"You see?" said Stark to the chiefs. "And even if Ekmal did survive, he will have little to snare for ransoms. Think of the loot of Yurunna. Get up, boy." Jofr sighed and made as though to rise. Instead, he flung himself across the fire, straight at Stark's throat, and there was in his hand a small knife with which he was used to cut meat.

Stark caught his hand and Ashton his feet. The knife dropped.

"That's why he refused your bread and salt," said Ashton. "I told you it was a blue-eyed viper."

Stark smiled. "It's a brave one, at any rate." He shook the boy and set him on his feet. "Get home to your mother."

Jofr went away with his guards, and he was weeping again, this time with sheer frustration. The blade had come so close.

Hann, Kref and Marag slaughtered the too sorely wounded with due honor and ceremony and buried their dead. Runners came out of nowhere to dispose of the Ochar.

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The army gathered itself and moved on, traveling swiftly toward the bitter lake.

The Tears of Lek shone sullenly under Old Sun like an unpolished shield dropped in the midst of desolation. Its heavy waters never froze even in the dead of winter. White salt pans gleamed, scarred by generations of quarrying. On the unfriendly surround of stiff sedges and sand, the camps of green Thorn and white Thuran were set up. The yellow Qard as usual, were late. Camp was made, and the men began celebrating their victory. Thorn and Thuran were as savagely joyful as the actual victors. They sang harsh yelping songs and did leaping dances to the rattle of small drums and the shrilling of pipes. This went on all night, and there was almost a second war when it seemed to Hann, Marag and Kref that their newly made and so far non-fighting brothers were taking too large a part in the rejoicing. In the red morning Stark and Ashton, with Alderyk and the chiefs, rode out to a line of untidy hills and climbed to a place where they could overlook Yurunna.

From this distance it was not the city that took the eye so much as the oasis that surrounded it.

There was water, in plenty. Sunlight glinted on irrigation ditches, a spidery pattern amid the fields. Things were a lot further along here than at Ildann's village. Color smeared the land in patches; sickly yellow, greenish black, dusty ocher, leprous white. There were orchards of spiny twisted trees. To Stark, it was supremely unlovely. To the tribesmen, it was paradise. In the midst of this ugly garden, some careless titan had dropped a huge grim rock, and on top of the rock someone had built a darkness. There was little detail to be seen this far away, but that was the impression Stark had, a walled and brooding darkness above the gloomy fields.

"You see how it stands, Eric," Ashton said. "Not pretty, but rich and fat all the same. And alone. Every

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hungry tribesman who ever passed this way has looked at it and plotted how to take it."

"And sometimes tried," said Ildann. "Oh, yes. tried."

"The Wandsmen keep the city well prepared. A caravan came in while I was there, bringing military stores, oil and the stuff they call kheffi, some kind of resinous fiber that makes the spreading fire when it's soaked and lighted. There were timbers and cordage to repair the ballistas, and there were weapons. They train the Yur well and keep them trained, about a thousand of them. Yurunna is vital to their presence here in the north, and they know that even the best-bought loyalty, such as they have from the Ochar, ought not to be tempted with weakness."

"Very formidable," said Alderyk.

"Yes."

"Impregnable?"

"Certainly difficult."

"For ordinary humans, yes," said Alderyk.

He clapped his wings and cried a vaulting cry. Dust whipped across the desert, and a long while later Stark saw trees in the oasis bend to a sudden gust. The yellow Qard came in that afternoon. The next day the army marched and set down before Yurunna.

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High on its rock, the city scragged the sky like the top of a shattered tree stump. A wall encircled it, high and tight. Buildings stretched up to peer over with narrow eyes. Steep roofs gave back a hard gleaming in the rusty light of Old Sun, except where there were empty gaps. A single road, wide enough for a cart, zigzagged 90

up the western face of the rock to the single gate. The gate, Ashton said, was fashioned of black iron and very strong. It was set deep between two flanking towers. On the tops of these towers great cauldrons were set, with engines for casting the spreading fire.

At other places around the wall other engines were set. Yur in polished leather manned the wall, and now and again a Wandsman passed along it with a couple of hounds in leash. The wall was sheer and smooth, thirty feet or so atop seventy or eighty of sheer cliff.

Lacking modern weapons, lacking even primitive siege engines, the invaders faced a city that seemed impregnable.

But that night the attack on Yurunna began, though not one man of the Lesser Hearths dight himself for war.

The men drummed and danced and piped and sang or did otherwise as it pleased them. But there was another singing, and that came from the camp of the Fallarin, where the Tarf stood guard in a silent circle, armed with four-handed swords.

The singing was sprightly and wicked and mischievous and cruel, and under it like a whispering base was the sound of wings a-beat. Up in the city a small wind began to prowl,

It skipped on roof tiles and ran along narrow streets. It poked and whined into holes and corners. It climbed old walls and felt the texture and the weakness of them. It purled at cressets, torches, lamps. It snuffed wood. It grew.

It became a hundred winds.

Yurunna was old, a palimpsest, city built upon half-obliterated city as this people and that came down from the north and took it and held it and then left it again for the next wave of wanderers. Some of the buildings were stout, solid stone. Some were built in part of timber brought up from the south, using one or two walls of an older shell so that the wooden structures resembled the nests of mud-dauber wasps plastered to the stone. In the center of the city and in the

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area around the gate the buildings were used and lived in. In the small outer quarters of the small city the buildings were unused, except along the wall where the sinews of war were stored ready to hand. These buildings were sound, and kept so. Of the others, some had fallen. Some were ready to fall. All night long the werewinds laughed and gamed in the narrow ways of Yurunna, and the Yur looked up with their copper-colored eyes like the eyes of dolls and saw deadly roof tiles spin like autumn leaves, shied down at them by the fingers of the wind. Chimneys crumbled. Old walls swayed and shook until they toppled. The dark was full of clatterings and crashings. The Yur women wept in their great house, trembling when the shutters banged open and the curtains blew, scurrying to protect their screaming young.

The Wandsmen, two score of them who oversaw the breeding of Yur and Northbound, the training of the young, the ordering of city and field, were at first scornful of the power of the Fallarin. No wind could threaten their strong walls. They became uneasy as the night wore on and their own city seemed to have been turned against them; had in fact become a weapon in the enemy's hands.

The Northhounds on the wall and in the dark streets shivered, though they had felt far colder winds. They howled dismally, and when walls fell on them they died, and there was no enemy they could strike at. The face of the Houndmaster, already set in the grim lines of a heartstricken man, became more grim.

And that was not the worst.

The werewinds played with fire.

Cressets fell. Torches blew down. Lamps were knocked over. Flames sprang up, and the werewinds blew upon them, fanned them, sucked them up into whirling gold-red storms. The black sky brightened above Yurunna. The Wandsmen fought the fires with fewer Yur than they would have liked. They dared not strip the wall of defenders for fear of winged men, who might scale the unscalable and let down ropes for the wingless.

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Toward dawn, when the fires were to some degree controlled, the werewinds struck in several places, oversetting the cauldrons of oil and the supplies of the spreading fire on the wall, then tossing down the huge basket-torches that burned beside the emplacements. The resultant fires destroyed some of the ballistas, ate their way into some of the nearby storerooms, where there was more oil and more of the kheffi for the spreading fire. Wandsmen and Yur had no rest by day.

Stark assumed that the Fallarin rested. He made no attempt to find out. He rode among the tribes, making sure that certain preparations were being carried out.

By evening, the defenders of the city had repaired the damage on the wall, dragging up new ballistas, setting more cauldrons and containers. When it was full dark, the gay sadistic song began again, with the beating of wings. Again the werewinds prowled and frisked, and destroyed, and killed wherever they could.

Fires were harder to set because this night there were no torches or cressets or lamps in the city. They managed even so. They puffed old embers to life and tumbled more cauldrons and torches, throwing ballistas and crews from the wall and from the towers by the gate. At dawn there was a pall of smoke over Yurunna, and no rest within it.

For three long nights the werewinds made Yurunna their playground. On the morning of the fourth day Alderyk, gaunt and strange-eyed, came like a moulting eagle to Stark's tent and said:

"Now you must get off your hunkers, Dark Man. You and your Lesser Hearths and your demon hounds. We have broken the path for you. Tread it." He went back to his camp, angry cat's-paws striking up sand at every flapping step. Halk looked after him.

"That little man makes an evil enemy."

He had spent his idle days creaking and groaning at martial exercises. He had not yet got back his full strength, but half of Halk's strength was greater than most men's. Now he made steel flicker around his head.

"When we enter the city, I'll bear shield beside you." 93

"Not you," Stark said, "and not Simon, either. If I should fall, there'll be things for you to do."

Stark sent word to the chiefs. He spent time with Ashton. He spent time with Gerrith. He ate and slept, and the day passed.

For Yurunna that night began like the others-as it seemed to the Wandsmen, a year of others, with the whirling winds dancing death around them and over them, and sandy sleeplessness in their smoke-stung eyes, and their limbs aching. Then they began to perceive that there was movement in the darkness. They tried to follow it. The winds kicked and trampled, blinding them with dust, wreaking havoc along the wall. Twice and thrice the Wandsmen had replaced the defenses of the gate-towers, clearing away scorched wreckage from the square below to give the Yur fighting room. Now again cauldrons and spreading fire were thrown down to smote and blaze in the square. Gusts of wind pounded at the iron gate, so that it moved with a deep groaning. Things, said the hounds of Yurunna, where the Houndmaster and two handlers and two apprentice boys held them at the back of the square, away from the fires. Things come.

Kill, said the Houndmaster.

The hounds sent fear.

Thirty Tarf, fifteen on a side, bearing a ram made from a green tree trunk cut beside Yurunna's springs, came up the zigzag road to the gate. Twenty more came with them, holding the turtle roof above their heads. They did not flinch from the sending of the hounds.

The hounds said, Things do not fear us.

And they became afraid, with a new fear added to the ones they already had, of strange winds and noises and the smell of death.

The Houndmaster said, Those will come who do.

He was a tall Wandsman. The tunic under his dented mail was the somber red that marked him next in rank below the Lords Protector. From the time he had been a gray apprentice up from Ged Darod he had

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lived and worked with Northhounds. He loved them. He loved their ugliness and their savagery. He loved their minds, to which he had become so closely attuned. He loved sharing their simple joy of slaughter. His heart was broken for each hound he had lost to the were-winds.

For the nine traitor hounds he had lost to an off-world monster called Stark, who was neither man nor beast, more than his heart was broken. The Lords Protector had come, the august and holy men he had served all his life, tending the hounds and training them and sending them north to guard the Citadel from all intruders. His hounds-his hounds!-had not guarded, had betrayed, had followed after this sky-born blasphemy who flouted their power; and the Citadel was a burnt-out ruin, the Lords Protector driven shamefully to seek refuge at Yurunna.

They had been kind. They had absolved him of fault. Still, the hounds were his.

The dishonor was his.

After the Lords Protector, Gelmar came, in such haste that he killed his beast within sight of the gate. The Ochar were broken. Yurunna stood alone against the host of the north, and the leader of that host was Stark, with his nine faithless hounds.

Gelmar and the Lords Protector had fled on, down the road to Ged Darod. Now, as they had feared, Yurunna was tottering to its fall. And the Houndmaster had seen from the battlements a big dark man on a dappled beast riding a circuit of the walls, with nine white hounds running by him.

He spoke to his own hounds, the twenty-four that were all he had left, and less than half of them full-grown. He spoke to them gently, because the young ones trembled.

Wait, he said. There will yet be killing.

The ram begin to swing. The deep drum-sound beat out heavily over Yurunna. Muster-horns blew, calling the Yur to defend the gate. The defenses along the wall, already thin, were 95

thinned still more. Many of the storerooms were gutted, and the emplacements destroyed. Because of the blocking of streets where fire and wind had brought down buildings, bodies of men could no longer be moved quickly back and forth. They could only move freely on the wall. Now many of those who manned it were drawn to the gate.

When the wind dropped, it was seen that masses of men had gathered in the plain below and were already on the zigzag road.

Stark was under the wall with his hounds and fifty Tarf, led by Klatlekt. Half the Fallarin, with the rest of the Tarf and one-third of the tribal army, waited in the fields.

Kill, said Stark. Clear the wall.

The hounds ranged on either side, sending fear to the Yur above. When the chosen section of the wall was cleared, the Fallarin hop-flapped up the sheer cliff, up the unscalable wall, and made fast ropes of twisted hide around the crenels of the firestep.

Tarf swarmed up the ropes, swords and shields hung at their backs. Some spread out to hold the wall. Others hauled up rope ladders or helped the tribesmen climb.

Stark forced the growling hounds to submit while he fitted slings under their bellies. The Tarf hauled them up, careless of their rage and fear. Stark climbed beside them. On either side now came red Kref and green Thorn. The Fallarin returned to their mounts and rode away.

On the broad top of the wall Stark gathered his party: Klatlekt and twenty Tarf and the hounds. He set out toward the gate.

The hounds forgot the indignity of the slings. There was a dark excitement in their minds, a wildness mixed with fear.

Many minds, N'Chaka. Too many. All hate. All red. Red. Red. 96

In the square, where the ram was a wincing thunder in their ears, the hounds of Yurunna said:

Things come. There along wall. And men. And hounds.

Hounds?

