He shrugged. I got the idea praise made him nervous, which only proved him no ordinary Lokrian. “I did what I could,” he said. “I am no swordsman or archer. I used the only weapon I know.”

“You saved all of us,” I said, and I think that’s true. “Whatever Captain Tasos is paying you, it isn’t enough.” Would I have talked like that to somebody I was paying? I have my doubts, but it wasn’t my money.

And quite a bit of it evidently was the weatherworker’s. With a smile, he said, “I could buy and sell you.” From most Lokrians, that would have been bragging. The way he made it sound, he was sorry it was true, but it was anyhow. He was something special, all right.

“Yes, well, look what you’d have once you did.” I noticed I still had the pirate’s cutlass in my right fist. I had to do some serious talking to that hand before it would let go. “Want a souvenir?” I asked.

“Thank you, but no.” Stagiros tossed his head, the way Lokrians will. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he shaken it the way most people would. He was the most cosmopolitan Lokrian I ever met. Yes, a smuggler’s weatherworker. And he eyed me the way a natural philosopher will eye a nondescript beetle. “Why on earth are you going to Shqiperi? Why would anyone in his right mind go to Shqiperi?”

I struck a pose. The cutlass came in handy after all. “To become King of the Land of the Eagle,” I said grandly.

“The Shqipetari will kill you.” He could have been taking lessons from Max, except he didn’t sound quite doleful enough.

“I’ll have fun till they do,” I declared.

He looked at me. He looked through me. He might have been the sensible, staid man of Schlepsig, I the wild, excitable Lokrian. “Madness,” he murmured.

I bowed. “But a great madness,” I said.

We put in at Vravron the next day. Vravron is the Lokrian port nearest the border to Shqiperi. It has other things wrong with it, too. It isn’t one of Tasos’ regular stops. He went into the harbor for a couple of reasons-to pick up sailors to replace the men he’d lost and because Max and I asked him to.

If it hadn’t been the day after the fight with the pirates, I’m sure this strange fit of gratitude would have worn off. Tasos was not a man much afflicted by such sentiments. But he folded both of us into a sweaty embrace and said, “My valiant ones, I can deny you nothing!” To prove he could deny us nothing, he swigged from a flask of anise-flavored spirits and handed it to me.

I would like to know which foundry copper-plated Tasos’ gullet and stomach. I’d give them my business any time-they do good work. My own innards, being mere flesh and blood, commenced to smolder when I poured that poison down them. “Delicious,” I wheezed, amazed I hadn’t incinerated my vocal cords. I passed Max the flask.

He’d lit a cigar. That alarmed me; I feared he’d turn into a human blowtorch. But he survived and gave the flask back to Tasos. Later I found out he’d held his tongue against the mouth of the flask and hadn’t drunk at all. I wish I would have thought of that. It would have saved my plumbing some serious abuse.

When we came into Vravron harbor, customs men started buzzing around the Gamemeno like flies around a five days’ dead rabbit. Like the flies, they scented a feast. None of them ever came aboard, though, and I never saw Tasos hand out even a hemidemilepta. His hand may have been quicker than my eye, of course.

My eye saw Shqipetari-my subjects, though they knew it not. Most of the longshoremen at Vravron harbor, and all of the sweepers and trash haulers, were men who’d come down from the north after more work, and better, than they could find in their mountains. More work they got. Better? Not likely!

In Schlepsig, quite a few miners and quarrymen and busboys and barbers and the like are Lokrians. They do work few Schlepsigians care to do, and they do it for less money than most Schlepsigians would take. They’re convenient, even if hotheads do rant about dirty foreigners.

In this corner of Lokris, the Shqipetari were doing work few Lokrians cared to do, and I had no doubt they were doing it for less money than most Lokrians would take. They were…convenient. I don’t speak Lokrian, but the looks and the tone of voice the locals gave them said they thought the Shqipetari were a bunch of dirty foreigners.

They stood out. Eliphalet knows that’s so. They were tall men, most of them, long and lean-half a head taller than the Lokrians, more or less. Some had faces like falcons, narrow and fierce. Others looked more like horses. They let their mustaches droop down past the corners of their mouths, which made them look like brigands, even if, by some chance, they weren’t.

They wore white headwraps-not quite turbans because their hair stuck out in the middle, an odd effect. I found out later that they shaved part or all of the scalp that didn’t show, which made them look even odder without the wraps. Their shirts had all started out white, too. Over them they wore short fringed cloaks. Tight black breeches embroidered in red and rawhide sandals completed the outfits.

Well, almost. Shqipetari wouldn’t be Shqipetari without weapons. On their home grounds, they festooned themselves with swords-curved and straight-and crossbows and boar spears and pikes and morningstars and whatever other charming tools their imagination and their smiths could come up with. They tricked themselves out with silver chains, too, those who could afford them, so they jingled when they walked. To my mind, that made them seem less bloodthirsty, but they didn’t seem to care.

Lokrian law frowned on flaunting murder quite so openly. In Vravron, they were limited to one knife apiece. Some-most-of those knives could have done duty for ancient Aenean shortswords. Their hilts and scabbards were chaised (chased?) with silver. If a Shqipetar was somebody, he wanted you to know it.

They eyed Max and me as we got off the Gamemeno. I could flatter myself and say it was my good looks, but more likely it was Max’s inches. They were big men, yes, but not many overtopped me and none came close to Max.

“You should have worn your sword,” I told him, even if wearing it would have been illegal. “Then they would think you were one of them.”

“Just what I always wanted,” he said.

Finding out where Vravron’s crystallography office was proved a trial. None of the Lokrians we ran into admitted to speaking any language but his own, which did us no good. When the Shqipetari talked among themselves, it sounded as if they were trying to choke to death. No country that calls itself something like Shqiperi can be all good.

But I discovered that some of the men from the mountains knew Hassocki, while others spoke bits and pieces of Vlachian. Since Vlachians border them where Lokrians don’t, that wasn’t too surprising. Thanks to my stints in the Hassocki army, I had Hassocki and bits and pieces of Vlachian myself. We managed. I spread around a few coins, too, to encourage memories. That also helped, and they didn’t have to be very big coins. Shqipetari come to Lokris because they’re hungry.

As in Thasos, the Consolidated Crystal office in Vravron was an island of efficiency in a sea of, well, Lokrianity. Max and I got in line to send our message, and the line moved. The clerks weren’t sitting around drinking little cups of strong, syrupy-sweet coffee or smoking cigars or gabbing about women or the rowing races or whatever they do for fun in Vravron (they must do something there, I suppose). They didn’t act all high and mighty, either. If CC gets complaints about its clerks, it gets new clerks, and in a hurry, too. The people who work in those offices know it. It keeps them on their toes.

The clerk we got spoke decent Schlepsigian but better Narbonese, so we used that. I filled out forms and paid the fee, and he took me back to a crystallographer. The sorcerer-like the one in Thasos, he wore a homburg-spoke Schlepsigian at least as well as I do, though his olive skin, broad forehead, large, dark, liquid eyes, and narrow, delicate chin said he was a Lokrian. “To whom are you sending your message?” he asked.