"I do what the contract calls for, Reger," Bernhard told him coldly. "No more, no less. Right now my job is to tell you our client thinks you're eating too much of the black-market business in this territory."

"Your 'client,' eh? Sartan, I suppose? Again?"

Bernhard ignored the question. "So now I've told you. I suggest you do something about it." His hand curved in signal and both black-clad men began moving back.

A cautious frown creased Reger's forehead. "You mean... that's it?"

"I was told to cut back your ambitions," Bernhard said quietly. "How I do that is my choice. Though if I have to come back the results are likely to be more permanent."

"Ah. In other words, Sartan doesn't feel up to a full-scale war yet, is that it?" The older man snorted.

"Well, let me return his favor with a little advice. No one's succeeded in fencing Denver up as his own private preserve for over two hundred years. Not in peacetime, not during the war, not in thirty years of Ryqril occupation. If Sartan thinks he can do it he's going to get himself buried—and if you get too closely tied to his muzzle you'll go the same way." He glanced at Kanai, and even across the room Kanai could see the aura of age around those eyes. With regular Idunine doses, Reger's middleaged appearance meant nothing, of course, any more than Kanai's lithe body showed its own six decades. How old was Reger, anyway? Old enough to have been trying for control of Denver's underworld himself in the days before the Ryqril threat? Possibly. Maybe even probably.

Not that it mattered. The world had changed thirty years back, and it was Bernhard and Kanai who knew how to operate in it now. Reger and his kind were the dinosaurs, doomed to ultimate extinction.

"I'll give Sartan your words of wisdom," Bernhard told the older man, his tone lightly sarcastic. "Just don't make us come back."