A sudden jostling took the farmers and the merchants as they listened to the harpstrings. They made way sullenly for the file of sfarran warriors who came shouldering a path arrogantly through the press. They were tall, handsome men, their lean faces swart and dark. They looked like fighting men, trim in black and gilt field uniforms. Their black eyes moved everywhere, missing nothing. Now the sfarran detail was closer to the marble fountain where Kael sat with Flaith huddled close against him. He could feel the shiver run through her bare arm where it pressed his side. She whispered, "They look for us," and her dark eyes surveyed him, studying his disguise. He could read the approval in them. The sfarri glanced at them and passed on. A man cursed softly from the shadows. There was a wild flurry of capes and sandalled feet. A peddler, with a scraggly gray beard flowing across his chest, ran like a frightened rat from a group of Kash cattlemen and into a thick thong of rug merchants from Stig. "A rykinthus peddler," whispered Flaith. Kael felt the fury rise in him. The sfarri governed the people of this planet as they might a herd of cattle. There was no emotion in the chase. It was hunt and man down, capture him! Take him to the sfarri tribunal, where an atomic disintor ray would blast him into thick white powder. The peddler ran past Kael on shaking legs. In his darkest eyes Kael read the angry terror that lay deep within him. Teeth gritted, Kael moved clumsily, bumping into the foremost of the sfarri pursuers, throwing him off balance. Two others ran into him and fell heavily to the cobblestones of the square. The sfarran officer rose, tight-lipped at this clumsiness. His hand went to the holster of his addy-gun. Kael rammed a fist to his middle and slid sideways, his harp still in his hand. With a backward lash of his arm he drove the harp's heavy crown into his temple. The blow knocked the harp from his hand. He scrambled after it, where it lay on the cobblestones. His fingers missed as he snatched at it and swept across the strings. At the harsh, discordant sound that rose into the air the sfarran officer who had been reaching for him fell awkwardly to the stones, sprawling lifelessly. Other sfarri were falling too, as if the breath of life had been blown from them. They lay here and there beside the fountain, like dead men. Kael stared dumbly, hearing the shouts of the people of Clonn Fell falling back from the lifeless sfarri. Then he whirled and slipped in among the crowding merchants and farmers, pretending that he was driven by stark terror. A moment of wild, flurried movement, and he was free, darting behind a wooden wagon toward the heavy drapes of a carpet stall. Flaith was shrinking back, also losing herself in the milling mob. Kael saw her, dove toward her. She cried out, "What was it? How'd you do it? What killed them?" "I don't know! We have no time to play guessing games!"