The bird arched back in the windmoan, hissed over their heads, plunging toward the dome of the city. "Sire, she stoops. A mountain man!" Taen shrilled his recall whistle frantically as the kauri pursued and struck repeatedly at a leaping, dodging shadow that silhouetted smaller and smaller against the dome in its pell-mell retreat toward the gate. Finally the bird soared up and back like a dark meteor across the stars and glided with a smack onto her perch. "The Assassin's spy?" "Or Konrad's, sire. A pity I called her off without thinking. We could have searched the body and learned whose." II The Assassin's outguards picked them up long before they reached the crags. Jeff could see nothing. But the rattle of pebbles, the rumble of dislodged boulders from so many directions was not encouraging. The Assassin had quite an army. The crag tops winked yellow, flashlight eyes as Taen led the young doctor up a narrow, rock-overhung trail to a moss-bearded hole where an old mountain man motioned them inside with his spear. Taen forestalled Jeff's question: "Yes sire, it is hardly what one would expect. You see, The Assassin's palace was magicked to sand and steam by the weapons of the first of your comrades to land upon this planet. They did not understand--they never have understood--that The Assassin's person is inviolate. They have blown away his prestige with their own mightier weapons. Every man can now be his own assassin, they say, or at least so my people have understood. Many of The Assassin's followers have joined your Security Guards. Many of his wealthiest clients now deal through them. So he is forced to haggle over the prices of his victims like a common tradesman, not in his mighty castle but in a poor cave." He pointed down the taper-lit passageway that stretched ahead of them. "But be sure not to offer a bribe for your wife's life, sire. The Assassin will never come to that." The monster bowed low and his tuberculed face smiled without intelligence as his charred, fingerless paw pointed their way into the labyrinth. "That was Garnak," whispered Taen. "Sire, the ancestors of The Assassin netted him in the swamps. For generations he was their chief agent of death for those who could not afford a skar; a quick-moving creature with the understanding of a man, they trained him to kill without a sound. He was The Assassin's most prized possession. But the great mushroom of fire and dust your people made rise from The City of Three Spears scorched all the worth from Garnak. The Assassin beat his own head against the altar when they brought back the Garnak that you saw."