'Keep going!' she said fiercely. 'We're almost there!'

Benna raised his head. His eyes were surrounded with puffed-out flesh. Masha hadnever seen such oedema; the blackness and the swelling looked like those of acorpse five days dead in the heat of summer.

'No!' he mumbled. 'Not old Lahboo's building!'

3

Under other circumstances, Masha would have laughed. Here was a dying man or aman who thought he was dying. And he'd be dead soon if his pursuers caught upwith him. (Me, too, she thought.) Yet he was afraid to take the only refugeavailable because of a ghost.

'You look bad enough to. scare even the Tight-Fisted One,' she said. 'Keep goingor I'll drop you right now!'

She got him inside the doorway, though it wasn't easy what with the boards stillattached to the lower half of the entrance. The top planks had fallen inside. Itwas a tribute to the fear people felt for this place that no one had stolen thewood, an expensive item in the desert town.

Just after they'd climbed over, Benna almost falling, she heard a man uttersomething in the raspy tearing language. He was near by, but he must have justarrived. Otherwise, he would have heard the two.

Masha had thought she'd reached the limits of terror, but she found that shehadn't. The speaker was a Raggah!

Though she couldn't understand the speech - no one in Sanctuary could - she'dheard Raggah a number of times. Every thirty days or so five or six of thecloaked, robed, hooded, and veiled desert men came to the bazaar and thefarmers' market. They could speak only their own language, but they used signsand a plentitude of coins to obtain what they wanted. Then they departed ontheir horses, their mules loaded down with food, wine, vuksibah (the veryexpensive malt whisky imported from a far north land), goods of various kinds: