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gurney, his snarl
transformed into a wary frown. “Knife sent you?”
    “He did.” It was the truth, after all.
    “He?” Fenimore raised the blade once again,
his eyes so intent they seemed to burn.
    Oh, shit.
Anytime a Flame was not in
visible sight, they were always assumed to be female. Chet couldn’t
remember where he’d learned the rule; he’d never needed to know it
before. It was just one of those cultural things you learned by
osmosis, like
never tease a doedicu,
which Chet knew even
though he’d never seen one of the enormous, hump-backed animals
outside a zoo.
    “She, she!” he said hastily. The blade did
not retreat. “Um, Knife said you were a rake and a scoundrel, and
a, a libertine, and a liar, and a cheater, and not to trust
anything you said!”
    Fenimore lowered the blade with a snort. “She
would
say that,” he murmured. “It’s true, you know.”
    Chet dared to breathe. He looked at the
driver’s seat, but no one had even glanced back. They were still
smoking and talking, the radio belting out a contemporary song with
lots of silly “do-wap do-wap" harmonies. While the attack had
seemed all-encompassing to Chet, he realized belatedly that
Fenimore had kept his voice down. Chet reached up and touched his
throat. His hand came away with a thin trail of blood. Fenimore had
cut
him. This was real. The man was a killer.
Well, of
course he is
. The century he came from was a bloody one, even
within one of the most cultured civilizations on Uos. Even now
Fenimore’s eyes took in his surroundings, darting this way and
that, as if... as if he were a prisoner.
    Fenimore’s free hand instinctively tried to
scratch at the IV needle the nurse had taped to his forearm. He
jerked in surprise, then eyeballed it. “What slow torture on Uos or
the God Plain is this?”
    Answer his questions about this
century,
Knife had said. Chet licked his lips. “It’s a needle
designed to put liquid into your body," he began.
    “I
know
that, you slit-eyed, red
haired bastard. Are you poisoning me with poppy vapors? You fail. I
do not feel... weakened.” Fenimore’s roving eyes had now caught
sight of passing traffic out the windows. “Where are the ceroses
for those carriages? Are they... they’re holy contraptions, aren’t
they? I’m
surrounded
by holy contraptions. Is this the God
Plain? Are you the servant of some god?”
    Chet found himself bristling at both the
racial epithets and Fenimore’s assumption that he was a mere
servant. Just about everyone in Wetshul was flaxen. His race was no
longer so despised and poor as they had once been. Well... it made
sense, too, given the time period in question. Fenimore was from a
Tache high court, for Pantheon’s sake. He’d assume almost every
other race was beneath him, except perhaps the bistre-colored
people of the Jantrael Straight.
    Chet decided it was time to assert himself.
“We’re in Wetshul. You fell into lucid mud, Fenimore LaDaven. Don’t
you remember?”
    “I...” Fenimore gulped, suddenly less fierce.
“It’s a blur. I remember rain, and a fight. I was being... hounded
down. My servant betrayed me; he was following me in a stolen
carriage. He couldn’t shoot me because of the dark and wet powder.
But I don’t remember
why
.”
    “The lucid mud is just dust now. I’m a, a
scholar, a student with a Literati university. We were digging for
artifacts and found you.”
    Fenimore grunted and eyed Chet with rather
more curiosity than before. Then his expression grew horrified, as
if Chet had sprouted a second head. “Oh, Pantheon.
You
again. I thought... but no.”
    “What?” Chet blinked, totally lost.
    Fenimore’s expression grew reserved, almost
pleasant. “So, you are a student up the mountain at Semaphore this
time around?”
    This time what? Chet nodded, grateful
Fenimore was making sense—if only a little bit—and that there were
some
cultural commonalities between them. Belatedly, he
realized they’d both been speaking in the