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dropping swiftly, wings folded. Shortly, it checked its drop and glided in.
Phthie introduced herself and immediately thereafter said that she carried good news. She had spotted
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the gworl and the woman, Chryseis, only four hundred miles ahead of them. They had taken passage on
a merchant boat and were traveling down the Guzirit toward the Land of Armored Men.
"Did you see the horn?" Kickaha said.
"No," Phthie replied. "But they doubtless have it concealed in one of the skin bags they were carrying. I
snatched one of the bags away from a gworl on the chance it might contain the horn. For my troubles, I
got a bag full of junk and almost received an arrow through my wing."
"The gworl have bows?" Wolff asked, surprised.
"No. The rivermen shot at me."
Wolff, asking about the ravens, was told that there were many. Apparently the Lord must have ordered
a number to keep watch on the gworl.
"That's bad," Kickaha said. "If they spot us, we're in real trouble."
"They don't know what you look like," Phthie said. "I've eavesdropped on the ravens when they were
talking, hiding when I longed to seize them and tear them apart. But I have orders from my mistress, and
I obey. The gworl have tried to describe you to the Eyes of the Lord. The ravens are looking for two
traveling together, both tall, one black-haired, the other bronze-haired. But that is all they know, and
many men conform to that description. The ravens, however, will be watching for two men on the trail of
the gworl."
"I'll dye my beard, and we'll get Khamshem clothes," Kickaha said.
Phthie said that she must be getting on. She had been on her way to report to Podarge, having left
another sister to continue the surveillance of the gworl, when she had spied the two. Kickaha thanked her
and made sure that she would carry his regards to Podarge. After the giant bird had launched herself
from the rim of the monolith, the men went into the jungle.
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"Walk softly, speak quietly," Kickaha said. "Here be tigers. In fact, the jungle's lousy with them. Here
also be the great axebeak. It's a wingless bird so big and fierce even one of Podarge's pets would
skedaddle away from it. I saw two tigers and an axebeak tangle once, and the tigers didn't hang around
long before they caught on it'd be a good idea to take off fast."
Despite Kickaha's warnings, they saw very little life except for a vast number of many-colored birds,
monkeys, and mouse-sized antlered beetles. For the beetles, Kickaha had one word: "poisonous."
Thereafter, Wolff took care before bedding down that none were about.
Before reaching their immediate destination, Kickaha looked for a plant, the ghubharash. Locating a
group after a half-day's search, he pounded the fibers, cooked them, and extracted a blackish liquid.
With this he stained his hair, beard, and his skin from top to bottom.
"I'll explain my green eyes with a tale of having a slave-mother from Teutonia," he said. "Here. Use some
yourself. You could stand being a little darker."
They came to a half-ruined city of stone and wide-mouthed squatting idols. The citizens were a short,
thin, and dark people who dressed in maroon capes and black loincloths. Men and women wore their
hair long and plastered with butter, which they derived from the milk of piebald goats that leaped from
ruin to ruin and fed on the grasses between the cracks in the stone. These people, the Kaidushang, kept
cobras in little cages and often took their pets out to fondle. They chewed dhiz, a plant which turned their
teeth black and gave their eyes a smoldering look and their motions a slowness.
Kickaha, using H'vaizhum, the pidgin rivertalk, bartered with the elders. He traded a leg of a
hippopotamus-like beast he and Wolff had killed for Khamshem garments. The two donned the red and
green turbans adorned with kigglibash feathers, sleeveless white shirts, baggy pantaloons of purple,
sashes that wound around and around their waists many times, and the black, curling-toed slippers.
Despite their dhiz-stupored minds, the elders were shrewd in their trading. Not until Kickaha brought a
very small sapphire from his bag-one of the jewels given him by Podarge-would they sell the
pearlencrusted scabbards and the scimitars in their hidden stock.
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