Yes.

The Houndmaster stroked rough heads. Good, he said. That is good. He passed word to the Wandsman captains that invaders were on the wall. He snapped orders to his two handlers and the apprentice boys, all Wandsmen, though of lesser and least rank, and thus safe like himself from the Northhounds. All were leaden with weariness, and the boys were all but useless with fright. However, the time would not be long. They would do. He did not call up any of the Yur. The renegade hounds would only kill them before they could shoot arrow or lift spear, and the captains would need every one.

He spoke to his favorite hound, an old wise bitch.

Hounds, Mika.

Mika made an eager growling and led the way.

Up on the wall Gerd said suddenly, N'Chaka. They come to kill. 16

Stark had come far enough around the curve of the wall to be able to see the top of the north gate-tower above the roofs. The tribesmen were coming strongly behind him, pouring up onto the wall, helped by the strong arms of the Tarf. They could still be thrown back if the hounds of Yurunna spread death and terror among them.

Stark went down stone steps, down off the wall, into 97

the street below. Klatlekt and the twenty Tarf came with him. The hounds slunk, whining.

Houndmaster, Gerd said. Angry.

Dim faint memories stirred, of old days, of running in couples with littermates, of an overmastering mind that gave orders and engendered a respect that was as near to love as a Northhound could feel. He will kill us, Grith said.

How?

With hounds. With his great sword.

Kill N'Chaka, Gerd said.

Not N'Chaka, Stark answered. And, contemptuously, Stay, then, if you fear the Houndmaster. N'Chaka will fight for you.

N'Chaka understood that he had little choice about fighting in any case. That was why the Tarf were there. But he felt a responsibility toward these fangy horrors who had become his allies. He had deliberately seduced them into betraying their masters, knowing that they could not comprehend what they were doing. They had followed him, they had served him, they were his. He had a duty to fight for them.

To the Tarf he said, "Do not touch mine."

He set off along a street that led inward from the wall. He had no worry about finding the hounds of Yurunna. They would find him. He wanted it to be as far as possible from the tribesmen.

Gerd howled. Then he bayed, and Grith bayed, and the others took it up. They followed Stark, and that deep and dreadful challenge rang ahead of them along the silent stony ways with no other sound in them but the drumbeat of the ram. The hounds of Yurunna heard. The young ones whined, partly from fear and partly from excitement, feeling a new ferocity rise within them. The old ones lifted their own voices, and their eyes glowed with a deadly light. The old relationship was long forgotten. These were strangers invading their territory, crying a pack cry, following a strange leader who was neither hound nor Wandsman.

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The Houndmaster said kill. They would kill gladly.

The streets were not too much encumbered. The stout stone buildings here had resisted the winds and fires. Both parties moved rapidly, hound-minds guiding eagerly toward a meeting.

The Houndmaster knew the streets, and Stark did not.

The Houndmaster spoke. Handlers and struggling apprentices forced the hounds to a reluctant halt. Ahead of them was a small open space, a little square where four streets met.

The Houndmaster waited.

In that one of the four streets that led from the wall, Gerd said, There! and rushed ahead into the square.

Nine hounds running, heads down, backs a-bristle. 'N'Chaka would have held them. But N'Chaka was fighting his own fight.

When the Northhounds fought each other, as the males did for leadership of the pack, they used every weapon they had. Fear would not kill a Northbound, but it served as a whip to wound and drive, the stronger against the weaker. The hounds of Yurunna did not at first send fear against the invading hounds. By order of the Houndmaster they sent it all against the alien leader. N'Chaka struggled to stand erect, to breathe.

To live.

"Slip them," said the Houndmaster, and the hounds of Yurunna went free. Twenty-four against nine, in the small square. Twenty-four encircling and overlapping nine, carrying them back by sheer weight into the mouth of the street whence they had come. Twenty-four and nine inextricably mixed. To the Tarf, indistinguishable.

The Houndmaster followed them with his great sword raised high, and to him each hound was as well known as the hairs and scars and pits upon his own face.

Three hounds of Yurunna, with the Houndmaster's old bitch Mika leading, burst out of the boiling mass into the street where the Tarf stood crammed between 99

the walls, their effective force reduced by the constriction to no more than five or six.

At their forefront Klatlekt stood by Stark, blinking his green-gold eyes. He warded the enemy hounds' first rush with his sword, while Stark sobbed for breath and stared blindly with the icy sweat beading his face.

"We must have fighting room," said Klatlekt. Hound-fear could not harm him. The fangs and the ripping claws could. He plucked at Stark with one powerful hand. "Come. Or we go without you."

The hounds attacked again, two feinting to draw Klatlekt's blade, the bitch driving straight for Stark's throat.

In the square the sword of the Houndmaster flashed down. And up. And down again.

N'Chaka saw death coming, smelled death, heard it. Sheer brute reflex, the dangerous last blind outlashing, brought his own sword forward. Houndmaster! Kill, Gerd! Kill. Or we all die.

The Houndmaster, untouchable Wandsman belly deep in hounds, swung his sword. Gerd, torn and bleeding, with N'Chaka's cry ringing in his mind, saw the flash of that blade above him and broke the unbreakable commandment. The Yurunna bitch-hound shrieked, an almost human sound, as the life-long mind-bond snapped. She turned her head, searching, crying out, and Stark ran her through the neck, clumsy and vicious with the black terror on him. He went forward, shouting to his hounds, and they flung themselves in a frenzy of guilt and triumph on the hounds of Yurunna, sensing that the Houndmaster's death had robbed them of their strength.

The guilding presence was gone, the strong firm voice that had spoken in their minds since they first saw light.

Stark became that voice.

Go back to your kennel. Back, or we kill.

The hounds of Yurunna begged help from the 100

handlers. The handlers no longer spoke. Gerd had learned how easy it was to kill Wandsmen.

Back to your kennel! Go!

The apprentices had fled long ago. The hounds of Yurunna were quite alone. The strangers and their strange leader fought fiercely. The things fought with them, the unhuman things that wielded long sharp swords and were not touched by fear.

Go, said the strong commanding voice in their minds.

The young hounds, already fearful and with no master to give them courage, did as Stark told them. There were eight still able to run. The old hounds died there, full of rage and grief, and Stark knew that if the Houndmaster had been present on the Plain of Worldheart, he would never have made himself leader of Flay's pack.

The small square fell quiet again. Gerd and Grith came panting to Stark's side. Only three others came with them, and not one unmarked. Stark and Klatlekt and several more of the Tarf had taken wounds, but none was disabled. Klatlekt blinked heavy eyelids and said, "If this is finished, we will return to the wall."

"It is finished," Stark said, knowing that more than this fight was finished. The face of the Houndmaster stared white and accusing from amid the rough sprawled carcasses. As a terror and a menace, as a weapon of the Wandsmen, the Northhounds were finished forever.

Stark took Gerd's head between his hands. You have killed Wandsmen. Gerd's teeth showed, even though he trembled. Houndmaster killed us. So. Other Wandsmen will kill.

With a strange echo of despair, Gerd said, We kill them. Grith?

We kill.

Come, then, Stark said, and went off after the quick-footed Tarf, who had not waited for him. He was con101

scious of his hurts and of his weariness, but he was exhilarated by this triumph over the Wandsmen. He ran swiftly, his heart beating hot, eager for more.

The booming of the ram had stopped. In its place was the confused uproar of men fighting. The tribesmen were making their attack. Most of them had come down off the wall to strike the Yur in the streets and the square. A strong party of tribesmen and Tarf had gone on to the tower and were fighting their way into it. Down below it housed the mechanism that controlled the gate, which was standing firm in spite of the battering. Stark and his hounds lent aid where it would help the most. He took a particular pleasure in picking out the Wandsman captains and saying, Kill. It was time they felt the weight of the weapon they had used for so long against other men.

The north tower was taken. The clanking mechanism hauled open the iron gate, and the tide of purple and white, brown and yellow, poured through it into the square. The zigzag road was a solid river of men rushing upward, yelping, howling, brandishing sword and spear, and below the road more men came from among the warty crops and spiny orchards to jostle for a place. Nothing could stand against that tide. The bodies of tribesmen spitted on Yur spears hung there with no room to fall. The defenders were forced back, back against stone walls, out of the square, into the streets, where the bands of Hann and Marag, Kref and Thuran, Thorn and yellow Qard hunted them and killed. When the killing was done, the looting began. Most of the fat storehouses where food and drink were kept had escaped the damage of the werewinds, being in the heart of the occupied section of Yurunna; many of them were in underground chambers cut in the rock. The tribesmen pillaged the storerooms, and the houses, and the public places. The Keepers of the six Hearths did what they could to maintain order.

Even so, things happened.

The men found the great walled house of the Yur 102

women and battered down its doors. Instead of the orgy of pleasure they had anticipated, they found creatures like obscene white slugs that stared at them with empty eyes and screamed without ceasing, clutching their unnatural young like so many identical blank-faced dolls. Overcome with disgust, the tribesmen made a silence in the place and never once thought of these degraded things as food.

That was the end of the Yur, the Well-Created servants of the Wandsmen. Some of the men still lived, but there would be no more breeding. Stark had no part in this. He had gone to the kennels. The gray-clad apprentices were there, boys up from Ged Darod only that year. One of them, a sullen heavy-faced youth, was crouched in a corner hugging himself and waiting to die, with hate and fear and nothing else at all in his eyes.

The other was with the hounds. He was slight and dark, his boy's face still unformed, his boy's hands too large and knuckly. He was afraid. There was no reason why he should not be. He was hollow-eyed and red-eyed and pale with exhaustion. But he was with the hounds where he belonged. And he met Stark's gaze with what dignity he could muster, even though he knew that those five grim blood-dabbled beasts at Stark's heels might kill him where he stood.

"How are you called?" Stark asked.

"Tuchvar," said the boy. And again, more clearly, "Tuchvar."

"Where from?"

"Tregad."

Tregad was a city-state, east of Irnan and north of Ged Darod. Stark nodded and turned to the young hounds. They whined and glanced at him furtively with their hellhound eyes that had not yet come to their full evil brightness.

You know me.

They did.

I am N'Chaka. I lead you now. 103

The hounds appealed to Tuchvar. Houndmaster? They knew that that mind had ceased to speak to them. They could not yet grasp the fact that it would never speak again.

Tuchvar said aloud, "This man is master now." N'Chaka? Master?

Master, Stark said. These old ones will teach you the law. Gerd moved forward, stiff-legged and growling. The young hounds said, We will obey.

Stark spoke now to Gerd and Grith. Will you go with me below Yurunna?

It was their turn to be uneasy. Not know. Hound-kind never sent but to Citadel.

Stark said, You cannot stay here. Things with swords will kill you, things that do not feel fear. You must go with me.

Go with N'Chaka or die?

Yes.

Then we go.

Good.

He didn't know whether it was good or not. They were cold-weather beasts, and he had no idea how well they would adjust to warmer climates. Some animals managed very well. In any case what he told them was true. Neither the Fallarin nor the Lesser Hearths of Kheb would consent to having a pack of Northhounds loose and leaderless to prey on them and their cattle. The Tarf would see to that.

Gelmar and the Lords Protector had not counted on the Tarf. He explained all this to Tuchvar. "Will you come with the hounds, as least as far as Tregad? Or do you serve the Wandsmen too loyally?"

"Not," said Tuchvar carefully, "so loyally that I want to die for them right here." He had been listening to the sounds outside and not liking them. He did not see what good it would do for him to die. It could not help the Wandsmen. It would certainly not help him.

The other apprentice spoke up from his corner, voice pitched high with fear and spite.

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"He serves no one loyally but the hounds. Even at Ged Darod he was thinking all the tune about star-ships and other worlds and listening to the heresies of Pedrallon."

Stark went over and yanked him to his feet.

"Stop shivering, boy. Nobody's going to kill you. What's your name?"

"Varik. From Ged Darod." Pride stirred in the lumpish face. "I was born there, at the Refuge."

"Farer's get," said Tuchvar. "They haven't any fathers."

"The Lords Protector are my fathers," said Varik, "and better than yours, sitting fat behind walls and trying to hide away food from the hungry."

"My father's dead," said Tuchvar bitterly, "but at least I know who he was, and he worked."

"All right," said Stark. "Now. Who is Pedrallon?"

"A red Wandsman," said Varik, "with the rank of Coordinator. The Twelve took away his rank and put him to doing penance for a year. It was supposed to be a secret, of course; they said Pedrallon had been relieved of his duties because of his health, but nothing stays a secret in our dormitories, not for very long."

Busy little apprentice Wandsmen, Stark thought, nibbling up crumbs of forbidden gossip like mice in a cupboard.

"What was his heresy?"

Tuchvar answered.

"He said the migrations were beginning again. He said that some of Skaith's people would have to go, to make room for others. He said it was wrong to stop the Irnanese."

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17

There was a complex of buildings where the two score Wandsmen had lived, with such women as they might have from time to time. The quarters lacked nothing of comfort. Stark and his party and the Keepers of the six Hearths had lodged themselves here. The Fallarin, ever exclusive, had found themselves another place.

At the center of the complex was a wide hall furnished with handsome things brought up from the south. The Hearth-Keepers had managed to keep their men from looting here. Rich carpets were on the floor. Hangings brightened the dark stone of the walls. Many lamps lighted it, in a profligate squandering of oil. Braziers gave off warmth. Tarf and tribesmen mingled, carrying food and wine to the tables, where the conquerors of Yurunna were celebrating their victory.

