"Come now, Twelvester. Didn't your mother ever tell you it's churlish to keep people waiting?"

Yustaffa's piping voice broke through Raif thoughts. As the fat man finished speaking a stone hit the small of Raif's back. Snapping around, Raif pounced toward the crowd. People shied away from him. One woman, a tired-looking mother with a baby at her teat, cried out in fright. Raif felt muscles in his jaw pumping as he fought the itch to draw his new sword.

Yustaffa tutted with mock disapproval, deeply gratified by Raif's reaction. "Shame on you, my fellow Rift Brothers. You know the procedure. Story first. Stones later." He smiled winningly at Raif. "Don't worry, I'm just saying that to keep them quiet."|

The flames were fierce now, leaping and crackling, firing off sparks.

Darkness was rising, and it didn't take much to imagine it was originating in the Rift. On the edge of the rimrock Raifflspied one of the windlasses that were used to lower bodies into the abyss. He swallowed, wished again he had thought to bring meat.

Glancing once at Thomas Argola, he said, "I journeyed into the Great Want and was lost for many days. I nearly died, but a group of men called the lamb brothers found me, healed my wounds, and set me on my way."

Several things happened as he spoke. When he named the lamb brothers both Thomas Argola's and Yustaffa's faces registered a beat of surprise. The outlander concealed his surprise better, but Raif detected a momentary loosening of his jaw. Most of the crowd listened in silence, drawing in breath when Raif had named the Great Want, yet even before he'd finished wonder had been replaced by suspicion.

"No one gets out of the Want," shrieked the low-breasted hag who'd spoken earlier.

"Aye," agreed many in the crowd.

Someone else called out, "What was you doing there anyway? Only madmen go the Want."

"Never heard of no lamb brothers," pitched in a shaggy bear of a man near the front.

Yustaffa sucked in his cheeks with relish. "Such suspicion. Makes you wonder how they sleep at night."

"I've heard of the lamb brothers."

All turned to look at the tiny cragsman Addie Gunn who was making his way across the rimrock. Addie had once been a Wellman, and you could still see the clan in him. He wore a pouch around his waist, but it contained salt, not guidestone. The habit of carrying powder was a hard one to break. "The lamb brothers live in the sand deserts of the Far South and they survive on ewe milk and lamb meat and dress themselves in wool and fleeces."

Addie was fierce about matters pertaining to sheep and no one in the crowd doubted his word. As a cragsman at Wellhouse he had maintained his own herd. Raising a quick hand in greeting to Raif, he addressed himself directly to Yustaffa. "You come from the glass desert due north of the sands. Tell me you haven't heard of them too."

As he watched Addie Gunn standing in the firelight, arms folded across his chest, daring Yustaffa to lie to the crowd, a muscle close to Raifs heart contracted. He had forgotten the goodness here. For once Yustaffa was lost for words. Coiling the end of his belt rope around his fat middle finger, he hmmed and aahed and tutted. Finally, he let the rope go. "Well now that you mention it," he said sulkily, "I do have a recollection about them. Course it doesn't prove that they were in the Want or that Twelve Kill actually met them."

Men started to jeer. He'd lost the crowd and he knew it.

Addie shook his head slowly, frowning at Yustaffa and the Maimed Men. "The lamb brothers live on the dunes. League upon league of nothing but sand. Every hill looks like the next, and by the time you've topped one your footprints have been blown clean away and you can't even be sure which way you came. I ask you: How much more difficult could the Want be than that?" The cragsman's gaze darted from man to man, defying anyone to disagree with him. None did. Addie Gunn was well respected here. His know-how brought in goats and sheep. "Good," he said with a fatherly nod. "That's sorted then. Now as for the fact of what the lad was doing there in the first place I say this: Sometimes a man's business is his own. He didna harm any Rift Brothers, and before he left I watched with my own two eyes as he fought long and hard in the raid. You don't have to take my word for it. There's Linden Moodie and Stillborn and others who'll tell you just the same. Now granted the lad's made a mistake not bringing supper for the pot, but I for one will go out with him tomorrow. And between his fancy Sull bow and my own two sheep eyes I have an inkling we'll bring something back. He's useful, don't forget that. Twelve Kill by nature as well as name."

The crowd nodded. Most were quiet. A group of older children broke away from the fire to kick around a leather ball. Stillborn chose that moment to return to the space before the fire. He was carrying a small burlap sack on his back and he shrugged it forward, letting it drop onto the rimrock.

"Trail meat," he said with some wistfulness, still looking at the sack. "Cured it myself last autumn. Spiced it real good too. If there's babbies around with milk teeth it'll knock 'em clean out" Unable to actually come out with the words Trail meat all round he walked away from the sack.

The Maimed Women pushed forward first. One woman, a blond-haired maid with a cleanly excised left ear, shoved Yustaffa in the backside to get to her share of meat. The fat man spun around and smacked her face and she smacked him right back. Raif, Stillborn and Addie Gun moved to the side. Glancing over his shoulder, Raif looked to the place where he'd last seen Thomas Argola. The outlander was gone.

"Addie," Raif said. "Thanks. You saved my head."

The cragsman smacked his lips. "C'mon now, lad. It was nothing"

Raif nodded solemnly. "Nothing."

Addie seemed pleased by this. "You'd better get some sleep. Wei have to be up and out afore dawn. Well have to cover a lot of ground. Bad time of year to go looking for game."

"Worse time to come back with nothing." Stillborn also seemed pleased. "Guess I might come with you. Someone'll have to wheel back the cart."

Addie looked at Stillborn as if he was exactly the kind of person you didn't want on a stealth hunt. Which was probably true, "If you're not at the east rim an hour afore sunup I'm not waiting" was all the cragsman said in reply.

"Where's Traggis Mole?" Raif asked, instantly killing the easy camaraderie between them.

Stillborn's large deformed face, with its seam of flesh and black bristles running from the temple down to the neck, sobered. "He's about all right, though I've seen him less of late. He'll have been told you're here, but you know the Mole. Chooses his own time."

Raif nodded. It was probably a mistake to feel relief at that statement, but he couldn't help himself. Right now he wanted to pull his aching feet from his boots, and sleep.

Perhaps seeing this, Stillborn said, "Cmon, lad. Let's get you set for the night. You'd best stay with me. Addie. You didn't do half a bad job up there. I never knew you had the gift of the gab."

"Nor did I," Addie replied lightly before slipping away.

Stillborn picked up Raif s pack as if it weighed exactly nothing. Silently, he led Raif down the series of rope ladders and stairs that led to his cliff cave. Raif was grateful not to be probed or forced to think. He was dead tired and had stood so long in the sleet that his hands and face were tingling.

The Rift music started as they arrived on the lower terrace. Grass lamps had been lit and the city was aglow with orange lights. The Rift music made the flames flicker. Bass murmurs, low whistles and door-hinge creaks rose from the hole in the earth, punctuated by long silences and sudden rock tremors. Raif could no longer see the Rift, and was glad.