It had been a costly morning. Herndon turned as if to walk on, but he found his way blocked by a small wrinkle-faced man who had come out of the jewelry-auction crowd across the way. "My name is Bollar Benjin," the little prune of a man said. His voice was a harsh croak. His body seemed withered and skimpy. He wore a tight gray tunic of shabby appearance. "I saw what you just did." "What of it? It's not illegal to dispose of slaves in public," Herndon said. "Only a special kind of man would do it, though," said Bollar Benjin. "A cruel man--or a foolhardy one. Which are you?" "Both," Herndon said. "And now, if you'll let me pass--" "Just one moment." The croaking voice suddenly acquired the snap of a whip. "Talk to me a moment. If you can spare a thousand stellors to buy a slave you kill the next moment, you can spare me a few words." "What do you want with me?" "Your services," Benjin said. "I can use a man like you. Are you free and unbonded?" Herndon thought of the thousand stellors--almost half his wealth--that he had thrown away just now. He thought of the Seigneur Krellig, whom he hated and whom he had vowed so implacably to kill. And he thought of the wrinkled man before him. "I am unbonded," he said. "But my price is high. What do you want, and what can you offer?" Benjin smiled obliquely and dipped into a hidden pocket of his tunic. When he drew forth his hand, it was bright with glittering jewels. "I deal in these," he said. "I can pay well." The jewels vanished into the pocket again. "If you're interested," Benjin said, "come with me." Herndon nodded. "I'm interested." "Follow me, then." CHAPTER II Herndon had been gone from Borlaam for a year, before this day. A year before--the seventeenth of the reign of the Seigneur Krellig--a band of looters had roared through his home village in Zonnigog, destroying and killing. It had been a high score for the Herndon family--his father and mother killed in the first sally, his young brother stolen as a slave, his sister raped and ultimately put to death. The village had been burned. And only Barr Herndon had escaped, taking with him twenty thousand stellors of his family's fortune and killing eight of the Seigneur's best men before departing. He had left the system, gone to the nineteen-world complex of Meld, and on Meld XVII he had bought himself a new face that did not bear the tell-tale features of the Zonnigog aristocracy. Gone were the sharp, almost razorlike cheekbones, the pale skin, the wide-set black eyes, the nose jutting from the forehead. For eight thousand stellors the surgeons of Meld had taken these things away and given him a new face: broad where the other had been high, tan-skinned, narrow-eyed, with a majestic hook of a nose quite unlike any of Zonnigog. He had come back wearing the guise of a spacerogue, a freebooter, an unemployed mercenary willing to sign on to the highest bidder.