THE TROUBLE TWISTERS

Poker is not a very good three-handed game, so the crew of the trade pioneer ship Muddlin Through had programmed her computer to play with them. It bought chips with IOU's. Being adjusted to an exactly average level of competence, it just about balanced winnings and losses in the course of a mission. This freed the crew to go after each other's blood.

"Two cards," said its mechanical voice. David Falkayn dealt them onto a scanner plate that he had rigged at one end of the saloon table. An arm projecting from a modified waldo box shoved the discards aside. Down in their armored tank, at the middle of the ship, think cells assessed the new odds.

"One," said Chee Lan.

"None for me, thank you," rumbled Adzel.

Falkayn gave himself three and picked up his hand. He'd improved: a pair of treys to match his kings. Adzel might well stand pat on nothing better, and Chee had probably tried to complete a flush; the first round of betting, opened by the machine, had been unenthusiastic. But Muddlehead itself, now—

The steel arm dropped a blue chip into the pot.

"Damn!" shrieked Chee. Her tail bottled out to twice its normal size, the silky-white fur stood erect over her whole small body, and she threw her cards down so hard that the tabletop ought to have rung. "Pestilence upon you! I hate your cryogenic guts!"

Imperturbably, Adzel doubled the bet. Falkayn sighed and folded. Chee's fury ebbed as fast as it had come. She settled down on her elevated stool and began washing, cat-fashion. Falkayn reached for a cigarette.

Muddlehead raised back. Adzel's dragon countenance wasn't able to change expression, except for the rubbery lips, but his huge scaly form, sprawled across the cabin, grew tense. He studied his cards again.

A bell tone interrupted him. That part of the computer which was always on watch had observed something unusual.

TU go," Falkayn said. He rose and went quickly down the forward passageway: a tall and muscled young man, yellow haired, blue-eyed, snub-nosed, and high of cheekbone. Even here, ? light-years from die nearest fellow human, he wore lounging pajamas. that would not have been out of place in Tycho Lodge. He told himself that he was obliged to maintain standards—younger son of a baronial house on Hermes, currently a representative of the Polesotechnic League, and all that sort of thing—but the fact was that he had not quite outgrown a certain vanity.

At the midsection scanner turret, he punched controls. No oddities appeared in the screen. What the devil had the observer units noticed? So much computer capacity was engaged in the game that the ship herself couldn't tell him. Maybe he'd better— He shifted the cigarette in his mouth and increased the magnification.

Westward in a deep purplish sky, the sun stood at eternal late afternoon. It was a K0 dwarf, barely one-tenth as luminous as man's home star, furnace red. But at a mere third of an astronomical unit from Ikrananka, it showed nearly three and a half times the angular diameter and gave about as much irradiation. Through the dull light and thin air, a few other stars were visible. Spica, little more than three parsecs away, shone like a white jewel. Otherwise the heavens held nothing but a flock of leathery-winged flying beasties and, above the northern heights, the yellow cloud of a dust storm.

Halfway up a hill, Muddlin' Through commanded a wide overlook of the Chakora. That former sea bottom stretched ruddy-green and indigo shadowed, densely planted with low succulent crops. Here and there on it Falkayn could see clusters of buildings, woven in patterns from gaily colored fibers, each surrounding a stone tower: the thorps and defensive keeps of agricultural families. Wherever a spring seeped forth, the vegetation became intensely verdant and gold. And there thickets of long stalks, like plumed bamboo, the closest this world had ever come to trees, swayed in the wind.

The hill itself was craggy, eroded, with little except scrub growing between the boulders. On its top loomed the ramparts of Haijakata. At the foot was a tower guarding the town's well, accessible from above through a tunnel. Nearby, a dirt road from the east twisted to enter the gates. Falkayn didn't see any natives abroad.

No, wait. Dust smoked on that highway, three or four kilometers off but rapidly nearing. Somebody was bound here in an awful hurry.

Falkayn adjusted the scanner. The scene leaped at him.

Half a dozen Ikranankans were urging their zandaras on. The big, brown-furred, thick-tailed bipeds rose in souring arcs, touched earth, instantly gathered their leg muscles and sprang again. The riders shook lances and sabers aloft. Their open beaks showed that they screamed.

A breeze blew aside the dust and Falkayn saw what they were pursuing. He just avoided swallowing his cigarette.

"No," he heard himself feebly say. "Such things don't happen. I swear they don't."

His paralysis broke. He whirled and ran back aft. At a mere sixty-five percent of Terrestrial gravity, he moved like a scared comet. He burst into the saloon, skidded to a halt, and roared, "Emergency!"

Chee Lan hopped across the table and switched the computer back to normal function. Adzel thrust a final chip into the pot and turned over his cards. He had a straight. "What is the matter?" Chee asked, glacially self-possessed as always when trouble showed.

"A . . .a woman," Falkayn panted. "Being chased."

"By whom?"

"Not me, dammit. But listen, it's so! Bunch of native cavalry after a human female. Her zandara looks tired. They'll catch her before she gets here, and Lord knows what they'll do."

While Falkayn was blurting, Adzel looked at Muddlehead's hand. Full house. He sighed philosophically and shoved the pot over. Bis-ing, he said, "Best we go remonstrate with them. Chee, stand by."

The Cynthian nodded and pattered off to the bridge. Adzel followed Falkayn to the lower exit. His cloven hooves clanged on the deck. At the locker, the man slipped on a gun belt and stuck a radio transceiver into a pocket of the coat he grabbed. They valved through.

To avoid delays when going out, they maintained interior air pressure at local norm, about three-fourths of Earth sea level. But they preferred more warmth and moisture. Swift, dry, and chill, the wind struck savagely at Falkayn's mucous membranes. His eyes needed a moment to adapt. Adzel picked him up in two great horny hands and set him on his own back, just behind the centauroid torso. The Wodenite had had one of the sharp plates which jutted from his head, along his spine to the end of his tail, removed for that purpose. He started downhill in a smooth gallop. His musky odor blew back around Falkayn.

"One supposes that another ship has come," he said, his basso as placid as if they were still dealing cards. "By accident?"

"Must be." Falkayn squinted ahead. "She's dressed funny, though. Could she have run afoul of barbarian raiders? We do keep getting hints of war in the Sundhadarta mountains."

He could barely make out the highest peaks of that range, glooming above the eastern horizon. On his left marched the tawny cliffs which had once been a continental shelf. To right lay only the evergreen fields of the Chakora. Behind him reared Haijakata hill, and his ship like a shining spearhead. But the view here had grown deadly familiar. He wasn't sorry for a bit of action. No danger to speak of; that gang would probably head for home and mother the minute they saw Adzel.

Muscles rippled between his thighs. The cloven air shrilled and nipped his ears. Hoofbeats drummed. And now, ahead, he could clearly see the girl and her pursuers. Harsh nonhuman yelps reached him.

She waved and spurred her flagging zandara to a last rush. The Ikranankans shouted to each other. Falkayn caught a few words-why, they spoke the Katandaran language-One of them halted his beast and unslipped a crossbow from his saddle. It was a slender weapon. His arms had merely half a man's strength to cock it. But the darts it threw were needle sharp and traveled far in this gravity. He fired. The missile zipped within centimeters of her loosened auburn braids. He cried an order while he fitted another dart. Two more riders unlimbered their own bows. "Judas on Pluto!" Falkayn gasped. "They mean to kill her!" Every sense he had surged to full alertness. He looked through red-tinged dust and ruby light as if he were face to face with the closest autochthon.

The being stood some one hundred fifty centimeters tall. In body he resembled a barrel-chested, wasp-waisted man with unduly long, thin limbs. Sleek brown fur covered him; he was warm-blooded and omnivorous, and his mate brought forth her young alive; but for all that, he was no mammal. Atop a slender neck, his bowling-ball head sported a black ruff, pale eyes, donkeylike ears, and a corvine beak that might have been molded in amber. His padded feet were bare so the three long toes on each could grip stirrups. Otherwise he wore tight cross-gaitered pants, a leather cuirass with iron shoulder pieces and a zigzag insigne on the breast, and a wide belt from which there hung dagger and saber. Three sharp-nailed fingers and a thumb cranked the bow taut. His right hand lifted the stock.

Falkayn snatched forth his blaster and fired upward. It was a warning; also, the beam dazzled native eyes and spoiled their aim. The girl cheered.

The squad at her back scattered. They were all accoutered more or less alike. The kinship symbol they shared was not familiar to Falkayn. Their leader screeched a command. They rallied and charged on. A dart buzzed near the man. Another broke on Adzel's scales.

"Why—why—they have decided to kill us, too," the Wodenite stammered. "They must have been prepared for the sight of us."

"Get going!" Falkayn howled.

He was born and bred an aristocrat on a planet where they still needed soldiers. Boyhood training took over in him. Gone metal steady, he narrowed his fire beam for maximum range and dropped one zandara in its tracks.

Adzel opened up. His ton of mass accelerated to a sprint of one hundred fifty KPH. Wind whipped blindingly in Falkayn's eyes. But he wasn't needed any more. Adzel had gotten in among the Ikranankans. He simply bowled over the first animal and rider. Two others spun through the air in a bow wave. His tail struck to one side, and that flattened a fourth. The last two bolted off across the fields.

Adzel braked himself and trotted back. A couple of the opposition were hotfooting it elsewhere, the other casualties seemed barely able to move. "Oh, dear," he said. "I do hope we did not injure them seriously."

Falkayn shrugged. A race of giants could afford to be gentler than men. "Let's get back to the ship," he said.

The girl had stopped further down the road. As they neared her, his lips shaped a whistle.

Perhaps she was a little too muscular for his taste. But what a figure! Tall, full, long-legged and straight-backed . . . and her outfit showed delightfully much of it, what with half-length boots, fur kilt hiked up for riding, doublet appropriately curved over a sleeveless blouse, and a short blue cloak. She was armed with cutlery similar to the natives', had a painted shield hung by her saddle and a flat helmet over her rusty coils of hair. Her skin was very white. The features had an almost Hellenic clearness, with big gray eyes and wide mouth to soften them.

"What ho!" Falkayn murmured. "And where are you from, lass?"

She wiped sweat off her brow and breathed hard, which was pleasant to see. Adzel continued lumbering down the road. She clucked to her zandara. It walked alongside, too exhausted to be skittish of his enormousness.

"You . . . are . . . are in truth from Beyond-the-World?" she asked. Her husky Anglic held an accent he had never met before.

"Yes. I suppose so." Falkayn pointed to the ship.

She traced a sign. "Algat is good!" The word was local, meaning approximately "magic."

Recovering some composure, she peered after her enemies. They had restored order, but weren't giving chase. Even as she watched, one of them on an unharmed animal started off, hell for leather, toward the far side of the hill. The rest followed slowly.

She reached out to touch Falkayn's hand, as if to make sure he was real. "Only rumors drifted usward," she said low. "We heard a strange Ershokh had arrived in a flying chariot, and the Emperor forbade anyone to come near. But the story could've grown in telling. You are truly from Beyond-the-World? Even from Earth?"

"I said yes," he answered. "But what are you talking about? What do you mean, Ershokh?"

"Humans. Did you not know? They call us Ershoka in Katandara." She considered him, and it was as if a mask slid over her. With a slowness and caution he did not understand, she ventured: "Ever since our ancestors came, over four hundred years ago."

"Four hundred?" Falkayn's jaw hit his Adam's apple. "But the hyperdrive wasn't invented then!"

"Obviously she means Ikranankan years," said Adzel, who was hard to surprise. "Let me see, with a revolution period of seventy-two standard days . . . yes, that makes about seventy-five Terrestrial years."

"But—I say, how the deuce—"

"They were bound elsewhere, to . . . what is the word? ... to be colonists," the girl said. "Robbers captured them and left them here, the whole five hundred."

Falkayn tried to make his mind stop whirling. Vaguely he heard Adzel say, "Ah, yes, doubtless a squadron from the Pirate Suns, venturing so far from their bases in the hope of just such valuable booty as a large ship. They were not interested in ransom. But it was meritorious of them to find a habitable planet and maroon rather than kill their prisoners." He patted her shoulder. "Do not fret, small female. The Polesotechnic League has long since taught the Pirate Sun dwellers the error of their ways."

Falkayn decided that any comforting should be done by him. "Well!" he beamed. "What a sensation this will make! As soon as we tell Earth, they'll send transportation for you."

Still she watched him, strangely and disappointingly careful. A damsel lately in distress ought not to act that way. "You are an Ersho—I mean an Earthman?"

"Actually I'm a citizen of the Grand Duchy of Hermes, and my shipmates are from other planets. But we operate out of Earth. David Falkayn's my name."

"I am Stepha Carls, a lieutenant in the household troops of—" She broke off. "No matter now."

"Why were those klongs chasing you?"

She smiled a little. "One thing at a time, I beg. So much to tell each other, truth?" But then she did drop her reserve. Her eyes widened, her smile went up to about fifty megawatts, she clapped her hands and cried: "Oh, this is purest wonder! A man from Earth —my own rescuer!"

Well, now, Falkayn thought, a bit stunned, that's more like it. He dropped his questions and simply admired the scenery. After all, he'd been away from humankind for a good many weeks.

At the ship they tethered the zandara to a landing jack. Falkayn bowed Stepha up the ramp to the lock. Chee Lan came springing to meet them. "What a darling pet," the girl exclaimed.

Chee bristled. In some respects she was not unlike Master Beljagor. "You try to kitchy-koo me, young lady, and you'll be lucky to get your fingers back." She swung on her fellows. "What in the name of nine times nine to the ninety-ninth devils is going on?"

"Didn't you watch the fight?" Falkayn said. Under Stepha's eyes, he preened himself. "I thought we did a rather good job on those bandits."

"What bandits?" Chee snapped. "From here I could see them go right into town. If you ask me—if you have the wit to ask me, you pair of vacuum-headed louts—you've clobbered a squad of Imperial soldiers—the same Emperor's that we came here to deal with!"

II

They hied themselves to the saloon. Going into town might lead to being shot at. Let Gujgengi come and ask for an explanation. Besides, they had a lot of mutual explaining to get out of the way first.

Falkayn poured Scotch for himself and Stepha. Adzel took a four-liter bucket of coffee. His Buddhistic principles did not preclude drinking, but no ship on an extended mission could carry enough liquor to do him much good. Chee Lan, who was not affected by alcohol, kindled a mildly narcotic cigarette in an interminable ivory holder. They were all in bad need of soothing.

The girl squinted and scowled simultaneously at her glass—she wasn't used to Earth illumination-raised it to her lips, and tossed it off. "Whoo-oo-ool" she spluttered. Falkayn pounded her back. Between coughs and wheezes, her oaths made him blush. "I thought you were being niggard," she said weakly.

"I suppose you would have lost most of your technology in three generations, at that," Adzel said. "Five hundred people, children included, have insufficient knowledge between them to maintain a modern civilization, and a colony ship would not have carried a full microlibrary."

Stepha wiped her eyes and looked at him. "I always thought Great Granther was an awful liar," she said. "But reckon he must really have seen some things as a youngling. Where are you from?"

He was certainly an impressive sight. Counting the tail, his quadrupedal body was a good four and a half meters long, and the torso had arms, chest, and shoulders to match. Blue-gray scales shimmered overall, save where scutes protected the belly and plates the back; those were umber. The crocodilian head sat on a meter of neck, with bony ears and shelves over the eyes. But those eyes were large, brown, and wistful, and the skull bulged backward to hold a considerable brain.

"Earth," he said. "That is, Zatlakh, which means 'earth' in my language. Humans dubbed it Woden. That was before they ran out

of Terrestrial names for planets. Nowadays, for the most part, one uses whatever term is found in the language of what seems the most advanced local culture: as, for instance, Ikrananka' here."

"Wouldn't you be good in combat?" Stepha mused. One hand dropped to her dagger.

Adzel winced. "Please. We are most peaceful. We are only so large and armored because Woden breeds giant animals. The sun is type F5, you see, in the Begulus sector. It puts out so much energy that, in spite of a surface gravity equal to two and a half times Earth's, life can grow massive and—"

"Shut your gas jet, you blithering barbarian," Chee Lan cut in. "We've work on hand."

Adzel came near losing his temper. "My friend," he growled, "it is most discourteous to denigrate other cultures. Granted that my own people are simple hunters, nevertheless we would dare set our arts against anyone's. And when I got a scholarship to study planetology on Earth, I earned extra money by singing Fafnir in the San Francisco Opera."

"Also by parading at Chinese New Year's," said Chee poisonously.

Falkayn struck the table with his fist. "That'll do for both of you," he rapped.

"But where in truth is the, ah, lady from?" Stepha asked.

"The second planet of O2 Eridani A," Falkayn said. "Cynthia, its human discoverers named it, after the captain's wife."

"I have heard that she was not exactly his wife," Chee murmured.

Falkayn blushed again and stole a glance at Stepha. But she didn't look embarrassed; and considering those cusswords she'd ripped out— "They'd reached about an Alexandrine level of technology on one continent, at the time," he said, "and had invented the scientific method. But they didn't have cities. A nation was equal to a trade route. So they've fitted very well into League activities." He realized that now he was blithering, and stopped short.

Chee tapped the ash from her cigarette with one delicate six-digited hand. She herself was a mere ninety centimeters tall when she stood fully erect. Mostly she crouched on muscular legs and equally long arms, her magnificent brush curled over the back. Her head was big in proportion, round, with a short black-nosed muzzle, neat little ears, and cat whiskers. Save for a dark mask around the huge luminous-golden eyes, she was entirely covered by white Angora fur. Her thin voice turned brisk: "Let us begin by reviewing your situation, Freelady Carls. No, pardon me, Lieutenant Carls, isn't it? I assume your ancestors were marooned in this general area."

"Yes," Stepha nodded. She picked her words with renewed care. "They soon made touch with the natives, sometimes violent, sometimes not. The violence taught them humans have more strength and endurance than Ikranankans. And here is always war. Better, easier, to be the best soldiers than sweat in fields and mines, not so? Ever since, every Ershokh has grown into the—body?—the corps. Those who can't fight are quartermasters and such."

Falkayn observed a scar on her arm. Poor kid, he thought in pity. This is all wrong. She should be dancing and flirting on Earth, with me, for instance. A girl is too sweet and gentle a creature in her heart to-

Stepha's eyes glittered. "I heard old people tell of wars in Beyond-the-World," she said eagerly. "Could we hire out?"

"What? Well-er-"

"I'm good. You should have seen me at the Battle of the Yanjeh. Ha! They charged our line. One zandara spitted itself on my pike, ran right up." Stepha jumped to her feet, drew her saber and whizzed it through the air. "I took the rider's head off with one sweep. It bounced. I turned and split the fellow beside him from gullet to guts. A dismounted trooper attacked on my left. I gave him my shield boss, crunch, right in the beak. Then—"

"Please!" roared Adzel, and covered his ears.

"We do have to find out the situation," Falkayn added hastily. "Are you or are you not an enemy of the Emperor in Katandara?"

Stepha checked her vehemence, sat down again, and held out her glass for a refill. Once more she was speaking with great caution. "The Ershoka hired out to the first Jadhadi, when the old Empire fell apart. They helped set him on the Beast in Katandara, and rebuild the Empire and expand it, and since then they've been the household troops of each Emperor and the core of his army. Of late, some of them were the capturers of Rangakora, in Sundhadarta to the east on the edge of the Twilight. And that's a most important place to hold. Not alone does it command the chief pass through the mountains, but the water thereabouts makes that country the richest in the Chakora."

"To chaos with your pus-bleeding geopolitics!" Chee interrupted. "Why were you being chased by Imperial soldiers?"

"Um-m-m ... I am not sure." Stepha sipped for a moment's silence. "Best might be if you tell me of yourselves first. Then maybe between us we can find why the third Jadhadi has you off here instead of in Katandara. Or do you know?"

Adzel shook his ponderous head. "We do not," he answered. "Indeed, we were unaware of being quarantined. We did have intimations. It seemed curious that we have not yet been invited to the capital, and that so few came to visit us even among local dwellers. When we took the flitter out for a spin, we observed military encampments at some distance. Then Gujgengi requested that we refrain from flying. He said the unfamiliar sight produced too much consternation. I hesitate to accuse anyone of prevaricating, but the reason did seem rather tenuous."

"You are truth-told walled away, by Imperial order," Stepha said grimly. "Haijakata has been forbidden to any outsiders, and no one may leave these parts. It hurts trade, but—" Falkayn was about to ask why she had violated the ban, when she continued: "Tell me, though. How come you to be here, in this piddling little corner of nowhere? Why did you come to Ikrananka at all?"

"She's stalling," Chee hissed to Falkayn in League Latin.

"I know," he answered likewise. "But can you blame her? Here we are, total strangers, and the last contact her people had with galactic civilization was that piracy. We've got to be kind, show her we really mean well."

Chee threw up her hands. "Oh, cosmos!" she groaned. "You and your damned mating instinct!"

Falkayn turned his back on her. "Pardon us," he said in Anglic. "We, uh, had something personal to discuss."

