The man turned suddenly. It wasn’t Odal!

Dulaq jerked back in surprise. It couldn’t be. He had seen his face. It was Odal… and yet this man was a stranger. Dulaq felt the man’s eyes on him as he turned and walked away quickly.

A mistake, he told himself. You were overanxious. A good thing this is a hallucination, or the autopolice would be taking you in by now.

And yet… he had been so certain that it was Odal. A chill shuddered through him. He looked up, and there was his antagonist, on the thoroughfare above, at the precise spot where he himself had been a few minutes earlier.

Their eyes met, and Odal’s lips parted in a cold smile.

Dulaq hurried up the ramp. Odal was gone by the time he reached the upper level. He couldn’t have gotten far.

Slowly, but very surely, Dulaq’s hallucination crumbled into a nightmare. He’d spot Odal in the crowd, only to have him melt away. He’d find him again, but when he’d get closer, it would turn out to be another stranger. He felt the chill of the duelist’s ice-blue eyes on him again and again, but when he turned there was no one there except the impersonal crowd.

Odal’s face appeared again and again. Dulaq struggled through the throngs to find his opponent, only to have him vanish. The crowd seemed to be filled with tall blond men crisscrossing before Dulaq’s dismayed eyes:

The shadows lengthened. The sun was setting. Dulaq could feel his heart pounding within him, and perspiration pouring from every square centimeter of his skin.

There he is! Yes, that is him. Definitely, positively him! Dulaq pushed through the homeward-bound crowds toward the figure of a tall blond man leaning casually against the safety railing of the city’s main thoroughfare. It was Odal, the damned smiling confident Odal.