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could yell.
    The Emperor of Vallia, sneaking off so that his bodyguard corps should not fly with him!
    This had happened before and would happen again. My guards understood that sometimes I had to go off by myself. They’d do their damnedest to go with me, and it had turned into a species of game between us. If they suspected I intended to go off alone they’d be on the
qui vive
and I’d be at shift to take great pains to outwit them.
    This time they were not expecting me to fly off, as our night conference remained secret.
    The fluttrell — I, of course, did not know his name — bore on through thin air as She of the Veils finally sank. The night pressed in, for the moment a pseudo night of Notor Zan, when no moons float in the sky and the star glitter cannot make up for the lost illumination.
    Flutsmen habitually decorate their mounts and themselves with multitudes of feathers and silks and trailing cords and sashes. These are things I abhor. Oh, they look fine enough; I do not care to have a foreman grab a pretty shoulder cord or waist sash and reel me in to be spitted.
    In addition, these decorations announce the allegiance of the flutsman. One band may tell another in the air. The protocol of aerial meeting is strict by virtue of the need to know if the flyers approaching are friend or enemy. I did not know if the flying silks I had with me would proclaim me a friend or an enemy to other bands of flutsmen. Certainly, there were no survivors of the band from whom this fluttrell and these silks had come.
    By morning when Zim and Genodras rose to flood down their mingled streaming lights, the fluttrell had flown me a goodly distance on the journey. Now was time, I felt, to rest him, feed and water him, and, perhaps, myself catch forty winks.
    We slanted down over open country, the fields large and quite unlike the intensive cultivations farther south. In fact, very little of the land looked as though it was being worked. A town — a straggling place of stone houses looking as though it humped itself out of the very ground — showed up ahead.
    Now I was not intending to hide on this flight. I looked what in very truth I was — a paktun, a fighting man ready to hire out as a mercenary. This cover had stood me in good stead in the past. With Deb-Lu-Quienyin’s skill, taught to me, of subtly altering the planes and lines of my face so that I could pass unrecognized through a crowd of friends, I should not be molested on the score of being that arch devil, Dray Prescot, the Emperor of Vallia.
    So I circled the fluttrell and slanted down to the town. There were no regular perching poles for the birds; but a makeshift one had been erected outside a tavern.
    The flight across Vennar to Inch’s Black Mountains appeared to me at that time as a hiatus in my plans. I wanted the journey over as soon as possible; yet fluttrells are flesh and blood birds, they are not machines.
    I decided to call this saddle bird Salvation because he had been brought out of bad company.
    He went up onto the perching pole gladly enough, and flickered his wings proudly enough, for there were two other birds perching there. It was then I noticed how strong that betraying yellowish cast was to the fringes of his velvety green feathers.
    “Poor old Salvation,” I said to him. “Looks as though you are in for a bad time.”
    There might be a vet in the town, which from its placing and my knowledge of the geography of Vallia, I knew to be Snarkter, an oddly un-Vallian name. There were mines nearby, from which was extracted the ore that yielded cryspals, so precious that I might have to rule harshly on who owned the mines when Inch and Turko took over. Maybe there would have to be a border line right through the middle, dividing up the crystal mines fairly. If there was a vet he might be able to doctor calsanys and plains asses and mytzers and quoffas, and the occasional zorca, but what would he know of fluttrells?
    A few people were shuffling about,