once it had been someone’s barn. It had sleeping rooms upstairs
over the serving hall and storerooms in the back. It sat at the
base of a block of buildings that formed a somewhat lopsided U,
situated on a hill at the western edge of the city.
Par breathed deeply the night air, savoring its flavors. City
smells, smells of life, stews with meats and vegetables laced
with spice, sharp-flavored liquors and pungent ales, perfumes
that scented rooms and bodies, leather harness, iron from forges
still red with coals kept perpetually bright, the sweat of animals
and men in close quarters, the taste of stone and wood and dust,
mingling and mixing, each occasionally breaking free-they
were all there. Down the alleyway, beyond the slat-boarded,
graffiti-marked backs of the shops and businesses, the hill
dropped away to where the central part of the city lay east. An
ugly, colorless gathering of buildings in daylight, a maze of
stone walls and streets, wooden siding and pitch-sealed roofs,
the city took on a different look at night. The buildings faded
into the darkness and the lights appeared, thousands of them,
stretching away as far as the eye could see like a swarm of
fireflies. They dotted the masked landscape, flickering in the
black, trailing lines of gold across the liquid skin of the Mer-
midon as it passed south. Varfleet was beautiful now, the scrub-
woman become a fairy queen, transformed as if by magic.
Par liked the idea of the city being magic. He liked the city
in any case, liked its sprawl and its meld of people and things,
its rich mix of life. It was far different from his home of Shady
Vale, nothing like the forested hamlet that he had grown up in.
It lacked the purity of the trees and streams, the solitude, the
sense of timeless ease that graced life in the Vale. It knew noth-
ing of that life and couldn’t have cared less. But that didn’t
matter to Par. He liked the city anyway. There was nothing to
say that he had to choose between the two, after all. There wasn’t
any reason he couldn’t appreciate both.
Coil, of course, didn’t agree. Coil saw it quite differently. He
saw Varfleet as nothing more than an outlaw city at the edge of
Federation rule, a den of miscreants, a place where one could
get away with anything, hi all of Callahom, in all of the entire
Southland for that matter, there was no place worse. Coil hated
the city.
Voices and the clink of glasses drifted out of the darkness
behind him, the sounds of the ale house breaking free of the
front room momentarily as a door was opened, then disappear-
ing again as it was closed. Par turned. His brother moved care-
fully down the hallway, nearly faceless in the gloom.
“It’s almost time,” Coil said when he reached his brother.
Par nodded. He looked small and slender next to Coil, who
was a big, strong youth with blunt features and mud-colored
hair. A stranger would not have thought them brothers. Coil
looked a typical Valeman, tanned and rough, with enormous
hands and feet. The feet were an ongoing joke. Par was fond of
comparing them to a duck’s. Par was slight and fair, his own
features unmistakably Elven from the sharply pointed ears and
brows to the high, narrow bones of his face. There was a time
when the Elven blood had been all but bred out of the line, the
result of generations of Ohmsfords living in the Vale. But four
generations back (so his father had told him) his great-great-
grandfather had returned to the Westland and the Elves,
married an Elven girl, and produced a son and a daughter. The
son had married another Elven girl, and for reasons never made
clear the young couple who would become Par’s great-
grandparents had returned to the Vale, thereby infusing a fresh
supply of Elven blood back into the Ohmsford line. Even then,
many members of the family showed nothing of then- mixed
heritage; Coil and his parents Jaralan and Mirianna were ex-
amples. Par’s bloodlines, on the other hand, were immediately