Then the guttural "Hoon! Hoon!" of the blood call as the blades went in, the sick-making butcher's cleaver sound of metal hammering home in flesh, the frenzied screaming of a man scalped alive.

"That war took longer than anyone thought it would," he said carefully.

"They usually do," Saba said, with a grim smile.

"And afterwards I couldn't seem to settle down, somehow. Went east and west, north and south-to the dead cities, often, doing salvage."

By then they were in the stables attached to her fa ther's inn; the tavern was a rambling two-story affair seemingly knocked together from several pre Change buildings, but the stables were newer, made of beam and plank with brick floors. He liked what he saw of the ac commodation for the beasts, and he was pickier about that than about where he slept himself. Boy and Billy went into stalls, and he rubbed them down carefully, put on dry blankets and saw to the fodder-good timothy-clover hay without any musty smell, a hot cooked mash of oats and beans, and fresh water.

It looked like the muck was shoveled out regularly, with fresh sawdust and straw laid down; he checked their feet, and made a note to have Bill reshod-the one on his left rear had looked good enough in Bend, but it was a little loose now and definitely getting thin. Pavement wasn't kind to hooves, especially when years of frost and storm had roughened it.

"You boys rest up. You can take it easy for a while," he said, rubbing Boy's forehead as the horse butted at him. "You both earned it."

"You know how to look after horses," Saba said with approval, as she and a teenage boy helped him with the tack and the loads from the packsaddle.

Ingolf grinned. "You have to, if you want the horses to look after you. I had to push these two fellas a lot harder than I liked, but it was that or get stuck in Bend or Sis ters for the winter. I got Boy in the Nebraska country and he's the best all-round horse I've ever had."