Anywhen Read Free

other, but this was both true and not true. Druidsfall was unmistakably Boadacean, but as the central city of the traitors it was also distinctively itself. Those buildings with their curtain walls of petrified corpses, for instance . . .
    Luckily, custom now allowed Simon to stay clear of those grim monuments, now that the first, disastrous formalities were over, and seek his own bed and breakfast. In the old, disinterestedly friendly inns of Druidsfall, the anonymous thumps and foreign outcries of the transients —in death, love, or trade—are said to make the regular lodgers start in their beds with their resident guilts. Of course all inns are like that, but nevertheless, that was why traitors liked to quarter there rather than in the Traitors' Halls run by the fraternity: It guaranteed them privacy, and at the same time helped them to feel alive. There is undoubtedly something inhibiting about trying to deal within walls pieced together of broken stone limbs, heads, and torsos, some of which had clearly been alive when the foundations were being dug and the scaffolding bolted together.
    Thus, here in The Skopolamander, Simon could comfortably await his next contact, now that he had dumped his poisons. This—if there was to be one—would of course have to come about before the end of his immunity period. "Quarantine" was perhaps a more appropriate term.
    No, the immunity was real, however limited, for as a traitor to High Earth he had special status. High Earth, the Boadaceans thought, was not necessarily Old Earth—but not necessarily not, either. For the rest of his twelve days, Simon would not be killed out of sheer conservatism, at least, though nobody official would attempt to deal with him, either.
    He had eight of those days still to run—a dull prospect, since he had already completed every possible preliminary to going to ground, and spiced only by the fact that he had yet to figure out how long a day might officially be. The rhythms of Flos Campi offered no reliable clues his Sol-tuned diurnalism could read. At the moment there was nothing lighting the window of the room but an aurora, looking like a curtain of orange and hazy blue fire licking upward along a bone trestle. Radio around here, and probably even electrical power, must be knocked out as much as half the time, with so much stray magnetism washing back and forth. That might prove useful; he filed the thought.
    In the meantime, there went the last of the poisons. Simon poured water from an amphora into the catch basin, which promptly hissed like a dragon just out of the egg and blurted a mushroom of cold blue steam which made him cough. Careful! he thought; acid after water, never water after acid—I am forgetting the most elementary lessons. I should have used wine. Time for a drink, in Gro's name!
    He caught up his cloak and went out, not bothering to lock the door. He had nothing worth stealing but his honor, which was in his right hip pocket. Oh, and of course, High Earth—that was in his left. Besides, Boadacea was rich: One could hardly turn around without knocking over some heap of treasures, artifacts of a millennium which nobody had sorted for a century, or even wanted to be bothered to sort. Nobody would think to steal from a poor traitor any object smaller than a king, or, preferably, a planet.
    In the tavern below, Simon was joined at once by a playwoman.
    "Are you buying tonight, excellence?"
    "Why not?" And in fact he was glad to see her. She was blond and ample, a relief from the sketchy women of the Respectables, whom fashion made look as though they suffered from some nervous disease that robbed them of appetite. Besides, she would exempt him from the normal sort of Boadacean polite conversation, which consisted chiefly of elaborately involuted jokes at which it was considered gauche to laugh. The whole style of Boadacean conversation, for that matter, was intended to be ignored; gambits were a high art, but end games were a