In the morning it was Trian's turn to be collared and muzzled. Turning off, again the road began to run past small prosperous manors, all of which were separated by coppiced woodland with charcoal burners at work. These manors had a more military look; a larger keep with no hall and with substantial gate houses. The serfs and slaves seemed friendly enough, but the guards and guard patrols seemed more business like. Slaves, obvious as they all wore metal or metal with leather collars, seemed very much in evidence. The metal collared slaves tended to be used as guards; their collars had metal spikes. The Boys passed several large wagons carrying provisions in both directions during the day. Unlike the provision wagons the Boys had seen coming and going from the other town, these wagons were driven by slaves.

As night approached, the Boys passed another livery stable and reached the gates of the other main village. Really it depends by what ones definition of a village or towns size is. This town had a more martial look, and the Boys had a clairvoyant premonition that this was going to be a problem to enter. There was already an argument going on. The guards were getting mad at a group of visitors who, like us, could not speak the local lingo. We came up to them. The guards were getting nasty, so Trian was uncollared and hissed at them with wide open mouth in the standard raptor aggression stance (head down, tail up) with wings flapping. The guards backed down, but not much. It was as if they might have seen a dragon but had no respect for them. The Boys decided to back off, for now.

The Boys turned to the visitors. They were dinosaurian but with three eyes, three fingers on each hand, and three toes on each plantigrade foot, and no tail. There were also heat radiator flaps behind each ear hole. The three eyes reminded the Boys of something that Dad had told them about Zacathans, or rather the most advanced land adapted species from the Zacan star system. Dad had told the Boys that in some earlier life He had been a Zenopath, which ranked as a Lieutenant, assigned as the Zenobiologist and chief alien contact telepath on a long distance exploration star ship. Dad might be as rubbish at foreign languages as the Boys were, but the Mayan like Zacathan and the psychedelic colour based Krondaku scripts were another matter.

They got down to "talking". The Chief Zacathan and his trainee were telepaths and powerful psychcreators. So with the belligerent guards left on one side, the Boys learned that the Zacathan group were traders and explorers. Previous groups had been before and had no trouble at the Town, but obviously this was not the same Town. It was clear that if the Boys had waited outside to town long enough, a qualified (telepathic) official would have come to deal with them. The Boys suggested sleeping over at the livery stables, then escorting them to the other town in the morning.