"In—" Togger might have shouted, so loud did it seem. Farree put a hand inside of his loose over-tunic to touch the smux's back bristles. He did not need Togger's urging now—the beacon he followed was growing stronger and stronger.

Pain and fear: but now he was almost certain that both those were of the past—that he was not on his way to rescue some captive. However, where fragments of wings were to be found, there also one could certainly learn from whence they had come. Naturally the trader would lie. Farree's pointed teeth showed for an instant as he grinned in promise. However—there were he, and Maelen, and Vorlund, and the Zacanthan, and, of course, Togger. All of them had the reading gift. His own had been honed and polished during the past months when he had traveled with the two spacers—he knew that he was far better now at this ploy than he had ever been.

There was a crowd ahead. Farree halted for a moment and looked to what lay between him and that which he sought. To push into that crowd—it would take only one drunken jostling to have him uncloaked and betrayed to a trader who dealt in wings.

Most of those he surveyed were crowded about a platform set the height of a man's shoulder above the surface of the street. On this a tall and very thin man, who wore such a skin-tight article of clothing that he might be thought to be bones alone, was waving a narrowed hand with six long fingers back and forth. From the tip of each finger spouted a flame. He took up from an upturned box which served as a table a pannikin half full of liquid, turning it as far as he might without spilling its contents so that the crowd, or at least those immediately before his perch, could see that the pannikin did have contents. Having made a portion of his audience believe that, he held the small bowl with a pair of tongs directly above his own flaming fingers, chanting aloud words which apparently none of his listeners could understand. Now he had won their full attention. As they crowded closer Farree was left with a small space to push by. What he sought was very near; the anguish of the message had become stronger and he traced it to a booth right on the other side of the magician. There seemed to be no one in charge there, though a man in a stained and worn spacer's uniform from one of the large company ships stood directly before its entrance, eyes on the magician.

Farree reached the end of the booth, searching with his eyes the wares laid out there. Some of that was trader trash—such as the companies used with natives on planets newly opened, where the inhabitants did not know the true value of off-world things. But this was not what he sought. He felt Togger move and knew that the smux wanted out; but it was better, he counciled with a swift thought, to wait yet a while.

He himself held his hand over the counter, clutching the cloak as tightly around him as possible. Slowly he swung it palm down, fingers straight and together. No, not on the board at all. But close, very close. Farree would have to risk Togger after all. With a quarter of his attention on the back of the man he believed was the trader, Farree dropped the smux on the piles of stuff. Togger could hurry if there was a good reason and he did so now, speeding over the trade goods, though he had to stop once and shake a gaudy necklace of fake Ru crystal off one of his claws. Reaching the other end of that narrow shelf he swung part way out, only two of his hind feet anchoring him to the surface. There was a sudden surge of the fear-torment. Farree braced himself as if he stood in the path of a tempest.

The smux came into view again, dragging a flat package which pushed some of the trade trash before it. Farree was shaking now. The fear-terror was fast changing into anger. He looked down at the stuff but there was no weapon there. No, the unlicensed trader would not want the State Pacifers to find him with such. Instead Farree grabbed up the packet. His trembling had become worse, and his hold had fallen from his cloak so that the garment was ready to slip from him.

Togger sprang, landing on Farree's chest. His claws went out, caught at the cloak and dragged it shut toward him. In Farree's hands the packet shook and nearly fell.

"Hey, you! Trying to get that without a credit, eh? Well, you don't play that game with Ryss Onvet, no, you don't. I can call me a street warden good and clear. We may be trash to your up-nosed crowd from the town but we still got our rights, always being that we ain't on any list."

"But of course that is so," Farree felt the Zacanthan move in on one side of him and Maelen and the spacer on the other. "My friend here wishes to make a purchase. He was waiting to attract your attention. The magician, I must admit, is quite good, very good indeed. Now, if you are willing to conduct business, how much does my friend owe?"

The man had a heavy scar across his forehead which twisted his eyebrows unnaturally, but Farree, in spite of the overwhelming discharge from the package, could sense that the merchant was squinting at them narrowly as if he looked for something or someone who was not there.

He must have made up his mind quickly for he said in a rush of words, in trader tongue for emphasis, that he had no business to do with strangers—

"Do you then," Maelen wanted to know, "deal only with your neighbors here? Certainly that makes your market a very limited one and I should think your sales were few."

"Gentle Fein,"—he got out the polite address as if it strangled him to say it—"I deal with all comers, yet I also take specialty consignments. One of those your friend there has taken up. I can also add theft to my complaint against him since that which he holds is not for sale at all."

"No? Look at me, merchant, and at my friend here." She indicated Krip Vorlund with a small gesture. "Did you not sell to us a short time since a curiosity which was indeed better ware than any you show here?"

The man opened his mouth as if to refute her at once and then seemed to look beyond them as if he sought for some help.

"Was this not true?" she pressed.

He coughed and stroked his throat as if he had swallowed something he could neither control internally nor heave out again.

"Yes," his voice was hardly above a mutter.

"Sooooooo," the word was such a hiss from the Zacanthan that, for a moment, Farree could believe that he companioned some great reptile. "What isss sissss sing?"

He reached across to Farree and effortlessly freed the packet from his hand.

"Treasure? Sssso you mussst declare it sssso—" Even as the hiss grew more pronounced the Zacanthan effortlessly put a talon under the top fold of the wrapped package and gave one short pull to display its contents.

Farree already knew what he would see. There were two more lengths of the shining wing stuff. One was a red-brown shading through warm yellows and oranges. And the other—

Green, several shades of green: not the darker shades which made up the glory of his own wings; lighter.

Not green—red! The whole world had turned red about him. He mouthed a strange cry which he had never voiced before and his hands shot forth—not to seize again upon what the Zacanthan held—but to grasp that throat rising above the grimy collar of the disgraced uniform, to dig into the trader's dirty red flesh and squeeze, squeeze and squeeze!