Stepha smiled, patted his hand, and leaned quite close to breathe, "I do understand, David. ... So pretty a name, David. And you from Beyond-the-World! I'm strangling to hear everything about you."

"Well, uh, that is," stuttered Falkayn, "we're trade pioneers. Something new." He hoped his grin was modest rather than silly. "I, er, helped work out the idea myself." With due regard for preserving the basic secret, he explained.

Nicholas van Rijn left his desk and waddled across to the transparency that made one entire wall of his office. From this height, he could overlook a sweep of slim city towers, green parkscape, Sunda Straits flashing under Earth's lordly sky. For a while he stood puffing his cigar, until, without turning around, he said:

"Ja, by damn, I think you has here the bacteria of a good project with much profit. And you is a right man to carry it away. I have watched you like a hog, ever since I hear what you did on Ivanhoe when you was a, you pardon the expression, teen-ager. Now you got your Master's certificate in the League, uh-huh, you can be good working for the Solar Spice & Liquors Company. And I need good men, poor old fat lonely me. You bring home the bacon and eggs scrambled with turmeric, I see you get rich." "Yes, sir," Falkayn mumbled.

"You come speak of how you like to help open new places, for new stuffs to sell here and natives to buy from us what have not yet heard what the market prices are. Hokay. Only I think you got more possibilities, boy. I been thinking a lot, me, these long, long nights when I toss and turn, getting no sleep with my worries."

Falkayn refrained from telling van Rijn that everybody knew the cause of the merchant's current insomnia was blond and curvy. "What do you mean, sir?" he asked.

Van Rijn faced about, tugged his goatee, and studied him out of beady eyes set close to the great hook nose. "I tell you confidential," he said at length. "You not violate my confidence, ha? I got so few friends. You break my old gray heart and I personal wring your neck. Understand? Fine, fine. I like a boy what has got good understandings.

"My notion is, here the League finds new planets, and everybody jumps in with both feets and is one cutthroat scramble. You thought you might go in at this. But no, no, you is too fine, too sensitive. I can see that. Also, you is not yet one of the famous space captains, and nobody spies to see where you is bound next. So . . . for Solar Spice & Liquors, you go find us our private planets!" He advanced and dug a thumb into Falkayn's ribs. The younger man staggered. "How you like that, ha?" "But-but-that is-" Van Rijn tapped two liters of beer from his cooler, clinked glasses,

and explained.

The galaxy, even this tiny fragment of one spiral arm which we have somewhat explored, is inconceivably huge. In the course of visiting and perhaps colonizing worlds of obvious interest to them, space travelers have leapfrogged past literally millions of others. Many are not even catalogued. Without a special effort, they are unlikely to become known for millennia. Yet from statistics we can predict that thousands of them are potentially valuable, as markets and sources of new exotic goods. Rather than continue to exploit the discovered planets, why not find new ones . . . and keep the fact quiet as long as possible?

A sector would be chosen, out where the traffic is still thin: Spica, for instance. A base would be established. Small, cheap automated craft would be dispatched by the hundreds. Whenever they found a world that, from their standardized observations of surface conditions, seemed promising, they would report back. The trade pioneer crew would go for a closer look. If they struck pay dirt, they would collect basic information, lay the groundwork for commercial agreements, and notify van Rijn.

"Three in a ship, I think, is enough," he said. "Better be enough, what wages and commissions your pest-bedamned Brotherhood charges! You, the Master merchant, trained in culture comparisons and swogglehorning. A planetologist and a xenobiologist. They should be nonhumans. Different talents, you see, also not so much nerve-scratching when cooped together. Nicer to have a lovingly girl along, I know, but when you get back again, ha, ha!—you make up good. Or even before. You got just invited to my next little orgy, boy, if you take the job."

"So you knew there was a civilization here with metal,' Stepha nodded. "Of course your robots—jeroo, to think I never believed Great Granther when he talked about robots!—they didn't see us few Ershoka. But what did they tell you was worth coming here for?"

"An Earthlike planet is always worth investigating," Falkayn said.

"What? This is like Earth? Great Granther-"

"Any planet where men can live without special apparatus is Earthlike. They're not too common, you see. The physical conditions, the biochemistry, the ecology . . . never mind. Ikrananka has plenty of differences from Earth or Hermes, true."

(Mass, 0.394 Terrestrial, density 0.815, diameter 0.783. But though its sun is feeble, it orbits close. To be sure, then tidal action has forced one hemisphere constantly to face the primary. But this slow rotation in turn means a weak magnetic field, hence comparatively little interaction with stellar charged particles, which are not emitted very strongly from a red dwarf anyway. Thus it keeps a reasonable atmosphere. Granted, most of the water has been carried to the cold side and frozen, making the warm side largely desert. But this took time, during which life based on proteins in water solution could evolve and adapt. Indeed, the chemistry remains startlingly like home.) "What is there to get here?"

"Lots. The robots brought back pictures and samples. At least two new intoxicants, several antibiotics, potential spices, some spectacular furs, and doubtless much else. Also a well-developed civilization to gather the stuff for us, in exchange for trade goods that they're far enough advanced to appreciate." Chee smacked her lips. "The commissions to be gotten!" Stepha sighed. "I wish you'd speak Anglic. But I'll take your word for true. Why did you land at Haijakata? You must have known Katandara is the biggest city."

"It's complicated enough being a visitor from space, without getting swarmed over from the start," Falkayn replied. "We've been learning the local language, customs, the whole setup, in this backwater. It goes pretty quick, with modern mnemonic techniques. And the Emperor sent Gujgengi as a special teacher, once he heard of us. We were going to the capital before now; but as soon as we announced that, the professor started finding excuses for delay. That was three or four weeks back."

"I wonder how much we really have learned," Chee muttered. "What are weeks?" Stepha asked.

"Forget it," Chee said. "See here, female, you have involved us in trouble that may cost us our whole market." "What a stupid!" the girl barked impatiently. "Conquer them." "A highly immoral procedure," Adzel scolded. "Also it is against policy: as much, I confess, because of being economically unfeasible as for any other reason."

"Will you get to the point, you yattertongues?" Chee screamed. "Why were those soldiers after you?"

The alarm bell toned. The computer said, "A party is approaching from the town."

III

Falkayn decided he had better be courteous and meet the Imperial envoy-instructor at the air lock. He kept his blaster conspicuously on one hip.

Waiting, he could look up to the walls on the hillcrest. They were of dry-laid stone; water was too precious to use in mortar. Their battlements, and the gaunt towers at their corners, enclosed a few score woven houses. Haijakata was a mere trading center for the local farmers and for caravans passing through. A rather small garrison was maintained. The northern highlands had been cleared of those barbarian raiders who haunted most deserts, Gujgengi admitted, so Falkayn suspected the troops were quartered here mainly as a precaution against revolt. What little he had found out of Ikranankan history sounded turbulent.

Which is still another worry, he fretted. Old Nick isn't going to invest in expensive facilities unless there's a reasonably stable social order to keep the trade routes open. And the Katandaran Empire looks like the only suitable area on the whole planet. No trading post on Ikrananka, no commissions for me. What a jolly, carefree, swashbuckling life we explorers lead!

His gaze shifted to the oncoming party. There were a couple of dozen soldiers, in leather breastplates, armed to the teeth they didn't have with swords, knives, crossbows, and big ugly halberds. All wore the curlicue insigne of the Tirut phratry; everyone in the garrison did. At their head stalked Gujgengi. He was tall for an Ikranankan, skinny, his blue-black fur grizzled, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles perched precariously on his beak. A scarlet robe swept to his feet, emblazoned with the crest of the Deodakh, the Imperial, phratry. At his tasseled belt hung a long snickersnee. Falkayn had not yet seen any native male without a weapon.

The human made the knee bend with arms crossed on breast that did duty here for a salaam. "To the most noble Gujgengi and his relatives, greeting," he intoned ritually. He'd never be able to pronounce this guttural language right. His speaking apparatus was not designed for it. And his grammar was still ramshackle. But by now he was reasonably fluent.

Gujgengi did not use the formula, "Peace between our kindred," but rather, "Let us talk," which implied there was a serious matter on hand that he hoped could be settled without bloodshed. And he made signs against evil, which he hadn't done of late.

"Honor my house," Falkayn invited, since the native tongue had no word for ship and "wagon" was ridiculous.

Gujgengi left his followers posted and stiffly climbed the ramp. "I do wish you would put in decent lighting," he complained. Since he saw no wavelength shorter than yellow, though his visual spectrum included die near infrared, the fluoros were dim to him; his horizontal-pupiled eyes had little dark adaptation, which was scarcely needed on the sunward hemisphere.

Falkayn guided him to the saloon. Gujgengi grumbled the whole way. This place was too hot, one might as well be in Subsolar country, and it stank and the air was wet and would Falkayn please quit breathing damp on him. Ikranankans didn't exhale water vapor. What their metabolism produced went straight back into the bloodstream.

At die end, he stopped in the doorway, stiffened, and adjusted his glasses. "So you are in truth sheltering her!" he croaked.

Stepha reached for her saber. "Now, now, now," said Adzel, laying irresistible fingers around her arm. "Is that nice?"

"Be seated, most noble," said Falkayn. "Have a drink."

Gujgengi accepted some Scotch with ill-concealed eagerness. Ikranankans were quite humanlike in that respect. "I was given to understand you came in friendship," he said. "I trust this occurrence can be satisfactorily explained."

"Why, sure," Falkayn said, more heartily than he felt. "We saw this female of my race being chased by strangers who, as far as we could tell, were raiders. Naturally we supposed she was from our homeland."

Chee blew a smoke ring and added in her silkiest voice, "The more so when you, most noble, had never seen fit to tell us there was an old human settlement here."

"Ak-krrr," Gujgengi hemmed. "With so much else to teach you—" "But surely you knew how interesting this one thing would be,"

Chee pursued.

"—at your own request—"

"Beally, most noble, we are shocked and grieved."

"They merely form another phratry of soldiers—"

"Of considerable importance to the Empire, with which we were negotiating in good faith."

"She broke the Emperor's express command—"

"What command? That we be isolated? Now that, most noble, is another deplorable discovery. We begin to wonder how much faith has been kept with us. Perhaps we are not welcome here? We can withdraw, you know. We have no wish to force ourselves or our trade goods on anyone."

"No, no, no!" Gujgengi had inspected samples of everything from synthetic fabrics to chemical firearms. He breathed harder each time he thought about them. "It was only—"

"Though to be frank," Chee said, "the withdrawal cannot be permanent. Our people at home must be told about these Ershoka, and come arrange for their transportation to a more suitable clime. The overlords of Earth will not be pleased to learn that Katandara was keeping these unfortunates in concealment. Were they, perhaps, being mistreated? I am afraid that a very grave view will be taken of this affair."

Falkayn was too rocked back to enjoy the spectacle of Gujgengi's rout. He hadn't thought of the implications. Returning the Ershoka home—why, that'd blow the gaff clear to Andromeda! And he was supposed to keep his discoveries quiet!

Maybe— No. He looked at Stepha, seated proud and cat-lithe on the edge of her chair, the light glowing in her tresses and gray eyes, down the white curves of her, and knew he couldn't betray her with his silence. Anyhow, it would be useless. Once traders started coming here, they'd also learn the facts, and some conscientious bastard was certain to blab.

Gujgengi lifted his tumbler in a hand gone shaky, tilted his head back, and poured deftly into his open bill. "I ought to confer with the Emperor," he said. "I really ought to. But. . . under the circumstances . . . perhaps we can reach an understanding."

"I do hope so," said Adzel.

"The fact is," Gujgengi confessed, "shortly before you came, a— ak-krrr—a most unhappy situation arose. The Empire has been in the process of conquering Sundhadarta." No mealymouthed phrases about "pacification" in this language. "The key to that whole region is Rangakora city. Being strongly fortified, it was hard to take, so the Emperor dispatched a contingent of his own crack troops, the Ershoka, to help in the storming, under High Guardsman—uk-k-k—"

"Bobert Thorn," said Stepha curtly, supplying the labials.

"They succeeded—"

"You might thank her," said Chee.

Gujgengi looked confused and needed another drink. "They succeeded," he managed to continue. "But then, uk, Ohertorn decided this could be the nucleus of a kingdom for himself. He and his men . . . well, they threw out our troops and took possession. There they have been ever since. We have, uk, not yet gotten them dislodged. Meanwhile the Ershoka still in the capital grow restless. And then you, of the same race, conceivably of the same phratry, appear! Do you wonder that the Emperor wished to, ak-krrr, proceed with, shall we say, circumspection?"

"Judas on a crutch!" said Falkayn indistinctly.

Stepha sat for a moment in a silence deepened by the rustle of air in ventilators, the impatient tap of Chee's cigarette holder on the table, and Gujgengi's asthmatic breathing. She scowled at the deck and tugged her chin. Abruptly she reached a decision, straightened, and said:

"Yes, truth, this has hurt the Ershoka in Katandara. They know they're under suspicion. Let the Emperor get too bloody suspicious, and he may even try to have 'em massacred. I don't think that'd be so wise of him—any bets who'd come out of the fracas alive?—but we don't want to rip the Empire apart. At the same time, we've got to look out for our own. So we heard rumors about these newcome strangers. Bound to happen, you know. Haijakatans would've carried die news around before the ban was laid on. Now and then, a planter may still sneak past the guard posts. We had to find out, in the Iron House, what these yarns meant. Else we'd be like blind men on a cliff trail. I reckoned to reach this place. My own idea, I true-speak you. None else knew. But a patrol eyeballed me."

Gujgengi did not seize on the obvious opportunity to bluster about loyalty and subordination. Or maybe there was no such chance. More and more during the weeks, Falkayn had gotten die impression that Ikranankans were loyal to their own blood kindred and anything else was a mere bond of convenience.

But wait!

Excited, he sprang up. Gujgengi reached for his sword, but the man only paced, back and forth, feet jarring on the deck, as he rattled out:

"Hey, this whole thing is a turn of magic for us." No word for good luck. "Your Emperor was wrong to suspect us. We're traders. Our interest lies in a secure realm that we can deal with. The weapons on this ship can blow down any wall ever built. We'll take Bangakora for him."

"No!" Stepha shouted. She boiled to her own feet, saber gleaming forth. "You filthy-"

Falkayn let her run down, in Adzel's grasp, before he asked, "Why, what's wrong? Aren't you on the Imperial side?"

"Before I let you kill a thousand Ershoka," she said between her teeth, "I'll—" and she was off again, in quite a long and anatomical catalogue of what she would do to David Falkayn.

"Oh, but honey chil'," he protested. "You don't understand. I'm not going to kill anybody. Just knock down a wall or two, and overawe die garrison."

"Then Jadhadi's soldiers will take care of them," she said bleakly.

"Uh-uh. We'll protect them. Make some arrangement."

"See here," Gujgengi objected, "the Emperor's prerogatives—"

Falkayn told him where the Emperor could store his prerogatives, but in Latin. In Katandaran he said, "An amnesty is our price for helping. With safeguards. I don't think it's too high. But that's for the Emperor to decide. We'll fly to him and discuss the matter."

"Now, wait!" Gujgengi cried. "You cannot—"

"Precisely how do you plan to stop us, sonny boy?" Chee leered.

Gujgengi fell back on argument. The Emperor would be displeased if his orders were flouted. There was no suitable place in Katandara for landing the ship. The populace was so uneasy that the sight could provoke a riot. Et cetera, et cetera.

"Best we compromise," Adzel whispered. "Arrogance breeds resistance."

After considerable haggling, Gujgengi agreed that, under the circumstances, the flitter might go. It was small, could dart in before many people saw it and sit unseen in the palace gardens. And indeed a message to Katandara by land would take an awkwardly long time.

"As well, at that, to keep the ship here," Chee remarked. "A reserve, in case you have trouble."

"In case we do?" Adzel pounced,

"You don't think I intend to go live in that dust pot of an atmosphere, do you? Not if I can help it. And I can play my tapes in peace while you and your cast-iron ear are gone."

"If you intend to play what, for lack of a suitably malodorous word, is called Cynthian music, then I will most certainly not be

here."

"We'll take you home with us," Falkayn offered Stepha.

She had held oddly aloof, watching with the mask back in place. Now she hesitated. "You won't get into trouble, will you?" he asked.

"N-n-no," she said in Anglic, which Gujgengi didn't speak. "My barrack mates will have covered my disappearance, even if they didn't know the reason for it. Not hard to do, when these stupid Ikranankans think all Ershoka look alike. But we must be—I mean, we're confined to the city for the time being. I can't walk right in the gates, and if I arrived openly with you, I'd be watched." She pondered. "You land quick, right in front of the Iron House, and I can dash in. If they ask you why, afterward, tell them you mistook it for the palace."

"Why do you care if you're watched?"

"I don't like the idea." She grasped his hands and leaned close. "Please, David. You've been so good a friend till now."

"Well-"

She waggled her eyelashes. "I hope we can become still better

friends."

"All right, dammit!"

Arrangements were quickly made. Falkayn changed into a warm tunic, trousers, and boots, with a white cloak and a bejeweled cap tilted rakishly across his brow to add class. Two guns snugged at his waist, blaster and stunner. Into a breast pocket he slipped a transceiver; the planet had sufficient ionosphere for radio to reach between here and Katandara. He stuffed a bag with extra gear and gifts for the Emperor. Adzel took no more than a communicator hung about his neck.

"We'll call in regularly, Chee," Falkayn said. "If you don't hear from either of us for eight hours straight, haul gravs and come a-running."

"I still don't know why you bother," the Cynthian grumbled. "That wretched female has already spoiled this whole mission."

"The secrecy angle? We may solve that somehow. At worst, even with competitors swarming in, Old Nick will get some good out of a stable Empire. And, uh, in any event we can't let bloodshed go on."

"Why not?" She gave up. "Very well, be off. I'll continue our sessions with Gujgengi. The more information we have, the better."

The Imperial agent had already gone back to town with his escort But Haijakata's parapets were dark with natives clustered to see the takeoff.

"Oh-h-h!" Stepha gasped and clutched Falkayn's arm. He resisted the temptation to do some aerial acrobatics and lined off for Katandara, a little north of west. The preliminary survey had made excellent maps, and Gujgengi had identified points of interest on them.

Kilometer after kilometer, the Chakora fled beneath them. They rode in a humming bubble over endless red-green fields, tiny thorps, once a strung-out caravan of laden four-footed karikuts guarded by warriors on zandara-back. "Those must be Shekhej," Stepha remarked. "Their phratry does most of the hauling in these parts."

Adzel, squeezing the trio together by his bulk (not that Falkayn minded), asked, "Is every trade a family affair?"

"Why, yes," Stepha said. "You're born a Shekhej, you're a caravaneer. All Deodaka used to be hunters till they conquered Katandara; now they're officials. The Tiruts and others, like we Ershoka, are soldiers. The Rahinjis are scribes. And so it goes."

"But suppose one is born with the wrong sort of talent?"

"Oh, each phratry has lots of different things to do. The main job is the most honorable one. But somebody has to keep house, keep accounts, keep farms if the group owns any—everything. You'd not trust that to outsiders, would you?

"Also, a youth at the age when he's to begin learning the phratry secrets, he can be adopted into a different one if he wants and if it'll take him. That's one reason we Ershoka are so apart. We couldn't many with any Ikranankans"—Stepha giggled and made a vulgar joke—"so we have to stay in the corps.-On t' other hand, for that same reason, we know we can trust our young. They've no place else to go. So we initiate them early."

"I understand most phratries are very ancient."

'Yes. Kingdoms come and go, none last more'n a few generations, but a bloodline is forever."

Her words confirmed what Falkayn had already gathered. It bespoke an ingrained clannishness that worried him. If the attitude was instinctive, this was a poor world in which to set up operations. But if it could be altered—if the Ikranankans could be made to feel loyalty toward something larger than a cluster of families—

Katandara hove into view. The city lay no more than two hundred kilometers from Haijakata, which in turn was halfway to Rangakora.

The Empire's great extent was west and south, through the fertile Chakora.

Winding from the northeast came the Yanjeh River, a silver gleam surrounded by a belt of vegetation that glowed against stark eastern hills and tawny western ranchlands. Where it ran down the former continental shelf and emptied into broad, muddy Lake Urshi, Ka-tandara was built. That was an impressive city, which must house half a million. Whole civilizations had possessed it, one after the other, as Rome and Constantinople, Peking and Mexico City, had been possessed: each adding to walls and towers and buildings, until now the ramparts enclosed a sprawl built almost entirely in stone. Old were those stones, the hewn outlines crumbling, and old were the narrow streets that twisted between facades gray, square, and secretive. Only at the landward end, where the ground rose steeply, was there anything not scoured by millennia of desert sand —the works of the newest rulers, marble-veneered and dome-topped, roofed with copper and decorated with abstract mosaics. That section, like those of earlier overlords, had a wall of its own, to protect masters from people.

