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of a pickpocket at an orgy.”
    I thought of my scrunchy meal of caterpillar-rotted metal, and said nothing.
    Noise from up ahead halted us. After a long time of listening, we moved carefully forward along a tunnel hung with tapestries.
    Any damn tapestry can hide a fellow with a bow or a knife, ready to degut you. We inspected everything with enormous thoroughness, and even then one of the tapestries detached itself from its hangings and like a monstrous bat swooped down on us.
    We flailed about with our swords, and Seg put a torch to the flapping horror and scorched it away. It flip-flopped off, burning, crackling to shredded blackness.
    We caught our breaths.
    “Strangle your eyes out and your head off, that,” remarked Nath. Any amusement I might feel at his by now complete adaptation to the requirements of survival in the Coup Blag had to be indulged in when we were out of it.
    We went on toward the source of the noises ahead, and we gave a pretty hefty tug at each tapestry as we passed. There were only three more we had to torch.
    The noises increased in volume and sorted themselves out into two varieties. Both varieties were exceedingly ugly. One was the screams of women. The other was the sound of nuzzling and grunting as of beasts feeding.
    Seg’s face, which I have often described as handsome, as, indeed, it is, shocked suddenly with blood. He took the appearance of an eagle about to swoop. When my blade comrade appears like that, it is best for evildoers to run and hide and pray they are not discovered by Seg Segutorio.
    Nath ripped out: “That sounds like—” and then he started off after Seg.
    Kov Loriman flopped sacklike onto the floor.
    If what was going on in the chamber up ahead was as my comrades and I suspected, then this would be the opportunity — evil and heart-breaking though it be — to revive the Hunting Kov. If I had read his character aright, then despite all his arrogance and haughty treatment of others, his slavish indulgence in hunting, this situation would appeal to those traits of character I knew him to possess which had not been deadened by his lofty station in life. I seized him under his left shoulder and fairly dragged him along the passageway.
    The women were of many races, diffs and apims. Not all were young and beautiful, though they mostly were younger rather than older, and their condition suggested they were kept hard at arduous tasks when they were not employed as they were now. Some retained remnants of clothing. None wore ornaments or jewelry. And they screamed.
    The bestial sounds came from the gorilla-faced malkos who were, after all, men, even if they were not apim. They were employed as guards by Csitra in her maze of the Coup Blag. They were unpleasant, brutish customers, and Seg had dealt firmly with a bloodthirsty pack of them when he’d met the lady Milsi, who was now his wife.
    I hauled Kov Loriman up straight. I had not drawn my own sword, and so was able to draw his and thrust it into his hand. I wrapped his fingers about the expensive hilt.
    Loriman was a Pandahem noble, widely-traveled, as I guessed, who’d been to many countries and down to the southern continent of Havilfar. He’d seen a lot of the world in his travels, during his hunting forays. He would have heard of the legends and stories clustered about the name of the Emperor of Vallia, Dray Prescot, and like any sophisticated man, would have considered them palpable falsehoods. Still and all, he’d have heard of Dray Prescot in his scarlet breechclout with the great Krozair longsword flaming.
    Now it is quite clear that in this my narrative I tell you of the surface of things openly, thus allowing you the pleasure of teasing out the inner meanings. I do not mean hidden meanings. They are plainly there for those who see beneath the tapestry of the language. Language itself, whether of Earth or of Kregen, is at once a communication and a barrier.
    Kov Loriman had to be made to see what his eyes told