Samlor was willing enough to do that. The problem was how.

Star wasn't in the street and wasn't answering him. He'd find her if he had to wash Sanctuary away in the blood of its denizens, but first he had to get clear of this mess into which Fate seemed to have dropped him through no fault of his own.

Why had that clumsy, suicidal stranger attacked him? Why had the fellow even accosted him?

But first, survival.

Samlor switched the dagger to his right hand, master hand, and dodged into the alley nearest him.

The passageway was scarcely the width of his shoulders,

but a door-strapped and studded with metal-gave onto it from the building on the other side. The Cirdonian slapped the panel as he dodged past it. Had it opened, he would have dived in and dealt with those inside in whatever fashion seemed advisable.

But he didn't expect that; and as he expected, the door was as solid as the stone to either side of it.

The alley jogged, though Samlor didn't recall an angle from inside the Vulgar Unicorn's taproom. He slid past the facet of masonry, into an instant of pitch darkness before someone within the tavern reignited a lamp.

There were two slit windows serving this side of the taproom. The grating still covered one, but the light silhouetted the crisp rectangle of the other from which the wickerwork had been torn since the caravan master last saw it inside.

Even so, the opening was too narrow to pass an adult.

Samlor's mouth opened to call, but the child in the midst of four men was already screaming, "Uncle Samlor."

CHAPTER 2

THERE WERE THREE of them between him and Star, packed into the passageway so that the child's dust-whitened garments were only a shimmer past their legs. They were the punks from the table by the door. Beyond them was a fourth man, tall and hooded, closing Star's escape route.