With a magnifying scanner, Stepha could point out details at such a distance that the flitter was yet unseen. Falkayn went into a dive. Air shrieked. The controls thrummed beneath his hands. At the last instant, he threw in reverse grav and came to a bone-jarring halt.

"Farewell, David ... till we meet again." Stepha leaned over and brushed her lips across his. Blood beat high in her face. He caught the sweet wild odor of her hair. Then she was out the lock.

The Ershoka were barracked in a single great building near the palace. It fronted on a cobbled square, along with the homes of the wealthy. Like them, it was built around a courtyard and turned a blank entry to the world. But some memory of Earth lingered in peaked iron roof, gable ends carved into monster heads, even the iron doors. A few Ikranankans gaped stupefied at the flitter. So did the sentries at the barrack entrance, big bearded men in chain mail, helmets gilt and plumed, cloaks that the wind flung about in rainbow stripes. But at once their weapons snapped up and they shouted.

Stepha sped toward them. Falkayn took off. He had a last glimpse of her being hustled inside.

"Now ho for OF Massa's," he said. "Let's hope he asks questions first and shoots later."

IV

A gong rang outside the guest apartment. "Come in," said Falkayn. A servant in close-fitting livery parted the thick drapes which served for interior doors in this wood-poor country. He saluted and announced that the Emperor wished audience with the delegates of the 'Olesotechnic'gir. His manner was polite but unservile, and he used no special titles for the ruler, like His Majesty or His Potency or His Most Awe-inspiring Refulgence. The system of hereditary jobs did not amount to a caste hierarchy; backed by his kin, a janitor was as proudly independent as a soldier or scribe.

"My associate has gone out," Falkayn said, "but I suppose I'll do."

Do what? he wondered to himself. We've been cooling our motors for a week by my watch. Maybe one of those couriers that keep scurrying back and forth has put a firecracker in Jadhadi's pants, at last. Or maybe this time I can, when he isn't looking. Sure wish so. All right, I'll do, and I'll l do, and I'll do.

He went to get a suitably fancy tunic for the occasion. The rooms lent him were spacious, except for low ceilings, and luxurious in their fashion. Too bad the fashion wasn't his. He liked hangings of gorgeous orange fur, especially when he estimated what such pelts would fetch on Earth. But the murals were not only in an alien artistic idiom; half the colors registered on him as mere black. The bare floor was always cold. And he couldn't fit himself comfortably onto the gaunt settees or into a shut-bed designed for an Ikranankan.

The third-story balcony gave him a view of the palace gardens. They suggested an Old Japanese layout: rocks, low subtly hued plants, the extravagance of a fountain—which played inside a glass column, to control evaporation. Little but roofs were visible above the estate walls. To the west, the sun shone dull and angry crimson through a dust veil. Another storm, Falkayn thought; more trouble for the ranchers out yonder.

A week inside an imperial palace could have been interesting, if the imperium had been human and reasonably decadent. Katandara was neither. In sheer despair, he had been improving his language by reading what was billed as the greatest epic in the world. It had more begats than the Bible. He made a face at the codex and thumbed his transceiver. "Hullo, Adzel," he said in Latin, "how're you doing?"

"We are about to enter what I assume is a tavern," the Wodenite's voice replied. "At least, the legend says this is The House of Exquisite Pleasures and Ferocious Booze."

"Oh, Lord, and I have to mind the store. Listen, the big red wheel has summoned me. Probably just for more quizzing and more postponement of any decision, but you never know. So maintain radio silence, huh?" As far as the galactics could tell, the Ikranankans were ignorant of this means of communication. It was as well to keep some aces in the hole.

Unless the Ershoka had told— No, that seemed unlikely. Set down with nothing more than clothes and a few hand tools, caught up almost at once in this tumultuous culture, their ancestors had rapidly forgotten the arts of home. Why build guns or anything else that would prove an equalizer, even if you found time and skill to do so when you lived by being twice as tough as the locals? Except for a few gadgets useful in everyday life, the humans had introduced nothing, and their knowledge dwindled away into fable.

"Very well," Adzel said. "I will assure Captain Padrick it is harmless magic. I have to calm him anyway. Good luck."

Falkayn returned to the main room and followed the servant down long corridors and sweeping ramps. A hum of activity surrounded him, footfalls, voices, rustling robes and papers. Ikranankans passed: gowned officials, hooded merchants, uniformed flunkies, planters in kilts, ranchers in chaps and spurred boots, visitors from afar, even a trader from the warm lands of Subsolar, shivering in a hairy cloak —the ebb and flow of life through this crown on the queen city. Cooking odors reminded Falkayn he was hungry. He had to admit regional cuisine was excellent, auguring well for van Bijn. If.

At the entrance to the throne room, four Ershoka stood guard, as gaudily outfitted as the men before the Iron House. They weren't at attention. That hadn't been invented here, and the humans had been smart enough not to suggest the idea. But they and their gleaming halberds scarcely moved. Flanking them were a dozen Tirut archers. Falkayn felt pretty sure those had been added since the troubles began in Rangakora. You couldn't blame Jadhadi for a soured attitude, when he could no longer trust his own Sicherheitsdienst.

Still, there was something downright paranoid about his wariness. Instead of jumping at Falkayn's offer to recover the stolen town, he'd interrogated for a week. Since he had nothing to lose by accepting, or at least hadn't given any such reasons, it must be due to exaggerated xenophobia. But what caused that, and what could be done about it?

Falkayn's attendant switched the drapes aside, and he passed through.

Jadhadi III waited on the Beast, a chimera in gilt bronze whose saddle he bestrode. Falkayn stopped at the required distance of seven paces (which, he suspected, gave the Ershoka by the throne time to intervene if he should make an assassin's lunge) and saluted. "Where is your companion?" asked the Emperor sharply. He was middle-aged, his fur still sleekly red-black, his beginning paunch hidden under a scarlet robe. One hand clutched a jeweled scepter which was also a businesslike spear.

"An officer of the household troops invited us on a tour of your 'city, most noble," Falkayn explained. "Not wishing to be both absent—"

"What officer?" Jadhadi leaned forward. The nearest of his Ershoka, a woman who would have made a better Valkyrie were she not battle-scarred, gray-haired, and built like a brick washtub, dropped hand to sword. The others in attendance, scribes, advisers, magicians, younger sons learning the business of government, edged closer. Their eyes glowed in the murky light.

"Why . . . Hugh Padrick, his name was, most noble." "Ak-krrr. Will they be back soon?" "I don't know, most noble. Is there any haste?" "No. Perhaps not. Yet I mislike it." Jadhadi turned to a native guards officer. "Have them found and returned." To a scribe: "Post a notice that all Ershoka are forbidden contact with the delegates of the 'Olesotechnic'gir."

"Most noble!" The one other human not on sentry-go in the room —its length, between the polished malachite columns, was filled with alternate Ershoka and Otnakaji—stepped out from the courtiers. He was an old man, with beard and shoulder-length hair nearly white, but erect in his tunic. Falkayn had met him at other audiences: Harry Smit, senior of the phratry and its spokesman before the Emperor. "I protest."

The chamber grew suddenly very still. Shadows wove beneath the silver chandeliers, whose luminance shimmered on marble and fur and rich dark fabrics. Bitter incense smoked snakishly from braziers. The harpists at the far end of the chamber stopped their plangent chords, die ornate clock behind them seemed to tick louder.

Jadhadi stiffened in his saddle. The diamond eyes of the Beast glittered as hard as his own. "What say you?" the Emperor rasped.

Smit stood soldierly in front of him and answered: "Most noble, we Ershoka of your household also rage at Bobert Thorn's insubordination. He is no longer one of us, nor will we receive his followers among us again." (The woman guard acquired a look at those words, even more harsh than the situation warranted.) "Only let us march to Rangakora, and we will show you. that the house of Ershokh stands by the house of Deodakh no less now than in the years of the first Jadhadi. But you trust us not. You keep us idle, you spy on our every step, you assign other phratries to join us in the duties that were ours since this palace was raised. This we have borne in patience, knowing you cannot be sure how strong the call of blood may be. Nonetheless, we chafe. They grumble in the Iron House. Insult them so openly, and I may not be able to restrain them."

For a moment glances clashed. Then Jadhadi looked away, toward his chief magician. "What say you, Nagagir?" he asked sullenly.

That stooped Ikranankan in the habit emblemed with devices of power refrained from saying the obvious—that this room held fifty Ershoka who wouldn't stand for any rough treatment of their phra-try chief. Instead, he croaked shrewdly, "The matter seems slight, most noble. Very few guards will find their way to your distinguished guests. If they feel so strongly about it, what difference?"

"I was speaking in your own best interests," Harry Smit added in a mild voice.

Falkayn thought he saw an opening. "If we don't linger here, most noble, the issue hardly arises, does it?" he said. "Take my offer, and we'll be off to Rangakora; refuse, and we'll go home. What about a decision?"

"Krrr-ek." The Emperor gave in. "Cancel those orders," he said. To Falkayn: "I cannot decide blindly. We know so little about you. Even with friendly intentions, you could somehow bring bad luck. That was what I summoned you for today. Explain your rites to Nagagir, that he can evaluate them."

Oh no! Falkayn groaned to himself.

However, he found the session interesting. He'd wondered before about what seemed a total absence of religion but hadn't gotten around to querying Gujgengi. While he couldn't ask Nagagir to explain things point by point—might be as dangerous to reveal ignorance as to keep it—he gathered a certain amount of information indirectly. By claiming, sometimes falsely, not to understand various questions, he drew the magician out on the key items.

Only a moron or a tourist would generalize about an entire planet from a single culture. But you could usually figure that the most advanced people on a world had at least one of the more sophisticated theologies. And Katandara's was astoundingly crude. Falkayn wasn't sure whether to call that mishmash a religion or not. There weren't any gods: merely a normal order of things, an expected course of events, which had obtained ever since primordial Fire and Ice happened to get together and condense into the universe. But there were vaguely personified demons, powers, call them what you will; and they were forever trying to restore chaos. Their modus operandi was to cause disasters. They could only be held at bay through magic, ranging from a hundred everyday observances and taboos to the elaborate arcana which Nagagir and his college practiced.

And magicians weren't uniformly good, either. You never knew if somebody hadn't been corrupted and was lending his abilities to the service of Destruction.

The mythology sounded as paranoid as the rest of Ikranankan thought. Falkayn began to despair of getting a trade treaty okayed.

'Yes, indeed," he fended, "we of the Polesotechnic League are mighty wizards. We have studied deeply those laws of chance that govern the world. I'll be glad to teach you a most educational rite we call poker. And for keeping off bad luck, why, we can sell you talismans at unbelievably low prices, such as those precious herbs named four-leaved clovers."

Nagagir, though, wanted details. Falkayn's magic could be less effective than the human believed; Destruction sometimes lured people thus to their doom. It could even be black magic; the most noble would understand that this possibility had to be checked.

Not being Martin Schuster, to upset a whole cult by introducing the Kabbalah, Falkayn must needs stall. "I'lll prepare an outline, most noble, which we can study together." Lord help me, he said to himself. Or, rather, Chee Lan help me. Not Adzel~a Buddhist convert isn't good for much in this connection except soothing noises— but I've seen Chee tell fortunes at parties. I'll call her and we'll work out something. "If you would make a similar outline of your own system for me, that would be valuable."

Nagagir's beak dropped open. Jadhadi rose in his golden stirrups, poised his spear, and screeched, "You pry into our secrets?"

"No, no, no!" Falkayn spread his hands and sweated. "Not your classified information—I mean, not anything hidden from the uninitiated of the sorcerer phratries. Just the tilings that everybody knows, except a foreigner like me."

Nagagir cooled off. "That shall be done," he said, "albeit the writing will take time."

"How long?"

Nagagir shrugged. Nobody else was much more helpful. While mechanical clocks had been around for some centuries, and the Ershoka had made improvements, Katandara used these simply to equalize work periods. Born to a world without nights or seasons, the people remained vague about any interval shorter than one of their seventy-two-day years. Matters were worse in the boondocks where Muddlin Through sat. There, the Ikranankans just worked at whatever needed doing till they felt ready to knock off. Doubtless their attitude made for a good digestion. But Falkayn's innards curdled.

"May I go, most noble?" he asked. Jadhadi said yes, and Falkayn left before he spat in most noble's eye.

"Have some dinner brought me," he instructed the servant who guided him back, "and writing materials, and a jug of booze. A large jug."

"What kind of booze?"

"Ferocious, of course. Scat!" Falkayn dropped the curtain across his door.

An arm closed around his throat. "Guk!" he said, and reached for his guns while he kicked back.

His heel struck a heavy calf-length boot. The mugger's free hand clamped on his right wrist. Falkayn was strong, but he couldn't un-limber a weapon with that drag on him, nor the one on his left hip when another brawny Ershokh clung to that arm. He struggled for air. A third human glided into view before him. He lashed out with a foot, hit a shield, and would have yelped in anguish had he been

able. The shield pressed him back against the mugger. And behind it was the face of Stepha Carls. Her right hand pushed a soaked rag over his nostrils. The strangler eased off; reflex filled Falkayn's lungs; an acrid smell hit him like a blow and whirled him toward darkness.

V

Ordinarily, Hugh Padrick said, Old City wasn't the safest area in the world. Aside from being the home of phratries specializing in murder, theft, strong-arm robbery—plus less antisocial occupations like gambling and prostitution—it was a skulking place for the remnants of earlier cycles, who resented the Deodakh conquest. Ershoka went down there in groups. However, Adzel counted as a group by himself.

"But I don't want to provoke a conflict," the Wodenite said.

"Hardly reckon you will," Padrick grinned. In undress uniform, tunic, trousers, boots, cloak, sword and knife, he was a big young man. His curly brown hair framed rugged features, where a new-looking beard grew beneath a Roman nose. His conversation had been interesting on the several occasions when he dropped in at the apartment. And Adzel, whose bump of curiosity was in proportion to the rest of him, couldn't resist the guardsman's offer of a conducted tour.

They strolled out the palace gates and across New City. The Wodenite drew stares but caused no sensation. News had gotten around about the Emperor's guests. And the educated class had some knowledge of astronomy.

"Did you humans teach them that?" Adzel asked when Padrick remarked on it.

"A little, I reckon," the Ershokh replied. "Though I'm told they already knew about the planets going around the sun and being worlds, even had a notion the stars are other suns."

"How could they? In this perpetual daylight—"

"From the Rangakorans, I think. That's a city with more arts than most. And close enough to Twilight that their explorers could go clear into the Dark for charting stars."

Adzel nodded. Atmospheric circulation must keep the far side reasonably warm. Even the antipodes of Subsolar would hardly get below minus fifty degrees or so. For the same reason, as well as the planet being smaller and the sun having a larger angular diameter, there was less edge effect here than on Earth. Neither the poles nor the border of Twilight differed radically in climate from the temperate zones.

Natives who ventured into the frozen lands would be handicapped by poor night vision. But after establishing fuel depots, they'd have fire on hand. Probably the original motive for such a base had been mining. Scientific curiosity came later.

"In fact," Padrick murmured, "Rangakora's a lot better town than this. More comfortable and more, uh, civilized. Sometimes I wish our ancestors had met the Rangakorans before they joined with a slew of barbarians invading a busted empire." He clipped his mouth shut and glanced around to make sure he hadn't been overheard.

Beyond the inner wall, the ground fell abruptly. Buildings grew progressively older, weathered gray blocks crowding each other, shut doors marked with the symbols of long-dead civilizations. In market sections, females occupied booths, crying their husbands' wares, food, drink, cloth, pelts, handicrafts. In the workshops behind them, iron rang, potters' wheels whirred, pedal-driven looms whickered. But the shops themselves were locked away from public sight, lest a demon or a wicked magician find ways to cause an accident.

Traffic was brisk, raucous, aggressive in fighting its way through the narrow sand streets. Planters' carts, drawn by spans of karikuts, loaded with Chakoran produce, creaked past near-naked porters with burdens on their shaven heads, but yielded to swaggering Shekheji caravaneers. A flatbed wagon was guarded by none less than several Tiruts, for it carried stalks spliced and glued together to make timber, more costly than bronze. Awkward when they must walk rather than leap, a dozen zandaras bore Lachnakoni come to trade hides for city goods; the desert dwellers gripped their lances tight and peered warily from behind their veils. Noise surfed around, harsh Ikranankan babble, rumblings, groanings, footfalls, clangor, and dust and smoke swirled with a thousand sharp smells.

No one disputed Adzel's right of way. Indeed, quite a few tried to climb straight up the nearest wall. A hundred beaked faces goggled fearfully off the verge of every flat roof. Padrick carried high a staff with the Deodakh flag, and of course some word about the strangers had penetrated this far. But the ordinary Katandaran didn't seem very reassured.

"Why is that one in the brown robe making signs at us, from yonder alley?" Adzel asked.

"He's a wizard. Taking your curse off the neighborhood. Or so he hopes." Padrick was hard to hear above the voice-roar that was rising toward a collective shriek.

"But I wouldn't curse anybody!"

"He doesn't know that. Anyhow, they reckon anything new is likely black-magical."

An attitude which evidently prevailed in high society, too, Adzel reflected. That would help account for Jadhadi's reluctance to ally himself with the League envoys. I must discuss this with David when I get hack.

Padrick spent some time showing points of interest: a statue five thousand Earth-years old, the palace of a former dynasty turned into a warehouse, a building whose doorway was an open beak . . . museum stuff. Adzel paid more attention to the imposing houses of several great phratries, where the seniors lived and member families held council. Though they took part in the present government, these blood groups had not changed their headquarters to New City. Why should they? Empires, languages, civilizations, the march and countermarch of history, all were ephemeral. Only the phratry endured.

"The House of the Stone Ax," Padrick pointed. "Belongs to the Dattagirs. Their senior still carries that ax. Flint head; nobody knows when it was made, except must've been before metalworking." He yawned. "You getting bored? Let's go where we can find some life. Old City."

"Won't they avoid me there, too?" Adzel asked. He hoped not. It pained him that mothers should snatch their cubs and run when he appeared—such cute, fuzzy little infants, he'd love to hold one for a while.

"Not so much," Padrick said. "Less scared of black magic, seeing as a lot of them are black magicians themselves."

Down they went, past a ruined wall and into the casbah. The houses they found were more tall and narrow than those of later eras, shoulder to shoulder with overhanging balconies so that a bare strip of plum-colored sky showed overhead and shadows were thick purple. Living in a more prosperous time, when the land was not quite as arid, the builders had cobbled their streets. Adzel's hooves rang loud on the stones, for this was a silent quarter, where cloaked dwellers passed on furtive errands and only the keening of a hidden harp resounded. Along the way, that toppled toward the sea bed, Adzel could look back to the red-tinged cliffs above the whole city; and down, to the remnants of wharves among the reeds where Lake Urshi glimmered.

Padrick stopped. "What say you of a drink?"

"Well, I like your brew—" Adzel broke off. The transceiver at his neck had come alive with Falkayn's voice.

"What the demons!" Padrick sprang back. His sword hissed from the scabbard. A pair of Ikranankans, squatting before a doorway across the lane, gathered their ragged capes around them and vanished inside.

Adzel waved a soothing hand and finished his Latin conversation with Falkayn. "Don't be alarmed," he said. "A bit of our own magic, quite safe. A, ah, a spell against trouble, before entering a strange house."

"That could be useful, I grant." Padrick relaxed. " 'Specially hereabouts."

"Why do you come if you find danger?"

"Booze, gambling, maybe a fight. Gets dull in barracks. C'mon."

"I, ah, believe I had better return to the palace."

"What? When the fun's only beginning?" Padrick tugged Adzel's arm, though he might as well have tried to haul a mountain.

"Another time, perhaps. The magic advised me—"

Padrick donned a hurt expression. "You're no friend of mine if you won't drink my liquor."

"Forgive me," Adzel capitulated. "After your great kindness, I would not be discourteous." And he was thirsty; and Falkayn hadn't intimated there was any hurry.

Padrick led the way through a half-rotted leather curtain. A wench sidled toward him with a croaked invitation, saw he was human, and withdrew. He chuckled. 'The stews are no use to an Ershokh, worse luck," he remarked. "Oh, well, things are free and easy in the Iron House."

As the Wodenite entered, stillness fell on the crowded, smoky room. Knives slid forth at the wicker tables where the patrons sat. Torches guttering in sconces threw an uneasy light—dim and red to Adzel, bright to a native—on sleazy garments, avian faces, unwinking eyes. Padrick set down his flag and raised his hands. "Peace between our kindred," he called. "You know me, Hugh of the Household, I've stood many a round. This is the Emperor's guest. He's big but gentle, and no demon's trailing him. Any demon 'ud be scared to."

A drunk in a corner cackled laughter. That eased the atmosphere somewhat. The customers returned to their drinks, though they kept looking sideways and doubtless their mutterings were now chiefly about this dragonish alien. Padrick found a backless chair and Adzel coiled on the dirt floor across from him. The landlord gathered courage to ask what they wanted. When Padrick pointed to Adzel and said munificently, "Fill him up," the Ikranankan cocked his head, calculated probable capacity, and rubbed his hands.

