I held up a hand to put an end to the spate. "Are we going the right way?" I asked.

The keen eyes surveyed the streets. "Aye. We are within a street's length. Do you turn left at the clock tower which yon felinoids are stropping their talons upon, and we will be upon Ella's doorstep in no more than a dozen paces."

I have good eyesight, but it took another hundred feet before I focused on the shapes at the base of the tower. He was right. The clock tower looked like a popular meeting spot for the citizens of Perrt, a hundred or so of whom were spaced out around its square base, claws out and raking hard at the surface, which seemed to be made of a soft stone. From hundreds of years of wear it had been carved into long narrow ridges like corduroy. The Orions gossiped as they clawed, and

came away from the walls with their fingernails honed to fine points and ears full of the latest news, the local variation on the old water cooler. I skirted them and counted twelve paces to the second doorstep.

"Mount here, good Aahz," Ersatz said. "Kelsa is within."

Ori Ella's tabby housemaid answered the door and left us in the hallway. I had given her my name, but told her I'd state my business to the mistress of the house. She took that without question. I would have bet that over 80% of visitors did the same thing. Either the seer would know all about us without having to be told, or she was a charlatan, and she'd get out of me what she could read from my body language when we met.

Apparently, Kelsa was good at choosing the company she kept. The arched door at the end of the hall burst open, and an Orion with pure white fur came bustling toward me, shimmering blue and green robes fluttering in her wake. She had huge blue-green eyes with vertical pupils that were open into wide ovals.