My visitor arrived. It was Sfido. We talked for an hour or more, and managed with all our talk to rouse my host's wife, who had abandoned the celebration and wisely taken to her bed. She has found a bed for him, and warmed a bowl of the bean soup. He said that he was too tired to eat, but looked half starved and managed to finish the whole bowl quickly enough, dipping the soft white bread that is so much valued here into it and eating like a lost hound.

Let me go back to the beginning.

There was a knock at the door. At first I did not answer, fearing I would quickly have a dozen drunken revelers to deal with; he knocked again, pounding the panels like a man in fear. "Rajan! Dervis!"

No one here calls me either, so I opened. At first I did not recognize him, unshaven, starved and frenetic as he looked; in the ten days since I had last seen him, the dapper officer had vanished. I told him brusquely that Atteno's shop was closed, and asked what he wanted.

"I must talk to you, Rajan. I call you that because it won't put us in a false position now."

I knew him then, but it took me a second or two to recall his name. "Sfido? Captain Sfido?"

"Yes." He drew himself up, heels clicking and shoulders squared, and saluted me. I suppose I must have asked him to come in and sit down; certainly I got out the old wooden chair that my host keeps by the till for him.

"Poor man." Oreb regarded him through one jet-bead eye and snapped his crimson beak as though to say, Behold the straits to which the wicked have fallen!

Sfido tried to smile; I have seldom seen a grown man appear so pathetic. "You have your little pet back, I see."

I told him that Oreb was under no restraint and had returned to me of his own will.

"None save your magic."

"I have none; but if I had any, I surely would not use it for that."

"None at all." It was not a question.

"No. None."

"You transported us to Green in the twinkling of an eye, then to Soldo, then to Green again, and brought us back as soon as it suited your purpose to do so." He sighed. "That sounds as if I'm arguing with you. I suppose I am, but I didn't seek you out to argue. Have you ever heard of a man called Gagliardo, Rajan? He's a citizen of my own Soldo."

"I don't believe so."

"He's rich and can live on his rents, so he studies the stars, which interest him, and he's had some strange instruments built for that purpose. You gave me a horse and sent me home, remember? I was to inform our Duko that Kupus and his troopers had turned coat."

"Certainly."

"I tried to see Duko Rigoglio at once, but he was too busy; so I went to see Gagliardo and asked how far it is to Green. When it's as close as it ever comes, it's thirty-five thousand leagues. I can't understand how anybody can measure a distance that great, and Gagliardo admits he may be in error by a thousand leagues or so, but that's what he said."

I thanked him, adding, "I've wondered about that from time to time, and I'm glad to get the information."

"Talk, talk," Oreb commented dryly.

I said, "It's astonishing that anybody should be able to make such a measurement, I agree; but I find it still more astonishing that the inhumi should be able to make the crossing from their whorl to ours, hurling their naked bodies thousands of leagues through the abyss."

"Green's nowhere near its closest now," Sfido said. "It's more than eighty thousand leagues away."

I shook my head. "They don't dare attempt such distances. They come only when the two whorls are at their closest, and even then many perish-or so I've been told."

"Bad things," Oreb declared piously.

"No worse than we are," I told him. When Sfido did not speak, I said, "It's true that there are inhumi in the Long Sun Whorl; but they made the trip on board returning landers, apparently."

"You carried a couple of hundred men across eighty thousand leagues, four times, in the winking of an eye." Sfido sighed. "That's what I told Duko Rigoglio. I said that he had seen you himself and had to know that as long as Blanko had you on its side it was suicide to fight."

"Did he agree to peace?"

Sfido shook his head.

"So he sent you here to kill me," I hazarded.

"When will you make the attempt?"

"No cut!" Oreb exclaimed.

Sfido took up the word, after a momentary pause repeating, "No."

"Then he will send someone else, I presume. He tried to have Fava poison Inclito."

"I wanted him to bribe you, that was my suggestion. I told him that I doubted you could be killed at all, and an assassin would just lose his own life and whatever part of his reward the Duko had advanced him. But I said that you might help us for gold and power, and that he should offer you a great deal of both. Women, horses, troopers, and whatever his emissary sensed you wanted. A throne in Blanko or Olmo."

"You were wrong," I said, "since I have already died once. But you proposed that Duko Rigoglio offer me a throne?"

Sfido nodded.

"You're too old to have been born here. How old were you when you left Grandecitta?"

"Fifteen."

"That was my own age at the time I left Viron. You should remember boarding the lander and crossing the abyss, exactly as I do. Were any of you rich?"

He laughed, the weary laugh of one who has witnessed the ironic conclusion of his efforts. "We thought then that some of us were, Rajan. And there were others that we thought were. Neighborhood rich. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so. My father owned a little shop very much like this in a poor neighborhood."

"That's it. Some of us were as rich as this."

"How long ago, Captain Sfido? Twenty years?"

"Not quite."

"And now we, who complained so bitterly about the rich when we were poor, have taken up every practice and custom we hated in them. Thrones! One for Duko Rigoglio and another for me. I can't begin to tell you how many complaints I heard about the rich when I was growing up, Captain."

"Don't call me that anymore, Rajan." He smiled bitterly. "It puts us in a false position."

I smiled back at him, while laughing to myself at myself.

"Certainly I've put myself in the reprehensible position of keeping a tired man talking because I wanted to. You've come to me for help, obviously, and I'll give it to you if I can. How can I help you?"

He squared his shoulders again and threw his head back. "Sfido needs no one's help. I'm here to help you."

I said that it was good of him, and waited.

"General Inclito will be defeated. You may deny it, but it's true."

"I believe it's true that you believe it. Can we leave it at that?"

"No. I've been in the hills and watched the fighting. I have no supernatural powers, but I've an eye for war. It was not for nothing that I was chosen to command our advance guard."

I said truthfully that I had never supposed it was.

He sat in silence for a moment, struck by a new thought. "You, with all your magic, Rajan. You should be at the front with the troops. Why are you here?"

"To raise the money I promised the mercenaries. I have enough now, or nearly enough. For one month's pay, that is."

"They offered to serve you for nothing. I was there, and that was when you ordered them to take my needier…"

"Yes?"

"I had it again when we returned to this whorl. You had them take it from me a second time. And those troopers, the great worm tore them to bits. Horrible! But they were alive again, and the General's daughter was dead."

"You said you had come to help me," I reminded him.

"Yes. Can you foresee the future? That's what one of the men from your own town told me."

"Not always."

"But sometimes. Often, I think. Do you agree that Blanko's horde will be defeated?"

I said (patiently, I hope) that he had said so, and that I deferred to his greater knowledge of military matters.