The brandy, or gin or arrack or whatever you wanted to call a liquor distilled from extraterrestrial fruits, was no more potent than concentrated sulfuric acid. But it had a pleasant dry flavor. Adzel tossed off half a liter or so. "I must not be greedy," he said.

"Don't be shy. This is on me." Padrick slapped a fat purse. "We draw good pay, I must say that for him on the Beast."

"I have been wondering. Surely not all the Ershoka live in the Iron House."

"No, no. You serve there between getting your commission, if you do, and getting married. And it's phratry headquarters. But families take homes throughout New City, or they go to one of our ranches, or whatever they like. After marrying, women usually lay down their arms. Men go drill once a year and naturally join the colors in an important war."

"How then did Bobert Thorn's contingent dare revolt? Their families at home were hostage to the Emperor."

"Not so. If he touched a one of those left behind, we'd all rise, from Harry Smit on down to the youngest drummer boy, and set his head on a pike. But anyhow, a lot of the wives and kids went along. That's usual, if there's a siege or an extended campaign. Women make perfectly good camp guards, against these flimsy Ikranankans, and they're our quartermasters and—" Padrick finished listing their functions.

That wouldn't have been feasible, under such primitive conditions, if this were Earth. But few if any native germs affected humans. It made another reason why the Ershoka .were prime soldiers. Before preventive medicine becomes known, disease thins armies more cruelly than battle.

"I sympathize with your plight," Adzel said. "It cannot be easy, when you are so close-knit, to be in conflict with your own relatives."

"Who said we were?" Padrick bridled. "That doddering Smit? The phratry bonds weren't so strong when he was growing up. He'd never get anyone my age to march against Thorn." He drained his beaker and signaled for more. "But seems the Iron House will obey its officers enough to stay neutral."

To change a difficult subject, Adzel asked if he had seen Stepha Carls since her return. "I sure to curses have!" Padrick said enthusiastically. "What a girll"

"A pleasant, if impulsive personality," Adzel agreed. "I wasn't talking about personality. Though truth, she's tough and smart as any man. Here's to Stepha!"

Beakers clunked together. Seeing the dragon so convivial, the house relaxed yet more. Presently an Ikranankan drinking buddy of Padrick's drifted over to his table and said hello. "Siddown!" the Ershokh bawled. "Have one on me." "I really should return," Adzel said.

"Don't be stupid. And don't insult my good friend Rakshni. He'd like to make your 'quaintance."

Adzel shrugged and accepted more booze. Others came to join the party. They started yarning, then they started arguing about the Rangakora situation—not very heatedly, since nobody in Old City cared what happened to the parvenu Emperor—and then they had a short brawl between three or four cutthroats that broke the last ice, and then they began toasting. They toasted their phra-tries and they toasted the wenches cuddling in among them and they toasted the memory of good King Argash and they toasted the Yanjeh River that kept Katandara alive and they toasted Lake Urshi that took charge of so many inconvenient corpses and they toasted Hugh Padrick often because he was buying and about then they lost track and the tetrahedral dice commenced to rattle and all in all they had quite a time. Booze was cheap and Padrick's purse was full. The party ended at last more because a majority had passed out on the floor than because he went broke.

"I . . . mus' . . . really must ... go back," said Adzel. His legs seemed more flexible than he preferred, and his tail had made up its own mind to wag. That demolished most of the furniture, but the landlord didn't object. He had passed out, too.

"Uh, yeh, yeh, reckon so." Padrick lurched erect. "Duty calls."

"In a shrill unpleasant voice," Adzel said. "My friend, you have uh—hid—wrong concep'. If you were at one wi' the universe—now please don' fall inna common error iden'ifying Nirvana with annihilation, matterfack's f be achieved in this life—" He was no zealot, but he felt this fine chap reefing beside him deserved at least to have an accurate understanding of Mahayana Buddhism. So he lectured the whole way back. Padrick sang songs. Natives scurried out of the way.

"—an' so," Adzel droned, "you see reincarnation not at all necesshry to the idea uh Karma—"

"Wait." Padrick halted. Adzel bent his neck down to regard him. They were near the gates of New City.

"Why, whuzzuh mazzuh?"

"Remembered an errand." The Ershokh was acting sober with unexpected swiftness. Had he really matched the others drink for drink? Adzel hadn't noticed. "You go on."

"But I uz jus' coming to the mos' in'eresting part."

"Later, later." Wind ran down the empty street, driving sand, and ruffled the bronze hair. No one else was in sight. Odd, thought Adzel hazily. The citizens had retreated from him before, but not to that extent. And there was no equivalent of night time; the same proportion were always awake.

"Well, thank you f'r a (whoops!) ver' inshuck—insturruck—insurrect—in-struc-tive 'shperience." Adzel offered his hand. Padrick took it hurriedly, almost embarrassedly, and loped off. The sword jingled at his belt.

A strange place, this. Adzel's thoughts turned sentimentally back to Woden, the dear broad plains under the brilliant sun, where his hooves spurned kilometers . . . and after the chase, the fellowship of the campfire, friends, children, females. . . . But that was long behind him. His family having been close associates of the League factor, they had wanted him to get a modern education; and he'd gotten one, and now he was so changed that he would never feel at home among the hunters. The females he didn't miss, being sexually stimulated only by the odor of one in rutting season. But a certain sense of belonging, an innocence, was forever gone. He wiped his eyes and trotted on, weaving from side to side of the street. "There he comes!"

Adzel jerked to a stop. The space before the New City wall was a broad plaza. It swarmed with soldiers. He had some troubre estimating how many, for they kept doubling when he looked at them, like amoebas; but a lot, and every one a native. The gates were shut, with a line .of catapults in front.

At cavalry troop bounded forward. "Halt, you!" shouted the leader. His lance head flashed bloody in the red light. "I awready halted," said Adzel reasonably.

Though uneasy, the Imperial zandaras were well disciplined. . They moved to encircle him. "Most noble," called the troop leader, in a rather nervous tone, "let us talk. Trouble is afoot and the Emperor, ak-krrr, desires your presence."

Adzel clapped a hand to his stomach—the scutes rang—and bowed. His neck kept on going till his snout hit the ground. That annoyed him, but he hung on to urbanity. "Why, sure, any ol' thing t' oblizhe. Le's go."

"Uk-k-k,. as a matter of form only, most noble, the Emperor wishes you to, krrr-ek, wear these badges of dignity." The officer waved forward a foot soldier, who obeyed without visible happiness. He carried-a set of chains.

"What?" Adzel backed off. His mind wobbled. "Hold, there!" the officer cried. "Hold or we shoot!" The catapult . crews swiveled their weapons about. One of those engines • could 'drive a steel-headed shaft through even a Wodenite. "Bu-bu-buh wha's wrong?" Adzel wailed.

"Everything. The demons must have broken all barriers. Your associate has vanished,, with a good score of Ershoka. When he learned this, the Emperor sensed treachery and had the Iron House surrounded. Those inside grew angry and would not surrender. They shot at our own people!" The officer ran clawlike fingers through his ruff. His cloak flapped in the wind, his zandara made a skittish leap. Crossbows cocked where lances were not couched; his troopers held their ring about the Wodenite.

"What?" Confound that liquor! And no anti-intoxicants on hand. Adzel thumbed this) switch of his transceiver, "David! Where are you? Whuh hajfpen?" Silence answered.

"David! 'Merzh'ncy! Help!" •

"Now keep still," the officer chattered, "Hold out your wrists first. If you are blameless, you shall not be harmed."

Adzel switched to the ship's wavelength. "Chee! You there?"

"Of course I am there," said the waspish voice. "Where else would I be but where I am?"

Adzel recited a tantra or two under his breath. The beneficent influence cleared some of his private fog. He blurted out an explanation. I'll go long wi'm," he said. "Peaceful. You come in uh ship. They'll got . . . they will have to lemme go then, an' we'll look f David."

"At once," said Chee.

A squad of magicians made frantic passes. Adzel turned to the officer. "Yes, 'course I'll hie th' Emperor." From the radio came an indistinct mumble. Chee must be talking with someone else. He extended his arms and opened his mouth. It was meant for a smile, but it showed an alarming-array of fangs.

The officer pricked the chain-bearing infantryman with his lance. "Go on," he said. "Do your duty."

"You do" it," whimpered the other.

"What do I hear? Do you contradict an order?"

"Yes." The infantryman backed away. His mounted comrades opened a sympathetic way for him.

"Oh, come now," said Adzel. He wanted to see Jadhadi and get, to the bottom of this affair as fast- as possible. He sprang forward. The cavalry yelped and scuttled aside.

"But I on'y wanna help!" Adzel roared. He caught the soldier, removed the chains, and set him down again. The Ikranankan curled into a little ball.

Adzel hunkered on his tail and considered. The links had gotten fouled. "How yuh 'spec' me to fasten these?" he asked pettishly. The more he tried to unsnarl the mess, the worse it got. The Imperial army watched in fascination.

A shout broke from the transceiver. "Adzel! Get away! The un-sanctified creature of unmentionable habits has caught me!"

There followed sounds of scuffling, a sharp blow, and nothing.

For a lunatic instant Adzel thought he was back on the ship playing Lord Love a Duck: seven card stud, low hole card wild. He had a trey in reserve, which with another trey on the board completed a royal flush, and he raised till his pay was hocked for the next six months, and then came the final draw and he got a deuce. The alcohol fumes blew out of him and he realized he wasn't actually in that situation. It merely felt that way.

The League trained its spacemen to react fast. He continued fumbling with the chains while his eyes flicked back and forth, assessing the terrain. Given a quick dash—yes, in yonder direction— and a certain amount of luck, he could make a break. But he mustn't hurt any of these poor misguided souls, if that could possibly be avoided.

He gathered his thews and leaped.

A cavalry trooper was in his way. He scooped the Ikranankan up, zandara and all, and threw him into the detachment of spearmen beyond. Their line of grounded pikes broke apart. He bounded through. Yells exploded around him, with a sleet of crossbow quarrels. A catapult shaft buzzed his ears. The mounted officer laid lance in rest and charged from the side. Adzel didn't see him in time. The steel point smote. It didn't go in but met the radio at the Wodenite's throat and smashed the case open. Adzel brushed past, still gathering speed. The zandara spun like a top, the rider went off in an arc. A blank wall loomed ahead, four stories high. Adzel hit it at full velocity. Momentum carried him upward. He grabbed the verge and hauled himself over. The rough-surfaced stones gave sufficient ,grip. A catapult bolt struck by his flank, knocking out splinters of rock. Adzel crossed the roof, jumped to the next, dropped into an alley, and headed back toward Old City.

No help for him there, of course, except that he'd be hard to track through that maze. He'd get to Lake Urshi. They had nothing to chase a swimmer but clumsy rafts that he could easily outdistance. Once on the far shore, he'd strike across the Chakora. No word could reach Haijakata ahead of him— But damn the loss of his transceiver!

Well, Chee's would serve, after he'd bailed the little fluffbrain out of whatever trouble she'd gotten into. They'd raise ship, retrieve their flitter at the palace, and start looking for David. If David was alive. If they themselves stayed alive.

VI

Perhaps there was something to the Katandaran theory that supernatural beings were uniformly malevolent. If Chee Lan had been aboard the spacecraft when Adzel called— But she herself, an uncompromising rationalist, would have said her luck, though bad, involved no great improbability. She had been spending almost half her time with Gujgengi. Both were anxious to learn as much as possible about each other's civilizations.

One new idea she introduced, not entirely to his liking, was that of regular appointments. Haijakata's lone clock kept such slapdash time that she presented him with a watch. After that, drums rolled and flags got replaced to signal a change of guard with some predictability; and she knew when to go uphill for another session.

The computer, which she had set to remind her, did so. "You might be more respectful," she grumbled, laying down her book. She had pretty well convinced her shipmates that the Cynthian volumes she had along were philosophical works (in fact, they were slushy love novels) but still she enjoyed the chance to read without inane interruptions.

"You did not program me to be respectful," said the mechanical voice.

"Remind me to. No, cancel that. Who cares about a machine's opinions?"

"No one," said Muddlehead, which did not have rhetorical units.

Chee hopped off her bunk and made ready. Transceiver and taper in one hand, a ladylike needle gun at her waist, were all she needed. "Standby orders as usual," she said, and went out the lock.

Muddlehead hummed quietly to itself. Standby meant that, although the Katandaran language had been added to its memory bank, it would only obey commands—voice, radio, or code—from one of the crew. However, Chee had connected the external speaker, in case she ever wanted to ask from the outside what the sensors observed.

The entry valve locked behind her and she scampered down the ramp. One hatch remained open immediately above the landing jacks, for an extra bolt-hole. There was no danger of natives wandering in and causing damage. Apart from their awe of the ship, the hatch merely led to the empty No. 4 hold, which no Ikranankan could harm, and Muddlin Through wouldn't operate the door from it to 'tween-decks for anyone but a crew member. Chee prided herself on thinking ahead.

The crimson sun was whiter and brighter to her eyes than to Falkayn's or Adzel's. Nonetheless she found the landscape shadowy, swore when an unseen twig snagged the fur she had spent an hour grooming, and was glad to reach the highway. And the air drank moisture from her nose like Falkayn drinking after a cruise when the Scotch gave out; and the wind was as cold as van Rijn's heart; and it carried from the Chakora scents of vegetation akin to creosote and Gorgonzola. Oh, to be back on Ta-chih-chien-pi, Life-home-under-Sky, again, in a treetop house among forest perfumes! Why had she ever left?

Money, of course. Which she was currently not making, at a furious rate. She bottled her tail and hissed.

The sentries at the gate touched sword to beak in salute as her small form passed. After she was safely beyond, they fingered charms and whispered incantations. True, the newcomers had not caused any trouble so far, and in fact promised great benefits. But demons are notorious liars.

Chee would not have been surprised, or even offended, had she seen. More and more she was discovering how immensely conservative these Ikranankans were, how suspicious of everything new. That accounted for their being still prescientific, in spite of a fantastically long recorded history. She hadn't yet developed any explanation for the attitude itself.

She sprang lithely among the plaid-woven huts. A female sat outside one, putting food in the mouth of an infant. To that extent, Ikranankans were like Cynthians. Neither had mammary glands, the young being born equipped to eat solid food. (Cynthians use their lips to suck, not suckle.) But there the resemblance ended. An Ikranankan's wife was little, ruffless, drab, and subservient. A female Cynthian, who must carry her cub through the trees—though not strictly arboreal, among endless forests the race has made the branches a second environment—is bigger than her mate, and every bit as tough a carnivore. Matrilineal descent is the norm, polyandry occurs in numerous cultures, and the past has known some outright matriarchies. Chee supposed that was why her planet was so progressive.

She popped in the door of the large cabin where Gujgengi had quartered himself. The envoy was seated at a table with his host, garrison commandant Lalnakh. They were playing some game that involved dropping colored sticks onto a board divided in squares.

Chee soared to the tabletop, nearly upsetting the frail wicker structure. "What's that?" she asked.

Lalnakh scowled. Gujgengi, more used to her unceremonious ways, said, "It is called akritel," and explained. The rules were rather complicated, but in essence the game amounted to betting on how the sticks would fall. "Quite popular," Gujgengi added.

"Do you want to make your play or do you not?" Lalnakh snapped.

"Indeed, indeed. Give me time." Gujgengi adjusted his spectacles and pondered the distribution of rods that had already been dropped. The less likely a configuration he made, the more he would win; but if he failed to get a score within the range he declared, he would lose correspondingly. "I do believe my luck is normal today," he said, nodding at the stack of coins already before him. A galactic would have spoken of a run of good luck. "I will try to—" He chose his sticks and made his declaration.

"You shouldn't guess," Chee said. "You should know."

Lalnakh glared. "What do you mean?"

"Not the actual outcome," Chee said. "But what the chances are. Whether the chance of winning is good enough to justify the bet you make."

"How in Destruction can that be calculated?" Gujgengi asked.

"Play, curse you!" Lalnakh said.

Gujgengi rattled his sheaf of sticks and let them drop. He made his point.

"Arrr-k!" Lalnakh growled. "That does for me." He shoved his last coins across the table.

Gujgengi counted. "You appear to owe more," he said.

Lalnakh made a vile remark and fished in the pouch below his doublet. He threw a dull-white disk into Gujgengi's stack. "Will you take that? Rangkoran work. I've carried it for a talisman. But the demons were too strong for it today."

Gujgengi wiped his glasses and squinted. Chee had a look herself. The medallion bore a pleasing design, a wreath on the obverse and a mountainscape on the reverse. But part of the silver had rubbed off. "Why, this is plated bronze," she said.

"An art they have there, among others," Gujgengi replied. "They put the metal in a bath and—I know not what. Strong magic. I was there once on an embassy, and they had me grip two copper threads coming out of a box, and something bit me. They laughed." He recollected his dignity. "But at any rate, being so magical, objects like this are prized. That makes yet another reason why the conquest of Rangakora is desirable."

"Which we could accomplish for you," Chee pointed out. "And, incidentally, we can sell you any amount of plated stuff ourselves."

"Ak-krrr. Understand, most noble, I have no audiority to make so, uk-k-k, momentous?—yes, so momentous a decision. I am simply the Emperor's representative."

"You can make recommendations, can't you?" Chee pursued. "I know messengers go back and forth all the time."

"Uk-k-k, indeed. Shall we continue our previous discussions?"

"I'm going," Lalnakh said surlily.

That was when the transceiver spoke.

"Chee! You there?"

Adzel's voice, in badly slurred Anglic. Was the big slubber drunk? Chee hoped no Ershoka were present. Her skin prickled. "Of course—" she began, more tartly than she felt.

Lalnakh sprang aside, yanking out his dagger. Gujgengi rose and made industrious signs against evil. His glasses slipped off his beak to interrupt him.

"What the plague is this?" Lalnakh demanded.

"Where are my spectacles?" Gujgengi complained from the floor. "I cannot see my spectacles. Has a demon run away with them?"

"Protective magic," said Chee quickly in Katandaran, while die radio muttered with noise of a large crowd. "Nothing to fear."

"Help me find my spectacles," Gujgengi quacked. "I need my spectacles."

Lalnakh swore and retrieved diem. Chee heard Adzel out. Her fur stood on end. But the self-possession of trouble came upon her, and her mind raced like a cryogenic calculator.

"At once," she said, and looked at the Ikranankans. They stared back, stiff and hostile.

"I must go," she said. "My magic has warned me of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?" Lalnakh rapped.

Gujgengi, more accustomed by now to outworld marvels, pointed a lean finger. "That was the monster's voice," he said. "But he is in the capital!"

"Well, yes," Chee said. Before she could improvise a story, Gujgengi went on:

"That must be a thing for speaking across distances. I had begun to suspect you possessed some such ability. Now, now, most noble, please do not insult me by denying the obvious. He has called you to his assistance, has he not?"

Chee could only nod. The Ikranankans trod closer, towering above her. She didn't want to be caught, later, in an outright lie; bad for future relations, which were ticklish enough already. "The Ershoka have rebelled," she said. "They are barricaded in the, what you call it, the Iron House. Adzel wants me to come and overawe them."

"No, you don't," Lalnakh told her; and Gujgengi: "I am distressed, most noble, but since your fellows arrived at the palace, I have been sent explicit orders that your conveyance is to remain in place."

"Sandstorms and pestilence!" Chee exclaimed. "Do you want a civil war? That's what you'll get, if the Ershoka aren't brought into line, and fast." The racket from the radio grew louder. "Use your judgment for a change. If we wanted Jadhadi's ruin, would I not sit here and let it happen?"

They paused. Lalnakh looked uncertain. Gujgengi scratched beneath his beak. "A point," he murmured. "Yes, a distinct point."

The set broke into a roar. Metal belled, voices howled, thuds and bumps shivered the speaker. A thin Ikranankan cry: "Help, the beast is killing me!"

Lalnakh started. Sunlight slanting into the gloomy room touched his knife with red. "Is that friendly?" the officer said, low in his throat.

Chee pulled her gun. "Some misunderstanding," she chattered. "I true-speak that we are your friends, and I'll shoot anyone who calls me a liar." Adzel's mild basso hiccuped forth, above an iron rattle. "Hear that? He isn't fighting, is he?"

"No," Lalnakh said. "Feeding."

Chee poised on the table. "I shall go," she stated. "I suggest you do not try to stop me."

Gujgengi surprised her. She had taken him for a mere bumbling professor. He drew his sword and said quietly, "I am a Deodakh.

Did I fail to try, they would read my ghost out of the phratry."

Chee hesitated. She didn't want to kill him. That would also louse up future negotiations. A disabling shot?

Her attention was distracted from Lalnakh. The officer's hand swept through an arc. His knife smashed into her weapon. The impact tore it from her hand. He threw himself over her. She had barely time to cry a warning, then she was on the floor, pinioned.

"Hak-k-k," Lalnakh grated. "Keep still, you!" He cuffed her so that her head rang, snatched off her transceiver and threw it aside.

