Otherwise Read Free Page B

the high spires of the Citadel, which is at the top of the high-piled City, are touched with light filtering through the blue-green forests, and then the High City around it and then the old-fashioned mansions mostly shuttered are touched, and then the old inns and markets, and the narrow streets of the craftsmen, and then the winding water-stairs, piles, piers, ramparts, esplanades and wharfs—even then the still lake, which has no name, is black. Mist rises from its depths like chill breath, obscuring the flat surface so that it seems no lake but a hole pierced through the fabric of the world, and the shadowy, broad-nosed craft that ride its margins—and the City itself—seem suspended above the Deep.
    But when the first light does strike the Citadel, the whole world knows it’s high morning; and though the watermen can still see only stars, they are about their business. The Protectorate has ever feared a great bridge over the lake that couldn’t be cut down at need, and so the four bridges that hang like swaying ribbons from the High City gates are useless for anything but walkers or single riders. The watermen’s business is therefore large, and necessary; they are a close clan, paid like servants yet not servants, owing none, singing their endless, tuneless songs, exchanging their jokes that no one else laughs at.
    It was the watermen in their oiled goatskins who first saw that Red Senlin had returned from the Outlands, because it was they who carried him and his armed riders and his fierce Outland captains into the City. The watermen didn’t care if Red Senlin wanted to be King; it’s well-known that the watermen, “neither Folk nor not,” care only for the fee.
    Fauconred had put the Visitor on early watch, to make some use of him; but when the first chill beams silvered the Drum fog he woke, shivered with premonition, and went to find the Visitor.
    He was still watching. Impervious apparently to loneliness, weariness, cold, he still looked out over the quadrant assigned to him.
    “Quit now,” Fauconred said to him hoarsely, taking his elbow. “Your watch is long over.” The man (if man he was) turned from his watch and went with Fauconred, without question or complaint.
    “But—what,” he asked when they sat by Fauconred’s fire, “was I to watch for?”
    “Well, the Just,” Fauconred said. “They can be anywhere.” He leaned toward the Visitor, as though he might even here be overheard, and the Visitor bent close to hear. “They draw lots by some means, among themselves. So I hear. And each of them then has a Protector, or Defender, that he is pledged to murder. Secretly, if possible. And so you see, since it’s by lots, and nothing personal, you’ll never know the man. You can come face to face with him; he seems a cottager or… or anyone. You talk. The place is lonely. Suddenly, there is the Gun.”
    The Visitor considered this, touching the place on his head where he had been hurt. “Then how could I watch for one?” he asked.
    Fauconred, confused, tossed sticks angrily into the fire, but made no other answer. Day brightened. Ahead lay the Downs at last…
    It was a waterside inn.
    “Secretly,” the cloaked man said. “And quickly.”
    “You are…”
    “A… merchant. Yes. What does it matter?” His old, lean hand drew a bag from within a shapeless, hooded traveler’s cloak. It made a solid sound on the inn table.
    The girl he spoke to was a waterman’s daughter. Her long neck was bare; her blond, almost white hair cut off short like a boy’s. She turned, looked out a tiny window that pierced the gray slatting of the inn wall. Above the mountains the sky had grown pale; below, far below, the lake was dark.
    “The bridges?” she asked.
    “Closed. Red Senlin has returned.”
    “Yes.”
    “His mob has closed the bridges.”
    “Then it must be illegal to ferry.”
    The other, after a moment, added a second bag to the table. The girl regarded neither. “Get me,” the