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captained by a Krozair of Zy.” I said this deliberately. I wanted to probe Fazhan — and Rukker, too. For the martial and mystic Order of Krozairs of Zy is remote from ordinary men on the Eye of the World, strange, and dedicated to Disciplines almost too demanding for frail human flesh.
    Fazhan turned his head back quickly.
    “The Krozairs!” he said. He breathed the word as a man might in talking about demigods.
    The Rapa, Lorgad, snuffled and hissed. “Krozairs! We fought them — aye, and we thrashed them.”
    “Thrashed?” I said.
    The Rapa passed a hand over his feathers, smoothing them. “Well — it was a hard fight. But King Genod’s new army won — as it always wins.”
    “But one day it will be smashed utterly!” said Fazhan. His voice blazed in the night, and surly voices answered from the other rowing benches in the gloom, bidding the onker be quiet so tired men might sleep.
    I had learned what little Rukker would tell me of his story, and I knew Fazhan’s, that he had been a ship-Hikdar in a swifter from Zamu. Yet he was not a Krozair Brother, not even of the Krozairs of Zamu. As for Rukker, as he said himself, he was essentially a land soldier, and knew nothing of ships and the sea. As a mercenary he had hired out his — And then he had paused, and corrected himself, and said he had been hired out as a paktun to Magdag. I knew, if I was right and he was a gernu, a noble, that he had taken a force of his own country to fight for Magdag for pay. Now this was, to me, passing strange, for my previous experience with Katakis had been of them as slave-masters, slavers who bartered human flesh. There were a number of races of diffs living up in the northeastern seaboard of the Eye of the World, notably around the Sea of Onyx. Rukker had said he came from an inland country there, a place he had once referred to as Urntakkar, that is, North Takkar. He did not refer to it again.
    I said, “Have you heard of Morcray?”
    “No.”
    So I let that lie, also.
    But if the Katakis were moving out from their traditional business and becoming mercenaries, then the future looked either darker and more horrible, or scarlet and more interesting, depending on the hardness of your muscles and the keenness of your sword.
    We sailed in company with other swifters; just how many we thalamites in our stinks and gloom could not know. We anchored for the night and then took a wind and so rested the next day, and on the following day, the wind fell and we pulled. That was a hard day. Another ten slaves were hurled overboard, either dead or flogged near to death. Those who remained hardened, and the replacements from the slave-hold were those who failed.
    That night we once again hauled
Green Magodont
out of the water. I saw six other swifters being hauled up, and also there were signs of a wooden stockade being constructed on the shore into which the slaves might be herded. I knew that Magdag, no less than every other Green city of the northern shore, was utilizing every possible sinew of war. Slaves were now becoming valuable, even though many a poor devil had been captured by the new army of King Genod, the genius at war.
    In the stockade only a few fights broke out. Most of us wanted to stretch out — and what a luxury that was! — and sleep. I did not stay awake long. The four of us — for the Rapa, Lorgad, was accepted by us as an oar-comrade — slept together. The morning came all too soon, and with many groans and stretching of stiff joints, we rose and were doused down with a vile concoction of seawater and pungent ibroi, and then we gobbled the food thrown to us. This was a mash of cereal, a torn hunk of stale bread, and a handful of palines. For the palines everyone gave thanks to whatever gods they revered.
    The whip-Deldars stalked among us, the lashes licking hungrily, sorting us out amid a great clanking of chains.
    “I believe,” said Fazhan, staring about, “that we are to go up to be zygites this