"Now, now," Gujgengi chided. "No violence, most noble, no violence until we learn whether violence is necessary. This is all most unfortunate." He saluted Chee, where she lay in Lalnakh's grasp. Simultaneously, he crushed the radio under his foot. "I shall dispatch a messenger at once. Until word comes, you shall be treated as honorably as circumstances allow."

"Wait a bit!" Lalnakh said. "I am the garrison chief."

"But my dear friend, it may conceivably turn out that some accommodation can be reached."

"I doubt it. These creatures are demons, or demon-possessed. But jail her any way you like, as long as I can inspect your security arrangements. What I am going to do is post a guard on that flying house. With catapults, in case the giant arrives, and orders to kill if he does."

"Well," said Gujgengi, "that is not a bad idea."

¦

VII

Falkayn didn't black out. Rather, consciousness fragmented, as if he were at a final stage of intoxication. His mind went off on a dozen different tracks, none involving will power.

Sagging against the wall as the Ershoka released him, he was dizzily aware of its hardness at his back; of how the floor pressed with a planet's mass on his boot soles; of air chill and dry in his nostrils, soughing in his lungs, and the bitter drug odor; of his heart slamming; of red light a-sheen on the naked floor, and the dusky sky in a window across its expanse, which seemed to be tilting; of the big blond man who had mugged him, and the equally big redhead who supported him; of the redhead's nose, whose shape had some cosmic and probably sinister significance— He thought once that the Ikra-

nankan stuff he'd breathed must have pharmaceutical possibilities; then he thought of his father's castle on Hermes and that he really must write home more often; but in half a second he was remembering a party at Ito Yamatsu's place in Tokyo Integrate; and this, by an obvious association, recalled several young women to him; which in turn led him to wonder—

"Give me a hand, Owen," Stepha Carls muttered. "His batman'll be back soon. Or anybody might chance by."

She began to strip off Falkayn's clothes. The process could have been embarrassing if he weren't too muzzy to care, or fun if she'd been less impersonal. And, of course, if the blond warrior hadn't assisted. Falkayn did try to observe various curves as she handled him, but his brain wouldn't stay focused.

"All right." Stepha jerked her thumb at a bundle on the floor. The yellow-haired man unrolled it, revealing Ershoka garb. The cloth was coarse, the pants reinforced with leather: a cavalry field outfit. She started to dress Falkayn. Her job wasn't easy, the way he lolled in the redhead's arms.

The stupor was leaving, though. Almost, he tried to shout. But drilled-in caution, rather than wit, stopped him. Not a chance, yet. However, strength flowed back, the room no longer whirled, and presently they'd buckle on his dagger belt. . . .

Stepha did so. He could have whipped out the knife and driven it into her back where she squatted before him. But that would be a dreadful waste. He lurched, sliding aside from the redhead. His hand brushed across the dagger haft, his fingers clamped, he drew and stabbed at the man's chest.

At! There was no blade, only a squared-off stub barely long enough to keep the thing in its sheath. The Ershokh took a bruise, no doubt; he recoiled with a whispered curse. Falkayn, still wobbly, staggered for the doorway. He opened his mouth to yell. The blond grabbed his arms and Stepha her wet rag. Tiger swift, she bounded forward and crammed it down his gape.

As he spun into pieces again, he saw her grin and heard her murmur genially, "Nice try. You're a man of parts in more ways than one. But we reckoned you might be."

She bent to take his guns. Light coursed along her braids. "Hoy!" said the blond. "Leave those."

"But they're his weapons," Stepha said. "I told you what they can do."

"We don't know what else they're good for, what black magic might be in 'em. Leave them be, I said."

The redhead, rubbing his sore ribs, agreed. Stepha looked mutinous. But there was scarcely time to argue. She sighed and rose. "Put the stuff in his cabinet, then, so they'll think he just stepped out, and let's go."

With a man on either side supporting him by his elbows, Falkayn lurched into the hall. He was too loaded to remember what the fuss was about and obeyed their urging mechanically. In this residential part of the palace, few were abroad. On the downramp they passed his servant, returning with a jug of ferocious booze. The Ikranankan didn't recognize him in his new clothes. Nor did anyone in the more crowded passages below. One official asked a question. "He got drunk and wandered off," Stepha said. "We're taking him to barracks."

"Disgraceful!" said the bureaucrat. Confronted by three armed and touchy Ershoka who were sober, he did not comment more.

After some time Falkayn was so far recovered that he knew they'd come to a sally port in the north wall. Cityward, the view was blocked by a row of houses. Some twenty Ershoka, most of them men, waited impatiently in battle dress. Four Tiruts, the sentries, lay bound, gagged, and indignant. The humans slipped out.

The canyon of the Yanjeh lay west of town, marked by leafy sides and the loud clear rush of water. There, too, the upland highway entered. Here was sheer desert, which rose sharply in crags, cliffs, and talus slopes, ruddy with iron oxide and sun, to the heights. In such a wilderness, the Ershoka vanished quickly.

"Move, you!" The blond jerked Falkayn's arm. "You're undoped by now."

"Uh-h-h, somewhat," he admitted. Normality progressed with every stone-rattling stride. Not that that did him much good, hemmed in by these thugs.

After a while they found a gulch. A good fifty zandaras milled about in the care of two Ikranankan riders. Several were pack animals, most were mounts and remounts. The band swung into their saddles. Falkayn got on more gingerly. The natives headed back toward town.

Stepha took the lead. They climbed until they were above the cliffs, on dunes where nothing lived but a few bushes. At their backs, and northward, Yanjeh Belt shone green. The city gloomed below them, and beyond, the Chakora reached flat and murky to the horizon. But they pointed themselves east and broke into full gallop.

No, hardly the word! Falkayn's zandara took off with an acceleration that nearly tore him from his seat. He knew a sick moment of free fall, then the saddle and his lower jaw rose and hit him. He flopped to the right. The man alongside managed to reach over and keep him from going off. By then the zandara was once more aloft. Falkayn bounced backward. He saved himself by grabbing the animal's neck. "Hoy, you want to strangle your beast?" someone yelled.

"As . . . a . . . matter . . . of . . . fact . . . yes," Falkayn gusted between bounces.

Around him gleamed helmets, byrnies, spearheads, gaudy shields, and flying cloaks. Metal clattered, leather creaked, footfalls drummed. Sweat and zandara musk filled the air. So did fine sand, whirled up in a cloud. Falkayn had a glimpse of Stepha, across the wild pack. The she-troll was laughing!

He gritted his teeth. (He had only meant to set them, but his mouth was full of sand.) If he was to survive this ride, he'd have to learn the technique.

Bit by bit, he puzzled it out. You rose slightly in the stirrups as the zandara came down, to take the shock with flexed knees. You swayed your body in rhythm with the pace. And, having thought yourself athletic, you discovered that this involved muscles you never knew you had, and that said muscles objected. His physical misery soon overwhelmed any speculation as to what this escapade meant.

A few times they stopped to rest and change steeds, and after some eternities to camp. That amounted to gulping down iron rations from the saddlebags, with a miserly drink of water from your canteens. Then you posted guards, got into your bedroll, and slept.

Falkayn didn't know how long he had been horizontal when Stepha roused him. "Go 'way," he mumbled, and burrowed back into the lovely dark. She grabbed a handful of hair and yanked. Eventually she dragged him to breakfast.

Their pace was easier now, though, and some of the aches worked themselves out of Falkayn. He began to notice things. The desert was getting hillier all the time, and a little more fertile, too. The sun behind him was lower, shadows stretched enormous in front, toward the Sundhadarta mountains, whose slate-blue bulk was slowly lifting over the world's edge. The Ershoka had relaxed, they joked and laughed and sang some rather bloodthirsty songs.

Near the end of the "day," a lone rider with a few spare animals overtook them. Falkayn started. Hugh Padrick, by Satan! The Ershokh waved affably at him and rode to the head of the parade to confer with Stepha.

Those two were still talking when the second camp was made, on a hilltop among scattered vividly yellow bushes. The Ershoka didn't go to sleep at once but built small fires and lounged about in companionable groups. Falkayn let another man unsaddle his zandaras, hobble them and turn them out to graze. Himself, he sat down with the intention of sulking but got up fast.

A shadow in the long light fell across him. Stepha stood there. He must admit she was a handsome sight, big, full-bodied, queenly featured. More used to the chill than he, she'd stripped to blouse and kilt, which further lightened his mood.

"Come join us," she invited.

"Do I have a choice?" he said hoarsely.

The gray eyes were grave on his. She touched his hand in an almost timid fashion. "I'm sorry, David. No way to treat you. Not only after what you did for me. No, you deserve better'n this in your own right. But won't you let me explain?"

He followed her less grudgingly than he made out, to a fire where Padrick sat toasting some meat on a stick. "Hullo," the Ershokh said. A grin flashed white in his grimy beard. "Hope you liked the ride so far."

"What's become of Adzel?" Falkayn demanded.

"Dunno. Last I saw, he was headed for the palace, drunk's a brew-master. Reckoned I'd better get out of town before the fun started, so I went back to Lake Urshi where I'd hid my animals and took off after you. Saw your dust a long ways off." Padrick lifted a leather bottle. "Took some booze."

"Do you suppose I'll drink with you, after—"

"David," Stepha pleaded. "Hear us out. I don't think your big friend can have gotten into deep trouble. They'd not dare hurt him when the little one still has your flyer. Or Jadhadi may decide right away you were snatched, 'stead of leaving of your will."

"I doubt that," Falkayn said. "A galactic might, but those Ikranankans see a conspiracy under every bed."

"We've made trouble for our own mates, too, in the Iron House,"

Stepha reminded him. "Could come to blows between them and the beak faces, what with nerves being strung so tight on both sides."

"That's a hell of a way to run a phratry," Falkayn said.

"No! We're working for their good. Only listen to us."

Stepha gestured at a saddle blanket spread over the ground. Falkayn yielded and lowered himself, reclining Roman fashion. The girl sat down beside him. Across the fire, Padrick chuckled tolerantly. "Dinner coming soon," he promised. "How about that drink?"

"Oh, the devil, all right!" Falkayn glugged. The thermonuclear liquid scorched some of the aches from him and blunted his worry about Adzel.

"You're Bobert Thorn's people, aren't you?" he asked.

"We are now," Stepha said. "Me alone, at first. You see, Thorn sends out spies, Ikranankans, that is. If they must be conquered, the Rangakorans would mostly rather have Ershoka than Deodaka; we seem to get along better. So some of their units are fighting on our side, and then there are the merchants and— Anyhow, it's, not hard for one to sneak out and mingle with the besiegers, claiming to be a highland trader come to see if he can peddle anything. Or whatever."

Rotten security, Falkayn reflected. How come, in a race that suspected everyone not an in-law of being an outlaw? . . . Well, yes, such clannishness would make for poor liaison between different kin-regiments. Which invited, if not espionage, at least the gathering of intelligence.

"Jadhadi's people also got wind of you," Stepha said. "I reckon he alerted his top officers, and somebody blabbed." Falkayn could imagine the process: a Tirut or Yandaji ordered by a Deodakh to have secrets from his own relatives, getting mad and spilling the beans on principle. "Just dim, scary rumors seeped down to the ranks, you understand. But our spies heard them, too. We didn't know what they meant, and had to find out. Twilight was still over the area, so I got clear without being seen, rustled me a couple of zandaras, and headed off. A patrol near Haijakata did notice me, though. My spare mount took a quarrel. I bloody near did myself." She laughed and rumpled Falkayn's hair. "Thanks, David."

"And, of course, when you sounded us out and learned we were on Jadhadi's side, you pretended to be likewise," he nodded, mainly to rub his head against her palm. "But why'd you take the risk of coming back to Katandara with us?"

"Had to do something, didn't I? You meant to break us. I didn't know what I could swing, but I did know there must be a lot of people who wished they'd been sent to Rangakora, too. And I knew nobody in the Iron House would give me away to the Ikranankans." Stepha grinned mischievously. "Oh, but old Harry Smit was madl He wanted to court-martial me on the spot. But too many others wouldn't have it. He settled for confining me to barracks while he tried to figure out some answer to the whole mess. That was a mistake. I could sit there and talk, whenever he wasn't around. I could guess who to talk most with, too—old friends and lovers that I knew well."

"Huh?" said Falkayn. Padrick looked smug.

"So we plotted," Stepha said. "We waited for a chance to act. Hugh hired a couple of his Old City buddies to buy animals and supplies and keep them stashed. We'd money enough between us, our gang. Then he went and got to know you. Plain, we'd never snatch you from Adzel. Would've been simpler if you'd gone out with Hugh. But when you let Adzel go first, we reckoned we'd better not lose more time. One by one, our people found excuses to stroll into town. Owen and Ross smuggled me out the back. We headed for your apartment. Nasty shock when you weren't there! But you must've gone to an Imperial audience, so we waited and hoped. Glad we did."

Falkayn took another comforting swig, rolled over on one elbow, and looked hard at the girl. "What's the point of this fantastic stunt?" he demanded.

"To stop you from helping Jadhadi," Padrick said. "Maybe even get you to help us. We're your fellow humans, after all."

"So are the Ershoka back in Katandara."

"But we're doing this for them also," Stepha insisted. "Why should our phratry be hirelings, and have to live under law and custom never meant for them, when they could be masters of their own country?"

"A better country than back yonder, anyhow," Padrick said.

"Bobert Thorn's thought," Stepha agreed. "He hoped the Ershoka would break from Jadhadi and come join him as soon as they learned what he'd done. Be tough, we know, cutting a way through the Imperial army. There'd be lives lost. But it could be done"—her voice rang forth—"and well worth the price!"

"You may have provoked matters so far by snatching me that the

Ershoka won't have any choice," Falkayn admitted bitterly. "And for what? Didn't I tell you that you can all be returned to Earth?"

Stepha's eyes widened. Her hand went to her mouth. "Oh! I forgot!"

"Too late now," Padrick laughed. "Besides, take time to fetch your flyers, right, David? Meanwhile, what's to happen at Rangakora? And . . . I'm not sure I'd want to leave. Earth ways may be too different, worse than Katandara."

"Very well," Falkayn said. "You've succeeded this far. You've made trouble in the capital. You've prevented our ship taking action till my mates find what's become of me. You may have driven a wedge between us and Jadhadi. But don't think we'll do your dirty work for you."

"I wish you would, though," Stepha murmured, and stroked his cheek.

"Now cut that out, girl! I come to curry Caesarism, not to raze it."

"No matter," said Padrick. "Long's your, uh, ship keeps hands off"—Falkayn had a brief giddy vision of Muddlin Through with hands—"we'll manage. And it'll sure do that while we've got you."

"Unless she rescues me, knocking down your damned walls in the process."

"They try," said Padrick, "and they'll find you in two pieces. We'll let 'em know that, if they do show up." He didn't even have the decency to sound grim.

"It'd be such a pity," Stepha cooed. "We've hardly begun our friendship, David."

"Meat's cooked," said Padrick.

Falkayn resigned himself. He didn't mean to stay passive longer than he must. However, food, drink, and a pretty woman constituted a situation which he could accept with an equanimity that would make Adzel proud of him. (Adzel, you scaly old mutt, are you safe? Yes. You've got to be. All you need do is radio Chee for help.) The conversation at dinner was amicable and animated. Padrick was a fine fellow after several drinks, and Stepha was a supernova. The only fault he could find, at length, was that they insisted on switching off the party to rest for the next stage. Dismal attitude.

His watch had been left behind with everything else, but as near as he could tell, the Ershoka had a well-developed time sense. The ancient cycles of Earth still governed them. An hour to get started, sixteen hours—with short breaks—to travel, an hour to make camp and relax, six hours' sleep, divided roughly between two changes of guard. Not that there was much to fear, in this wasteland.

But the country grew yet greener as the sun sank, until the Sundhadarta foothills were carpeted with mosslike growth, brooks rilled, and forests of plumed stalks swayed in the wind. Once clouds massed in the north, colored hot gold. The mountains rose sheer to east, aglow in the level red light. Falkayn saw snow peaks and glaciers. Above them the sky was a royal purple deepening toward black, where fifty stars and a planet glimmered. They were at the edge of the Twilight Zone.

Not only did the atmosphere diffuse enough light to make a belt of dusk; Ikrananka had a rather eccentric orbit, and so librated. The gloaming swept back and forth across these lands, once in each seventy-two-day year. At present it had withdrawn, and the sun stood a little above the western piedmont. The slopes reflected so much heat, and so much infrared got through at this altitude, that die region was actually warmer than Katandara. The precipitation of the cold season was melting, and rivers foamed down die cliffs. Falkayn understood now why Rangakora was coveted.

He estimated that the party had traveled about five Terrestrial days, covering some four hundred kilometers, when they turned south toward the eastern end of the Chakora. A shoulder thrust huge before them and they must climb, up toward the snow cone of Mount Gundra. Falkayn had gotten used to the saddle and let his zandara do the struggling while he admired the tremendous view and reminisced about his last session by the campfire. Padrick had gone off with some other girl, leaving him and Stepha alone. Well, not exactly alone; no privacy, with people scattered around; but still, he reflected, his captivity might turn out to have compensations. . . .

They rounded a precipice and Rangakora stood above them.

The city was built athwart a pass over the range, on a small plateau. A road of sorts wound heavenward from it, and on this side precipitously down toward the sea bottom. That glimmered misty, marshy, intensely green and gold. A river coursed near the wall. For the most part it was hidden by forest, but just above Rangakora it leaped over a sheer cliff and thundered in a waterfall crowned by rainbows. Falkayn caught his breath.

The Ershoka halted and drew together. Shields went onto arms, sabers into hands, crossbows were cocked and lances couched. Falkayn realized with a gulp that now was no time to contemplate scenery.

The plateau's verdure was scarred by feet. Campfires smoked around die city's rough walls, tents crowded and banners flew. Tiny at this remove, Jadhadi's people sat in clumps before the prize from which they had been expelled.

"We'll make a rush," Padrick said. The wind and the cataract boomed around his words. "Thorn's folk'll see us and sally forth to fetch us in."

Stepha brought her animal next to Falkayn's. "I'd not want you to get ideas about bolting and surrendering to the others," she smiled sweetly.

"Oh, hell," said Falkayn, who already had diem.

She looped a cord from her saddlebow to his zandara's bridle. Another girl tied his right ankle to the stirrup. He had often been told about the moral and psychological value of absolute commitment, but this seemed a bit extreme.

"Battle formation!" Padrick called. His sword flew clear. "Charge!"

The beasts bounded forward. Drums beat staccato alarm from die Imperial outposts. A cavalry squadron marshaled themselves and started full tilt to intercept. Their lances flashed intolerably bright.

VIII

Being as prone to disorderly conduct as most races, the Ikranankans needed jails. Haijakata's was a one-room cabin near the market square. An interior grid of stout stalks, closely lashed together, protected the woven outside walls against any tenants. If a prisoner wanted light, he could draw back the door curtain; but the wooden-barred gate beyond would remain locked. Furniture amounted to a straw tick and some clay utensils. Ghee had broken one of these and tried to cut her way out with a shard. It crumbled, showing that while her captors might be crazy, they were not stupid.

A click and rattle snapped her out of a rather enjoyable reverie. The gate creaked open, the curtain was pulled aside, relieving the purplish dusk, and Gujgengi's spectacles glittered. "I was just thinking about you," Chee said.

"Indeed?" The mandarin sounded flattered. "May I ask what?"

"Oh, something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead. What do you want?"

"I . . . uk-k-k . . . may I come in?" The curtain drew wider. Behind the gaunt, robed form, Chee saw a couple of armed and alert guards, and beyond them a few civilians haggling at the market booths. The quarantine had reduced trade to a minimum. "I wish to ascertain if you are satisfactorily provided for."

"Well, the roof keeps off the rain."

"But I have told you that rainfall is unknown west of Sundhadarta."

"Exactly." Ghee's glance fell wistful on the saber at Gujgengi's side. Could she lure him in alone and snatch that— No, he need only fend off an attack and holler. "And why can't I have my cigarettes? That is, those fire-tubes you have seen me put in my mouth."

"They are inside your house, most noble, and while the house does not appear to resent being guarded, it refuses to open for us. I asked."

"Take me there, and I will give it orders."

Gujgengi shook his head. "No, I regret. That involves too many unknown powers you might unleash. When the present, ak-krrr, deplorable misunderstanding has been cleared up, yes, indeed, most noble. I have dispatched couriers posthaste to Katandara, and we should receive word before long." Taking an invitation for granted, he stepped through. The soldiers closed the awkward padlock.

"Meanwhile poor Adzel arrives and gets himself killed by your hotheads," Chee said. "Pull that curtain, you dolt! I don't want those yokels gaping in at me."

Gujgengi obeyed. "Now I can scarcely see," he complained.

'Is that my fault? Sit down. Yes, there's the bedding. Do you want some booze? They gave me a crockful."

"Ek-k-k, well, I ought not."

"Come on," Chee urged. "As long as we drink together, we are at least not deadly enemies." She poured into a clay bowl.