The hall was crowded. Everyone who could possibly force his way in had done so. They stuffed themselves on the plenty of the Wandsmen's storerooms, washing it down with Southron wine and bitter beer. When the feasting was done, some of the men danced with flashing swords while drums thumped and pipes shrilled. Others rose and sang boasting songs. They began to drink to their leaders, each Hearth vying with the others in claims to bravery and prowess in battle.

They drank to the Fallarin.

They drank to the Dark Man.

Ildann put down his goblet and said, "Now Yurunna is taken, we remember your promise, Stark."

He spoke so that the words were a challenge, intended to be heard by all. He waited until the hall

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became quiet, with every head bent toward him, listening, and then he asked:

"What will you do now?"

Stark smiled. "Have no fear, Ildann. You have Yurunna. I leave to you and your fellows the task of sharing out the loot and the land, the placing of villages and the method of ruling them. You're at full liberty to kill each other if you choose. I've done my part."

"You go south, then?"

"To Tregad. To raise an army for Irnan. If we succeed, there will be war with the Wandsmen." He looked out over the hall, at all the masked faces. "War. Loot. High pay. And at the end, the starships. The freedom of the stars. That may mean nothing to you. If so, stay and make bricks for the villages. If any wish to come with me, you will be welcome."

Ildann had three sons. The youngest rose to his feet. His name was Sabak. He was slender as a reed and light as a roebuck in his movements, and he had fought well. He said:

"I will go with you, Dark Man."

Ildann crashed his fist on the table. "No!" Sabak said, "I have a mind to see these ships, Father."

"Why? What do you want with other worlds? Have I not fought to bring you the best of this one? Yurunna, boy! We have taken Yurunna!"

"And that is well, Father. I too fought. Now I wish to see the ships."

"You're a child," said Ildann, suddenly quiet. "Men must feed and breed wherever they are. One world or another, feeding and breeding are the most of a man's life, along with, the fighting that goes with them. No matter where you go, you'll find nothing better than what you have."

"That may be, Father. But I will see for myself." Ildann turned on Stark, and Gerd, crouched by Stark's feet, sprang up snarling.

"I-see now why the Wandsmen wish to kill you," Ildann said. "You bring a poison with you. You have poisoned my son with dreams." 107

A puff of wind made the lamps flicker. Alderyk had risen. The light gleamed gold at his throat and waist and in his falcon eyes.

"The boy has wisdom enough to understand that there is something beyond the walls of his sty, Ildann. Feeding and breeding are not enough for everyone. I too will go with the Dark Man. I am a king, and I have a duty to be as wise as Ildann's youngest son."

There was a clamor of voices. Ildann shouted furiously. Again the lamps flickered and the cloaks of the men rustled as the small wind admonished them.

"The ships are there," Alderyk said. "The men are there, men from other worlds. We cannot pretend that things are still as they were before the landing, or ever will be again. We must know, we must learn." He paused.

"There is another matter."

He spoke now to Stark, his eyes agleam with cruel mirth.

"I said you were like a black whirling wind, to break and shatter. It's our world you blow across, Dark Man, and when you fly away among the stars, we'll be left to deal with whatever wreckage you may have devised. So it seems my duty to be with you."

A buffet of air slapped Stark about the head, tossing his hair, making him blink and turn aside.

"I control winds, you know," said Alderyk.

Stark nodded tranquilly. "Very well." He stood up. "Let the word be passed. I leave Yurunna tomorrow,' when Old Sun is at his highest. Let every man who wishes to come south with me be in the square beside the gate at that time, mounted, armed and with three week's provisions." He left the hall, with Ildann's angry voice raised again behind him. Ashton came, too, and Halk and Gerrith.

Halk said, "I think I'll go into the streets and drum up trade." In the quiet of the corridor, the sounds of celebration came clearly from outside. Through the windows Stark could see fires burning and men moving about them, dancing, chanting, drinking. Grith and

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the three rose stiffly from where they had lain on watch.

"Take Gerd with you to watch your back," Stark said. "The Hearth-Keepers may object to this stealing of ' their men."

"Keep your grimhound," Halk said, and touched his sword. "This is enough."

"Will yon argue?" Stark asked, and Gerd swung his heavy head to stare at Halk. Halk shrugged. He walked away. Gerd followed. Halk did not look back or notice him.

"What will you get?" Ashton asked.

"A few boys like Sabak, with stars in their eyes. Malcontents, troublemakers, the restless types who would rather fight than make bricks. Not too many, probably." He smiled briefly. "Alderyk I'll be glad to have, in spite of his thorns."

He said good night and went to his quarters. He sat for a time, brooding. He knew that Gerrith would be waiting for him. He did not go to her. Instead, he took a lamp and made his way quietly, with the hounds, along the chilly corridors and down several flights of steps until he reached the cellars, cut deep into the rock. The Wandsmen had had no need of prison cells and so there were none. Some of the smaller storage chambers had been pressed into service as dungeons, to hold the handful of Wandsmen who had survived the fall of Yurunna.

Half a dozen of the yellow-cloaked Qard were lounging on piles of grain sacks, by way of being guards. Two of them played a game with varicolored pebbles, tossing them into a space marked out with intricate patterns drawn in the dust of the floor. The others made bets.

One of them looked up. "Hey," he said. "The Hound-master!" They all left off what they were doing and stood. Stark stared at them with displeasure.

"How long have you called me by that name?"

"Since we first heard it from the Hann, who first saw 109

you with the Northhounds," said one of the men. "Didn't you know?"

"No. What else am I called?"

"Herder of Runners. Dark Man. Some even call you Starborn, but most of us don't believe that."

"Ah," said Stark. "You don't."

The man shrugged. "It may be. But it's easier to think that you came from the south."

"What do you know of the south?"

"There are great cities there, as high as mountains, and forests between them where there are all sorts of monsters and the trees eat men. Old Sun burns there with great heat, which is itself unnatural. I think anything might come from the south."

"Well," said Stark, "in a manner of speaking, I did come from there. What will you do now that you have Yurunna?"

"Build a village." The city was too large, too dark and cheerless for the tribesmen. They would build in the familiar pattern, at the edge of cultivation, close to their fields and herds. "We'll bring our women to tend the crops; men can't do that, you know. The land bears only for women. It is the same in the south?"

"I can name you a dozen places where it's so, and another dozen where it isn't." And not only in the south, friend, Stark thought. All over the galaxy. The man shook his head. "You and your companions are the only strangers I've ever seen. There are different thoughts behind your eyes. I hadn't ever wondered about people living and thinking in other ways. Our way seems the only one, the only right one..."

One of the other men leaned forward. "Say truly, Dark Man. Are you from the south, or from another world?"

"From another world," said Stark. "Look up into the sky some night and see the stars; think of the ships going back and forth between them. Maybe some day you'll get tired of fighting the cold and the Runners and decide to go out there yourselves."

The men muttered and glanced at each other. 110

"We are Qard," said the first man. "We have a place in the tribe, we have a set of laws to live by. If we went to some other place ..."

" 'The land shapes us,' " Stark said. " 'If we were in another place, we would be another people.' " He remembered Kazimni, the wolf-eyed Izvandian, captain of mercenaries at Irnan, who had said that. "And of course it's true. Yet there are those who have lived for centuries with the hope that someday the star-roads would be open."

He remembered the ruins of the towers away in the darklands, and the madness of Hargoth the Corn King, who had seen the ships in his Winter Dreaming, shining beside the sea. He and his people had been ready to migrate all the long way south to Skeg, singing the Hymn of Deliverance, to find those ships. They had hailed Stark as the savior come to lead them, until that black day at Thyra and Gelmar's cruel lie. The Corn King and his priests had left there stricken men, believing that the ships were already gone and that their endless waiting must continue.

"Anyway," said the tribesman, "the ships are far away, if they exist at all. The choice will not be made in my lifetime."

And perhaps not in mine either, Stark thought, and said, "I will speak to the red Wandsman."

There was only one of that rank among the survivors. His name was Clain, and he had been one of the administrators of the city. He was intelligent and well controlled; a rather cold and rigid man, too proud to show the rage and despair he must be feeling. Which was not true of the lesser Wandsmen. They were all to be kept alive with a view to ransom or as possible trade goods in future negotiations.

Clain was alone, at his own request, and not uncomfortable in his confinement. He stood when Stark entered, stiff with unwelcome, looking bitterly at the hounds. Stark left the three outside, taking only Grith with him into the cell. He shut the heavy door.

"Can you not leave me in peace?" the Wandsman asked, and Stark felt sorry for him in a way. Battered,

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exhausted and soiled, Clain was the model of painful defeat.

"I've already told you that Irnan still fights. I've told you all I know about what forces have been sent against her. I've told you there was talk among the Lords Protector, in their short visit here, concerning the starport at Skeg

..."

"They spoke of closing the starport if Irnan should be relieved and the revolt widened."

"I told you that."

"They are guarding the starport closely, hoping that my friend and I may come there."

"I told you that, too."

Stark shrugged. "We knew it anyway. Now tell me about Pedrallon." Clain sighed. "I have told you that I don't know Pedrallon."

"He's a red Wandsman. Surely there aren't so many of you at Ged Darod that you haven't at least heard of him."

"My place was not at Ged Darod, it was here . . ."

"One of your colleagues has told us that you went down to Ged Darod eight months ago, at about the time Pedrallon was disciplined by the Twelve."

"That's true. But I am not in the confidence of the Twelve."

"Really. Yet the gray apprentices knew all about it." Cain's mouth made an icy pretense of a smile. "I suggest that you return to the kennels, then, for further information."

Stark frowned. "You have no idea of the basis of Pedrallon's heresy?"

"I am not concerned with such matters. I went to Ged Darod to see about increasing the supplies we send-did send-to the Ochar. Their crops have suffered ..."

"You don't know why he was disciplined so severely?"

"I only heard that he was ill."

"And you don't know what his penance was?"

"I told you-"

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"Yes," said Stark, "you did indeed. Grith ..." All this time Clain had been avoiding the sight of the Northhound, as though he knew what must happen because of her. Now his skin became even grayer than before.

"I beg you-"

"I believe you do," said Stark. "I'm sorry." Grith, touch. Not kill. Touch. The massive head lifted. Stark could have sworn she smiled, pulling her dark lips back from gleaming fangs. Her bright eyes grew brighter still, smoky fires under heavy brows.

Clain went on his knees and wept. "They were our servants," he said between chattering jaws. "Ours. This is evil. Wrong." Touch him, Grith.

In no more than five minutes Stark had everything he wanted. He left Clain curled up, shivering on his pallet. He nodded to the Qard and went up the stairs again. He knocked at Ashton's door and went into the room. Noises filtered through the shuttered windows from the streets of Yurunna. The tribesmen were still joyful. Ashton looked at Stark's face and sighed,

"What have you found out?"

"Pedrallon was sentenced to a year of menial duties at the Refuge as well as being stripped of his rank. They seem to have considered executing him, but didn't-Wandsmen are hardly ever sentenced to death. The small number of Wandsmen who openly supported his position were also punished, in lesser ways. There may have been others who were not open."

"Well?" said Ashton.

"Pedrallon was accused of being in secret communication with the star-captains at Skeg. He denied it. He was also accused of having a group of adherents on the outside. He denied that, too. If there was a conspiracy, it was a small one, and it may be out of business entirely. But from what Clain said, there is a possibility that Pedrallon had secured a transceiver from one of the captains and that some of his group

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had it hidden in or near Ged Darod. If so, it's still there. The Wandsmen never found it."

"A transceiver," Ashton said, and sighed again.

"If the Wandsmen send the ships away, as they promise to do, we'll be cutting our own throats if we succeed in raising men at Tregad. If we don't, if you and I just run for Skeg, our chances of getting through their cordon are about nil."

"Do you know there's a transceiver?"

"I said it's a possibility."

"Ged Darod. The heart and center. And you're thinking of going there."

"I don't think there's any way out of it," Stark said, "if we hope to leave Skaith alive. Or dead."

18

The Wandsmen's Road was old. Above Ged Darod it ran through the barren places where survival was difficult, so that even during the Wandering and the unsettled times that followed, the road had not been too much exposed to attack by marauding bands. The system of wayhouses made travel on the road swift and comfortable for those authorized to use it. For the unauthorized, it was death.

Over the centuries there had been much coming and going along the road: Wandsmen and their armed escorts and mercenaries on the Lower Road, Yur and Ochar above; caravans bringing goods and supplies up to Yurunna, with their escorts and companies of lower-grade Wandsmen; caravans bringing women for the Wandsmen at Yurunna and for the distant peoples of Thyra and the Towers, beyond the mountains in the haunted darklands. Special parties, outwardly indistinguishable from the ordinary, conveyed each new 114

Lord Protector north to the Citadel, which he would never leave until in his turn he was laid to rest among the thermal pits of Worldheart. But never had there been such a company on the road as went upon it now from Yurunna. Stark rode at the head, on a dappled beast. Thirteen great white hounds followed him, with the gray apprentice Tuchvar to whip them in. With Stark at the head of the column were Ashton and Gerrith, and Halk with a great sword slung at his back, the hilt standing up over his shoulder; somewhere in the storerooms of Yurunna he had found a blade to his liking for size and weight. Alderyk rode where he would, Klatlekt and half a dozen Tarf trotting attendance beside him.

