Bone was concerned. "What'll we do if a ship don't come?" Gordimer had vowed that warships would patrol the coast as far norm as the roads of Vantrad until Else and his band were safely home.

"If no ship shows up I'll strap a mummy on your back. And — like some black crow of an old woman, you can lug your baby around while you work."

Bone was no more religious than Else. That was characteristic of Sha-lug. They had seen too much to be unquestioning in their conviction of God's Mercy. The old man made a sign warding the evil eye. He followed that with a gesture meant to invoke God's favor—if He so willed.

Bone did not like the dead. He bore a particular prejudice against those dead who had practiced their trade a long time. Of the ancient dead of Andesqueluz, the Demon Kingdom, whose sorcerer kings' accursed relicts Else's Company had pilfered from their tombs, Bone's opinion consisted of irrational hatred deeply awash in stark terror. These days the Demon Kingdom was lost in the backwaters of history, known intimately only to scholars, but echoes of the terrible truth lived on in myth and fairy tale.

But Bone was a good soldier.

Sha-lug was synonymous with Good Soldier.

There were no incidents that night Nevertheless, Else did not sleep well. He could not help anticipating further deviltry from the night Al-Azer claimed that the supernatural reverberations of the bogon's destruction had not damped out yet Anything might be attempted by sorcerers who wanted to spy on their neighbors during such unsettled times.

ELSE DID NOT POSSESS AN IMAGINATION ADEQUATE TO ENCOM-pass the magnitude of his one cannon blast.

None of the company but al-Azer er-Selim realized that the blast had changed the world forever.

Al-Azer would never speak the words. He would not write them down. Few mortals would realize the truth, even within the supernatural trades.