A spider wandered over his shoulder and up his cheek and began struggling in his black mop of hair, and was unmolested. The spider felt warmth, but no movement, not so much as a twitch. (If mental curses could have effect, the spider was a goner.)

The sentry ambled by, scuffing and tapping. The thief heard him yawn. Dumb, he thought, dumb. How nice it was of sentries to pace and make noise, rather than be still and listen!

The sentry having moved on leftward along the perimeter of the wall, the thief moved on rightward; northwestward. He'd an armlet of leather and copper well up his right upper arm, and a long bracer of black leather on that wrist. Each contained a nasty leaf-bladed throwing knife of dull blue-black. There was another in his left buskin, where sheath and hilt were mere decoration. He wore no other weapons, none that showed. Certainly he bore neither sword nor axe, and the bow lay at the base of the granary wall.

He stopped. Stepped into a crenel just above two feet deep. Stared, off into the darkness. Yes. There was the spire of the Temple of Holy Allestina Ever Virgin, poor thing. It was the first of the markers he had so carefully spotted and chosen, this afternoon.

The thief did not intend to enter the palace by just any window. He knew precisely where he was going.

The task of regaining line and arrow was more difficult than he had anticipated. He silenced snarls and curses. Knot a rope ten times and try swinging on it and the accursed thing might well work itself loose. Shoot an arrow to wrap a cord slimmer than a little finger around a damned gilded brass flagpole, and he had to fight to get the damned thing to let go!

Within four or six minutes (with silenced snarls and curses) he had sent enough loops and twitches ripple-writhing up the line to loosen the arrow. It swung once around the spire, twice, encountered the line, and caught. More curses, a sort of prayer, and more twitches and ripples riding up the line. Reluctantly the arrow ended its loving embrace of the pennon spire. The line fluttered loose. Down came the arrow. It fell with a clatter that, to a shadowy thief in shadows, sounded like thunder on a cloudless day.

Sleepy sentries heard no thunder. Only he noticed. He reeled in line and arrow. In a crouch, he reached behind him into hi snugly fitted backpack. From it he drew two cylinders of hard wood wrapped with black cloth. Around them he looped his line arrow detached. He held silent for a time, listening. A fly hummed restless and loud. The thief heard nothing to indicate that any o his actions had been noticed with anything approaching alarm.

Rising, he went on his way. Along the perimeter of the palace along the flagged walkway betwixt dome and toothy wall.

Moving with a cat suppleness that would have been scary to an] observer, he reached his second marker. Nicely framed betweer two merlons, he could see it, away off in the distance. The purple' black shape ofJulavain's Hill. Again he smiled, tight of lip.

A merlon became a winch, aided by the two wooden cylinders brought for the purpose. They would pay out the silken cord and prevent the stone from slicing it. Its other end he secured to his ankles. And froze, waiting while the sentry clumped by. He was not importantly thumping his pike's butt, now. He no longei cared to keep himself awake. The thief gritted his teeth against the ghastly noise of the hardest of wood grating over harder flagstones. The porker was dragging his pike!

Then silence was thick enough to cut with a knife, of which the thief owned an abundance. He waited. And waited.

At last he stepped, still crouching, into the crenel. Turning, he carefully winched himself, backwards, down the wall. Down and down, until he came to a particular window. It was cut in the shape of a diamond. That decision had involved more than aesthetics; the damned thing was harder to enter.

Most carefully indeed, he turned. He paid out the cord with his hands until he was quite upside down outside that window. Blood flowed into his head while he strained muscles and vision until he was assured that the chamber was uninhabited.

Then, grinning, Hanse the thief flipped down and dropped lightly into the bedchamber of H.R.H. Kadakithis, Prince-Governor of Sanctuary.

He had done it again! And this time all on his own and without aid. He had breached the wall, eluded the guards, broken into the palace, and was in the very privatemost chamber of the Prince-Governor himself!

Well, lord Prince, you wanted to see Shadowspawn - here he is, awaiting you! Thus he thought while he freed his ankles of expensive silken line and removed his gloves. At least this time no bedmate waited here for her youthful lord.

It was all Hanse could do to keep from laughing aloud in sheerest prideful delight.

'A nice-looking girl left this here for you, Hanse,' Moonflower the Seer had told him. 'She got it from another - along with a coin for her trouble - who got it from still another.'

Hanse raised his dark, dark brows and hooked a thumb in the shagreen belt he wore over a screamingly red sash. From one side of the belt was slung a dagger. An Ilbarsi knife, long as his whole arm, hung down his other leg.

'This you ... Saw, Passionflower?'

She smiled, a hugely fat and grossly misnamed woman who overflowed two cushions atop a low stool. She saw him as a boyish boy and had ever let him turn her head with his charm, which she was almost alone in seeing.

'Oh no,' Moonflower said almost archly, 'I needed to go to no such trouble. I know things, you know.'

'Oh, I know you know things, you clever darling,' he told that gross dumpling in her several skirts, each of more than one unrepeated colour. 'And this time you're going to let me know how you know, I know.'

She nodded at the wax-sealed walnut shell he was idly tossing in his left hand. 'You know me too well, don't you, you naughty scamp! Smell it.'

Up went his close-snuggling brows again, and he brought the shell to his nose. He rolled his eyes. 'Aha! Perfume. A good one. Times are good for the only true mage of Sanctuary, then.'

'You know that is not my perfume,' she said, not without a sideward turn of her blue-tressed head to give him an arch look.

'Now I know that,' Shadowspawn said, jocular and easygoing and almost cute in the sunlight, 'because you tell me so. The walnut was given you by a well-off girl wearing good perfume, then. Betwixt her breasts, I'll bet, where she bore this charming charm.'

She lifted a dimpled finger. 'Ah! But that is the point. The scent on that charm is not mine, and the girl who gave it me wore none at all.' -

'Oh Moonflower, pride of the S'danzo and of Sanctuary! By Ils if the P-G knew of your genius, he'd not have that ugly old charlatan at court, but you, only you! So. By the perfume you know that there was a third woman, who gave this and a coin to another to give to you to give to me.' He wagged his head. 'What a game of roundabout! But what makes you think this thing was given her by still another, to begin with?'

'I saw the coin,' Moonflower said, all kittenish inside a body to block a door or bring groans to a good steed.

'It bore still another scent?'

Moonflower laughed. 'Ah Hanse, Hanse. I know that. Soon you will know too, surely, once you open the walnut shell. Surely it contains a message from someone who wanted no one to know he sent it to you.'

'He?'

'Do you care to make a wager?'

He who was called Shadowspawn clutched the walnut to him in mock terror. With his other hand he clutched his purse theatrically. 'Wager with you about your wisdom? Never! No one has accused me of being stupid.' Well, almost no one, he mentally added, thinking of that burly stranger, Tempus the Hell Hound ... Tempus the ... what?