Next were fifty Fallarin, with their rich harness shining and dust in the folds of their wings, and five score Tarf with their four-handed swords and curiously stubby bows from which they could fire a deadly stream of arrows. After them came the tribesmen, purple Hann with Sabak at their head, red Kref and green Thorn, white Thuran and yellow Qard, brown Marag, all in dusty leather. One hundred and eighty-seven of them, divided into groups according to their tribe, the day's place in line of each group chosen by lot in the morning. Stark hoped that they would become a single body of fighting men, but that time was not yet. He humored their pride.

South from Yurunna, at the great scarp of the Edge, the mountain wall on their right hand came to an end. Four thousand feet below, the desert spread away to the horizon without a break, except for abrupt up-thrusting fangs of rock, worn thin with endless gnawing at the wind. The sand was streaked and stained in many colors, black and rust red, poison green, sulphur yellow. It was chillingly devoid of life, but the markers of the road marched out across it, a line of tiny dots.

At the foot of the Edge, just below them, where springs ran from beneath the cliffs, there were patches

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of cultivation and areas where a brownish sward covered the sand. A multitude of speckles on these areas were the herd-beasts of Yurunna, which had been driven to pasture here out of the way of the army. Men would come presently to drive them back.

The company wound its way down a steep and tortuous road cut in the sheer rock.

It was warmer at the foot of the scarp. The smell of water was strong in the dry air. High above the fields, where the face of the cliff was eroded into open caves, inaccessible dwellings squatted in remoteness and mystery; clusters of uneven walls with inscrutable windows at which no faces showed. Whether or not the star-roads were open made little difference here. The company refilled waterskins at the springs and went on. They moved swiftly, yet the desert seemed to have no boundaries. The way houses had been abandoned, beasts driven off, supplies carried away or destroyed. By this they knew that spies had been left to watch Yurunna, and that word its fall had gone ahead of them. The wells had been blocked with boulders or choked with sand. Water supplies ran short. Men sickened of the hard stony waste with its deathly colors like the skin of a poisonous reptile. The beasts became footsore. There began to be grumbling and discontent. The hounds panted in the warmer air and the tribesmen threw open their leather cloaks. The Fal-larin sulked and wished for water to wash their fur glossy again.

As Stark had guessed, most of the tribesmen were the restless ones, the trouble makers, and the Hearth-Keepers had not been too sorry to see them gone. At night Stark went among them, talking to them, telling tales of marches and battles on worlds far away, imbuing them with as much of his own strength of purpose as was possible, binding them to himself by sheer force of personality.

Nevertheless, he watched them.

Gerd roused him one night. A dozen or so hooded forms were stealing away from the camp, on foot,

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leading their animals. Stark let them get a certain distance away and then sent the pack. The deserters came crawling back to camp herded by thirteen grim white hounds. The attempt was not repeated.

Yet Stark could not blame them. Sometimes at night he stood, with Gerd and Grith by him, and listened to the stillness and felt the empty leagues around him and wondered what he was leading his small legion into. If they survived this ugly desolation, their way to Tregad was by no means clear. Gelmar had a long head start. Gelmar would have the news from Yurunna. Gelmar would look at a map, consider the logistics and assume that Tregad, being the nearest possible source of help for Irnan, would be Stark's most likely destination. Surely he would think of some way to intercept him.

They were three days without water at the last. Then they came to the first stream, with a line of stunted trees twisting along its course, and knew that they would live.

Stark had brought maps from Yurunna. As soon as was possible he left the Wandsmen's Road and struck out southeast for Tregad.

The land was not hospitable. In the Barrens to the west there had at least been an abundance of water and edible mosses for the beasts. Here there was little in the way of forage except along the stingy watercourses. Still, the beasts were hardy and they managed, and the men grew more cheerful even though their own bellies were pinched. The deathly colors had been replaced by an honest gray-brown. The Fallarin splashed and fluttered like birds at the cold pools and sleeked their fur until it glistened. The hounds had remained well so far. Here they hunted and found game, small shy creatures that might outrun the hounds' feet but not their fear.

The Three Ladies now ruled the sky again, glorious clusters brighter than moons, so that the nights were filled with a milky radiance. To Stark and the Irnanese they were like old friends, To the Fallarin and the tribesmen they were an astonishment.

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With startling abruptness the nature of the country changed. They came out of the barren places and into the northern edge of the Fertile Belt not far above the latitude of Irnan. Here were grass and water and arable land. Here, for the first time, they found villages, walled, dourly squatting above their fields, with watchtowers here and there to guard against predators-chiefly, the Wild Bands.

Several times the hounds gave warning. Stark and his men could catch glimpses of them, furtive sinking forms all hair and tatters, loping along at a distance, eyeing them.

Sabak said, "They're no better than Runners."

"Not much," Stark agreed, "but some. They're not as brainless, they haven't got such big teeth and they're not anything like as fast." He added, "Don't straggle."

Using the hounds and the Tarf as scouts, Stark was able to hit the villages before they could shut their gates. At each one he spoke to the people. The Dark Man of the prophecy told them of the fall of the Citadel and of the taking of Yurunna. They were a small dark people here, quite different from the tall Irnanese, and their manner was not friendly. Yet when they heard of the news their faces brightened. They too chafed under the yoke of the Wandsmen, who came at every harvest time to take a portion of their meager crops so that they were always on the edge of hunger. Many of the people had gone, to become Farers. Slowly the villages were dying. The hardness of the life and the small rewards had left ruins here and there and fields abandoned to the greedy weeds.

In each village a few of the folk picked up what arms they had or could improvise, and they joined with Stark's company. And along the paths and the herdsmen's tracks and the hunters' ways, messengers took the words of the Dark Man among scattered Settlements.

Other messengers were abroad, too. One night a signal fire flared atop a distant hill, its 118

light paled by the lovely glow of the Three Ladies. A second fire kindled to life farther away, and then a third, a tiny pinpoint. The fourth Stark could not see, but he knew it was there, and a fifth-as many as were needed.

"They've seen us," Halk said. "They know where we are and where we're going. Wherever they choose to be waiting for us, there they will wait." Stark found the main road to Tregad, and the company went down it like a thunderbolt.

It had been spring when Stark and his companions left these latitudes, with orchards just in blossom and the fresh green blanketing the fields. Now grain was yellowing toward harvest and fruit was heavy on the boughs. Deep summer. Yet there was no one but themselves on the road to Tregad, where there ought to have been traders and drovers, wandering mountebanks and the bands of Farers. The gates of the villages they passed hung open, but the people had gone to hide themselves in the hills and the fields were un-tended. Stark, with the hounds and some of the Tarf, scouted ahead, alert for ambush. The hounds were not as tireless as they had once been. The young ones especially had become thin and listless. They suffered from fluxes, and Tuchvar worried and nursed them with infusions of herbs and green bark from a particular shrub. The old hounds fared better, though they suffered in the midday heat, mild as it was in this temperate climate. Still, they went obediently as they were told, and Stark rode with them far in advance of the troop.

There was no ambush. Woods and narrow defiles held no enemy.

"But of course," said Ashton, "Gelmar knows you've got the hounds, so an ambush wouldn't work-they'd warn you."

"He must meet us somewhere," Halk said. "He or his people."

"No doubt they will," said Stark. 119

And they did.

Tregad, when they came to it in the middle of an afternoon, was a city much like Irnan, stone-built and solid behind massive walls. Irnan was gray; the stone of Tregad was honey-colored so that it appeared far less grim, glowing warmly in the sunlight with the broad fields and orchards at its feet and its head halfway up the shoulder of a mountain, and a wide dark lake beyond. Four thousand Farers thronged the fields and orchards. They trampled the standing crops into the ground, tore the fruiting branches from the trees. They howled and screamed and surged in irregular waves upon the gates of the city, which were shut against them.

There were some scraps of color on the city wall just below the battlements. Stark made out the bodies of six men hanging there, one in a red tunic, five in green.

"It looks," he said, "as if Tregad has hung up her Wandsmen." Halk's great blade came rasping from its sheath. His face, still gaunt and craggy, shone with exultation.

"Tregad has revolted, then! Well, Dark Man, there are allies beyond that Farer trash! What will you do? Attack? Or run away?"

19

Halk leaned forward, his jaw thrust out, challenging. Stark had an idea that if he said run, the long blade would be for him.

Farer trash or not, the odds were staggering. He did not know what had happened in Tregad, though he could make a guess. Presumably, having slain their

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Wandsmen for whatever reason, the people of the city were committed to revolt. Presumably, when they saw a small force attacking the Farers, they would make a sally to support it. If they did not, or if they came too late, the results would be unpleasant.

Stark sighed and said, "Alderyk?"

The Fallarin had been staring at the mob, his aristocratic nose wrinkling with disgust.

"I think we must have a wind," he said, "to blow away the stink." He rode back to his people. They began to move out, forming the familiar crescent-a much smaller one this time, and with no Runners ahead of it to drive against the enemy. Stark sent Tuchvar with Grith and half of the pack to stay by Gerrith and Ashton, both of whom were armed and ready. He himself rode back along the line, snapping orders.

The Farers began to be aware of the newcomers.

They were drawn from every race of the Fertile Belt, in all colors, sizes and shapes. They were of all ages, except young children and the very old. They were dressed, or not dressed, in every conceivable fashion, each according to his taste; rags, body-paint, flowing things, flapping things, no things. Some were shaven bald as eggs, others had hair to their knees. Some were adorned with flowers or plucked branches hung with fruit. Some affected tufts of leaves, or feathers or garlands of the potent love-weed. These were the blessed children of the Lords Protector, the weak to be succored, the homeless to be sheltered, the hungry to be fed. Happy children, blowing free with the winds of the world, living only for the day because the years of Old Sun were numbered and there was no time to waste on anything but love and joy. Their other name was mob.

The ones in the outer fields saw Stark's troop first. They stopped their trampling and stared. The stopping and staring spread gradually inward toward the wall, until the whole motley crowd of them had fallen quiet. They stared across a level space of turf at the company that had appeared so suddenly from among the

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low hills above Tregad. They saw the dark man on the dappled beast, the huge white hounds, Halk and the sun-haired woman and the off-world man, the winged Fallarin glinting with gold in the sunlight, the Tarf with their striped bellies and four-handed swords, the tribesmen in their leather cloaks, the villagers with crude weapons and faces full of hate.

They stared, startled and agape, until they realized how small a troop it was and who was leading it.

A single voice, a woman's voice, cried out, "The Dark Man and the whore of Irnan!"

Mob shout, mob yell.

"The Dark Man and the whore!"

A woman, slim and naked, with body-paint laid on in whorls of pink and silver, pushed her way from the crowd and leaped onto a farm wagon abandoned in the fields. She was graceful and young and her hair was like a dark cloud around her head.

Stark knew her. "Baya."

So did Halk. "I told you then to kill her, Dark Man. Did I not?" Baya shouted to the mob. "I was at Irnan! I saw the arrows fly. I saw the Wandsmen butchered. I saw the Farers slain ... because of them!" She flung out her arm toward Stark and Gerrith, her body bent like a bow.

"The star-spawn and the red-haired bitch whose mother made the prophecy!" The mob gave tongue, a strange wild high-pitched scream. Gerrith said, "That is the girl you brought from Skeg?"

"It is." Baya had made the first contact there with Stark, leading him to Gelmar and a deadly trap beside the milky sea. She had led the search for him after he escaped, when Yarrod and his group from Irnan hid him among the ruins beyond the river. Stark remembered how he had broken up a particularly nasty business involving two of Baya's Farer companions, high on love-weed, and had then been faced with the choice of killing the girl to keep her mouth shut or bringing

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her along on the journey to Irnan. He had chosen to do the latter. Mordach, Chief Wandsman of Irnan, freed her when he took Stark and Yarrod's people prisoner. Stark had not seen her again. He had wondered if she survived the slaughter in the city. Now he knew.

"These are the ones we came to take!" she was crying. "Let the traitors of Tregad rot behind their walls, we don't need them. Kill the Dark Man! Kill the whore! Kill! Kill! Kill!"

She leapt from the wagon and began to run across the turf, naked and lithe and light, hair flying behind her. Her name meant Graceful, and she was. Gerd snarled and lifted his hackles, his head against Stark's knee. N'Chaka. Kill?

The blood-cry of the mob shook the heart. The Farers began to move, not as one man, but in groups, patches, swirls, until the whole of the mass was in motion. They were armed only with such things as stones and sticks and knives, an assortment of weapons as haphazard as themselves. But they were a good four thousand strong. They were not afraid.

The Fallarin had formed their crescent. They began to chant. The tribesmen had swung into a V formation, with Stark and Halk at the apex and the villagers between the wings.

"Archers," said Stark. "And keep together. Head straight for the gate. Above all, don't stop."

Arrows were nocked to strings. The mob streamed toward them, a flapping bobbing grotesque multitude with that single slender form fleeting ahead. The first sharp gust of wind knocked Baya from her feet. Her pink-and-silver body rolled on the green turf. The Fallarin moved forward, hunched in their saddles, dark wings beating, voices harsh and commanding. Magic or mind-force, the winds obeyed it. They whirled and beat, lashing hair and garments, pelting the Farers with leaves and twigs and heads of broken grain, chaff to sting and blind the eyes.