Gujgengi tossed off the dose and accepted a refill. "I do not perceive you drinking," he said in a heavy-footed attempt at humor. "Do you plan to get me intoxicated, perhaps?"

Well, Chee thought with a sigh, it was worth trying.

Briefly, she grew rigid. The jolt passed, her mind hummed into overdrive, she relaxed her body and said, "There isn't much else to do, is there?" She took the vessel and drank. Gujgengi couldn't see what a face she made. Pah!

"You malign us, you know," she said. "We have none but the friendliest intentions. However, if my comrade is killed when he arrives, expect revenge."

"Krrr-ek, he will be only if he grows violent. Somewhat against Commandant Lalnakh's wish, I have posted criers who will shout warnings that he is to stay away. I trust he will be sensible."

"Then what do you plan to do about him? He has to eat." Gujgengi winced. "Here, have another drink," Chee said.

"We, ak-krrr, we can try for some accommodation. Everything depends on what message I get from the capital."

"But if Adzel has headed this way, he will be here well before that. Come on, drink and I'll recharge the bowl."

"No, no, really, this is quite enough for an oldster like me."

"I don't like to drink alone," Chee urged.

"You have not taken much," Gujgengi pointed out.

"I'm smaller than you." Chee drained the vessel herself and glugged out some more from the crock. "Though you would be astonished at my capacity," she added.

Gujgengi leaned forward. "Very well. As an earnest of my own wish for friendship, I will join you." Chee could practically read his thought: Get her drunk and she may reveal something. She encouraged him with a slight hiccup.

He kept his own intake low, while she poured the stuff down at an ever mounting rate. Nonetheless, in the course of the next hour or so, his speech grew a little slurred.

He remained lucid, however, in contrast to Chee. He was not unsubtle about trying to trap her into an admission that Falkayn must have engineered the trouble in Katandara. When her denials grew belligerent, he abandoned that line. "Let us discuss something else," he said. "Your capabilities, for example."

"I'm'sh capable'sh you," Chee said.

"Yes, yes, of course."

"More sho."

'Well, you have certainly revealed—"

"Prettier, too."

"Uk-k-k, tastes vary, you know, tastes vary. But I must concede you an intrinsic—"

"So I'm not beautiful, huh?" Ghee's whiskers dithered.

"On the contrary, most noble. Please, I beg you—"

"Sing real good, too. Lisshen." Chee rose to her feet, bowl in hand, and staggered about waving her tail and caterwauling. Gujgengi folded his ears.

"Ching, chang, gull, guli vassa,

Ching, chang, guli, guli bum."

"Most melodious! Most melodious! I fear I must be on my way." Gujgengi stirred where he sat on the mattress.

"Don' go, ol' frien'," Chee pleaded. "Don' lea' me 'lone."

"I will be back. I—"

"Oops!" Chee reeled against him. The bowl swept across his glasses. They fell. Chee grabbed after them. She came down on top, with the bowl. There was a splintering.

"Help!" Gujgengi cried. "My spectacles!"

"Sho shorry, sho shorry." Chee fumbled around after the pieces.

The guards got in as fast as they could. Chee retreated. Gujgengi blinked in the sudden brightness. "What's wrong, most noble?" asked a soldier. His sword was out.

"Li'l accshiden'," Chee babbled. "Ver' shorry. I fix you up."

"Stand back!" The saber poked in her direction. The other guard stooped and collected the pieces.

"It was doubtless unintentional," Gujgengi said, making signs against demons. "I think you had best get some sleep now."

"Fix you up. Got doctors, we do, fix your eyes sho you never need glasshes." Chee was surprised at her own sincerity. The Imperial envoy wasn't such a bad sort, and doubtless he'd have a devil of a time getting replacements. Katandaran optometry must be a crude cut-and-try business.

"I have spares," Gujgengi said. "Conduct me to my residence." He saluted Chee and shufHed out. She rolled over on her tick and closed her eyes.

"Too mush light," she complained. "Draw 'at curtain."

They obeyed, before locking the gate again. She waited a few minutes until she rose, diough, and continued to emit realistic snores.

The liquor made her stomach uneasy. But it hadn't affected her mind. Ethanol is a normal product of Cynthian metabolism. And . . . unseen in murk, by Gujgengi's weak eyes, she had palmed a couple of the largest fragments and slipped them under the mattress.

She ripped the ticking with her teeth, for rags to protect her hands, and got busy at the far end of the hut.

The glass wasn't very hard. As edges wore down, it sawed with ever less efficiency on the lashings of the framework. She could use pressure flaking to resharpen-a League academy gives a broad practical education-but only a few times before the chunks got too small to handle. "Hell and damnation!" she shouted when one of them broke completely.

"What's that?" called a voice from outside.

"Z-z-z-z," snored Chee.

A human would have sweated through that slow hour, but she was philosophical about the possibility of failing. Also, she needed less of an opening than a man would. Nonetheless, she barely finished before her tools wore to uselessness.

Now, arch your spine, pour through your arms and legs the strength they won leaping from branch to branch in the forests of home . . . ugh! ... the canes bent aside, she squirmed through, they snapped back into position and she was caught against the outer wall. Its fabric was rough against her nose. Panting, shivering in the chill gloom, she attacked with teeth and nails. One by one, the fibers gave way.

Quick, though, before somebody noticed!

A rent appeared, ruddy sunlight and a windowless carpet wall across a deserted lane. Chee wriggled out and ran.

The city gates might or might not be watched too closely. But in either case, crossing that much distance, she'd draw half the town after her. Somebody could intercept her; or a crossbow could snap. She streaked around the jail and onto the plaza.

The natives screeched. A foodwife ducked behind her wares. A smith emerged from his shop, hammer in hand. Her guards took off after her. Ahead was a kiosk, at the center of the square. Chee sprang through its entrance.

Bough-hewn steps wound downward into the hill. A dank draft blew in her face. The entrance disappeared from sight and she was in a tunnel, dug from earth and stone, lit at rare intervals by shelved lamps. She stopped to pinch the wicks of the first two. Though she must then slow, groping until she reached the next illuminated spot, the Ikranankans were more delayed. Their cries drifted to her, harsh and distorted by echoes. Not daring to meet the unknown in the dark, they'd have to go back for torches.

By that time she was out at the bottom of the hill. A short stone passage led to a room with a well in the middle. A female let go the windlass handle and jumped onto the coping with a scream. Chee ignored her. The gate here was open and unguarded when the town faced no immediate threat. She'd seen that before, at the time Gujgengi gave her party the grand tour. She bounded from the tower, forth into brush and sand.

A glance behind showed turmoil at Haijakata's portals. She also glimpsed Muddlin Through, nose thrusting bright into the sky. For a moment she debated whether to try regaining the ship. Once aboard, she'd be invincible. Or a shouted command for the vessel to lift and come get her would suffice.

No. Spears and shields ringed in the hull. Catapults crouched skeletal before them. She'd never get within "earshot" without being seen, nor finish a wigwag sentence before a quarrel pierced her. And Muddlehead hadn't been programmed to do anything without direct orders, no matter what the detectors observed.

Oh, well. Adzel could set that right. Chee started off. Before long she was loping parallel to the Haijakata road, hidden by the farm crops that lined it, all pursuit shaken.

The air was like mummy dust—thin mummy dust—and she grew thirstier by the minute. She managed to suppress most symptoms by concentrating on how best to refute a paper she'd seen in the Journal of Xenobiology before they left Earth. The author obviously had hash for brains and fried eggs for eyes.

Even so, eventually she had to get a drink and a rest. She slanted across the fields toward a canebrake that must mark a spring. There she glided cautiously, a shadow among shadows, until she peered out at the farmstead it enclosed.

Adzel was there. He stood with a pig-sized animal, from a pen of similar beasts, hooting in his arms, and said plaintively to the barred and shuttered central keep: "But my good fellow, you must give me your name."

"For you to work magic on?" said a hoarse male voice from within.

"No, I promise you. I only wish to give you a receipt. Or, at least, know whom to repay when I am able. I require food, but I do not intend to steal."

A dart whined from an arrow slot. He sighed. "Well, if you feel that way—"

Ghee came forth. "Where's some water?" she husked.

Adzel started. "You! Dear friend, what in the universe has happened to you?"

"Don't 'dear friend' me, you klong. Can't you see I'm about to dry up and blow away?"

Adzel tried to bristle. Having no hair, he failed. "You might keep a civil tongue in your head. You would be astonished at how much less detested that can make you. Here I have been traveling day and night-"

"What, clear around the planet?" Chee gibed. Adzel surrendered and showed her the spring. The water was scant and muddy, but she drank with some understanding of what Falkayn meant by vintage champagne. Afterward she sat and groomed herself. "Let's catch up on our news," she proposed.

Adzel butchered the animal while she talked. He had no tools for the job, but didn't need them either. In the end, he looked forlorn and said: "Now what shall we do?"

"Call the ship, of course."

"How?"

Chee noticed for the first time that his transceiver was also broken. They stared at each other.

Gujgengi adjusted his spare glasses. They didn't fit as well as the old ones had. The view was fuzzy to his eyes. This might be preferable, though, he thought. The thing is so huge. And so full of sorcery. Yes, I do believe that under present circumstances I am quite satisfied not to see it too clearly.

He gulped, mustered his whole courage, and tottered a step closer. At his back, the soldiers watched him with frightened expressions. That nerved him a trifle. Must show them we Deodaka are uniformly fearless and so forth. Though he would never have come except for Lalnakh. Really, the Commandant had behaved like a desert savage. One knew the Tiruts weren't quite one's equals—who was?—but one had at least taken them for a civilized phratry. Yet Lalnakh had stormed and raved so about the prisoner escaping that . . . well, from a practical standpoint, too, it would not help Gujgengi's reputation. But chiefly for the honor of the bloodline, one must answer the Tirut's unbridled tirade with stiff dignity and an offer to go consult the flying house. Would the Commandant care to be along? No? Excellent. One did not say so immediately, for fear of provoking him into changing his mind, but when one returned, one might perhaps drop a hint or two that most noble Lalnakh had not dared come. Yes, one must maintain a proper moral superiority, even at the risk of one's life.

Gujgengi swallowed hard. "Most noble," he called. His voice sounded strange in his ears.

"Are you addressing me?" asked the flat tones from overhead.

"Ak-krrr, yes." Gujgengi had already had demonstrated to him, before the present wretched contretemps, that the flying house (no, the word was shi', with some unpronounceable consonant at the end, was it not?) could speak and think. Unless, to be sure, the strangers had deceived him, and there was really just someone else inside. If so, however, the someone had a peculiar personality, with little or no will of its own.

"Well?" said Gujgengi when the silence had stretched too far.

"I wait for you to proceed," said the shi'.

"I wish, most noble, to ask your intentions."

"I have not yet been told what to intend."

"Until then you do nothing?"

"I store away whatever data I observe, in case these are required at a later time."

Gujgengi let out a hard-held breath. He'd hoped for something like this. Greatly daring, he asked: "Suppose you observed one of your crew in difficulties. What would you do?"

"What I was ordered to do, within the limits of capability."

"Nothing else? I mean, krrr-ek, would you take no action on your own initiative?"

"None, without verbal or code orders. Otherwise there are too many possibilities for error."

Still more relieved, Gujgengi felt a sudden eagerness to explore. One had one's intellectual curiosity. And, of course, whatever was learned might conceivably find practical application. If the newly come Ershokh and his two eldritch companions were killed, well, the shi' would still be here. Gujgengi turned to the nearest officer. "Withdraw all personnel a distance," he said. "I have secrets to discuss."

The Tirut gave him a suspicious glance but obeyed. Gujgengi turned back to the shi'. "You are not totally passive," he pointed out. "You answer me in some detail."

"I am so constructed. A faculty of logical judgment is needed."

"Ak-krrr, do you not get, shall we say, bored sitting here?"

"I am not constructed to feel tedium. The rational faculty of me remains automatically active, analyzing data. When no fresh data are on hand, I rehearse the logical implications of the rules of poker."

"What?"

"Poker is a game played aboard my hull." "I see. Uk-k-k, your responsiveness to me is most pleasing." "I have been instructed to be nonhostile to your people. 'Instructed' is the closest word I can find in my Katandaran vocabulary. I have not been instructed not to reply to questions and statements. The corollary is that I should reply."

Excitement coursed high in Gujgengi. "Do you mean—do I understand you rightly, most noble—you will answer any question I ask?" "No. Since I am instructed to serve the interests of my crew, and since the armed force around me implies that this may have come into conflict with your interests, I will release no information which might enhance your strength."

The calmness was chilling. And Gujgengi felt disappointed that the shi' was not going to tell him how to make blasters. Still, a shrewd interrogator might learn something. "Would you advise me about harmless matters, then?"

The wind blew shrill, casting whirls of grit and tossing the bushes, while the hidden one considered. Finally: "This is a problem at the very limits of my faculty of judgment. I can see no reason not to do so. At the same time, this expedition is for the purpose of gaining wealth. The best conclusion I can draw is that I should charge you for advice." "But, but how?"

"You may bring furs, drugs, and other valuables, and lay them in that open doorway you presumably see. What do you wish me to compute?"

Taken aback, Gujgengi stuttered. He had a potential fortune to make, he knew, if only he could think. . . . Wait. He remembered a remark Chee Lan had made in Lalnakh's house before her arrest. "We play a game called akritel," he said slowly. "Can you tell me how to win at it?" "Explain the rules."

Gujgengi did so. "Yes," the shi' said, "this is simple. There is no way to win every time without cheating. But by knowing the odds on various configurations that may be achieved, you can bet according, to those odds and therefore be ahead in the long run, assuming your opponents do not. Evidently they do not, since you ask, and since Drunkard's Walk computations involve comparatively sophisticated mathematics. Bring writing materials and I will dictate a table of odds."

Gujgengi restrained himself from too much eagerness. "What do you want for this, most noble?"

"I cannot be entirely certain. Let me weigh what information I have, in order to estimate what the traffic will bear." The shi' pondered awhile, then named what it said was a fair amount of trade goods. Gujgengi screamed that this would impoverish him. The shi' pointed out that in that case he need not buy the information. It did not wish to haggle. Doubtless there were others who would not find the fee excessive.

Gujgengi yielded. He'd have to borrow a sum to pay for that much stuff; still, with the market depressed by the quarantine, the cost wouldn't be unmanageable. Once he left this miserable hamlet and returned to Katandara, where they gambled for real stakes—

"Did you learn anything, most noble?" asked the officer as Gujgengi started uphill again.

"Yes," he said. "Most potent information. I will have to pay a substantial bribe, but this I will do out of my own pocket, in the interests of the Emperor. Ak-krrr . . . see to it that no one else discourses with the shi'. The magic involved could so easily get out of hand."

"Indeed, most noble!" shuddered the officer.

IX

The heroes of adventure fiction can go through any harrowing experience and—without psychochemicals, usually without sleep, always without attending to bodily needs—are at once ready to be harrowed all over again. Real people are built otherwise. Even after a possible twelve hours in the sack, Falkayn felt tired and sore. He hadn't been hurt during that wild ride through the Katandaran lines, but bolts zipped nastily close, and Stepha sabered an enemy rider seconds before he reached the Hermetian. Then Bobert Thorn's people sallied, beat off the opposition, and brought the newcomers into Rangakora. Falkayn wasn't used to coming that near death. His nerves were still tied in knots.

It didn't help that Stepha was utterly cheerful as she showed him around the palace. But he must admit that die building fascinated

him. Not only was it more light and airy than anything in Katandara, not only did it often startle him with beauty; it held the accumulated wealth of millennia less violent than further west. There were even interior doors such as he knew at home, of bronze cast in bas reliefs; reasonably clear glass windows; steam heating.

They left the electroplating shop, a royal monopoly operated in the palace, and strolled to a balcony. Falkayn was surprised at how far the grave philosophers had progressed: lead-acid batteries, copper wire, early experimentation with a sort of Leyden jar. He could understand why this was a more congenial society for humans than Katandara.

"Jeroo, there's Thorn himself, and the King," Stepha exclaimed. She led Falkayn to the rail where they stood. His two guards tramped behind. They were friendly young chaps, but they never left him and their weapons were loose in the scabbards.

Thorn put down the brass telescope through which he had been looking and nodded. "That camp gets sloppier every watch," he said. "They're demoralized, right enough."

Falkayn glanced the same way. The palace was a single unit, many-windowed, several stories high. He was near the top. No wall surrounded it, simply a garden, and beyond that the city. Like Katandara, Rangakora was so old as to be almost entirely stone-built. But the houses here were a symphony of soft whites, yellows, and reds. 'Facing outward rather than inward, with peaked tile roofs and graceful lines, they reminded him somewhat of First Renaissance architecture on Earth. Traffic moved on comparatively wide, paved avenues, distance-dwarfed figures, a faint rumble of wheels and clatter of feet. Smoke drifted into a Tyrian sky where a few clouds wandered. Behind, the heights soared gray-blue to Mount Gundra, whose snowcap glowed gold with perpetual sunset. The falls tumbled on his right, white and green and misted with rainbows, querning their way down to a Chakora which here was brilliant with fertility.

His gaze stopped short, at the besiegers. Beyond the city ramparts, their tents and campfires dotted the plateau, their animals grazed in herds and metal flashed where the soldiers squatted. Jadhadi must have sent powerful reinforcements when he learned of the rebellion. "I'd still not like to take them on, the way they outnumber your effectives," he said.

Bobert Thorn laughed. He was a stocky, grizzle-bearded man with fierce blue eyes. Old battle scars and well-worn saber stood out against his embroidered scarlet tunic and silky trousers. "No hurry," he said. "We've ample supplies, more than they're able to strip off the country. Let 'em sit for a while. Maybe the rest of the Ershoka will arrive. If not, come next twilight they'll be so hungry and diseased, and half blinded to boot, we can rout 'em. They know that themselves, too. They haven't much guts left." He turned to the slim red-pelted young Ikranankan in saffron robe and gilt chap-let. "King Ursala, this here's the man from Beyond-the-World I told

you about."

The monarch inclined his avian head. "Greeting," he said, in a dialect not too thick to follow. "I have been most anxious to meet you. Would the circumstances had been friendlier." "They might be yet," Falkayn hinted.

"Not so, if your comrades carry out their threat to bring us under Katandara," said Ursala. His mild tone softened the import.

Falkayn felt ashamed. "Well, uh, there we were, strangers with no real knowledge. And what's so bad about joining the Empire? Nobody there seemed to be ill treated."

Ursala tossed his ruff and answered haughtily: "Rangakora was ancient when Katandara was a village. The Deodaka were desert, barbarians a few generations ago. Their ways are not ours. We do not set phratry against phratry, nor decree that a son is necessarily born into his father's profession." "That so?" Falkayn was taken aback.

Stepha nodded. "Phratries here're just family associations," she said. "Guilds cut right across them."

"That's what I keep telling you, most noble," said Thorn self-righteously. "Once under the protection of the Ershoka—" "Which we did not ask for," Ursala interrupted. "No, but if I hadn't decided to take over, Jadhadi's viceroy would

be here now."

"I suppose you are the best of a hard bargain," sighed the King. "The Irshari may have favored us too long; we seem to have lost skill in war. But let us be honest. You will exact a price for your protection, in land, treasure, and power."

"Of course," said Thorn.

To break an uncomfortable silence, Falkayn asked who or what the Irshari might be. "Why, the makers and rulers of the universe," said Ursala. "Are you as superstitious in Beyond-the-World as they are in the Westlands?"

"Huh?" Falkayn clenched his fists. A shiver ran through him. He burst into questions.

The responses upset every preconception. Rangakora had a perfectly standard polytheistic religion, with gods that wanted sacrifices and flattery but were essentially benevolent. The only major figure of evil was he who had slain Zuriat the Bright, and Zuriat was reborn annually while the other gods kept the bad one at bay.

But then the Ikranankans were not paranoid by instinct!

What, then, had made the western cultures think that the cosmos was hostile?

Falkayn's mind leaped: not at a conclusion, he felt sure, but at a solution that had been staring him in the face for weeks. Ikrananka's dayside had no seasons. There was no rhythm to life, only an endless struggle to survive in a slowly worsening environment. Any change in nature was a disaster, a sandstorm, a plague, a murrain, a drying well. No wonder the natives were suspicious of everything new, and so by extension of each other. No wonder that they only felt at ease with fully initiated members of their own phratries. No wonder that civilizations were unstable and the barbarians free to come in so often. Those poor devils!

Rangakora, on the edge of the Twilight Zone, knew rain and snow and quickening, in the alternation of day and dusk. It knew, not just a few isolated stars, but constellations; after its people had ventured into the night land, it knew them well. In short, Falkayn thought, while the local citizens might be S.O.B.'s, they were Earth's kind of S.O.B.'s.

But then-No. Rangakora was small and isolated. It simply hadn't the capability of empire. And, with the factions and wild raiders on this planet, van Rijn would deal with nothing less than an empire. Turning coat and helping out this city might be a quixotic gesture, but the Polesotechnic League didn't go in for tilting at windmills. A liberated Rangakora would be gobbled up again as soon as the spaceship left; for there would be no further visits.

