QUOTE : I’d thought I’d understood the rules of the game we were playing, Malkar and I, a particularly vicious and twisted version of cat and mouse, the same game we’d been playing since I was fourteen and his eye lit upon me and all the shabby gaudery of the Shining Tiger’s parlor. But Malkar changed the game, changed the stakes, changed the rules, and how stupid I had been to think I understood him, to think I knew what I was letting myself in for. I’d know he would hurt me, and I’d known it would be bad. That playlet the night before had only been practice; I’d known that as soon as he let me go. But I had thought the catastrophe would be mine alone-and, after all, no better than I deserved. I had been wrong, so terribly wrong that the knowledge of my stupidity and blindness was like a separate pain in itself.