The mob mass faltered and began to stumble. The 123

winds drove group against group, spreading confusion which fed upon itself. Stark raised his arm, and a tribesman in Harm purple put a horn to his lips and blew a strident call.

Stark said to the hounds, Now kill!

He kicked his beast into a run, heard the troop move behind him. Gerd ran at his knee. The winds dropped as suddenly as they had begun. Bowstrings twanged. He saw Farers dropping, spinning away. The floundering mob was split before him and he crashed on into the opening.

Fallarin and Tarf closed up swiftly behind the wings of the V. The beasts began to stumble over bodies. Halk was shouting a battle-cry that Stark had heard once before, in the square at Irnan: "Yarrod! Yarrod! Yarrod!" Stark looked at the gates of Tregad, and they were still far away and they were still shut. The mass of Farers seemed to be clotting and compacting ahead, between him and the gate.

There were too many of them. Swords rose and fell with increasing desperation. The hounds could not kill enough, could not kill fast enough. From out the milling screaming horde stones came flying. Stones are cloddish weapons, without grace or beauty, but they function. Stark shouted, urging the men on, fighting off a horrible vision of the mob rolling in like water in the wake of the troop and submerging it by sheer weight of numbers. Ponderously, with what seemed like dreamlike slowness, the gates of Tregad swung open.

Armed men poured out. A torrent of them. Hundreds of them. No sortie, but a full-scale attack. They fell upon the Farers with the ferocity of a long hatred, spilling blood into the fields as payment for the murdered grain. Archers and slingers appeared upon the walls. A mounted troop rode out. Farers began to run. The solid mass broke. Bits of it shredded away, and the armed men moved through the chaos, smiting, until the shredding became a rout and the Farers were

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fleeing for the hills, leaving their dead in heaps amid the wreckage they had made.

A comparative quiet came over the field. Tregadians went among the wounded or leaned on their arms and stared at the strangers. Stark rallied his folk. Some had been hurt by flying stones, and one of the Tarf was dead. Three of the villagers were missing. He sent Sabak and some others to search for them. Alderyk looked after the Farers, who were still being harried by the mounted troop and the more energetic foot. "The cold north has something to recommend it, after all," he said.

"You have the Runners."

"They don't pretend to be human," Alderyk said, "and we're not obliged to keep them fed."

The mounted troop turned and came back, having seen the Farers well on their way. An old man rode at the head of it, a fierce old man, all eyebrows and cheekbones and jut nose and thrusting chin. Locks of gray hah" hung from under a round hard leather cap. His body-leather was worn and stained with use, and his sword was plain, with a broad blade and a sturdy grip, made for a day's work.

His black eyes probed at Stark, darted to Gerrith and Ashton, to the Fallarin and the Tarf, back to the hounds and Tuchvar. Those eyes were startlingly young and bright with angry excitement.

"You bring an interesting assortment of talents, Dark Man."

"Is that why you waited so long?" Stark asked. "To see what we could do?"

"I was impressed. Besides, it was my attack you were interfering with. I might ask you why you didn't wait until we were ready." He sheathed his sword. "I am Delvor, Warlord of Tregad." He bowed with a stiff courtliness to Alderyk and his Fallarin. "My lords, you are welcome in my city." In turn he greeted the others. "You find us at a moment of sudden event. Those ornaments on the wall are still warm."

He faced Stark abruptly and said, "Dark Man. I have heard one story and another story, all from Wandsmen

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and Farers. Now I want to hear the true one. Has the Citadel fallen?"

"It has. Ask Ashton, who was prisoned there. Ask the Northhounds, who were its guardians. Ask the Hooded Men, who heard of it through Gelmar himself, the Chief Wandsman of Skeg."

Delvor nodded slowly. "I was sure, even though the Wandsmen said no and the Farers said lie. But it is strange, then ..."

"What is?"

"The Lords Protector. The mighty ones who dwelt at the Citadel. Where are they? Or were they only a myth?"

"They're no myth," Stark said. "They're old men, red Wandsmen moved up to the top of the ladder where there's only room for seven. They wear white robes and do the ultimate thinking, remote and cool and unhurried by the urgencies of the moment. They make the policies that run your world, but they're making them at Ged Darod now, instead of at the Citadel."

"At Ged Darod," Delvor said. "The Lords Protector, undying and unchanging . .

. Seven old men, turned out of their beds and their immortality, running for shelter at Ged Darod. Is this what you're telling me?"

"Yes."

"And yet there is no word of it? No beating of the breast, no crying of woe among the faithful? Those several thousand vermin didn't know it."

"They'll have to know in time," Stark said. "The Wandsmen can't keep it secret forever."

"No," said Halk. "But they haven't got to tell the truth, either." He looked almost himself again, holding the bloody sword, his face streaked with the sweat of battle. He laughed at Stark. "These Lords Protector are going to be harder to destroy than you thought, Dark Man."

"Come," said Delvor. "I forget my manners." They rode toward the gate, and the soldiers of Tregad raised a ragged cheer. Stark squinted up at the Wandsmen dangling on 126

the wall. "The red one wouldn't be Gelmar, I suppose?"

"No, that was our Chief Wandsman. One Welnic. Not a bad sort until he bethought him of his duty."

"What happened here?"

Delvor bent his black gaze upon the Farer dead sprawled amid crushed grain.

"They came swarming out of the hills this morning. We're used to Farers, the gods know, but they run in small packs normally, drifting in and out. These were in their thousands, and for a purpose. We didn't like the look of them. We shut the gates. One of those-" He pointed to a green Wandsmen swinging gently in the breeze, "a one-eyed man, slightly mad, I think, was leading them. He raged at us, and Welnic insisted that he be let in to talk. So we let him through the postern, with the mob howling outside. They'd been sent from Ged Darod. It was thought that you were coming here to try and raise troops for Irnan, and they meant to trap you here in my city. I might not have minded that so much, since no decision had been made . . ."

"You were still waiting," Halk said, "for word from the north."

"Prophecies are all very well," said Delvor coldly, "but one does not go to war on the strength of a simple statement that thus or such will happen."

"We did."

"It was your prophecy. We preferred to wait." He gestured impatiently and got back to the subject. "The Farers had been brought to take over our city, to make sure that you got no help from us. The people of Tregad were to be used as hostages. They felt that you would hesitate to use your several weapons against us, and so you could be more easily disarmed and taken. We refused to have our people so endangered. That madman, that one-eyed swine, told us that if some of them had to die, it was in a good cause, and he bade us open the gate to his mob, which was already screaming threats and damaging our fields. We became even more angry when Welnic told us we would have to obey. When we did not, the

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Wandsmen tried to open the gates themselves. You see where they ended." His restless gaze stabbed at them. "They pushed us too far, you see. We might never have gone over. We might have sat debating and havering until Old Sun fell out of the sky. But they pushed us too far." "So they did at Irnan," said Stark. As they came under the wall, he was able to distinguish the individual features of the Wandsmen. Distorted and discolored as it was, there was no mistaking one of those faces, with the livid scar marring all of one side from brow to chin. "Vasth," he said. Halk, recognizing his handiwork, said harshly, "He will trouble decent men no more. You've done well here, Delvor."

"I hope so. There are many who will not agree." "One thing puzzles me. Were there no mercenaries quartered on you, as there were at Irnan?"

"Only a token force. The rest had been sent as reinforcements to the siege. The Wandsmen were desperately anxious that Irnan should fall. I keep my men well trained to arms. We were able to deal with the mercenaries." They passed in through the long tunnel of the gateway, into the square beyond, a cobbled space surrounded by walls of honey-colored stone. People straggled about, looking dazed by the swift turn of things, talking in low voices. They fell silent as the cavalcade came in and turned to stare. At the Dark Man and the whore of Irnan, Stark thought, wondering if Baya had escaped a second time.

Trail-worn and tired, they dismounted from their lean and footsore beasts; the tall desert beasts so out of place here. The tribesmen shook the dust from their cloaks and stood proudly, their veiled faces giving an impression of remote impassivity beneath their hoods, fierce eyes fixed resolutely on nothing, refusing to be awed by crowds or buildings.

The Fallarin, dainty as winged cats, stepped lightly 128

down. The hundred Tarf, in quiet ranks, blinked in mild unconcern at the townsfolk.

"I wonder," said Ashton, "that Gelmar didn't come himself to Tregad."

"Probably," Stark said, "he has something more important to attend to." His face hardened. "We all know that as soon as word of this day's work gets back to Ged Darod, Gelmar will be on his way to Skeg to shut down the starport." 20

It was warm in the woods, shadowed and warm and quiet, Branches were thick overhead, screening out Old Sun. The hollow was rimmed with flowering bushes and lined with golden moss. The tiny stream that ran through the hollow whispered and chuckled to itself, almost too softly to be heard. The smells were sweet and drowsy. Now and then a bird called somewhere, or some small creature rustled, or the brown shag-coated riding animals whuffled contentedly at their tethers. It was altogether a pleasant place to sit on an afternoon, after all the cold deserts and bitter winds and hard riding. Tuchvar had difficulty keeping his eyes open.

He had to. He was on watch.

Because he knew the way to Ged Darod and could handle the hounds, the Dark Man had chosen him as guide and companion. Him alone.

The hounds slept, thirteen great white sprawls on the moss. It saddened Tuchvar to see them so gaunt, and he tried to convince himself that they looked better than they had. They twitched and groaned and muttered in their sleep. He was aware of them as they dreamed; fleeting scraps of memory, of hunts and fights

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and mating and feeding and killing. The old hounds remembered mist and snow and the free-running of the pack.

The Dark Man slept, too, with Gerd's head resting on his thigh and Grith snoring by his other side. Tuchvar peeped at him sidelong, feeling like an intruder and afraid that at any moment those strange clear eyes would open and catch him at it. Even in sleep the man was powerful. Tuchvar felt that if he were to creep toward that muscled body, relaxed and sprawled like those of the hounds, no matter how quietly he went it would spring up all in a second before he could reach it, and those long-fingered hands would have him by the throat.

But they would not kill him until the brain behind the disconcerting eyes had considered and made that decision.

Control. That was the strength one felt in the Dark Man. Strength that went beyond the physical. Strength that the big tall man with the big long sword did not have, and perhaps that was why he disliked the Dark Man so much, because he knew that he lacked this strength himself, and envied it. Stark's face fascinated Tuchvar. Had, since he first saw it there at Yurunna. He thought it was beautiful in its own way. Subtly alien. Brooding, black-browned, with a structure that might have been hammered out of old iron. A warrior's face, scarred by old battles. A killer's face, but without cruelty, and when he smiled it was like sunlight breaking through clouds. Now, in the unguarded innocence of sleep, Tuchvar saw something there that he had never noticed before. It was sadness. In his dreams, it seemed, the Dark Man remembered lost things and mourned them, not unlike the hounds. He wondered where, across the wide and starry universe, on what remote and unimagined worlds, Stark might have lost those things, and what they might have been.

He wondered if he himself would ever get beyond the narrow skies of Skaith. 130

Not if the Wandsmen had their way.

It made him hurt inside to think that with one single word they could make those skies a prison for him, forever.

The Dark Man stirred, and Tuchvar became busy with the fastenings of his blue smock. He had put off the gray tunic of an apprentice Wandsman at Tregad. He had not chosen to wear it in the first place, and he had grown to hate it. Being an orphan, he had come into the care of the Wandsmen; and Welnic, finding him more intelligent than most, had sent him to Ged Darod to be educated. That was a prideful thing, to be chosen, and even though he was made to study hard and learn the virtues of service and self-abnegation, the off-times in the lower city were a carnival, a fair that never ended. Then they sent him north to Yurunna, and that was a different story. Cold and bleak; half-lifeless above the unpleasant oasis, the city had oppressed him with a sense of the unnatural. There was no laughter in those cheerless streets, no activity except the Yur, with their blank faces and empty eyes, going about their regimented business. One never saw their women or their young ones. No children played. No one ever sang, or shouted, or quarreled, or made music. There was nothing to do. The senior Wandsmen kept to themselves. The Houndmaster had been a harsh disciplinarian; Tuchvar had wept no tears for him, though he recognized the man's devotion to the hounds. He himself had become attached to the brutes for lack of anything better. Varik had not been much, as an only companion. He had elected with snuffling loyalty to remain with the Wandsman being held at Yurunna, rather than aid the forces of subversion. Tuchvar wondered how he was, and hoped that he was miserable. It was Pedrallon and the Wandsmen's treatment of him that had made Tuchvar begin to question the system to which he was apprenticed. His eyes were on the stars. He lived for the day when he could go to Skeg and actually see the ships and the

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men from other worlds. He was passionately on the side of the Irnanese, and he had worshipped Pedral-lon, from his humble distance, for saying that the Irnanese were right and the Wandsmen wrong. And then Pedrallon had been silenced, punished, put to shame. He himself had been given a tongue-lashing by his mentor and soon after had found himself packed off to Yurunna. He had begun to think, for the first time in his life. Really think, trying to separate the deed from the word and the word from the truth, getting hopelessly confused because here there was nothing one could put one's hand on, only uncertainties and perhapses. But he decided at the last that in any case he wanted the stars more than he wanted to be a Wandsman, and if the Wandsmen were going to forbid him the stars, he would fight them in any way he could.

