The leader pointed down at me. “He’s a vout. Laro testifies to it. These two found the evidence hidden under his clothes!”

Two young Gheeths—the pair who’d mugged me—were pushed to the front of the crowd so vigorously they almost fell in. They had my bolt, chord, and sphere. At the leader’s prompting they raised these up for all to see. The crowd oohed and aahed at the exhibits as if they were nuclear bomb cores.

“The vout has broken the ancient law that keeps his kind apart. He has come among us as a spy. We all know what he did to poor Dag. We can only imagine what fate he had in store for Laro—had Laro not bravely fought his way free of the vout’s snare. Are we going to stand for it?”

“No!” the crowd shouted.

“Are we going to get any justice from the cops?”

“No!”

“But are we going to see justice done?”

“Yes!”

The leader nodded at the big guy with the rock. He flung it down at me so ponderously that I was able to step out of its path with ease. But a score of smaller, faster projectiles came in its wake. Running back and forth just to make myself a moving target, I caught sight of a stone stairway in the canal about a hundred feet distant. If I could get to its top I’d at least be at street level again—not in this hopeless situation, down below the mob. I ran for it and took several more bottles and rocks in my back, but I had my arms folded behind my head to shield it.

I got to the top of those stairs all right, but they were waiting for me there. I’d scarcely ascended to street level before they’d tripped and shoved me down onto the street. One of them fell on me, or maybe it was a clumsy attempt to tackle me. I grabbed the lapel of his jacket and held him there, keeping him on top of me as a shield. People elbowed each other aside to get in and aim kicks at me, but most of them drew up short when they saw one of their own people in the way. Hands reached in to grab him and haul him to his feet. I ended up with his empty jacket clutched in my hand. I tried to get up but was pushed down. I went to a fetal position and clamped my arms over my head.

It was a few seconds later that I heard The Scream.

The Scream was definitely a human voice but it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. The only way I can convey just how disturbing it was, is to say that it fully expressed the way I was feeling. I even wondered, in my panicked and addled state, whether it might have escaped from my own throat. The Scream had the effect of making everyone stand still. They were no longer attacking me, no longer fighting to get within kicking distance. Instead, all stood around trying to figure out where The Scream had come from and what it portended.

I rolled over on my back. A space had opened up around me. Around me, that is, and a shaven-headed man in a red T-shirt.

He stepped toward me and drew something from his pocket that rapidly became large: a sphere. In a second he had expanded it to about five feet in diameter, leaving it somewhat flaccid. He doubled it over me. My head and feet stuck out to either end but the rest of me was shielded against further blows—at least as long as this man stood there holding the sphere in place. A gust of wind could dislodge it. But he took care of that by vaulting to its top and perching on it: a precarious pose even when you attempted it with both feet. He, however, was placing all of his weight on one foot, leaving the other drawn up beneath him. Sometimes, when we’d been younger, we’d tried to stand on our spheres as a kind of childish game. Some adults did it as an exercise to improve their balance and reflexes. This seemed an odd time and place for calisthenics, though.

It did have the useful side-effect of leaving the people around me even more nonplussed than they had been by The Scream. But after a few moments one young man spied my head—a tempting and obvious target—and stepped toward me, drawing back one leg to deliver a kick. I closed my eyes and braced myself. Above me I heard a sharp, percussive sound. I opened my eyes to see my attacker falling backwards. A second later, moisture sprayed into my face: a shower of blood. A few small pebbles or something rattled to the pavement nearby. Blinking the blood out of my eyes, I perceived that they weren’t pebbles but teeth.

Another scream emanated from the edge of the crowd. This one was altogether different. It came from a person who was experiencing an amount of pain that was incredible, in the literal sense; his scream sounded surprised, as in I had no idea anything could be as painful as whatever is happening to me now! This got the attention of everyone except for one Gheeth who was coming toward me and my protector with an odd, fixed grin on his face, drawing a knife from his pocket and flicking it open. This time I got a better view of what happened. The man perched on the sphere above me faked a snap-kick with his free leg and the other waved his knife at where he supposed the kick was going; but before he even knew how badly he’d missed, my protector had grabbed the hand holding the knife and twisted it the wrong way—not simply by flicking his wrist but by jumping off the sphere and doing a midair somersault over the attacker’s arm, whose joints and bones came undone in a series of thuds and pops. The sphere rolled off me. The knife fell to the ground and I tried to clap my hand down on top of it, but too late—my protector kicked it away and it flew over the brink of the canal and disappeared.

I was unshielded. But it hardly mattered because the crowd had all moved in the direction of that horrible, astonished screaming. I pushed myself up on hands and knees and got to a kneeling position.

The source of the screaming was an adult male Gheeth who was being held in some sort of complicated wrestling grip by a shaven-headed woman in a red T-shirt. A similar-looking man of about eighteen was standing at her back, efficiently knocking down anyone who approached. By the time I came in view of all this, the mob had begun to hurl stones at these two. My protector abandoned me and slipped through the crowd to join the other two redshirts and help bat away projectiles. They began to retreat. Most of the mob went after them but some began to edge away; throwing stones at a lone avout might have been good sport for them but they wanted no part of whatever was going on now.

I turned, thinking I might just get out of here now, and found myself staring into the eyes of the Gheeth leader. He had a gun. It was aimed at me. “No,” he said, “we haven’t forgotten about you. Move!” He gestured with the gun in the direction that the crowd seemed to be moving. They were slowly pursuing the retreating redshirts down the edge of the canal toward a more open place a hundred feet away: a square where two streets met at canal’s edge. “Turn around and march,” he commanded.

I turned around and walked toward the square. Most of the mob had gone past us, so I was now in the outer fringes, the back lines, of a crowd of perhaps a hundred, all moving at a trot, then a run, after the three retreating redshirts, who by this point had dragged their hostage all the way into the square as they tried to get away from that overwhelmingly superior force of rock-throwing, knife-waving attackers.

My captor and I entered the square. The canal’s edge was to my left, the square spread away from it to my right. War-cries now sounded from that direction. I’m using the term war-cry here to mean the unearthly scream that the first redshirt had uttered when he’d come out of nowhere to protect me. Now we heard ten of them at once. The first one, as I described, had simply paralyzed everyone. But in a short time we had learned to associate the sound with face-smashing, limb-twisting Vale-lore experts. A battle-line of redshirts had materialized on our right flank; they’d been poised in the square, waiting for the first three to draw us into position. All heads turned toward, all bodies swerved away from them. Each of the redshirts had sent one or two members of the mob down to the pavement with bloody lacerations before we could even take in the image. The line of redshirts pivoted to link up with the first three, who now released the man they’d been torturing. Beginning to understand that they were outflanked on the right and that the square in general was enemy territory, unable to move left because of the canal-edge, the mob turned back, hoping to withdraw the way they’d come. But another salvo of war-cries came from the rear as several redshirts vaulted up out of the canal. They’d been hiding down there, clinging to the rugged canal wall like rock-climbers, and we had unwittingly gone right past them. They sealed off the retreat. The only way out now for the mob was to squirt forward between the canal-edge and the redshirts into the square, or jump down into the canal. As soon as a few had escaped via these routes, everyone wanted to do it, and it flashed into a panic. The redshirts let them go. In a few moments almost all of my attackers had simply disappeared. The two lines of redshirts joined up and contracted to form a sparse ring about twenty feet in diameter. They faced outwards. Their heads never stopped moving. In the middle of the ring were three people: the gun-toting Gheeth leader, I, and a single redshirt who always moved so that he was between me and the muzzle of the gun.