke around a leg of chicken that dribbled gravy into his whiskers. This he wiped away at once with a clean yellow cloth. Khibils are fastidious folk.
    “Most. It is not an unfamiliar pattern—”
    “Oh, agreed. I meant how can we turn it to our own ^benefit?”
    Sharp, too, are Khibils, especially those dubbed the Iarvin.
    I speared a momolam and lifted it.
Tuscurs Maiden
, in Limki the Lame, boasted a cook to be prized. In this, Linson merely emphasized his own approach to the important things of life. I squinted at the momolam, the small yellow tuber glistening and delicious and aching to be tasted.
    “Whoever supports us in opposition to Lem receives our support in their amorous designs? Is that it?”
    “Aye. Probably.”
    “Too simple, my friend.”
    “Nothing is simple where you’re concerned, Jak.”
    I placed the momolam into my mouth and shut my eyes and chewed. Pompino was right, confound it!
    I wondered what would chance if the Star Lords dispatched Pompino to Vallia to sort out a problem for them and we met up. I’d have a deal of explaining to do then, by Vox!
    He waggled his knife at me.
    “Your young friend Pando, the Kov of Bormark, is a rascal and yet a very very highly placed noble. He means to have his own way with this girl and to Cottmer’s Caverns with his cousin Murgon.”
    Refusing to be drawn into a wrangle about Pando’s character I said: “The Everoinye have commanded us to go and burn Lem’s temples. So this we do. We are going to burn as many temples as we can find in the kovnate of Bormark. Young Pando is the kov. A great deal of his property is going to be burned up when the temples are destroyed. What, Pompino, do you think the young rascal of a kov will say to that?”
    Pompino laughed and threw his gnawed chicken bone into a silver waste dish.
    “Why, Jak! He will roar and rage. But the temples will be burned!”
    “Humph,” I said, taking refuge in that silly sailorman’s noise when he has nothing to add that makes sense.
    So, after an interesting space in which Pompino fussed over selecting a wine that pleased him — a light Tardalvoh, of all things — I had to say: “Yes. Pando is determined to take the girl, this Vadni Dafni Harlstam, to wife. This will not only increase his estates, for her vadvarate marches with his kovnate to the south, it will infuriate his cousin Murgon—”
    “It may destroy him!”
    “You think so? He struck me as dark and dangerous—”
    “Oh, aye, he is. But I read him as a man to be broken rather than bend.”
    “With all the delays that have bedeviled us it’s a racing chance Murgon will reach Bormark before we do. As for races, I wouldn’t care to wager on which cousin will get there first.”
    Thinking of Pando and his mother, Tilda, I was of a mind that Murgon could bend or break so long as he failed in his dark designs. In this I was woefully adrift, as you shall hear.
    I could not tell Pompino that over the years I’d had agents in Pandahem to keep an eye on Pando and Tilda, and that they had failed me. The reason for their failure, at the time, was easy to understand, what with the turmoil of the Wars and the struggles against poor mad Empress Thyllis of Hamal and the devil wizard, Phu-Si-Yantong, known as the Hyr Notor. In those dread days men’s and women’s lives were cheap. We were clawing back to the light of the Suns, now, and life was resuming something of order and civilization; we still had a long way to go.
    So — this meant I was not in possession of the full facts. Ahead all was murk and uncertainty.
    Patting my lips with a yellow cloth, I stood up.
    “I’m for a spell on the quarterdeck. I need the breeze in my face for a time. You’ll join me?”
    “Later. If we are to avoid the Stromnate of Polontia and head straight for Bormark there are arrangements in the bills of lading and the accounts I must