The short Uclod man trudged at my side, muttering about the snow; he was obviously a Warm-Weather Creature, unprepared for a Melaquin winter. His skin, which had darkened in the tower, was now growing light again: turning from umber to orange, and onward to a bleached yellow jaundice reminiscent of dead grass. It could not have been that he was sickening from the cold, for the city was well-heated despite the note in the roof. (All around us, the snow melted as soon as it touched the pavement.) But Uclod’s skin seemed intent on reacting in exaggerated fashion to every tiny change in the environment.

"You were telling me about utter bastards," I said, "and why you have come to Melaquin if you are not after our land. Are you another fucking Explorer, marooned against your will?"

"Not me, missy," he replied. "I’m what you might call a private entrepreneur. Working at the moment for Alexander York."

"Who is a friend of Festina’s."

"Friend isn’t exactly the right word." "What is the right word?"

"Uh. Victim."

Uclod’s tone suggested there might be an excellent story in how this York person became Festina’s victim. I asked him to disclose everything… and he did.

The Sinister Admiral York

Alexander York had been a very bad man. He was a high-ranking admiral in the Technocracy’s Outward Fleet, where he did many awful things to humans and a race called the Mandasars. York’s greatest villainy, however, was trying to kill my Faithful Sidekick, Festina. She tried to kill him right back, and with the help of some alien moss, she won. (I did not quite follow how that worked, but I believe she stuffed moss into the bad man’s stomach until he exploded. That is not how Uclod told the story, but his version was so strange and implausible that I chose to reconstruct his tale in a way that made more sense.)