Beyond the trees, shimmering in the midst of the plain, lay Ged Darod, golden roofs and thronging multitudes, with the great towers of the upper city reared like a benison over all. Memories swept across Tuchvar's mind in a crushing wave, memories of power, deep-seated and very old, as strong as the foundations of the world. His belly contracted with a pang of dismal certainty.

Surely not even the Dark Man could overcome that power. He wanted to pound his fists against all frustration. Why were grown men so blind, so stupid, so stubborn, when the answers to everything were so clear and simple? He had stayed for hours in the state hall at Tregad, with its fine pillars and sturdy arches carved in patterns of vines and fruit, listening to the speeches and the arguments. Some were still concerned with the lightness or wrongness of what had been done, as though that mattered now. Some demanded that the city take the Dark Man and his companions prisoner and hand them over to the Wandsmen in the hope of buying forgiveness. These people had had to be forcibly silenced when the Dark Man and his people spoke, telling of the Citadel and Yurunna and urging

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help for Irnan as a means of freeing Tregad from the yoke of the Wandsmen. And of course that was the thing to do. Tuchvar could not understand why there was any question about it, why they did not at once raise every man they could spare and march to Irnan. Yet still they talked and argued. Some said they ought to shut themselves up behind their walls and wait to see what happened. Others wrangled about the starships-whether or not they were worth fighting for, whether or not some or all of the people should emigrate, whether or not both those questions were fruitless because in any case the Wandsmen would send the ships away. Men and women yelled and screamed at each other. Finally Delvor had risen, in his iron and worn leather, and fixed them his fierce glare.

"The stars are nothing to me one way or the other," he said. "Skaith was my mother, and I'm over old for fostering. But I tell you this: Whatever you want, life on another world or a better life right here, you will have to fight for it, and not with words or halfhearts, and you cannot fight alone. The first blow has been struck. Let us stake the second. Let us march to relieve Irnan. And let word be sent among all the city-states that the Citadel has fallen, that the Lords Protector are human and vulnerable men, that we fight for our own freedom, and if they want to get the bloody Farers off their backs, they had better damned well join us!"

Someone had yelled, "Tell 'em to try hanging up a few Wandsmen! It's tonic for the soul."

There had been a lot of cheering, and the majority of people in the hall, those who had had little to say, began to shout, "On to Irnan!" Then somebody shouted, "Yarrod! Yarrod!" like a battle cry, and so the decision was finally made in a bedlam of noise, and Tuchvar understood dimly that this had been the only possible decision all along and that the people had known it. A little later he had asked the off-worlder with the 133

kind eyes, the man called Ashton for whom Stark had a special look, why it had taken them so long.

"The city-states are democracies," Ashton said. "The curse of all democracies is that they talk too much. On the other hand, the Wandsmen haven't got to talk at all. They simply decree."

So now men were marching toward Irnan, and that had pleased the tall warrior Halk.

The wise woman, with her thick bronze braid of hair and her splendid body, had not seemed happy at all when she said good-bye to Stark. Tuchvar thought he had seen tears glint at the corners of her eyes when she turned away. He could not know it, but the Dark Man was reliving, in his dreams, an earlier moment spent with Ger-rith, the two of them quite alone.

"I have seen a knife, Stark."

"You saw one before, remember? And it was good."

"This is not good."

"Where is the knife? Who wields it?"

"I cannot see ..."

And her lips came against his, and he tasted salt upon them, the salt of tears...

Stark woke, and was in the hollow with Tuchvar and the hounds, and Ged Darod out on the plain. He wondered if the knife waited for him somewhere in those streets. Then he shrugged the thought aside. Knives were no new thing to him. Nor was being wary.

While the boy took food from the saddlebags, Stark went through the trees to where the wood ended above a cliff and he could look out over the plain, green and lush, with Ged Darod in the middle of it like a dream. Golden roofs, roofs tiled and lacquered in scarlet and green and cobalt blue, flashed and glittered in the sunlight. The upper city was built on a slight rise, natural or artificial, and the massive buildings there, with their soaring towers, were of a pure whiteness unrelieved by any color. Roads crossed the plain from all directions, converging upon the city, and the roads were thronged with pilgrims, indistinct masses of tiny figures moving in a haze of dust. 134

He went back to the hollow and said to Tuchvar, "Tell me again where I will find Pedrallon."

"If he's still kept there..."

"I understand that. Tell me."

Tuchvar told him, while he ate and drank, and washed in the running stream, and the sunlight slanted lower. Then the boy watched while Stark opened a bundle and took out the things he had brought from Tregad. Tuchvar had a special interest because Stark had consulted with him on what habit might pass without notice among the mass of pilgrims.

A cloak to conceal somewhat his height and his manner of walking. A hood to cover his head, and a mask or veil, after the manner of the Hooded Men, to hide his face. Stark had considered borrowing a cloak from one of his troopers. He decided against it; any member of any one of the Seven Hearths of Kheb would be a matter of interest to the Wandsmen on sight, and the Farers who had seen the troop at Tregad would pose too much of a threat. So he had chosen a cloak of coarse gray homespun, with a deep hood of a different cut and a cloth of faded blue to wrap about his face. Tuchvar had seen pilgrims in every sort of garb; and some hid this, and some that, and some nothing; he thought Stark's choice of garments would not draw notice. But when Stark turned to him and asked, "Will I pass," Tuchvar sighed and shook his head.

"You are too much you," he said. "Let your shoulders hang, and don't look at anyone straight . . . you have not a pilgrim's eyes." Stark smiled. He spoke to the hounds, ordering them to stay with the boy and wait for his return. The young hounds were not concerned. The five whined, Gerd and Grith protesting. In the end they obeyed, though not happily. Guard Tuchvar, Stark said, until I come. He went away between the trees, in the deepening dusk.

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21

By the time Stark reached the nearest road, far out across the green plain, it was full night. The Three Ladies rode the sky, serene and splendid, shedding a sweeter light than that of Old Sun, a light almost as bright. He was able to see that the number of pilgrims had not diminished. Half of Skaith, it seemed, was on the way to Ged Darod.

He moved through a thin scatter of stragglers dropped out beside the road and slipped into the stream.

His nose twitched, under the veil, to a variety of smells. Warm dust. Bodies washed and scented, bodies unwashed and stinking. Beast-flesh, sweaty, pungent. An underlying heavy sweetness of potent substances smoked or chewed. The stream was irregular, moving at different speeds within itself. It clotted up around a huge teetering construction like a wheeled temple, drawn and pushed by scores of naked men and women painted the holy brown of Skaith-Mother. It thinned again to a mere trickle of slow-footed walkers. Everyone moved at his own speed. Close to Stark, completely preoccupied, a man in a dirty shift was dancing his way to Ged Darod, three steps forward, leap, whirl, stamp, then three more steps and whirl again. Beyond him, a woman with hair hanging to her heels, all twined with flowers, moved like a somnambulist, arms held stiffly in front of her; she sang as she went in a high clear voice as sweet as a lark's.

A lank holy man, tattooed from crown to foot with sun symbols, cried out ecstatically to Stark, "Rejoice, for we shall be cleansed of evil!" 136

Stark muttered, "I rejoice," and passed him by, wondering. There were others in the stream wearing hooded cloaks, others with their faces hidden. No one gave Stark any special notice. Remembering Tuchvar's caution, he tried not to stride too fast, with too much purpose-a purpose which, he knew all too well, might be completely futile.

It was only a guess, based on the incoherent sobbings of a terrified man, that Pedrallon and his people had ever had a transceiver, let along that they still had it and were in a position to use it. Pedrallon himself might now be dead or incarcerated too deeply for anyone to find. He might have repented his sins and put himself back in the good graces of the Twelve, in which case even to ask about him would be dangerous. Simply entering Ged Darod was a gigantic risk.

Yet it had to be taken. Otherwise he and Simon Ashton could resign themselves to living out such lives as might be left to them on Mother Skaith, and the Irnanese could forget about emigrating. Short of a miracle. True, shutting down the starport and banishing the ships might lead to scattered landings by avaricious star-captains looking for gain. Some of them, or one of them, might land near Irnan or Tregad and might even accept passengers. But it was too much of a gamble to be taken if there was even a slight chance of communicating with Skeg in time.

Tuchvar had told him that the number of folk on the road was not unusual for this season of the year, and perhaps that was so. Yet Stark felt a strange mood among them. Anticipation. The excitement of great events occurring or about to occur; the excitement of being a part of them. He had no idea if some specific word had been spread among them or if he was witnessing one of those mystic hysterias that sweep over the less stable elements of a population from time to time like an air borne plague. Whichever it was, there were curious echoes in the cries he heard.

From a kind of bower at the top of the great creaking temple thing, a priestess, done up with artificial at137

tributes that would have shocked Skaith-Daughter, kept shouting at the night that all blasphemies would be expunged and all blasphemers punished. A carriage of gilded wood went by, carrying a party of folk from the tropic south, slender men and women in bright silks, their rapt small faces cameos cut in amber. They too cried out about punishments and the feeding of Old Sun. Stark went on, and the distant roofs of Ged Darod glistened ahead, in the light of the Three Ladies.

It was strange that there were no folk going the other way, no pilgrims leaving the city.

He passed a group of men all in yellow robes. Pod-masters, seeking more sanctity before they took on another mindless and happy group to lead to communal oblivion and the ultimate fulfillment, death. He passed more dancers, three women this time, holding hands. Their hair covered their faces. Their white limbs gleamed through flowing garments. There was music for them to dance to, a plucking and twan-gling of strings, a swelling and fading of pipes, where here and there a pilgrim beguiled his way. But the women did not hear that music. They were listening to a secret melody of their own, measured and solemn.

A large band of Farers grabbed at Stark's cloak and cried, "Words, pilgrim! We will hear words tonight. Are you ready for the truth?" Their eyes were glassy, their breathing heavy with sweet drugs. "The truth that casts out lies and castrates evil?"

"I am ready," Stark answered in a voice of thunder. "Are you? Embrace each other! Love!"

They laughed and did as he told them. One of the women flung her arms about him and kissed him, her lips hot through the veil.

"Stay a while, at the side of the road. I'll show you love." She nuzzled at the veil, catching at it with her teeth. "Why do you hide yourself?"

"I've taken a vow," said Stark, and thrust her gently away. There was a clear space on the road, where only one 138

man walked alone, eyes fixed on the white towers of Ged Darod.

"They succor the weak, they feed the hungry, they shelter the homeless. They are our fathers, the Lords Protector. They give us all we need." The man repeated this like a litany. Stark looked into his face and knew that he was on his way to die.

Behind him along the road he began to hear a disturbance. He turned. A party of mounted men moved toward him at a businesslike pace, threading their way through the people, sometimes getting off the road entirely to bypass an obstacle. They were not pilgrims.

Stark melted into the nearest group, which drew aside to make room. The hard-ridden beasts came shouldering by, with six riders. Four of them were Wandsmen. The other two were wrapped and hooded in black cloaks. Glancing up from under his own hood, Stark caught a glimpse of a face, furred, snow-white, with the great shining eyes of a creature who dwells away from the sun.

For a fleeting second he thought those eyes met his, in the gentle light of the Three Ladies.

A stab of alarm shot through him. But the riders went on; there was no outcry, and if the person in the black cloak had indeed noticed him, there had been no recognition. Stark pulled his veil higher and his hood lower and continued on, not happy with what he had seen.

These were Children of Skaith-Our-Mother. Kell á Marg's folk from the catacombs under the Witchfires. He even thought that he knew the one and could make a guess at the other. Fenn and Ferdic, who had come at him with daggers in the Hall of the Diviners.

He didn't know what they were doing at Ged Darod, so far to the south, out in the open world under the sky they had forsaken so long' ago. He did know that he had enough enemies already in the city. He did not need any more. The walls of Ged Darod rose out of the plain, and there was light above them like a glowing dome. The

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gates stood open, always open. There were a dozen gates, and each gate served a road. The streams of pilgrims poured through them into the City of the Wands-men.

It was a city of sound as well as light, and the sound was bells. They hung from the edges of the tiered roofs. They climbed the spires and girdled the golden domes. Thousands of them, swinging free to greet with their clapper tongues each passing breeze, so that the air was full of a sweet soft chiming. Down in the streets was a fragrance of incense and a jostling of crowds that seemed to lack all rancor, in spite of the numbers of pilgrims that continued to be absorbed into them. People squatted or lay against the walls of the buildings. Balconies overhead held more. Runnels of water went everywhere in stone channels, by way of sanitation, and there was a reason for the incense. It was impossible to provide accommodation for everyone, and the Farers preferred the streets in any case.

Stark was only interested in one hostel, and that was the Refuge, where the Farer girls went to have their babes and leave them for the Wandsmen to rear. He took his bearings, by Tuchvar's instructions, on a scarlet roof with ten tiers and plunged into the teeming streets.

22

As he walked, he became increasingly aware of the mood of the city. It waited. It waited with held breath. It waited, like a nerve stretched and rasped beyond endurance, for relief. Each fresh incursion of pilgrims seemed to heighten and exacerbate the tension. The city was a 140

catchbasin, filled to overflowing, with everything coming in and nothing going out.