Yet its steadying influence could prove invaluable to outworld traders. Wasn't some compromise possible?

Falkayn glanced despairingly heavenward. When in hell was Muddlin' Through going to arrive? Surely Chee and Adzel would look first for him here. Unless something dreadful had happened to them.

He grew aware that Ursala had spoken to him and climbed out of his daze. "Beg pardon, most noble?"

"We use no honorifics," die King said. "Only an enemy needs to be placated. I asked you to tell me about your home. It must be a marvelous place, and the Irshari know I could use some distraction."

"Well-uh-"

"I'm interested, too," said Thorn. "After all, if we Ershoka are to leave Ikrananka, that throws everything off the wagon. We might as well pull out of Rangakora now." He didn't look too happy about it.

Falkayn gulped. When the humans were evacuated to Earth, he himself would be a public hero, but van Rijn would take him off trade pioneering. No doubt he'd still have a job: a nice, safe position as third officer on some milk run, with a master's berth when he was fifty and compulsory retirement on a measured pension ten years later.

"Uh, the sun is more bright," he said. "You saw how our quarters were lit, Stepha."

"Damn near blinded me," the girl grumbled.

"You'd get used to that. You'd have to be careful at first anyway, going outdoors. The sun could burn your skin."

"The plague you say!" exploded one of Falkayn's guards.

The Hermetian decided he was giving a poor impression. "Only for a while," he stumbled. "Then you're safe. Your skin turns tough and brown."

"What?" Stepha raised a hand to her own clear cheek. Her mouth fell open.

"It must be hot there," said Ursala shrewdly.

"Not so much," Falkayn said. "Warmer than here, of course, in most places."

"How can you stand it?" Thorn asked. "I'm sweating right now."

"Well, in really hot weather you can go indoors. We can make a building as warm or cool as we please."

"D'you mean to say I'd have to just sit, till the weather made up its own confounded mind to change?" Thorn barked.

"I remember," Stepha put in. "The air you had was muggier'n a marsh. Earth like that?"

"Depends on where you are," Falkayn said. "And actually, we control the weather cycle pretty well on Earth."

"Worse and worse," Thorn complained. "If I'm to sweat, I sure don't want to do it at somebody else's whim." He brightened. "Unless you can fight them when you don't like what they're up to?"

"Good Lord, no!" Falkayn said. "Fighting is forbidden on Earth."

Thorn slumped back against the rail and gaped at him. "But what am I going to do then?"

"Uh . . . well, you'll have to go to school for a number of years. That's Earth years, about five times as long as Ikranankan. You'll have to learn, oh, mathematics and natural philosophy and history and- Now that I think about it, the total is staggering. Don't worry, though. They'll find you work, once you've finished your studies."

"What sort of work?"

"M-m-m, couldn't be too highly paid, I fear. Not even on a colony planet. The colonies aren't primitive, you realize, and you need a long education to handle the machines we use. I suppose you could become a—" Falkayn groped for native words—"a cook or a machine tender's helper or something."

"Me, who ruled a city?" Thorn shook his head and mumbled to himself.

"You must have some fighting to do," Stepha protested.

"Yes, unfortunately," Falkayn said.

"Why 'unfortunately'? You're a strange one." Stepha turned to Thorn. "Cheer up, Cap'n. We'll be soldiers. If Great Granther didn't lie, those places are stuffed with plunder."

"Soldiers aren't allowed to plunder," Falkayn said. They looked positively shocked. "And anyway, they also need more skill with machines than I think you can acquire at your present ages."

"Balls . . . of . . . fire," Thorn whispered.

"We've got to hold a phratry council about this," said a guard in an alarmed voice.

Thorn straightened and took command of himself again. "That wouldn't be easy right now," he pointed out. "We'll carry on as we were. When die siege is broken and we get back in touch with our people, we'll see what we want to do. Ursala, you and I were going to organize that liaison corps between our two forces."

'Yes, I suppose we must," said die King reluctantly. He dipped his head to Falkayn. "Farewell. I trust we can talk later at length." Thorn's good-by was absentminded; he was in a dark brown study. They wandered off.

Stepha leaned her elbows on the rail. She wore quite a brief tunic, and her hair was unbound. A breeze fluttered the bronze locks. Though her expression had gone bleak, Falkayn remembered certain remarks she had let drop earlier. His pulse accelerated. Might as well enjoy his imprisonment.

"I didn't mean to make Earth sound that bad," he said. "You'd like it. A girl so good-looking, with so exotic a background—you'd be a sensation."

She continued to stare at the watchtowers. The scorn in her voice dismayed him. "Sure, a novelty. For how long?"

"Well— My dear, to me you will always be a most delightful

novelty."

She didn't respond. "What the deuce are you so gloomy about all of a sudden?" Falkayn asked.

Her lips compressed. "What you said. When you rescued me, I reckoned you for a big piece of man. Should've seen right off, nothing to that fracas, when you'd a monster to ride and a, a machine in your hand! And unfair, maybe, to call you a rotten zandaraman. You never were trained to ride. But truth, you are no good in the saddle. Are you good for anything, without a machine to help?"

"At least one thing," he tried to grin.

She shrugged. "I'm not mad, David. Only dis'pointed. My fault, truth, for not seeing before now 'twas just your being different made you look so fine."

My day, Falkayn groaned to himself.

"Reckon I'll go see if Hugh's off duty," Stepha said. "You can look 'round some more if you want."

Falkayn rubbed his chin as he stared after her. Beginning bristles scratched back. Naturally, this would be the time when his last dose of antibeard enzyme started to wear off. Outside the ship, there probably wasn't a razor on all Ikrananka. He was in for days of itchiness, until the damned face fungus had properly sprouted.

The girl had not spoken without justification, he thought bitterly. He had indeed been more sinned against than sinning, this whole trip. If Chee Lan and Adzel had come to grief, the guilt was his; he was the captain. In another four months, if they hadn't reported back, the travel plan they'd left at base would be unsealed and a rescue expedition dispatched. That might bail him out, assuming he was still alive. At the moment, he wasn't sure he wanted to be.

A shout spun him around. He stared over the rail and the city wall. Thunder seemed to crash through his head.

Adzel!

The Wodenite came around the bend of the lower road at full gallop. Scales gleamed along the rippling length of him; he roared louder than the waterfall. A shriek lifted from the enemy camp. Drums rolled from Rangakora's towers. Men and Ikranankans swarmed beweaponed to the parapets.

"Demons alive!" gasped at Falkayn's back. He glanced, and saw his two guards goggling ashen-faced at the apparition. It flashed through him: a chance to escape. He slipped toward the door.

Stepha returned. She seized his arm and threw her weight against him. "Look aware!" she yelled. The men broke from their paralysis, drew blade, and herded him back. He felt sick.

"What's going on?" he choked. "Where's the spaceship?"

Now he could only watch. A Katandaran cavalry troop rallied and charged. Adzel didn't stop. He plowed on through. Lances splintered against his armor, riders spilled and zandaras fled in panic. He might have been halted by catapult fire. But the field artillery had not been briefed on extraplanetary beings, nor on what to do when an actual, visible demon made straight for them. They abandoned their posts.

Terror spread like hydrogen. Within minutes, Jadhadi's army was a howling, struggling mob, headed downhill for home. Adzel chased them awhile, to make sure they kept going. When the last infantry soldier had scuttled from view, the Wodenite came back, across a chaos of dropped weapons, plunging zandaras and karikuts, idle wagons, empty tents, smoldering fires. His tail wagged gleefully.

Up to the gates he trotted. Falkayn couldn't hear what he bellowed but could well imagine. The human's knees felt liquid. He struggled for air. No time seemed to pass before a messenger hastened out to say he was summoned. But the walk through hollow streets-Rangakora's civilian population had gone indoors to wail at the gods—and onto the parapet, took forever.

The wait calmed him somewhat, though. When he stood with Thorn, Ursala, Stepha, and a line of soldiers, looking down on his friend, he could again think. This close, he saw Ghee's furry form on the great shoulders. At least they were both alive. Tears stung his eyes.

"David!" bawled Adzel. "I hoped so much you'd be here. Why don't they let me in?"

"I'm a prisoner," Falkayn called back in Latin.

"No, you don't," said Thorn. "Talk Anglic or Katandaran, that I can understand, or keep mouthshut."

Because the spearheads bristling around looked so infernally sharp, Falkayn obeyed. It added to the general unpleasantness of life that everybody should learn how his ship was immobilized. And now he really was stuck here. His gullet lumped up.

Thorn said eagerly: "Hoy, look, we've got common cause. Let's march on Haijakata together, get that flying thing of yours away from them, and then on to Katandara."

Ursala's tone grew wintry. "In other words, my city is to be ruled from there in spite of everything."

"We've got to help our brethren," Thorn said.

"I intercepted a courier on my way here," Adzel told them. "I am afraid I lost merit by frightening him, but we read his dispatches. The Ershoka who were in town but not in the Iron House assembled and attacked from the rear. Thus combined, their forces crumpled the siege lines and fought their way out of the city. They took over— what was the name now? a Chakoran village—and sent for outlying families to come and be safer. Jadhadi does not dare attack them with his available troops. He is calling for reinforcements from the various Imperial garrisons."

Thorn tugged his beard. "If I know my people," he said, "they'll march out before that can happen. And where would they march but to us?" His countenance blazed. "By Destruction! We need but sit, and we'll get everything I wanted!"

"Besides," Stepha warned, "we couldn't trust Falkayn. Soon's he got back that flying machine of his, he could do what he felt like." She gave the Hermetian a hostile look. "Reckon you'd bite on us."

"The one solitary thing I wish for is to get away from this planet," he argued. "Very far away."

"But afterward? Your stinking merchant's interest does he with Katandara. And could well be others like you, coming later on. No, best we keep you, my buck." She leaned over the battlements, cupped her hands, and shouted: "Go away, you, or we'll throw your friend's head at you!"

Chee stood up between the spinal plates. Her thin voice barely

reached them through the cataract's boom: "If you do that, we'll pull your dungheap of a town down around your ears."

"Now, wait, wait," Ursala pleaded. "Let us be reasonable."

Thorn ran an eye along the faces crowding the wall. Sweat glistened and tongues moistened lips; beaks hung open and ruffs drooped. "We can't well sally against him," he said sotto voce. "Our people are too scared right now, and besides, most zandaras would bolt. But we can keep him at his distance. When the whole phratry arrives-yes, that'll be too many. We can wait."

"And keep me alive for a bargaining counter," said Falkayn quickly.

"Sure, sure," Stepha fleered.

Thorn issued an order. Engineers began to wind catapult skeins. Adzel heard the creaking and drew back out of range. "Have courage, David!" he called. "We shall not abandon you."

Which was well meant but not so useful, Falkayn reflected in a gray mood. Thorn not only desired to keep Rangakora, he had to, for the sake of his kinfolk. The Ershoka had been sufficiently infected by the chronic suspiciousness of Katandara that they'd never freely let Falkayn back on his ship. Rather, they'd make him a permanent hostage, against the arrival of other spacecraft. And once firmly established here, they'd doubtless try to overthrow the Deodakh hegemony. Might well succeed, too. The most Falkayn could hope for was that a rescue expedition could strike a bargain: in exchange for him, the League would stay off Ikrananka. The treaty would be observed, he knew; it didn't pay to trade with a hostile population. And when he learned this market must not merely be shared, but abandoned, van Rijn would bounce Falkayn clear to Luna.

What a fine bouillabaisse he'd gotten himself into!

His guards hustled him off toward the palace apartment which was his jail. Adzel collected what few draft animals had not broken loose from their tethers, for a food supply, and settled down to his one-dragon siege of the city.

X

Chee Lan had no trouble reaching the east wall unseen. The Katandarans hadn't been close enough to trample the shrubs, nor had the Rangakorans gone out to prune and weed. There was plenty of tall growth to hide her approach. Crouched at the foot, she looked up a sheer dark cliff; a cloud scudded through the purple sky above and made it seem toppling on her. Pungent tarry smells of vegetation filled her nose. The wind blew cold. From the opposite side she heard the cataract roar.

Here in the shadow it was hard to make out details. But slowly she picked a route. As usual, the stones were not dressed except where they fitted together, and the rains and frosts of several thousand years had pitted them. She could climb.

Her sinews tautened. She sprang, grabbed finger- and toeholds, reached for the next and the next. Chill and rough, the surface scratched her belly. She was handicapped by her loot from the empty camp, two daggers at her waist and a rope coiled around her. Nonetheless, unemotionally, she climbed.

When her fingers grasped the edge of a crenel, she did hesitate a moment. Guards were posted at intervals here. But— She pulled herself over, hunched down between the merlons, and peeped out. Some meters to left and right she saw the nearest watchers. One was human, one Ikranankan. Their cloaks fluttered as wildly as the banners atop the more distant towers. But they were looking straight outward.

Quick, now! Chee darted across the parapet. As expected—any competent military engineer would have designed things thus-several meters of empty paving stretched between the inside foot of the wall and the nearest houses. With commerce to the outer world suspended, no traffic moved on it. She didn't stop to worry about chance passersby, but spidered herself down with reckless speed. The last few meters she dropped. Low gravity was helpful. Once she had streaked into the nearest alley, she took a while to pant. No longer than she must, though. She could hear footfalls and croaking voices. Via a window frame, she got onto the roof of one house.

There she had a wide view. The bloated red sun slanted long rays over streets where gratifyingly few natives were abroad. Hours after Adzel's coming, they must still be too shaken to work. Let's see . . . David's sure to be kept in the palace, which must be that pretentious object in the middle of town. She plotted a path, roof to roof as much as possible, crossing the narrowest lanes when they were deserted, and started off.

Wariness cost time; but cheap at the price. The worst obstacle lay at the end. Four spacious avenues bordered the royal grounds, and they were far from deserted. Besides a trickle of workaday errands, they milled with anxious clusters of Ikranankans, very humanlike in seeking what comfort they could get from the near presence of their rulers. Chee spent a couple of hours behind a chimney, studying the scene, before a chance came by.

A heavy wagon was trundling down the street in front of her at the same time as an aged native in sweeping official robes was headed for the palace. Chee leaped down into the gut between this house and the next. She had counted on buildings being crowded. The karikuts clopped past, the wagon creaked and rumbled behind, its bulk screened her. She zipped underneath it and trotted along on all fours. At closest approach, she had about three meters to go to the Ikranankan gaffer. If she was noticed, the gardens were immediately beyond, with lots of hedges and bowers to skulk in. But she hoped that wouldn't be necessary.

It wasn't, since she crossed the open space in half a second flat. Twitching up the back of the old fellow's skirt, she dove beneath and let the cloth fall over her.

He stopped. "What? What?" she heard, and turned with him, careful not to brush against his shins. "Krrr-ek? What? Swear I felt . . . no, no . . . uk-k-k. . . ." He shambled on. When she judged they were well into the grounds, Chee abandoned him for the nearest bush. Through the leaves she saw him stop again, feel his garments, scratch his head, and depart mumbling.

So far, so good. The next stage could really get merry. Chee prowled the garden for some while, hiding as only a forester can hide when anyone passed near, until the permutations of perambulation again offered her an opportunity.

She had worked her way around to a side of the palace. A stand of pseudobamboo veiled her from it, with a hedge at right angles for extra cover, and nobody was in sight: except a native guard, scrunching down the gravel path in breastplate and greaves. He ought to know. Chee let him go by and pounced. A flying tackle brought him onto his stomach with a distressing clatter. At once she was on his shoulders, left arm choking off his breath and right hand drawing a knife.

She laid the point against his throat and whispered cheerfully:

"One squeak out of you, my friend, and you're cold meat. I wouldn't like that either. You can't be very tasty."

Slacking the pressure, she let him turn his head till he glimpsed her, and decided to pardon the gargle he emitted. It must be disturbing to be set on by a gray-masked demon, even a small one. "Quick, now, if you want to live," she ordered. "Where is the prisoner Ershokh?"

"Ak-k-k-uk-k-k-"

"No stalling." Chee pinked him. "You know who I mean. The tall yellow-haired beardless person. Tell me or die!"

"He—he is in—" Words failed. The soldier made a gallant attempt to rise. Chee throttled him momentarily insensible. She had taken care, while at Haijakata, to get as good a knowledge of Ikranankan anatomy as was possible without dissection. And this was a comparatively feeble species.

When the soldier recovered, he was quite prepared to cooperate. Or anyhow, he was too terrified to invent a lie; Chee had done enough interrogation in her time to be certain of that. She got exact directions for finding the suite. Two Ershoka watched it, but outside a solid bronze door.

"Thank you," she said, and applied pressure again. Cutting some lengths of rope and a strip of his cloak for a gag, she immobilized her informant and rolled him in among the plumed stalks. He was regaining consciousness as she left. "You'll be found before too long, I'm sure," she said. "Probably before they water the garden."

She slipped off. Now there was indeed need to hurry. And she couldn't. Entering the capitol of this damned nightless city unnoticed made everything that had gone before look like tiddlywinks. An open window gave access to a room she had seen was empty. But then it was to get from tapestry to settee to ornamental urn to statue, while aleph-null servants and guards and bureaucrats and tradespeople and petitioners and sisters and cousins and aunts went back and forth through the long corridors; and take a ramp at the moment it was deserted, on the hope that no one would appear before she found her next hiding place; and on and on— By the time she reached the balcony she wanted, whose slender columns touched the eaves, even her nerves were drawn close to breaking. She shinnied up, swung herself over the roof edge, and crawled to a point directly above a window that must belong to Falkayn's apartment. Her prisoner had told her it was between the second

and third north-side balconies. And two stories down, with a wall too smooth for climbing. But she had plenty of rope left, and plenty of chimneys poked from the tiles. She made a loop around the nearest. After a glance to be sure no one was gauping from the ground, she slid.

Checked, she peered in the window. An arabesque grille of age-greened bronze would let her pass, but not a man. Why hadn't she thought to search the Katandaran litter for a hacksaw? She reached through and rapped on the glass behind. There was no response. With a remark that really shouldn't have come out of such fluffy white fur, she broke the pane with a dagger butt and crept inside. While she looked around, she pulled in the rope.

The rooms were well furnished, if you were an Ikranankan. For a man they were dark and cold, and Falkayn lay asleep curled up like a hawser. Chee padded to the bed, covered his mouth—humans were so ridiculously emotional—and shook him.

He started awake. "Huh? Whuff, whoo, ugh!" Chee laid a finger on her muzzle. His eyes cleared, he nodded and she let him go.

"Chee!" he breathed shakenly. His hands closed around hers. "How the devil?"

"I sneaked in, you idiot. Did you expect me to hire a band? Now let's figure some way to get you out."

Falkayn gasped. "You mean you don't know?"

"How should I?"

He rose to his feet, but without vigor. "Me too," he said.

Chee's courage sank. She slumped down on the floor.

With a rush of love, Falkayn stooped, lifted her, and cradled her in his arms. "Just knowing you tried is enough," he murmured.

Her tail switched. The vinegar returned to her voice. "Not for me it isn't." After a moment: "All we need is an escape from here. Then we can wait in the outback for the relief expedition."

Falkayn shook his head. "Sorry, no. How'd we get in touch? They'd spot Muddlin Through, sure, but as soon as we reached that area, we'd be filled with ironmongery, so Jadhadi could throw the blame for our disappearance on Thorn. He'd probably get away with it, too. Think how these natives would stick together in the face of an alien."

Chee reflected awhile. "I could try to slip within voice range of our ship's detectors."

"M-m-m." Falkayn ran a hand through his hair. "You know you'd never manage that, as witness the fact you didn't try in the first place. No cover worth itemizing." Rage welled in him. "Damn that chance that Adzel's transceiver got smashed! If we could have called the ship—"

And then his mind rocked. He stumbled back and sat down on the bed. Chee jumped clear and watched with round yellow eyes. The silence grew huge.

Until Falkayn smashed fist into palm and said, "Judas on Mercury!

Yes!"

The discipline of his boyhood came back. He'd been drugged and kidnapped and given one figurative belly kick after another, and been unable to do a thing about it, and that had shattered him. Now, as the idea took shape, he knew he was a man yet. The possibility that he would get killed mattered not a hoot in vacuum. Under the thrumming consciousness, his soul laughed for joy.

"Listen," he said. "You could get out of town again, even if I can't. But your chance of surviving very long, and Adzel's, wouldn't be worth much. Your chance of being rescued would be still smaller. If you're willing to throw the dice right now—go for broke—then—"

Chee did not argue with his plan. She pondered, made a few calculations in her head, and nodded. "Let us."

Falkayn started to put on his clothes but paused. "Wouldn't you like a nap first?"

"No, I feel quite ready. Yourself?"

Falkayn grinned. His latest sleep had restored him. The blood tingled in his flesh. "Ready to fight elephants, my friend."

Dressed, he went to the door and pounded on it. "Hey!" he shouted. "Help! Emergency! Urgency! Top secret! Priority One! Handle with care! Open this door, you scratchbrains!"

