"Sky spirits, you keep telling me."

"Yes," he said, lowering his voice instinctively. "But not good ones, naturally—spirits of evil."

Karen looked at him sidelong and clucked her tongue.

"It's not funny; it's perfectly logical. They spend their lives one jump ahead of freezing or drowning. Their world's against them. Other savage races have figured it that way, even on Terra."

"All right, it's logical. What has it to do with us?"

"It has this to do," said Guthrie. "That clown, Trent, is going around making friends like a puppy. He's cutting his own throat, an' I'd bet he thinks he's cutting mine. But you don't think they'd sacrifice a bad person, do you?"

The thought penetrated, and she rose slowly to her feet. He reached out to her shoulders and gave her a little shake.

"The Skirkhi spend weeks before the stormy season making sure the evil spirits notice what nasty people they are. Like Terran kids before Christmas, in reverse. And there's that apple-polisher making a gilded saint of himself while the natives are spitting in their friends' faces and trying to steal their wives or cheat old Thyggar on their taxes."

The girl stared at him in horror. The flesh of her shoulders was soft but firm under his fingers. He suddenly wished there were no Skirkhi hanging about.

Suddenly, Karen's gray eyes widened with a new wariness.

"Let go!" she ordered.

"Maybe I shouldn't," Guthrie teased her. "Maybe I ought to let the Skirkhi see that you have claws. It would help your reputation here."

She began to struggle, and he had a hard time holding her but somehow hated to let go. He was conscious of a padding of feet in the alleyway as a couple of guards drifted in from the street.

Karen tried kicking him in the shin, then wound the fingers of one hand in his hair and yanked. Guthrie, who had by then clasped both hands in the small of her back, let go with his left to grab her wrist.

Immediately, the nails of her other hand raked past his right eye.

He muttered a curse, let go completely as he felt a sudden fury well up in him, then grabbed 

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