Yet the people were aimless. They wandered through the streets, thronged into the temples, spilled into squares and gardens. They danced and sang and made love. They prayed and chanted. There were many hostels and places where food and drink were dispensed at all hours. The Wandsmen provided everything their children desired, and Wandsmen of the lesser ranks moved about the city seeing that all was in order.

In the quiet enclaves of Ged Darod, between the-temple complex and the upper city, were hospitals for the sick and aged, creches for the orphaned and unwanted, homes for the disabled. No one was turned away, though most of the adult inmates were Farers gone in years who had long ago abandoned home and family and so had nowhere else to go when their Faring days were over. The temples were magnificent. The ones with the golden roofs were sacred to Old Sun. The others, no less beautiful, belonged to Skaith-Mother, Sea-Mother, Sky-Father and several aspects of the Dark Goddess of the high north and antarctic south. Pilgrims eddied slowly through these vast and solemn spaces, staring at richnesses and beauties such as they had never seen. Awed into silence, they made their offerings and did their worship and went away feeling that they had helped their world to live a little bit longer. The true ecstatics remained until they were gently carried away by the temple custodians.

These were the great temples, the powerful deities. There was a multitude of smaller ones. Even Tuchvar could not say who and what all these deities were or how they were worshipped. There were tales told in the apprentice dormitories at night that might or might not be true. Stark doubted nothing. On Skaith, anything at all was possible.

He came to the Great House of Old Sun, the largest of all the temples, a stunning splendor with its golden roofs and white pillars, all reflected in the huge tank

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that fronted it. A wall surrounded the tank, a stony lacework of tiny niches, and in each niche a candle burned, so that the water gleamed with a million tiny points of fire. People were bathing in the holy water, in the holy candlefire that symbolized the light of Old Sun, who drives away death and darkness.

Stark went along the right-hand side of the tank, past the temple, and into a street where souvenir sellers offered sun symbols in every size and substance. At the end of this street, Tuchvar had told him, he would see the walls surrounding the Refuge.

Purest white in the light of the Three Ladies, the buildings of the upper city stood above the jumbled roofs like a cliff. Rows and rows of small windows, identical in size, betokened the myriad chambers that lay behind that pale facade. There was much more hidden behind it: a vast complex of living quarters, schools, seminaries and administrative offices, forbidden to the public. Crowning it all was the palace of the Twelve, second only to the Citadel in its importance to the Wandsmen.

The street was clogged, like all the others, with far too many people. Stark moved snail-like, not daring to push and shove, keeping his head down whenever one of the Wandsmen appeared. He strained for a sight of the Refuge, hoping that some way would be apparent for him to approach the building without attracting attention.

He never saw it.

A deep-toned bell pealed out from somewhere high up in the white towers. The sweet chiming of the smaller bells was drowned instantly in that mighty tolling, the prattle of cherubs overborne by the voice of God. It was the summons for which the city had been waiting, and all over Ged Darod people roused from their aimlessness and began to move. Trapped in that irresistible tide, Stark moved with them. He was carried by side streets away from the Refuge, into a vast square below the Wandsmen's city,

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where an arched gateway pierced the white and many-windowed cliff. The gateway was a tunnel, stepped, rising out of sight. At the nearer end above the square there was a platform thrusting out, a kind of stage.

The bell boomed out its call over the shining roofs, steady, mesmeric, echoed in throbbing eardrums and the beating of the blood. The faithful poured into the square until it could hold no more, and the surrounding streets were blocked by solid masses of humanity. Stuck fast, Stark could do no more than try to work his way by slow degrees toward a place at the edge of the square where there were no buildings. The press was so great that he could not see what was hemming in the crowd there. Whatever it might be, that was the direction in which he wanted to go, for it offered the only hope of openness and possible escape from this heaving, breathing, muttering, stinking trap of bodies.

The bell fell silent.

For a moment the sound continued in Stark's ears-then stillness again, and gradually the sweet small tinkling that seemed very far away now, a mere backdrop for the silence.

A company of Wandsmen in blue tunics came down the steps of the gate, bearing torches. They set the torches in standards around the platform. They drew back and waited.

A company of Wandsmen dressed in green paced down the steps and took up places.

A wait, interminable, bringing a whimper as of pain from the crowd. The red Wandsmen came, a moving patch of dark crimson in the torchlight. They came in procession, four by four, down the steps and onto the platform, some before and some behind; and in their midst were the Lords Protector, spotless white.

A gasp of indrawn breath from the crowd as the seven men in their white robes moved forward, and then the puzzled whispers began, tossing like surf across the square.

"Who are they? What Wandsmen wear white?"

And of course, Stark thought, they didn't know. 143

They couldn't know. Never in the world before this minute had they seen a Lord Protector.

He began to have a cold premonition of what was coming. A red Wandsman stepped to the front of the platform and lifted his wand of office like a baton.

"My children!"

His harsh and sonorous voice carried clearly for an amazing distance, and when it reached its limits, other voices took up the message and passed it back through the far ranks of the crowd.

"My children, this is a night of great tidings. A night of joy, a night of hope. The messengers of the Lords Protector have come out of the high north to speak to you. Be silent, then, and listen!"

He stepped, giving place to one of the white robes.

Ferdias. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the ramrod stance and the noble head.

The crowd snuffled and panted in its intense effort to be absolutely still.

"My children," said Ferdias, and his voice was a benison, an outpouring of love. "This has been a time of trial. You have heard many things that were difficult to understand-prophecies of doom, news of revolt and disobedience and the slaying of Wands-men ..."

The crowd growled like a monstrous beast.

"Now you will hear more tales. Men will tell you that the prophecy of Irnan was a true prophecy, that the Citadel has fallen to the despoiling hands of a stranger and that the Lords Protector themselves are brought down." Ferdias waited out the response, holding up his hands.

"It is not true, my children! The Citadel has not fallen, cannot fall. The Citadel is not stone and timber to be burned by a careless torch. It is faith and love, a thing of the spirit, beyond the touch of any man. The Lords Protector who dwell there, undying, unchanging, forever watchful over your needs, are beyond the power of any man to harm. We, their humble servants, 144

who are privileged to hear their wishes, are sent now to bid you forget these lies, to let you know that you are, as always, safe in their protecting care." Under cover of the tumult, Stark managed to worm his way closer to the edge of the crowd, yelling joyfully with the rest, a sick anger gnawing at his belly. So much for his vaunted destruction of the Lords Protector. There had been an excellent reason for keeping the Citadel so remote; he remembered Skaith-Daughter's cynical remark that invisibility was a condition of godhead. Try now to tell this screaming rabble who the seven old men in white really were!

Ferdias was speaking again, his calm strong voice ringing out; father-voice, firm and kind and true.

"All the evil and disruption that beset us stem from one single event-the coming of the starships. The Lords Protector have been patient because of the benefits these ships could bring to you, their children. And because they love all men, they hoped that the aliens, the strange men from worlds beyond our knowledge, might understand and share that love." The voice suddenly became a whipcrack.

"It was not so. The strange men brought poison. They encouraged our people to rebel. They threatened our faith. They struck at the very foundations of our society. Now the Lords Protector have made their decision. The ships must go from Skaith, they must be forever gone!"

A subtle change in Ferdias' voice, and Stark had the queer feeling that the Lord Protector was speaking directly to him.

"This night the starport will be closed. There will be no more talk of emigration." The voice paused; barbed and toothed, it spoke again. "There will be no more escape."

Raving and yelling like the idiots around him, Stark moved a little farther and saw a stone balustrade at the edge of the crowd. Beyond it were the tops of trees. Farther beyond, somewhere out of sight, were the walls of the Refuge.

And at Skeg, where the starships stood like towers 145

beside the sea, Gelmar would be marshaling his forces. The red Wandsman had come again to the fore, waving his arms and his wand, signing the crowd to be quiet.

"Be still and listen! There is more. We have reason to believe that the Dark Man himself, the evil man of the prophecy, may be here in Ged Darod, may be among us now. If so, he wears a hooded cloak and all but his eyes are hidden. You will know him by-"

Stark did not wait to hear what they would know him by, if they took the time to look. He charged like a bull for the balustrade and went over it. The bastard son of Skaith-Our-Mother had noticed him after all. 23

Tree branches broke his fall. Turf soft and springy as a mattress received him twenty feet below. Stark hit rolling and was on his feet and running before the first man after him came down, too swiftly for his own good, and lay screaming over a broken leg.

Thrashings in the trees told of others climbing down more cautiously. Bedlam had broken out in the square above. Only a small number of people would have seen Stark's leap over the balustrade, and even they could not be certain of his identity. Every man in Ged Darod who had chosen to wear a hooded cloak would at that moment be fighting for his life or running for it as Stark was. Stark kept his own cloak on until he was out of sight of the people above. No point in letting them see him without it. A small private arbor of vines drooping great pendant flowers gave shelter. He stripped off the cloak and mask and thrust them in among rugs and

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cushions that rather surprisingly covered the floor. Then he ran again, cursing the name of Fenn, or Ferdic, whichever it might be. That fleeting instant on the road in which their eyes had met must have remained in the creature's consciousness, pricking at him until he noticed it and began to wonder. Then he began to picture to himself the Earthman's appearance, in the Hall of the Diviners, where they had tried to kill him, and before, in Kell á Marg's throne-room, and he began to think, "Yes, those eyes, the very look and color, and I could swear they knew me." Damn the Three beautiful Ladies. Damn the night-seeing eyes of a burrowing animal.

Not sure. He could not have been sure. But what did he, or the Wandsmen, have to lose by trying? Only the lives of a few pilgrims who would die at the hands of the mob. A small sacrifice for the chance of catching the Dark Man. Beyond the arbors were more arbors, amid fountains throwing sprays of scented water. There were broad swards set with curious statuary and peculiar apparatus. There were pavilions with curtains of scarlet silk. There were mazes set with little secret bowers. There were silvery pools that promised delight, and gossamer cages swung high from gaily painted poles to dip and bob in the air. Stark knew where he was now. These were the Pleasure Gardens of Ged Darod, and if it had not been for the summons of the bell, the gardens would have been busy with folk playing at various games, in groups and couples.

There was little pleasure here for Stark. He dodged and darted, using every bit of cover. He outdistanced his pursuers. But even though they had lost sight of him, they hung on, fanning out to search every shadow where he might be hiding, yelping at each other like curs on the track of a wolf. Outside the gardens, Ged Darod would be in a ferment, with crowds rushing this way and that after victims, their blood-lust at fever pitch. Stark felt the living

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weight of the city all about him, a devouring entity from which he had little chance of escape.

He fled on in the direction of the Refuge, thinking grimly that he might as well. No place else offered any hope at all. If Pedrallon was by a miracle still there, Stark might be able through him to salvage something out of the ruin, in spite of Ferdias.

There was a sunken place within the garden, paved in patterns of lustrous tile depicting various symbols of Skaith-Mother in her aspect as a fertility goddess. Slim pillars of varying heights were set about, and atop each one was a perch where a creature rested and lazily fanned iridescent wings; huge jewel-colored things resembling butterflies, except that each body was luminous. They glowed like silver lamps upon their perches, and their wings fanned perfume.

"They are dazed with nectar," someone said. "Sodden with honey. Their dreams are sweet."

He saw the woman.

She stood beside a pillar, one arm outstretched to touch it. Her garment was mist-gray and it clung to her like mist, softly, with her full, rounded, graceful body glimmering through it. Her hair was black, coiled high and held by an oddly shaped coronet of hammered silver set with a green stone. Her eyes were the color of a winter sea where the sun strikes it. He had never seen such eyes. They had depths and darknesses and tides of sudden light in which a man might lose himself and drown.

"I am Sanghalain of Iubar, in the White South," she said. She smiled. "I have waited for you."

"Not another seeress!" said Stark, and he smiled, too, though he could hear the yelping pack in the distance.

She shook her head, and then Stark saw another figure among the pillars.

"My comrade Morn," she said, "has the gift of mind-touch. It is the habit of his people, who live where other speech is difficult." Mom came forward and stood behind the woman, towering above her, huge-eyed and strange. Not hu148

man, Stark thought; not mutated by choice like the Children of the Sea. Some sort of amphibian mammal naturally evolved. He was hairless, with smooth-gleaming skin, dark on the back, light on the belly, camouflage against deep-swimming predators. The smooth skin oozed sweat, and the deep chest heaved uncomfortably. He wore a garment of leather, polished black and worked with gold lines, very rich in appearance, and he carried a trident, its long haft Maid with gold wire and pearls.

"When we first learned that you might be in the city, we realized you must have come to find Pedrallon. Nothing else could have brought you here. So we stayed by the Refuge while Morn tried to find you. There are so many minds. Not until you broke away from the crowd was he able to recognize you and say where you were. Then we came to meet you." She reached out and took his hand.

"We must hurry."

He went with Sanghalain of Iubar and round-eyed Morn, moving silently and at a pace that spoke of urgency. The yelping of the pack diminished as they left the Pleasure Gardens and went by narrow ways that brought them abruptly to a courtyard. Stark saw a coach and a baggage wagon, each with a human driver, and an escort of Morn's folk armed and waiting beside their mounts. The night had grown darker, with the setting of the first of the Three Ladies.

