So if the charming people of Lakedaimon wanted to go on murdering and raping and burning down chunks of their town, Eliphalet only knows what would have stopped them. Something else caught their fancy-a scandalous new dancer, I think it was-and they quit.

That clerk was on duty when we checked out. He rolled his eyes-partly, I suppose, at our getup. “I hope I don’t read about your case in one of our journals,” he said. I’ve had more encouraging good-byes. All things considered, it was lucky he and Max couldn’t talk to each other. They would have got on much too well.

Our getup…If the Quay of the Poxed Trollop was as charming a place as everybody said it was, we had two ways to approach it. We could try to blend in with the local lowlifes and seem invisible. Or we could be so gaudy and ostentatious that nobody-I dared hope-would presume to bother us.

Max blended in with the Lokrians the way oil blends with water. Come to that, I look about as much like a Lokrian as a camel looks like a unicorn-er, as a unicorn looks like a camel. You get the idea.

Since we couldn’t blend, we had gaudy forced on us. I put on my acrobat’s rig, while Max wore the Super Grand High Panjandrum’s uniform that was so much more effective in places where real generals didn’t dress like escapees from comic opera. The uniform did help us flag a cab. By the way the hackman bowed and scraped as he opened the door, he probably thought we were the Schlepsigian minister to Lokris and his military attachй. He was apologetic for knowing only a bit of Narbonese-that and Albionese are the foreign languages a Lokrian is most likely to speak.

“Quite all right, my good man,” I said in Narbonese, and he brightened. Then I told him, “Please be so kind as to take us to the Quay of the Poxed Trollop.”

Have you ever tossed a big chunk of ice into hot fat to congeal it on the instant? If you haven’t, you won’t understand what the hackman’s face did when I said that. “The…Quay of the Poxed Trollop, sir?” he wheezed. By the way he sounded, an invisible man was doing a pretty good job of strangling him.

“We have a ship to catch,” I said, wondering what kind of horrible scow the Gamemeno would turn out to be.

The hackman was thinking along the same lines. “A garbage barge?” he muttered. He slammed the door shut with what I thought quite unnecessary force, climbed up to his seat, and cracked the whip over the horse’s back. Springs creaking and big, iron-tired wheels clanging and bouncing over cobblestones, we set out.

Next to no one was on the sidewalk. Street traffic was drastically down, too. The riots had ended, but the locals feared they might pick up again any minute now. That was how it felt to me, too. When I said as much, Max looked at me and said, “I suppose you’ll tell me there’s a bright spot to all this, too.”

“Well, there may be,” I said. His expression could have frozen the ice to congeal the fat I was talking about before. “There may,” I insisted. “If anything will keep footpads at home beating their children, it’s the chance of getting caught in a riot.”

“You’re reaching,” Max said, and said no more.

Some of the people who were out and about didn’t have homes or flats any more. I say that partly because they looked as if they’d been wearing the same clothes for days-and they had-and partly because the cab rattled past the burnt-out ruins of quite a few homes and flats. Maybe the arsonists who started those fires hadn’t managed to turn all of Lakedaimon into a roasting pit, but nobody could say they hadn’t tried. The sour smell of old smoke hung in the air like an unwelcome guest who couldn’t figure out it was time to leave.

Shops had gone up in flames, too. Here and there, shopkeepers or hired guards patrolled the ruins to make sure nobody greedy went digging through the ashes. “The cradle of civilization,” Max remarked-and if that isn’t a judgment on a lot of things that have happened since the glory days of Lakedaimon, it will do till a nastier one comes along.

As we went down toward the waterfront, the neighborhood got worse. Back in ancient times, Lakedaimon’s port was a separate city. Nowadays, it’s just a slum. Even the good parts-like the quay from which the Halcyon had sailed-weren’t very good, and the bad parts were horrid. I would have taken the three gold globes for the harborside emblem if not for the profusion of wine jars and jugs of spirits over the taverns and the similar profusion of houses-if that’s the word I want-with red lanterns out front. It was the sort of place where cats didn’t eat rats. They got fat off protection money instead.

The hackman had the accursed gall to charge us three times as much for going from Papa Ioannakis’ to the harbor as the other fellow had charged for going from the harbor to the hostel. When I squawked, he suddenly stopped understanding Narbonese. “What’s going on?” Max asked. Wheep! Out came his sword, the way it had when Dooger and Cark tried to cheat us.

Maybe Wheep! is a word in Lokrian. Maybe the sight of the blade glittering in the famous Lokrian sunshine jogged the hackman’s memory. All of a sudden, Narbonese made sense to him again. So did the notion that he might-by unfortunate accident, of course-have tried to charge us too much. He was glad to accept the fare I proposed. He was even gladder to hop back up onto his cab and get out of there as fast as he could.

If I were a hackman, I would have been glad to get out of there, too. I don’t think Max noticed, but three or four men who, if they weren’t ruffians and robbers, could certainly have played them on the stage sidled towards us while I had my little…conversation with the driver. When his sword left the scabbard, they discovered they had business elsewhere. Coshing a very big man isn’t much harder than bopping anybody else over the head. Coshing a very big man who’s liable to run steel through your liver is a different sort of affair, one for which they had less appetite.

When Max started to sheath the sword, I set a hand on his arm. “Maybe you should leave that out,” I said. “It, ah, persuades people.”

He looked down at it, coughed, and shrugged. “However you like,” he said.

I didn’t like much about the Quay of the Poxed Trollop. I didn’t say anything about not liking it. We had to be where we were to get where we were going. That didn’t make it a garden spot. If I’d grumbled, though, think what Max would have said. I thought of it, and decided I didn’t want to hear it.

After the would-be highwaymen hit the highway (actually a foul-smelling, muddy alley where better than half the cobblestones were only memories), several poxed trollops came up to us. Well, I don’t know they were poxed, but the odds seemed good. Trollops they definitely were, in tawdry, tight-fitting finery and with painted faces more mercenary than any mercenary’s. They greeted us with endearments and obscenities-did they know the difference, or care?-in everything from Hassocki to Albionese.

I swept off my hat and bowed to them. After I nudged Max, he did the same. As always, his deep bow produced stares of astonishment, at least from the soiled doves who weren’t eyeing his crotch. Come to that, they looked more than a little astonished, too; the trousers on that ridiculous uniform fit snugly.

“My ladies,” I said (two lies in two words-can’t do much better than that), “can you tell me how to find the Gamemeno?” I stuck to Narbonese. More of them seemed to use it than any other, er, tongue.

Maybe I was wrong. The question sent them into gales of laughter. “Right here, pal,” one of them said, striking a pose that almost made my eyeballs catch fire.

“No, try me!” Another one twisted even more lewdly.

“Now what?” Max said, though he could scarcely have had much doubt.

I did. “I’m not quite sure,” I muttered, and went back to Narbonese: “The ship called the Gamemeno?”