The pole whacked down onto the rim, rope and all, shy of her knife and her fingers. Del'spole. As the shadow-figures surged up about Mira and vaulted over into her own well, all in a rush.

"Damn you!" she yelled at Del, and vaulted the side to

Del's deck, barreled straight up against Mira with that knife in her fist. Mira yelled and staggered backward.

" No!" Del howled. " No!"

About the time men hit her back and she grabbed a handful of Mira's shirt in the same fist as the knife; gave a wrench, as the hands on her shoulders hauled her off the deck to the well.

"Dammit!"

Fool!

Hard arms immobilized either elbow, knife-hand and hook-hand together. "Don't you hurt her," Mira was saying, "don't you hurt her, damn your hides!"

Someonewas on her side. Her victim was. She quit kicking and fighting; the men who held her let up so that some feeling came back to her hands. She drew a breath, sense getting back to her brain as she saw Del and Mira and boaters standing up solemn as judges in every boat well and deck along the side of Bogar Isle.

Canalers. All of them. Canaler-law. Canalers with a grudge or questions or something in mind. There was no place to run, not in all Merovingen.

"She never hurt me," Mira was saying. "Let *er go, let go. Altair, Altair, sweet—Let her go!"

"Let me go," Altair said. "Damn, you want to talk to me, you get your damn hands off me!"

Hands pried the hook and the knife from her numb fingers. They let her go then; and she hugged her arms back with a wince, holding them till it felt the joints had settled. She recognized a few of the men. And women. "Come on," a male voice said, and caught her arm and dragged her across the slats toward the shoreside.

She flailed out, braced her feet, trying to free herself. "I ain't—"

"You'll go with us." Another hand caught her left arm again, and bent it back till it was near to cracking. She yelled and winced to save it, and banged her knee on the boatside as they dragged her bodily over it.

"Let me go, dammit!" The arm strained at the socket. There was no fighting it. She stumbled on the uneven brickwork of Bogar Cut ledge, knewwhere they were taking her. "I'll walk, dammit, you're breaking my arm!"

Pressure eased up. Her vision came and went in flares of pain, and she stumbled again as a man shoved her toward a break in the wall. " Ow!" she yelled. And bashed her head on a brick as the man pushed her in through a rubbled split in Bogar's foundations. She was blind for a moment, free and reeling and staggering until some other man grabbed her and held her arm.

Body after body came into the place. She heard them in the dark, heard the shuffling and heard someone else bash his head on the same brick and swear. She jerked at the hands that held her. "Dammit, you can let go, I ain't running."

A match flared. A single candle took light, picked out a tumbled cavern of water-dripping brick and rubble-piles of fill, and a score of canalers, all in the same gold. It was the old Bogar warehouse, gone rotten at the foundations, halfway to its use as a new stone base for the isle, to shore it up from ruin.

Canalers knew such places. Like the vermin and the cats knew them.

There was a flat rock, a large slab of rock. A big man with an open shirt and a neck-scarf brought the candle there, sat down and fixed the candle on its own wax in front of him. Sweat glistened on his unshaven face. It showed like a devil's in the flicker of breeze from outside. Rufio Jobe was his name. He was not official. Nothing was, in the canals. But Jobe was a man who did things. Who got things done. Direct and final. And no one backtalked him.

"Give me my stuff back," she said.

Rufio Jobe settled his largish bulk square, set his hands on his knees. "Maybe you give us some answers, Little Jones."

"Answers. What answers?"

"Like what you been doing."

"I ain't doing nothing!"

"Del," Jobe said, and looked aside. She looked, and spotted Del Suleiman and his wife at her left, silent, his white hair and white stubble gone all neutral gold in the candlelight, her face gone all to tear-streaked jowls.

"Where you been?" Del asked.

"Where've I been?" Altair sucked air and shook her arms loose again, the left one fit to bring tears to her eyes. "I been trusting a damn liar, that's what I been doing! Ye might've knifed me while you was at it, mightn't you, Del? All that talk was a lie, Del Suleiman! Damn liar! You want my boat, that's what you want, that's what you wanted for years—"

"You set your hand to Mira again, I'll show you, you—"

"She never did!" Mira yelled; and: " Shut it dawn!" —from Jobe.

There was quiet then, the yell reverberating off the brick. A bit of stone fell Water dripped. Brick shifted under someone's foot. Altair shook off hands that threatened to grip her arms again. She was shaking. Her gut felt like water. The faces ringed her round and round. "Damn liar," she muttered and looked up and glared at Jobe. "I got privatebusiness. I left my boat with somebody I thought I trusted. That's what I done."

"You being a kid," Jobe said, "we ain't got no desire to be rough with you. Just want to talk. It was you took the knife out."

"How'd Iknow what you was? First I thought you was going for Mira's back. Then I still didn't know what you was. Old friends've sold out friends before. Like now. Am I going to wait round to see? Hell, I'm going to cut my boat loose an' when someone I know goes at my back and stops me I'm getting clear of 'im. World's gone crazy. World's gone clear crazy. Never would've knifed Mira; she didn't knife me neither, I knew that. But I figured if Del'd gone crazy she wouldn't be too."

"Now that may be and that may not be. Fact is, we got a lot of craziness going on. Like that fire the other night. Like killings in the uptown and them that did it is moving round me city somehow, I tell you, Little Jones, it ain't any real pleasure for me to be asking you: I was a friend of your mother's. But we got a real serious question for you. You know anything about that fire?"

"I was down there. Doesn't mean I did it. I was just there."

"You got this passenger. You want to tell us about 'im?"

''What's that got to do with it?"

"They got you to leave your boat. Suleiman can swear to that. You was following after some tall fellow dressed all like a canaler and walking like an uptowner. Later you was heading away from that fire with this tall fellow looked like a Falkenaer. You rode Mintaka Fahd's boat down from Oldmarket and told her he was running after some hightown girl."

"So I found him when I went off across the city, so we happened to be cut off by the fire and couldn't get back to Moghi's till we ran into gran Fahd. Who's this been so interested in my business?" Her heart was pounding in her chest. Lying to these was a fatal thing to do. A little he was one thing; a big lie and something going wrong, that was a way to die, just to turn up dead some morning and no one caring at all. Even suspicion was enough to starve on, harassed and pranked till a body had nowhere to go but the Harbor. If she ever got out of this basement alive. "Who said I was up to no good? Who said? Was it you, Del Suleiman? Was it you?"

"Girl," Jobe said, "there's just been a lot of gossip. Lotof gossip. Now you knows the rule: trouble ain't good for canalers. Ain't good at all. We got canalers ain't moving, we got a canal blocked, we got the law out poking round the canals, we got a whole lot less freight 'cause of this trouble in the town, and that means hungry kids and hungry old 'uns. Now d'you agree we got a legitimate concern here?"