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otherwise clear. Few boats plied the River, fewer than Leith remembered from his morning walks on the walls when last he'd been part of this place. Far fewer than anticipated by those Aslamen who had made this trip before, raising a number of puzzled comments from the stern of the dugout. Still enough river traffic, however, to force the navigator to continue his conversation with Leith in a series of snatches separated by careful perusal of the waters ahead.
    'You say we are hostile to strangers,' said the curly-headed Aslaman pilot, picking up a conversation he and Leith had shared since sunrise. 'If we are hostile, why did we allow you to set foot on Motu-tapu? And when you broke our laws, why did we let you leave?'
    Leith nodded, conceding the point. 'But we've met other lo— other people who are not First Men, and they were very friendly.'
    'Hmph,' the pilot snorted. 'They must have been people who still have their land. If they knew the history of the Pei-ra they would not think so kindly of First Men.'
    Again Leith was forced to concede. 'But neither Maendraga nor myself have maltreated such people. We are not your
    enemies! On my travels I attacked nobody, but was captured twice by people who are not First Men. The Fenni would have put us to death but for the intervention of one of their number, and the Widuz tried to sacrifice us to their god. How can you say that we're the ones to blame?'
    'Whose land were you on when these things happened? Your own?'
    For the third time Leith acknowledged the point. Even as he talked he remembered the words of Farr at the inn in Windrise, his assertion that the losian were not real people, ill-chosen words that probably led to the attack on the Company in the Valley of Respite.
    That's true, but—'
    But the Pei-ratin navigator turned away, and Leith noticed they drew level with the city docks.
    The air here tasted acrid, filled with smoke and sulphur. The pilot called out politely to a dock worker, asking for permission to put ashore.
    'You can't land that thing here, you savages!' Leith could hear the words, but the speaker remained hazy, though only twenty paces from them. 'What kind of craziness is this! With all that's happening, do you think we have time now for the likes of you? Go and see if you can land on the Straux shore, then take your chances. ..' The rest of the man's angry words faded away in the thick air.
    The navigator directed his crew to paddle towards the centre of the River, then turned and faced Leith, his eyes sad and resigned. 'You say we're hostile. Perhaps we are when it comes to letting people set foot on our sacred island, especially to those whose kind drove us from our land. Yet I have never heard Instruere called a holy place. People from all over the world are encouraged to come to this island. Why, then, are we met with hostility when we try to set foot on it?'
    Leith nodded again, as he had throughout the argument, but his mind was no longer on the issue of the losian. Smoke rose from a number of places inside Instruere's walls, and now he could hear an intermittent booming sound drifting across the water. Fires occurred often in Instruere, whether deliberate or accidental, but he did not remember it being like this. Perhaps Instruere was always like this in the autumn. But even as he considered these thoughts doubtfully, a new plume of thick black smoke curled over the walls and bent towards them, driven by the downriver breeze.
    They drew close to the Straux shore, and there before them stretched Southbridge. Oddly, none of the soldiers set to guard the bridge looked in their direction as they beached the outrigger. Their attention was engaged with, of all things, a group of people in outlandish dress accompanied by a long line of unusual-looking animals with long necks, bulbous, horse-like faces and peculiar lumps on their backs which Leith at first mistook for baggage. Traders come to peddle their exotic goods in the Great City, no doubt. The