awkwardness as he had shed his ruined smock, and his fear.
Lalo leaped over a handcart that had been abandoned in the road and paused to
send it spinning broadsides. That would not long delay them, but he could hear
mercenaries laying bets on a dogfight in the next street. Laughing like the boy
who had raced through these streets so long ago, he let his pursuers follow him
around the corner, slid eel-like through the crowd, and laughed again as the
tinny clash of weapons told him that the Hell-Hounds and the mercenaries had
met.
But what about Zanderei? Lalo waited in the shadow of a quiet doorway and
watched the gap at the entrance to the street. Night had fallen, and the moon,
now almost at the full, was drawing free of the distorting smoke of the City and
transforming the shape and shadows of the street with its own deceptive
dappling. How could he tell which one-
Ah, there, a shadow moved of itself, and Lalo knew that his enemy was here.
So soon! Shock tingled through his veins and set every hair on end. I must run .
. . the man moves too subtly-before those who would attack him for the silk he
wears can note him, he is away. I am a dead man if I cannot trap him somehow.
The glory he had tasted seemed now as inconstant as the moon. In a moment
Zanderei would reach his hiding place.
And yet it was almost as if he had done all this before-he remembered a time in
his boyhood, when he had come with his mates into the Maze in search of
excitement and been set upon there. He had escaped by-he looked up and saw that