A Flame in Hali by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page B

young boys, twins by the look of them, shrieked in delight as they tossed a glittery ball. Their nurse, her ample skirts of fine-woven wool swirling around her, ran after them.
    “Look at them,” Eduin said to Saravio. They were standing at a corner beside the door of the inn where they’d earned a few coins chopping wood and washing dishes.
    Along the street, a crowd in tattered rags, many with weeping sores on their exposed skin, pressed against the City Guards. Despite the clear skies, the air carried a faint prickle like the first intimation of lightning, perceptible only to trained laran yet hovering on the edge of the senses.
    Saravio still went cloaked. With time and Eduin’s coaching, he was rapidly losing the carriage of a Tower worker. No one would mistake him for a peasant, but he passed well among the underclass. He might have been a tradesman or a soldier, down on his luck and on the streets too long, surviving from day to day. Now, he had no difficulty finding work as a common laborer.
    Saravio’s lip curled in a sneer that Eduin felt rather than saw. “They play while our people suffer.”
    Our people. Eduin wondered if he could use Saravio’s bitterness and the simmering resentments of the people to generate an attack against Varzil Ridenow. “The Comyn are nothing but parasites,” he pointed out. “But it is the corrupt Towers that sustain their position. Without that power, they would be nothing.”
    Once Eduin had believed that the Towers ought not to take orders from kings, as if they were some breed of superior servant. Those who created laran weapons were the only ones with the right to decide how they were to be used. Such power ought to rule, not to serve. But the Keepers were too bound to law and tradition to see the truth, just as they had turned away Saravio’s remarkable gift. Although their reasons differed, Eduin and Saravio found common cause in their hatred of the Towers.
    “Stand back!” one of the Guards cried. He had drawn a stout wooden staff instead of his sword, and he pressed it against the foremost ranks of the crowd.
    “For pity!” one man cried. His shirt hung loose from shoulders that had once been broad and strong. Now the bones jutted from his body like the beams of a ruined house. “My children are starving!”
    “Then you should have stayed where you belong, and not come to Thendara.” One of the Comyn party, a young man barely twenty, took a step toward them. He’d thrown back his cloak to reveal a tunic of elaborately patterned cut velvet, ornamented with a golden chain whose price would have fed an entire village for a year. The sun glinted on his pale hair, the color of straw with only a slight tinge of red. Eduin caught only the whiff of laran from the boy, not nearly strong enough to be worth training.
    “My good fellow,” the young lordling drawled, “did you think you’d find the streets lined with food stalls? We have nothing for you here. Go back home.”
    “Home?” The man spoke with a thick accent. Anguish ripped through his cry, echoed by nods and glances from the people around him. “To what home? To a pile of cinders, all that’s left after the clingfire fell.” With one hand he jerked his shirt open. Gasps surrounded him.
    Eduin’s stomach lurched at the sight of the man’s chest, scarred over where it had been cut half away, leaving his arm a skeletal ruin. He’d seen what clingfire could do. Once ignited, it would burn anything combustible, even human flesh and bone, until there was nothing left. The only way to stop it was to physically dig out every single fragment. Someone had saved this man’s life, but at the cost of his livelihood.
    “What choice does he have?” Eduin muttered to Saravio. “He cannot farm with his arm like that. He came here for help, and this arrogant puppy tells him to go home!”
    “I did not come for charity,” the man went on, “but to find work.”
    “Work!” another man, equally ragged,