He made a perfunctory salutation and turned on his heel. Rodvard went with the rower, a burly man in a shirt with no jacket over it, asking as he strode along; “What was it he meant by saying I’d find it hard to run far?” The face composed in wrinkles of astonishment. “Why, he’s an Initiate! You’d no more than think on an evasion when the guards would be at your heels.” Rodvard looked at him in counter-surprise (and a shiver ran through him at the thought that these people of the Prophet might somehow have learned to read minds without the intervention of any Blue Star, a thing he had heard before only as a rumor). “What!” he said to change the subject. “I see no badges of status anywhere. Is it true that you have none in Mancherei?” The man made a face. “No status in the dominion—at least that is what the learners and diaconals say in their services.” He looked across his shoulder. “They’ll give you status enough, though, if you hold to their diet of greens and fish. Bah. Here we are.” The breakfast was not fish, but an excellent casserole of chicken, served by a red-faced maid, who slapped the rower when he reached for her knee. He laughed like a waterfall and ordered black ale. Rodvard hardly heard him, eating away with appetite in a little world of himself alone (hope mingling with danger at the back of his mind), so that it was a surprise when the rower nudged him and stood. “The reckoning’s made for you, Bogolan,” he said. “Come the meridian, you’ve only to ask for bread and cheese and beer. Go out, wander, see our city; but do not fail to return by the tenth glass; and take notice, your Dossolan coin will buy nothing in shops here, it is a crime to take such monies.” He swaggered out. The last words recalled Rodvard to his penniless condition, and he looked along himself uncomfortably, seeing for the first time how the black servant’s costume he had from Mathurin was all streaked, dirty and odorous, with a tear at the breast where the badge had been wrenched off. There was no desire to present himself to the world in such an appearance. He shrank back behind the table into the angle made by panelling and the tall settee to think and wait out his time, watching the room around him. On the floor of the place, the press of breakfasters was relaxing; maids were deliberate over clattering dishes, calling to one another in strong, harsh voices. He could not catch the eye of any to use his Blue Star in reading her thought, which might have been a pastime; and his own affairs were in such suspense and turmoil that thinking seemed little use. After a while the shame of merely crouching there overcame that of his garb, so he got up and went outside.