passageway, and Smith followed, carrying his drink.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Smith removed her medal and hung it above the stove. She considered it a moment before turning and drawing out a chair. She draped her gown’s train over one arm and sat down; and, with leisurely movements, took out and filled her smoking tube.
“A light, please, Smith,” she requested.
He lit a straw at the stove, digging in the banked coals, and held it out for her. She puffed until the amberleaf lit and sat back.
“Well?” she said.
“How would I get hold of a bloatfish liver, if I wanted one?” Smith asked her.
“Simple,” said Mrs. Smith. “You’d just walk down to the waterfront when the fishermen were sorting through their catches, before the fish-market dealers got there. You’d find a fisherman and ask if he had any nice live bloatfish. You might play the foolish old woman, a bit. And you’d listen very carefully when the fisherman told you how to filet the fish once you’d got it home, and thank him for his warning about the nasty liver. Then you’d carry the bloatfish home in a pail.
“And,” she went on composedly, “if there was a particularly wicked man asking for an early dinner … and if you knew he’d ruined a few innocent people in his time and even driven a couple of them to suicide … and if you knew a little girl was crying her eyes out because he’d threatened her with what amounts to a death sentence unless she slept with him, even though she’d just fallen in love with someone else… and moreover this wicked man wanted her to give him information that would betray certain other persons … Well, then, Smith, I expect something rather dreadful might find its way into the appetizer he’d ordered.
“Mind you, I admit to nothing,” she added. “But I have absolutely no regrets.”
Smith sat in silence a moment, turning his drink in his hands, watching the ice melt. “Information that would betray certain other persons,” he echoed. “He wasn’t sure about you yet, but if he’d scared Burnbright badly enough, he’d have had you; and you’ve got a restaurant and a reputation to lose. Much better prospect for blackmail.
“You sneaked up there in the dark and burned most of his notes, but someone—probably Burnbright—interrupted you before you finished. You had the feast to get on the table, and Burnbright to calm down, so you never got back in there to burn the rest of the papers before Pinion discovered the murder.”
Mrs. Smith exhaled smoke and watched him, silent. At last he said,
“Tell me how you got mixed up in the Spellmetal massacre.”
She sighed.
“Years ago,” she said, “I was working for the old Golden Chain caravan line. We got a party of passengers bound for the country up around Karkateen.
“It was the Sunborn and his followers. They’d just been thrown out of one town, so they’d chartered passage to another. But the Sunborn had already begun to talk of founding a city where all races would live together in perfect amity.
“When they left the caravan at Karkateen, I went with them.”
“Had you become a convert?” Smith asked. She shook her head, her eyes fixed on something distant, and she shrugged.
“I was just a bad girl out for a good time,” she said. “I didn’t believe the races could live together in peace. I didn’t believe one man could change the world. But the Sunborn asked me to come, and … if he’d asked me to jump from the top of a tower, I’d have done it. You never heard him speak, Smith, or you’d understand.
“He had the strangest gift for making one clean, no matter what he did in bed with one. He carried innocence with him like a cloak he could throw about your shoulders. With him, you felt as though you were forgiven for every wrong thing you’d ever done… and love became a sacrament, meant something far more than grappling for pleasure in the dark.
“Well. There were nearly thirty of us, of mixed races. Of the Children of the Sun there were a few boys and girls from well-to-do families. There was me; there were a couple of outcasts, half-breeds, and one girl who was blind; and there was a young man who always seemed uncomfortable with us, but he was the Sunborn’s kinsman, and so he followed him out of a sense of family duty. Ramack, his name was. The greenies were all a wild lot, nothing