I saw the shapes of the two people in the falling darkness. A tall black man stood leaning against a giant sword the way a shepherd leans on his staff. The blade looked more like an enormous meat cleaver than a sword. The man, Namtor, wore only baggy trousers with broad vertical black and white stripes tucked into boots. The dark-haired girl on her knees beside me possessed curves and contours I had only seen on statues. Olive-skinned and darkly beautiful, she wore nothing but a length of chain fastened to a steel cuff on each wrist. That chain was joined in the middle to a shorter one that attached to a chipped enameled steel collar that had seen many necks before hers. She seemed as oblivious and unselfconscious about the chains as she was of her nudity. .....