Free Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald Page A

you. I’m not coming from the port. And I’m not going there either.”
    She’d worked in Namport for five years now, long enough to know that for a hooker, the bars and the narrow streets around the edges of the spaceport were the last stop. She shivered.
    If I don’t quit acting crazy I will be working there. Freling isn’t going to want a crazy woman hanging around his bar, and if he knows I’m cracking up he’s going to spread the word.
    I’ve got to get some sleep.
    She was approaching the street of old, close-packed houses where she had her apartment. On the corner of the block, a bit closer to her, was one of the few places open at this hour: the little hole-in-the-wall grocery where she did most of her shopping. She quickened her stride, stumbling a little as the high heels of her shoes slid in a patch of mud that some earlier pedestrian had left on the sidewalk.
    Outside the shop, she paused for a second on the woven grain-straw mat, steadying herself with a hand on the door-frame as she wiped the clots of mud off her shoes. She caught a brief glimpse of herself in the shopwindow as she did so: hollow cheeks, shadowed eyes, and a bright red dress that only made it all worse.
    I look like a hag.
    She ran her fingers through her brown hair in a futile attempt to improve the sweaty, tangled curls. The colored lights in the shopwindow bounced off the mass of bangle bracelets on her arm. The sudden painful glare made her head spin; she clutched the doorframe even tighter until the dizziness faded and her head came back to something like normal. Still shaking, she pushed the door open and went in.
    At this hour, the shop was empty except for the owner at his usual place behind the front counter and a tawny-haired young man in a worn beige coverall. The young man was one she’d seen a few times around the neighborhood, usually in the late evening or the very early morning; he was looking at the shelves in back, and she supposed he must be another person who worked nights and slept—or tried to—during the day.
    The shopkeeper smiled and nodded at her as she entered. But the gesture was an empty one: just beneath the surface of his mind the small ugly thoughts twisted and squirmed, while his pleasant expression never changed.
    Liar, she thought, biting her tongue to keep from saying the word aloud, and forced herself to nod back. Her money was as good as anyone’s, no matter what she had to do to earn it, and Ulle would keep his opinions to himself as long as she had something to spend.
    Nobody’s hurt by what he doesn’t say, she told herself. Nobody except you, anyhow, and that doesn’t count.
    She picked up a basket from the stack by the counter and began to fill it. A box of water-grain cereal for porridge—a bundle of fresh greens for stewing—a brick of frozen marsh-eels that probably wouldn’t taste too bad when she added them to the greens—and then she was at the racks of bottles in the back of the store.
    “Can’t have marsh-eel soup without beer,” she said. She was talking to herself out loud too much these days, she knew that; but it helped her keep track of which thoughts were hers. “Beer for the soup, and aqua vitae for the cook.”
    She put a couple of bottles of Tree Frog beer into the basket. The square purple bottles of aqua vitae were on the top shelf; she was going to have to stretch to get one. The thought of doing so made her aware that her legs weren’t as steady as she had thought. Better not to try at all than to reach for a bottle and fall down while Ulle was watching.
    She could feel the shopkeeper’s gaze like hands on her back, following the movements of her hips under the tight red skirt. Vertigo struck again without warning; her head reeled, and the bottles of beer and instant-heat cha’a in front of her wavered and blurred, overlaid with a grotesque, distorted image of her own body seen from behind. Reality and hallucination ran together like water, and she watched