“Let me see if I understand you: two strangers of indeterminate sex, who refuse to give their names, have come to call on a man with a lifetime’s worth of enemies, here in the most dangerous city in the world. Alas, if he couldn’t even tell the difference between a man and a woman it would hardly do to have him answering the door.īelbo ceased to ponder the middle distance and cleared his throat. I had thought I might be able to start using him as a doorkeeper, reasoning that his long service at my side would enable him to recognize most of my visitors and that his size should intimidate those he didn’t. For a long time this hulking mass of bulging muscles and straw-colored hair has been my bodyguard, but in recent years his reflexes have grown noticeably slower.

What he lacks in brains he has always made up for with brawn. Was Belbo’s sight beginning to fail?īelbo is not the cleverest of slaves. But the daylight was still strong enough to see clearly, certainly clearly enough to tell if someone at the door was male or female. Days in Januarius are all too short, especially for a man of fifty-four like myself, old enough to feel the cold in his bones. I raised an eyebrow and looked beyond the flaming brazier, through the narrow window and into the garden, where the statue of Minerva kept watch over a little fishpond. ” He looked thoughtfully but without much concern into the middle distance, as if trying to remember what he had eaten for breakfast. “Well,” Belbo said, wrinkling his brow, “I’m pretty sure that one of them is a man. I pondered this for a moment and stared into the flames of the brazier. Two visitors at the front door, Master.” Belbo looked at me from under his brow and shifted from foot to foot uncertainly.

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