"Will you take the note to the Captain's woman?"
The man squirmed, avoiding Ransome's ice-blue stare.
"Captain killed the last man who looked at his woman," the gunner muttered sullenly. "Flogged him to death."
"I'm not asking you to look at her," Ransome reminded him.
The gunner sat looking at the stack of Mytor's money piled on the table before him. A woman drifted over.
"Go away," Ransome said, without raising his eyes. He added another bill to the stack.
"Let me see the note before I take it," the gunner demanded.
"It would mean nothing to you." Ransome pushed a half-empty bottle toward the man, poured him out another drink.
The man's hands were trembling with inner conflict as he measured the killing lash against the stack of yellow Yarotian kiroons, and the pleasures it would buy him. He drank, dribbling a little of the wine down his grimy chin, and then returned to the subject of seeing the note, with drunken persistence.
"I got to see it first."