never seen such oedema; the blackness and the swelling looked like those of a
corpse five days dead in the heat of summer.
‘No!’ he mumbled. ‘Not old Lahboo’s building!’
3
Under other circumstances, Masha would have laughed. Here was a dying man or a
man who thought he was dying. And he’d be dead soon if his pursuers caught up
with him. (Me, too, she thought.) Yet he was afraid to take the only refuge
available because of a ghost.
‘You look bad enough to. scare even the Tight-Fisted One,’ she said. ‘Keep going
or I’ll drop you right now!’
She got him inside the doorway, though it wasn’t easy what with the boards still
attached to the lower half of the entrance. The top planks had fallen inside. It
was a tribute to the fear people felt for this place that no one had stolen the
wood, an expensive item in the desert town.
Just after they’d climbed over, Benna almost falling, she heard a man utter
something in the raspy tearing language. He was near by, but he must have just
arrived. Otherwise, he would have heard the two.
Masha had thought she’d reached the limits of terror, but she found that she
hadn’t. The speaker was a Raggah!
Though she couldn’t understand the speech – no one in Sanctuary could – she’d
heard Raggah a number of times. Every thirty days or so five or six of the
cloaked, robed, hooded, and veiled desert men came to the bazaar and the
farmers’ market. They could speak only their own language, but they used signs
and a plentitude of coins to obtain what they wanted. Then they departed on