A key clicked in the lock. The door swung wide. A large Ershokh stood in the entrance with drawn sword. His companion waited a discreet distance behind. "Well?"

"I've got to see your boss," Falkayn babbled. Anything to get within arm's length. He stepped closer, waving his hands. "I've thought of something terrible."

"What?" growled from the beard.

"This." Falkayn snatched at the man's cloak, on either side of the brooch, with wrists crossed. He pulled his hands together. The backs

of them closed on his victim's larynx. Simultaneously, Chee hurtled into the hall and over the clothes of the other guard.

Falkayn's man slashed downward with his saber, but Falkayn's leg wasn't there any more. That knee had gone straight up. The soldier doubled in anguish. Then strangulation took him. Falkayn let him fall and bounded to the next Ershokh. Chee swarmed on that one, and had so far kept him from uttering more than a few snorts and grunts, but she couldn't overpower him. Falkayn chopped with the blade of a hand. The guard collapsed.

He wasn't badly injured either, Falkayn saw with some relief. He stooped, to drag them both inside and don a uniform. But there had been too much ruckus. A female Ikranankan stuck her head out of an entrance further down the hall and began to scream. Well, you couldn't have everything. Falkayn grabbed a saber and sped off. Chee loped beside him. The screams hit high C and piled on the decibels.

Down yonder ramp! A courtier was headed up. Falkayn stiff-armed him and continued. Several more were in the corridor below. He waved his sword. "Blood and bones!" he yelled. "Boo!" They cleared a path, falling over each other and clamoring.

And here was the electrical shop. Falkayn stormed in. Across workbenches crammed with quaintly designed apparatus, two scientists and several assistants gaped at him. "Everybody out," Falkayn said. When they didn't move fast enough, he paddled the Grand Chief Philosopher of Royal Rangakora with the flat of his blade. They got the message. He slammed the door and shot the bolt.

The uproar came through that heavy metal, louder by the minutes, voices, feet, weapon clatter, and alarm drums. He glanced around. The windows gave no access, but another door opened at the far end of the long room. He bolted that, too, and busied himself shoving furniture against it. If he piled everything there that wasn't nailed down and used Chee's rope to secure the mass further, he could probably make it impassable to anyone short of the army engineers. And they wouldn't likely be called, when the other approach looked easier.

He ended his task and returned, breathing hard. Chee had also been busy. She squatted on the floor amid an incredible clutter of batteries and assorted junk, coiling a wire into a helix while she frowned at a condenser jar. She could do no more than guess at capacitances, resistances, inductances, voltages, and amperages. However, the guess would be highly educated.

Both doors trembled under fists and boots. Falkayn watched the one he had not reinforced. He stretched, rocked a little on his feet, willed the tension out of his muscles. Behind him, Chee fiddled with a spark gap; he heard the slight frying noise.

A human voice bawled muffled: "Clear the way! Clear the way! Well break the obscenity thing down, if you'll get out of our obscenity way!" Chee didn't bother to look from her work.

The racket outside died. After a breathless moment, feet pounded and a weight smashed at the bronze. It rang and buckled. Again the ram struck. This time a sound of splintering was followed by hearty curses. Falkayn grinned. They must have used a balk of glued-together timber, which had proved less than satisfactory. He went to a gap where the door had been bent a little clear of the jamb and had a look. Several Ershoka could be seen, in full canonicals, fury alive on their faces. "Peekaboo," Falkayn said.

"Get a smith!" He thought he recognized Hugh Padrick's cry. "You, there, get an obscenity smith. And hammers and cold chisels." That would do the job, but time would be needed. Falkayn returned to help Chee. "Think we've got ample juice in those batteries?" he asked.

"Oh yes." She kept eyes at the single workbench not manning the barricade, where she improvised a telegraph key out of scrap metal. "Only four hundred kilometers or so, right? Even that slue-footed Adzel made it in a few standard days. What worries me is getting the right frequency."

"Well, estimate as close as you can, and then use different values. You know, make a variable contact along a wire."

"Of course I know! Didn't we plan this in your rooms? Stop yat-tering and get useful."

"I'm more the handsome type," said Falkayn. He wielded a pair of pliers awkwardly—they weren't meant for a human grasp—to hook the batteries in series. And a Leyden jar, though you really should call it a Rangakora jar. . . .

The door belled and shuddered. Falkayn kept half his mind in that direction. Probably somewhat less than an hour had passed since he crashed out. Not a hell of a lot of time to play Heinrich Hertz. But Chee had put on the last touches. She squatted before the ungainly sprawl of apparatus, tapped her key, and nodded. A spark sizzled

across a gap. She went into a rattle of League code. Invisible, impalpable, the radio waves surged forth.

Now everything depended on her finding the waveband of the late lamented transceivers, somewhere among those she could blindly try. She hadn't long, either. The door would give way in another minute or two. Falkayn left her for his post.

The bolt sprang loose. The door sagged open. An Ershokh pushed in, sword a-shimmer.

Falkayn crossed blades. Steel chimed. As expected, the man was a sucker for scientific fencing. Falkayn could have killed him in thirty seconds. But he didn't want to. Besides, while he held this chap in the doorway, no others could get past. "Having fun?" he called across the whirring edges. Rage snarled back at him.

Dit-dit-dah-dit. . . . Come to Rangakora. Land fifty meters outside the south gate. Dit-dah-dah. Clash, rattle, clang!

The Ershokh got his back to the jamb. Abruptly he sidled past the entrance, and another man was there. Falkayn held the first one by sheer energy while his foot lashed out in an epical savate kick. The second man yelped agony and lurched back into the arms of his fellows. Whirling, Falkayn deflected the blade of the first one with a quick beat and followed with a glide. His point sank into the forearm. He twisted deftly, ripping through tissue, and heard the enemy saber clank on the floor.

Not stopping to pull his own weapon free, he turned and barely avoided the slash of a third warrior. He took one step forward and grabbed, karate-style. A tug—a rather dreadful snapping noise—the Ershokh went to his knees, gray-faced and broken-armed, and Falkayn had his blade. It rang on the next.

The Hermetian's eyes flicked from side to side. The man he had cut was hunched over. Blood spurted from his wound, an impossibly brilliant red. The other casualty sat slumped against the wall. Falkayn looked into the visage that confronted him (a downy-cheeked kid, as he'd been himself not so long ago) and said, "If you'll hold off a bit, these busters can crawl out and get help."

The boy cursed and hacked at him. He caught the sword with his own in a bind and held fast. "Do you want your chum to bleed to death?" he asked. "Relax. I won't bite you. I'm really quite peaceful as long as you feed me."

He disengaged and poised on guard. The boy stared at him an instant, then backed off, into the crowd of humans and Ikranankans that eddied in the corridor behind him. Falkayn nudged the hurt men with a foot. "Go on," he said gently. They crept past him, into a descending hush.

Hugh Padrick trod to the forefront. His blade was out, but held low. His features worked. "What're you about?" he rasped.

"Very terrible magic," Falkayn told him. "Well save trouble all around if you surrender right now." Dit-dah-dah-dah!

"What do you want of us?" Padrick asked.

"Well, to start with, a long drink. After that we can talk." Falkayn tried to moisten his lips, without great success. Damn this air! No wonder the natives didn't go in for rugs. Life would become one long series of static shocks. Maybe that was what had first gotten the Rangakorans interested in electricity.

"We might talk, yes." Padrick's saber drooped further. Then in a blinding split second it hewed at Falkayn's calf.

The Hermetian's trained body reacted before his mind had quite engaged gears. He leaped straight up, under two-thirds of a Terrestrial gee. The whetted metal hissed beneath his boot soles. He came down before it could withdraw. His weight tore the weapon from Padrick's grasp. "Naughty!" he cried. His left fist rocketed forward. Padrick went on his bottom, nose a red ruin. Falkayn made a mental note that he be charged through that same nose for plastic surgery, if and when van Rijn's factors got around to offering such services.

An Ikranankan poked a spear at him. He batted it aside and took it away. That gained him a minute.

He got another while Padrick reeled erect and vanished in the mob. And still another passed while they stared and shuffled their feet. Then he heard Bobert Thorn trumpet, "Clear the way! Crossbows!"—and knew that the end was on hand.

The crowd parted, right and left, out of his view. Half a dozen Ikranankan archers tramped into sight and took their stance before him, across the hall. But he put on the most daredevil grin in his repertory when Stepha ran ahead of them.

She stopped and regarded him with wonder. "David," she breathed. "No other man in the world could've— And I never knew." "You do now." Since her dagger was sheathed, he risked chucking her under the chin. "They teach us more where I've been than how to handle machines. Not that I'd mind a nice safe armored vehicle."

Tears blurred the gray eyes. "You've got to give up, though," she begged. "What more can anyone do?"

"This," he said, dropped his saber and grabbed her. She yelled and fought back with considerable strength, but his was greater. He pinioned her in front of him and said to the archers, "Go away, you ugly people." The scent of her hair was warm in his nostrils.

Imperturbably, Chee continued to signal.

Stepha stopped squirming. He felt her stiffen in his grip. She said with an iron pride, "No, go 'head and shoot."

"You don't mean that!" he stammered.

"Sure do." She gave him a forlorn smile. "Think an Ershokh's less ready to die than you are?"

The archers took aim.

Falkayn shook his head. "Well," he said, and even achieved a laugh, "when the stakes are high, people bluff." A howl, a babble, distant but rising and nearing, didn't seem very important. "Of course I wouldn't've used you for a shield. I'm an awful liar, and you have better uses." He kissed her. She responded. Her hands moved over his back and around his neck.

Which was fun, and moreover gained a few extra seconds. . . .

"The demon, the demon!" Men and Ikranankans pelted by. A thunderclap was followed by the sound of falling masonry.

Stepha didn't join the stampede. But she pulled free, and the dagger flashed into her hand. "What's that?" she cried.

Falkayn gusted the air from his lungs. His head swam. Somehow he kept his tone level. "That," he said, "was our ship. She landed and took Adzel on for a pilot, and now he's aloft, losing merit but having a ball with a mild demonstration of strength." He took her hand. "Come on, let's go out where he can see us and get taken aboard. I'm overdue for a dry martini."

XI

The conference was held on neutral ground, an autonomous Chakoran village between the regions claimed of old by Katandara and Rangakora. (Autonomy meant that it paid tribute to both of them.) Being careful to observe every possible formality and not hurt one party's feelings more than another's, Falkayn let its head preside at the opening ceremonies. They were interminable. His eyes must needs wander, around the reddish gloom of the council hut, over the patterns of the woven walls, across the local males who squatted with their spears as a sort of honor guard, and back to the large stone table at which the conference was benched. He wished he could be outside. A cheerful bustle and chatter drifted to him through the open door, where Adzel lay so patiently; the soldiers who had escorted their various chiefs here were fraternizing.

You couldn't say that for the chiefs themselves. King Ursala had finished droning through a long list of his grievances and desires, and now fidgeted while Emperor Jadhadi embarked on his own. Harry Smit glared at Bobert Thorn, who glared back. The Ershoka senior still blamed his phratry's troubles on the rebellion. His honor the mayor of this town rustled papers, doubtless preparing an introduction to the next harangue.

Well, Falkayn thought, this was your idea, lad. And your turn has got to come sometime.

When the spaceship hovered low above them and a giant's voice boomed forth, suggesting a general armistice and treaty-making, the factions had agreed. They didn't know they had a choice. Falkayn would never have fired on them, but he saw no reason to tell them that. No doubt Chee Lan, seated before the pilot board in the sky overhead, had more to do now with keeping matters orderly than Adzel's overwhelming presence. But why did they have to make these speeches? The issues were simple. Jadhadi wanted Rangakora and felt he could no longer trust the Ershoka. A large number of the Ershoka wanted Rangakora, too; die rest wished for the status quo ante, or a reasonable substitute, but didn't see how to get it; each group felt betrayed by the other. Ursala wanted all foreign devils out of his town, plus a whopping indemnity for damages suffered. And Falkayn wanted—well, he'd tell them. He lit his pipe and consoled himself with thoughts of Stepha, who awaited him in the village. Quite a girl, that, for recreation if not for a lifetime partner.

An hour passed.

"—the distinguished representative of the merchant adventurers from Beyond-the-World, Da'id 'Alk'ayn."

His boredom evaporated. He rose to his feet in a tide of eagerness that he could barely mask with a smile and a casual drawl.

"Thank you, most noble," he said. "After listening to these magnificent orations, I won't even try to match them. I'll state my position in a few simple words." That should win him universal gratitude!

"We came here in good faith," he said, "offering to sell you goods such as I have demonstrated at unbelievably reasonable prices. What happened? We were assaulted with murderous intent. I myself was imprisoned and humiliated. Our property was illegally sequestered. And frankly, most nobles, you can be plaguey thankful none of us was killed." He touched his blaster. "Remember, we do represent a great power, which has a fixed policy of avenging harm done to its people." When expedient, he added, and saw how Jadhadi's ruff rose with terror and Smit's knuckles stood white on his fist.

"Relax, relax," he urged. "We're in no unfriendly mood. Besides, we want to trade, and you can't trade during a war. That's one reason I asked for this get-together. If the differences between us can be settied, why, that's to the League's advantage. And to yours, too. You do want what we have to sell, don't you?

"So." He leaned forward, resting his fingertips on the table. "I think a compromise is possible. Everybody will give up something, and get something, and as soon as trade starts you'll be so wealthy that what you lost today will make you laugh. Here's a rough outline of the general agreement I shall propose.

"First, Rangakora will be guaranteed complete independence, but drop claims to indemnification—"

"Most noble!" Jadhadi and Ursala sprang up and yelled into each other's beaks.

Falkayn waved them to silence. "I yield for a question to King Ursala," he said, or the equivalent thereof.

"Our casualties . . . crops ruined . . . dependent villages looted . . . buildings destroyed—" Ursala stopped, collected himself, and said with more dignity: "We were not the aggressors."

"I know," Falkayn said, "and I sympathize. However, weren't you prepared to fight for your freedom? Which you now have. That should be worth something. Don't forget, the League will be a party to any treaty we arrive at here. If that treaty guarantees your independence, the League will back the guarantee." Not strictly true. Only Solar Spice 6- Liquors is to be involved. Oh, well, makes no practical difference. He nodded at Jadhadi. "By my standards, most noble, you should pay for the harm you did. I'm passing that in the interests of reconciliation."

"But my borders," the Emperor protested. "I must have strong borders. Besides, I have a rightful claim to Rangakora. My great ancestor, the first Jadhadi—"

Falkayn heroically refrained from telling him what to do to his great ancestor and merely answered in his stiffest voice: "Most noble, please consider yourself let off very lightly. You did endanger the lives of League agents. You cannot expect the League not to exact some penalty. Yielding Rangakora is mild indeed." He glanced at his blaster, and Jadhadi shivered. "As for your border defenses," Falkayn said, "the League can help you there. Not to mention the fact that we will sell you firearms. You won't need your Ershoka any more."

Jadhadi sat down. One could almost see the wheels turning in his head.

Falkayn looked at Thorn, who was sputtering. "The loss of Rangakora is your penalty, too," he said. "Your followers did seize me, you know."

"But what shall we do?" cried old Harry Smit. "Where shall we go?"

"Earth?" Thorn growled. Falkayn had been laying it on thick of late, how alien Earth was to these castaways. They weren't interested in repatriation any more. He didn't feel guilty about that. They would in fact be happier here, where they had been born. And if they were staying of their own free choice, van Rijn's traders could be trusted to keep silence. In the course of the next generation or two—the secret wouldn't last longer in any event—their children and grandchildren could gradually be integrated into galactic civilization, much as Adzel had been.

"No, if you don't want to," Falkayn said. "But what has your occupation been? Soldiering. Some of you keep farms, ranches, or town houses. No reason why you can't continue to do so; foreigners have often owned property in another country. Because what you should do is establish a nation in your own right. Not in any particular territory. Everything hereabouts is already claimed. But you can be an itinerant people. There are precedents, like nomads and Gypsies on ancient Earth. Or, more to the point, there are those nations on Cynthia which are trade routes rather than areas. My friend Chee Lan can explain the details of organization to you. As for work—well, you are warriors, and the planet is full of barbarians, and once the League gets started here there are going to be more caravans to protect than fighters to protect them. You can command high prices for your service. You'll get rich."

He beamed at the assembly. "In fact, we'll all get rich."

"Missionaries," said Adzel into the pensive silence.

"Uh, yes, I'd forgotten," Falkayn said. "I don't imagine anyone will object if the ships bring an occasional teacher? We would like to explain our beliefs to you."

The point looked so minor that no one argued. Yet it would bring more changes in the long run than machinery or medicine. The Katandarans would surely leap at Buddhism, which was infinitely more comfortable than their own demonology. Together with what scientific knowledge trickled down to them, the religion would wean them from their hostility complex. Result: a stable culture with which Nicholas van Rijn could do business.

Falkayn spread his hands. "That's the gist of my suggestions," he finished. "What I propose is what an Earthman once called an equality of dissatisfaction. After which the League traders will bring more satisfactions to you than you can now imagine."

Thorn bit his lip. He wouldn't easily abandon his dream of kingship. "Suppose we refuse?" he said.

"Well," Falkayn reminded him, "the League has been offended. We must insist on some retribution. My demands are nominal. Aren't they?"

He had them, he knew. The carrot of trade and the stick of war; they didn't know the war threat was pure bluff. They'd make the settlement he wanted.

But of course they'd do so with endless bargaining, recrimination, quibbles over details, speeches—oh, God, the speeches! Falkayn stepped back. "I realize this is a lot to swallow at once," he said. "Why don't we recess? After everyone's had time to think, and had a good sleep, we can talk to more purpose."

Mainly, he wanted to get back to Stepha. He'd promised her a jaunt in the spaceship; and Adzel and Chee could jolly well wait right here. When the assembly agreed to break, Falkayn was the first one out the door.

Metal hummed. The viewport blazed with stars in an infinite night. That red spark which was Ikrananka's sun dwindled swiftly toward invisibility.

Staring yonder, Falkayn sighed. "A whole world," he mused. "So many lives and hopes. Seems wrong for us to turn them over to somebody else."

"I know why you would go back," Chee Lan clipped. "But Adzel and I have no such reason. We've a long way to Earth—"

Falkayn brightened. He had analogous motives for looking forward to journey's end.

"—so move your lazy legs," Chee said.

Falkayn accompanied her to the saloon. Adzel was already there, arranging chips in neat stacks. "You know," Falkayn remarked as he sat down, "we're a new breed. Not troubleshooters. Trouble twisters. I suspect our whole career is going to be a sequence of ghastly situations that somehow we twist around to our advantage."

"Shut up and shuffle," Chee said. "First jack deals."

A pair of uninteresting hands went by, and then Falkayn got a flush. He bet. Adzel folded. Chee saw him. The computer raised. Falkayn raised back. Chee quit and the computer raised again. This went on for some time before the draw. Muddlehead must have a good hand, Falkayn knew, but considering its style of play, a flush was worth staying on. He stood pat. The computer asked for one card.

Judas in a nova burst! The damned machine must have gotten four of a kind! Falkayn tossed down his own. "Never mind," he said. "Take it."

Somewhat later, Chee had a similar experience, still more expensive. She made remarks that ionized the air.

Adzel's turn came when the other two beings dropped out. Back and forth the raises went, between dragon and computer, until he finally got nervous and called.

"You win," said the mechanical voice. Adzel dropped his full house, along with his jaw.

"What?" Chee screamed. Her tail stood vertical and botded. "You were bluffing?"

"Yes," said Muddlehead.

"But, no, wait, you play on IOU's and we limit you," Falkayn rattled. "You can't bluff!"

"If you will inspect the No. 4 hold," said Muddlehead, "you will find a considerable amount of furs, jewels, and spices. While the value cannot be set exactly until the market involved has stabilized, it is obviously large. I got them in exchange for calculating probability tables for the native Gujgengi, and am now prepared to purchase chips in the normal manner."

"But, but, but you're a machine!"

"I am not programmed to predict how a court would adjudicate title to those articles," said Muddlehead. "However, my understanding is that in a commercially and individualistically oriented civilization, any legitimate earnings belong to the earner."

"Good Lord," said Falkayn weakly, "I think you're right."

"You're not a person!" Chee shouted. "Not even in fact, let alone the law!"

"I acquired those goods in pursuit of the objective you have programmed into me," Muddlehead replied, "namely, to play poker. Logic indicates that I can play better poker when properly staked."

Adzel sighed. "That's right, too," he conceded. "If we want the ship to give us an honest game, we have to take the syllogistic consequences. Otherwise the programming would become impossibly complicated. Besides . . . sportsmanship, you know."

Chee riffled the deck. "All right," she said grimly. "I'll win your stake the hard way."

Of course she didn't. Nobody did. With that much wealth at its disposal, Muddlehead could afford to play big. It didn't rake in their entire commissions for Operation Ikrananka in the course of the Earthward voyage, but it made a substantial dent in them.