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aside. The victorious warrior was chivalrous. Rather than taking the fallen man’s life, he let his vanquished foeman yield.
    At this point, an oddly handsome fellow with no hair at all on his head but a neatly trimmed beard at his chin stepped onto the platform. “That’s Hank Reinhardt,” the half-cat, half-woman Brenda informed Swan.
    “Is he the leader of these warriors?” Swan asked.
    “He runs Museum Replicas and those guys are the Museum Replicas fight team.”
    “Then they always fight beside one another and this is a practice bout only?”
    “It’s a demonstration, Swan,” Alicia said.
    “With swords so mighty, one of these warriors could cleave the chains which bind you, Gardner,” Swan suggested to her new friend who wore the manacles and leash.
    “These are good handcuffs! Why would I want somebody to screw ’em up?” Gardner declared.
    Swan merely shrugged her shoulders. Whoever this warrior Reinhardt was, he knew the language of steel, and the use of steel as well. He demonstrated a draw cut, executed as deftly as she had ever seen. Were these people who watched him from their seats wishing to train under him as warriors, Swan wondered? If so, some of them looked as if they would do well. Others, sadly, looked nearly beyond hope.
    “This Reinhardt raises an army against whom?”
    “He isn’t raising an army, Swan,” Alicia told her. “He’s just telling people about swords and stuff.”
    “Oh.” Swan looked around the hall.
    And she saw the handsomest man she had seen in all of her life. He was tall and well set in the shoulders and chest. His hair was the same red-brown color as her own. His eyes—she needed her second-sight to be sure—were a deep brown. They were clear, somehow strong and good. He wore a short brown leather jerkin of some sort, with a leather collar, long sleeves of leather and what appeared to be knit trim at the cuffs and at the bottom. If he wore hose, she could not see them, each leg covered instead with a medium blue material, the tops of his boots disappearing beneath. He seemed to wear no weapon, but that he was a warrior was beyond doubt. Using her second-sight, she read the runes emblazoned on his badge, “Alan Garrison.”
    “Who is Al’An Garrison, Alicia?” Swan asked.
    “Al-on? Oh! Alan. He’s cool, even if he is a Fed.”
    “Is Fed his ancestry, or the name of his village?” Swan inquired further.
    “You are cool with the way you talk, Swan! Alan’s one of these guys who keeps telling himself he’s gonna be a writer someday. See him here every year and at some of the other cons, too,” Alicia informed her.
    “He has never learned to write!”
    Brenda told her, “He wants to write stories and books and like that.”
    “Be a teller of tales! Yes! There were such people once where I come from. Perhaps, someday, there will be again.”
    “Anyway,” Brenda continued, “if he was illiterate, I don’t think he could be a Fed.”
    “A Fed,” Swan repeated.
    Gardner finally spoke. “He’s got a shield, right? You know, like Dan Akroyd in that old Dragnet movie? He’s got a shield with writing on it, says he’s a Fed.”
    Swan still did not understand, but decided that she should change the subject before her ignorance of this world became too much more obvious than it already was. When she looked back toward the corner, Al’An Garrison, the Fed, was gone.
    The warrior leader Reinhardt was wielding a different sword now and cleaving through a large white object. Swan refrained from asking her companions if the white object was an enchanted block of snow...

    The liberal regulation-mongering idiots with their no-smoking regulations were his unconscious allies this time, Bill Brownwood mused. Whether the doors leading out onto the segment of roof were supposed to be opened or not, they were, and for the last hour, while Brownwood sweltered in the afternoon heat, a parade of people in small groups had exited the doorway and stood around