They went through the first walled checkpoint without delay.  The guards were efficiently casual, a glance at the skitter and the identification brassards of the occupants.  It was all routine.

The danger with routines, she told herself, was that they very soon became boring.  Boredom dulled the senses.  That was a boredom which she and her aides constantly guarded against among their warriors.  This new force on Dosadi would create many shocks.

As Havvy took them up the normal ring route through the walls, the streets became wide, more open.  There were garden plantings in the open here, poisonous but beautiful.  Leaves were purple in the shadows.  Barren dirt beneath the bushes glittered with corrosive droplets, one of Dosadi's little ways of protecting territory.  Dosadi taught many things to those willing to learn.

Jedrik turned, studied Havvy, the way he appeared to concentrate on his driving with an air of stored-up energy.  That was about as far as Havvy's learning went.  He seemed to know some of his own deficiencies, must realize that many wondered how he held a driver's job, even for the middle echelons, when the Warrens were jammed with people violently avaricious for any step upward.  Obviously, Havvy carried valuable secrets which he sold on a hidden market.  She had to nudge that hidden market now.  Her act must appear faintly clumsy, as though events of this day had confused her.

"Can we be overheard?" she asked.

That made no difference to her plans, but it was the kind of clumsiness which Havvy would misinterpret in precisely the way she now required.

"I've disarmed the transceiver the way I did before," he said.  "It'll look like a simple breakdown if anyone checks."

To no one but you, she thought.

But it was the level of infantile response she'd come to expect from Havvy.  She picked up his gambit, probing with real curiosity.

"You expected that we'd require privacy today?"

He almost shot a startled took at her, caught himself, then:

"Oh, no!  It was a precaution.  I have more information to sell you."

"But you gave me the information about McKie."

"That was to demonstrate my value."

Oh, Havvy!  Why do you try?

"You have unexpected qualities," she said, and marked that he did not even detect the first level of her irony.  "What's this information you wish to sell?"

"It concerns this McKie."

"Indeed?"

"What's it worth to you?"

"Am I your only market, Havvy?"

His shoulder muscles bunched as his grip grew even tighter on the steering arms.  The tensions in his voice were remarkably easy to read.

"Sold in the right place my information could guarantee maybe five years of easy living - no worries about food or good housing or anything."

"Why aren't you selling it in such a place?"

"I didn't say I could sell it.  There are buyers and then there are buyers."

"And then there are the ones who just take?" .

There was no need for him to answer and it was just as well.  A barrier dropped in front of the skitter, forcing Havvy to a quick stop.  For just an instant, fear gripped her and she felt her reflexes prevent any bodily betrayal of the emotion.  Then she saw that it was a routine stop while repair supplies were trundled across the roadway ahead of them.

Jedrik peered out the window on her right.  The interminable repair and strengthening of the city's fortifications was going on at the next lower level.  Memory told her this was the eighth layer of city protection on the southwest.  The noise of pounding rock hammers filled the street.  Grey dust lay everywhere, clouds of it drifting.  She smelled burnt flint and that bitter metallic undertone which you never quite escaped anywhere in Chu, the smell of the poison death which Dosadi ladled out to its inhabitants.  She closed her mouth and took shallow breaths, noted absently that the labor crew was all Warren, all Human, and about a third of them women.  None of the women appeared older than fifteen.  They already had that hard alertness about the eyes which the Warren-born never lost.

A young male strawboss went by trailing a male assistant, an older man with bent shoulders and straggly grey hair.  The older man walked with slow deliberation and the young strawboss seemed impatient with him, waving the assistant to keep up.  The important subtleties of the relationship thus revealed were entirely lost on Havvy, she noted.  The strawboss, as he passed one of the female laborers, looked her up and down with interest.  The worker noted his attention and exerted herself with the hammer.  The strawboss said something to his assistant, who went over and spoke to the young female.  She smiled and glanced at the strawboss, nodded.  The strawboss and assistant walked on without looking back.  The obvious arrangement for later assignation would have gone without Jedrik's conscious notice except that the young female strongly resembled a woman she'd once known . . . dead now as were so many of her early companions.

A bell began to ring and the barrier lifted.

Havvy drove on, glancing once at the strawboss as they passed him.  The glance was not returned, telling Jedrik that the strawboss had assessed the skitter's occupants much earlier.

Jedrick picked up the conversation with Havvy where they'd left it.

"What makes you think you could get more from me than from someone else?"

"Not more . . . It's just that there's less risk with you."

The truth was in his voice, that innocent instrument which told so much about Havvy.  She shook her head.

"You want me to take the risk of selling higher up?"

After a long pause, Havvy said:

"You know a safer way for me to operate?"

"I'd have to use you somewhere along the line for verification."

"But I'd be under your protection then."

"Why should I protect you when you're no longer of value?"

"What makes you think this is all the information I can get?"

Jedrik allowed herself a sigh, wondered why she continued this empty game.

"We might both run into a taker, Havvy."

Havvy didn't respond.  Surely, he'd considered this in his foolish game plan.

They passed a squat brown building on the left.  Their street curved upward around the building and passed through a teeming square at the next higher level.  Between two taller buildings on the right, she glimpsed a stretch of a river channel, then it was more buildings which enclosed them like the cliffs of Chu, growing taller as the skitter climbed.

As she'd known, Havvy couldn't endure her silence.

"What're you going to do?" he asked.

"I'll pay one year of such protection as I can offer."

"But this is . . ."

"Take it or leave it."

He heard the finality but, being Havvy, couldn't give up.  It was his one redeeming feature.

"Couldn't we even discuss a . . ."

"We won't discuss anything!  If you won't sell at my price, then perhaps I should become a taker."

"That's not like you!"

"How little you know.  I can buy informants of your caliber far cheaper."

"You're a hard person."

Out of compassion, she ventured a tiny lesson.  "That's how to survive.  But I think we should forget this now.  Your information is probably something I already know, or something useless."

"It's worth a lot more than you offered."

"So you say, but I know you, Havvy.  You're not one to take big risks.  Little risks sometimes, big risks never.  Your information couldn't be of any great value to me."

"If you only knew."

"I'm no longer interested, Havvy."

"Oh, that's great!  You bargain with me and then pull out after I've . . ."

"I was not bargaining!"  Wasn't the fool capable of anything?

"But you . . ."

"Havvy!  Hear me with care.  You're a little tad who's stumbled onto something you believe is important.  It's actually nothing of great importance, but it's big enough to frighten you.  You can't think of a way to sell this information without putting your neck in peril.  That's why you came to me.  You presume to have me act as your agent.  You presume too much."