The passersby might not look at him, but Vo looked at them. He was a

spy by nature, curious in a mildly contemptuous way as always about crea-tures that seemed to him like another species from himself, things that wore their emotions as openly as their clothes, faces that reflected fear and anger and something he had come to recognize as joy, although he could not connect it to his own more abstract pleasures. They were like apes, these ordinary folk, carrying on their private lives in the full sight of anyone with eyes to see, the adults as uncontrolled in their bleatings and grimaces as the children. In this regard the Hierosolines around him now were barely dif-ferent from the people of Xis, who did at least have the sense to clothe the revealing nakedness of their wives and daughters from foot to crown, al¬though not for the reason Vo would have done so. Here in Hierosol the women seemed to dress any way they chose, some decently modest in loose robes and veils or scarves that covered their heads and part of their faces, but some nearly as shameless as the men, with necks, shoulders, legs, and most especially their faces exposed for all to see. Vo had seen women naked, of course, and many times at that. Like his fellow Perikalese mercenaries he had visited the brothels outside the palace's Lily Gate many times, although in his case it had been mostly because not to do so would have attracted attention, and Vo hated attention even more than he disliked pain. He had used some of the women as they chose to be used, but after the first time, when the oddness of the experience had some value in itself, it had meant little to him. He understood that copulation was a great motivator of mankind and perhaps even womankind as well, but to him it seemed only another ape trick, different from eating and defecating only because it could not be practiced solitarily, but required company.

Vo paused, his attention returned to the ships moving placidly in the gentle tides of the bay, tied up alongside the quay like so many great cows in a barn. That one, there, with the lean bow like the snout of a hunting animal: that must be the one he sought. The name painted in sweeping Xixian characters was unfamiliar, but anyone could change a name. It was less easy to hide the shape of a ship as swift as Jeddin's.

Daikonas Vo approached the gangway and looked up to the nearly empty deck. It could be that Dorza, her captain, was not here. If that was so, he would ask some questions and Dorza would be found. He felt con¬fident that he could get everything else he needed from Axamis Dorza himself. It was an impossibly long coincidence that the captain should sail out from Xis in the disgraced Jeddin's own ship on the very night of both the Leopard captain's arrest and the disappearance of Vo's quarry. Captain

Jeddin, despite torments that, had impressed even Vo, had denied any in volveinenl with the girl Qinnitan, but his denial seemed suspicious in it¬self: why would a man watching his own fingers and toes being torn loose from his body protect a girl he barely knew instead of assenting to anything the inquisitors seemed to want to hear? It certainly did not correspond with Vo's thorough experience of humanity in its final extremes.

He shouldered his bag and walked up the gangplank of the ship that had been the Morning Star of Kirous, whistling an old Perikalese work song his father used to sing while beating him.

Since Dorza had thrown her out, it had taken Qinnitan several days and many inquiries to find this woman, the laundry mistress. In the mean¬time, she had found herself in a situation she had never imagined in all her life, sleeping rough in the alleys of Hierosol, eating only what the mute boy Pigeon could steal. It could have been worse, but Pigeon had proved surprisingly adept at pilfering. From what Qinnitan could grasp of his story, he had not been fed well in the autarch's palace and he and the other young slaves had been forced to supplement their meager fare with thievery.

The citadel's laundry was huge, a vast space that had once perhaps been a trader's warehouse, but which now was filled not with cedar wood and spices but tubs of steaming water, dozens of them-the room, Qinnitan marveled, must exist in a permanent fog. Every tub had two or three women leaning over it, and scores more women and young boys were car¬rying buckets from the great cauldron set in the floor at the center of the room, which was kept continually bubbling by a fire in the basement. As Qinnitan watched, one of the girls slopped water over the edge of a bucket onto herself and then collapsed to the ground, shrieking. A woman of mid¬dle years, impressively thick-limbed but not fat, came over to examine the hurt girl, then gave her a cuff on the head and sent her off with two other washwomen before directing a third to take the bucket which the injured girl had somehow miraculously not dropped. The big woman stood with her hands on her hips and watched the wounded soldier being helped off the battlefield, her expression that of someone who knows that the gods have no other occupation but to fill her life with petty annoyances.

Qinnitan gestured for Pigeon to wait by the doorway. The laundrymistress watched her approach, scowling at this clear sign that her day was about to be unfairly interrupted again.

"What do you want?" she said in flat, unfriendly Hierosoline.

Qinnitan made a little bow, not entirely for show: up close, the woman was quite amazingly large and her sun-darkened skin made her seem some thing carved out of wood, a statue or a ship of war or something else wor¬thy of deferential approach. "You… Soryaza are?" she asked, aware that her Hierosoline was barbarous.

"Yes, I am, and I am a busy woman. What do you want?"

"You…from Xis? Speak Xis?"

"For the love of the gods," the woman grumbled, and then switched to Xixian. "Yes, I speak the tongue, although it's been years since I lived in the cursed place. What do you want?"

Qinnitan took a deep breath, one obstacle passed. "I am very sorry to bother you, Mistress Soryaza. I know you are an important person, with all this…" She spread her hands to indicate the sea of washing-tubs.

Soryaza wasn't so easily flattered. "Yes?"

"I… I have lost my father and my mother." Qinnitan had prepared the story carefully. "When my mother died of the coughing fever last summer, my father decided to bring me and my brother back here to Hierosol. But on the ship he too caught a fever and I nursed him for several months be¬fore he died." She cast her eyes down. "I have nowhere to go, and no rela¬tives here or in Xis who will take me and my brother in."

Soryaza raised an eyebrow. "Brother? Are you sure you do not mean a lover? Tell the truth, girl."

Qinnitan pointed to Pigeon. The child stood by the door with his eyes wide, looking as though he might flee at a sudden loud noise. "There. He cannot speak but he is a good boy."

"All right, brother it is. But what in the gods' names could this possibly have to do with me?" Soryaza was already wiping her hands on her volu¬minous apron, like someone who is finished with something and about to move on to the next task.

This was the risky part. "I… I heard you were once a Hive Sister."

Both eyebrows rose. "Did you? And what do you know of such things?"

"I was one myself-an acolyte. But when my mother was dying I left the Hive to help her. They would have let me come back, I'm certain, but my father wanted me here in Hierosol, his home." She let a little of the very real tension and fear mount up from inside her, where she had kept it carefully bottled for so long. Her voice quivered and her eyes filled with tears. "And now my brother and I must sleep in the alleyways by the harbor, and men… men try…"

Soryaza's brown face softened a little, but only a little. "Who was the high priestess when you were there? Tell me, girl, and quickly."