"We were on the point of leaving Ged Darod when the word was brought," said Sanghalain. "Quickly, Stark. Into the coach." He halted. "No. I came to see Pedrallon."

"He's gone. When he learned that your forces had taken Yurunna, he found means to disappear."

"Where is he, then?"

"I don't know. I have been promised that I will be taken to him." An imperious note came into her voice; she was used to command and impatient of obstruction. "We've already risked a good deal to save you, Stark. Get in, unless you wish to die in this madhouse."

A mournful far-off something spoke in his mind like the distant crying of a seabird.

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She speaks the truth. We wait no longer.

Morn shifted the heavy trident in his hands.

Stark hesitated only briefly. He got in.

The coach was a heavy thing constructed for long journeys rather than for grace of line. It was made of a black wood, carved and polished, and it had a hood of fine leather against sun and rain. Inside were soft rugs and cushions on a padded floor, so that a lady might ride in comfort, and at the rear was a compartment where things to be used at night or in cold weather could be stored out of the way.

The compartment had been emptied. At Sangha-lain's direction Stark crammed himself into it, and she deftly covered him with spare rugs, arranged the cushions and leaned herself against them.

He could feel her weight. Almost before it was settled, the coach began to move. Hard hoofs drummed and clattered on the stones. There was the creak and jingle of harness and the clacking of the wheels. Other than that there was no sound. If Morn and his folk had speech at all, they did not use it. The company left the courtyard and went a little way at a fair pace. Then the streets of Ged Darod closed around them.

Sounds echoed strangely in Stark's wooden box. Voices boomed and roared, sometimes indistinct, sometimes with startling clarity.

"Irnan! On to Irnan! Save the siege!"

And something was said about the Dark Man.

Fists pounded on the body of the coach. It rocked and jolted where the crowd pushed against it in spite of the mounted escort. Movement was slowed to a crawl. Still, they did move. They moved for a long time. Stark thought they must be nearing one of the gates. Then Sanghalain spoke sharply, just loud enough for him to hear.

"Be very quiet, Wandsmen."

The coach halted. Stark heard the same harsh sonorous voice that had spoken from the platform.

"You're in great haste to leave us, Lady Sanghalain." 150

Her answer was as cold as the waves that break along the foot of an iceberg.

"I came here to ask help. I did not receive it. I no longer have any reason to remain."

"Would it not have been wiser to wait for morning?"

"If you want the truth, Jal Bartha, I find your city disgusting and your rabble loathsome. I prefer to be away from both as soon as possible."

"You take a harsh attitude, my lady. It was explained to you why your request could not be granted. You must have faith in the Lords Protector. All will be made right in time."

"In time," said Sanghalain, "we shall all be dead and beyond caring. Be kind enough to stand aside, Jal Bartha."

The coach began faltering on its way again. After an interminable period the motion became freer. Noise and jostling subsided. The pace picked up. Stark dared for the first time to move, easing cramped muscles. Sanghalain said, "Not yet. Too many on the road." A little later she added,

"It will soon be dark."

When the last of the Three Ladies had set, some time would elapse before Old Sun rose. Stark had no idea what direction they had taken from Ged Darod, nor who the Lady Sanghalain was, or where Iubar might be in the White South; and he could not be sure that she was telling the truth about Pedrallon, though it sounded reasonable. The one thing he was sure of was that she had saved his life, and he decided to be content with that. For the rest of it, he was forced to contain his soul and his aching bones in such patience as he could muster-thinking of the ships at Skeg, thinking of the flame and thunder of their going, thinking of himself and Ashton left behind. The coach turned sharply off the road and went for a long distance over open ground. After a lot of jolting and bouncing it came to a halt and Sanghalain pulled away the cushions.

"It's safe now."

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He climbed out as from a coffin, gratefully. It was dark. He made out branches against the sky and the trunks of trees against a lesser gloom beyond. They were in some kind of a grove. The escort had lighted down and were tending their beasts.

"Care was taken that no one should see us leave the road," said Sanghalain.

"We are to wait here until the Wandsman comes." 24

Stark stared at the pale blur of her face in the gloom, wishing he could see her eyes, marking the place where her throat would be. He said very softly, "What Wandsman?"

She laughed. "What menace! There is no danger, Dark Man. If I had wanted to betray you, I could have done it more easily at Ged Darod."

"What Wandsman?"

"His name is Llandric. It was he who told me about Pedrallon. Who told me that one of the strangers in the black cloaks thought he might have seen you on the road. Llandric is Pedrallon's man."

"Can you be so sure?"

"Very sure. No one lies to Morn."

"And Morn was present?"

"Morn is always present at such a time. I could not rule Iubar without Morn." Again the far sad voice in Stark's mind, dim echoing of sea caves under storm. She tells the truth. No treachery.

Stark let himself relax. "Does Pedrallon still have access to the transceiver?"

"So I was told. I understand it is a thing that speaks over distances almost as quickly as the Ssussminh do."

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She gave the word a long rolling sound, Soosmeeng, like surf on shingle, and Stark understood that she referred to Morn's people.

"Where is it?"

"Wherever Pedrallon is. We must wait."

Wait and be patient, he thought, while Gelmar is sweeping Skeg clean with his broom of Farers.

The driver of the coach brought wine in a leather bottle and two silver cups. They drank, in the mild night, and Stark listened, hearing nothing but the rustle of leaves overhead, the cropping and stamping and blowing of the beasts.

"What brought you to Ged Darod?" he asked her. "What did you want from the Wandsmen that you didn't get?" Her attitude toward the red Wandsman Jal Bartha had indeed been harsh.

"The same thing the people of Irnan asked for and didn't get," she answered.

"Our life has become all but intolerable."

"Because of the Wandsmen?"

"No. We're too far away for Farers and oppression, not rich enough to warrant mercenaries. So poor, in fact, and so unimportant that I thought they wouldn't stop our going. I came all this long way north, in the hope-" She broke off. He sensed her anger, the same futile rage he himself had felt as he battered at the stone wall of the Wandsmen's power. He also sensed that there were no tears ready to come. Sanghalain was too strong for that.

"Where is Iubar?"

"Far to the south, where a peninsula juts into the Great Sea of Skaith. We used to be a prosperous country of fisherfolk and fanners and traders. Our galleys went everywhere, and if we had then to pay our tithes to the Wandsmen, we had enough. Things are different now. The great bergs come from the south, as do the blind mists, to kill our ships. Snow lies deep and long on our fields. The Children of the Sea despoil our fisheries, and the Kings of the White Isles raid our shores. I and my order have some power to protect, 153

but we cannot heal Mother Skaith, who is dying. If we move north, we must fight for every foot of land against the folk who hold it, and they are stronger than we. Whichever way we look, we see death." She paused and added,

"A madness has begun to creep among our people, which is even worse." She was silent for a time. Stark, listening, heard nothing beyond the grove. She was talking again, her voice low, with a hint of weariness. "Traders and sea gypsies brought us tales of the starships and the men from beyond the sky. We considered, and it seemed that here was a possibility of escape for our people. I took ship and came north to Skeg, to see for myself. The starships were there, and the foreign men, but I was not allowed to approach them. The Wandsmen would not permit it. When I asked them where I could obtain permission, they told me the authority was at Ged Darod. At Ged Darod I was told-but you know what they said, and so my long journey was for nothing, unless Pedrallon can help." She laughed with intense bitterness. "The strangers in the black cloaks had come to ask that the starships be sent away for the safety of Mother Skaith. But the Lords Protector had already taken that step, so they too had made their trip for nothing." Morn's voice echoed in Stark's mind. He comes. Alone. It was several minutes before Stark's ears picked up the soft thudding of hoofs. A man rode in among the trees, a dim shape, dark on a dark mount.

"Lady Sanghalain?" His voice was young, strained with excitement and an awareness of danger. It broke off, quviering, as he became aware of Stark's bulk beside the woman. "Who is that?"

"Eric John Stark," he said. "I am called the Dark Man." Silence. Then a letting out of held breath. "You did escape. Ged Darod has been seething with rumors. Some said you were killed ... I saw several bodies. Others said you were concealed somewhere, or had got away, or had never been there at all. Jal Bartha and

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the Children of Skaith were all over the city looking at the dead-" Stark cut him short. "We wish to see Pedrallon."

"Yes. My lady, we'll have to leave the coach and wagon here, and your escort, too."

"Not Morn."

"All right, but no more. Can you ride?"

"As well as you." She caught up a cloak, and Morn lifted her from the coach to the back of one of the beasts. "Give Stark one, too."

"How far have we to go?"

"An hour's hard ride to the east," said Llandric, sounding less than happy that his expected party of two had doubled. Probably he would have preferred to have Pedrallon's permission. If that gave him problems, Stark couldn't help it.

They came out of the grove into the open starlight of the plain; starlight dim enough to prevent them being seen at any great distance. Even so, Llandric was nervous.

"The Farers are out," he said. "Wandsmen are leading them to the siege. Did Tregad send a force to Irnan?"

"It's on its way now."

"So is an army of Farers, with a short road through the mountains." Several times they saw torches in the distance, tiny flecks of fire moving across the landscape. Stark hoped that Tuchvar and the hounds were safely hidden in the hollow. The lad would have to use his own judgment if things became threatening.

The country turned rougher and wilder, smooth plain giving way to tumbled hummocks and clumps of tough grass that made bad footing for the animals. Llandric urged them on, peering anxiously at the sky. By Stark's reckoning, a good hour and a bit more had elapsed by the time the rough ground ended at the edge of a vast and pallid swamp, where small dark men quick and wild as otters were waiting for them.

Each one took a beast by the bridle and led it, first along planks that were quickly taken up behind, leav155

ing no trace of hoofprints, and then along some trail that was hidden in knee-deep water. There was a rank wet smell of stagnant shallows and the weedy things that love them. Low-growing trees roofed the riders with pale leaves, shutting out the starshine. Ghost-white trunks loomed faintly, crouching in the water with their knees up. It was pitch black, yet the small men waded on without pause, winding and twisting until Stark had lost all sense of direction.

They came out at last on a muddy island. Dismounting, they walked a short distance along a path with crowding shrubbery on either side, heavy with night-blooming blossoms. Stark saw a glint of light ahead, made out a long low structure all but invisible among taller trees.

Llandric, leading the way, tapped in a ritual sequence on some brittle material that was not wood.

There was a sudden burst of static inside, beyond thin walls, and a voice said clearly:

"They're spreading, getting higher. Half of Skeg must be burning." A door opened, spilling light. A man looked out at them and said testily,

"Come in, come in." He turned away unceremoniously, more interested in what was going on in the room than he was in them. As courteously as he could, to make up for it, Llandric handed the Lady Sanghalain over the threshold. Morn followed her, stooping his bare bullet head almost to his chest. Stark followed him.

The house was built of reeds, bundled and tied or woven to form the ribs and walls. The technique with which it was done was so sophisticated, the patterns so intricate, that Stark knew it must be the age-old art of the dark marsh-dwelling people. Other islands must dot the swamp, where their secret villages were hidden. If outsiders came unbidden, the inhabitants would simply retire, knowing that when the intruders became sufficiently bored with floundering and drowning, they would go away. Or if they preferred, they might smile and agree to lead a search party. The marsh-dwellers could lead it for weeks without bringing it to this par156

ticular island, with no one the wiser. No wonder the Wandsmen had not found the transceiver or Pedrallon.

The transceiver stood at the end of the long room, a simple, rugged workhorse with a practically inexhaustible power pack and foolproof controls. The metallic voice was speaking from it again, in accented Skaithian.

"The shop's been shut, Pedrallon. I may as well go home." A pause. "Hear that?"

In the background a roar of thunder split an unseen sky.

"There goes another one. I'm sixth in line." There was a note of finality, as though he were about to sign off.

"Wait!" The man in the silk robe who sat cross-legged on the reed mat in front of the transceiver all but struck the thing in his urgency. "Wait, Penkawr-Che! Someone has come speak to you." He glanced over his shoulder, and his eyes widened as he saw Stark. "Yes. Someone has come. Will you wait?"

"Five minutes. No more. I've told you, Pedrallon-"

"Yes, yes, you have." Pedrallon had come to his feet. He was a slender man, graceful and quick, with the amber skin of the tropics. Somehow Stark was surprised that the richest, fattest, most comfortable segment of the planet's population would have produced the rebel Pedrallon, whose own people were under no imminent threat of any kind. He became aware at once of the tremendous vitality of the man, an intensity of feeling and purpose that made his dark eyes blaze with fires that were banked only by an iron will. Pedrallon's gaze noted Sanghalain, rested briefly on Morn, fastened on Stark.

"I expected the Lady of Iubar. I did not expect you." Llandric said, "He was there. I had to-I thought you would want-" He forced himself to make a complete sentence. "This is the Dark Man."

"I know," said Pedrallon.

Hate showed in his face, naked and startling.

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25

In a moment the look was gone, and Pedrallon was speaking with swift urgency.

"I've been in touch with Penkawr-Che for some time. I've not been able to persuade him to join in any scheme for taking people away from Skaith. Perhaps one of you will have better luck."

Stark thrust Sanghalain forward. "Speak to him." She looked uncertainly at the black box, and he pointed to the microphone. "There."

"Penkawr-Che?"

"Make it fast."

"I am Sanghalain of Iubar in the White South. I have authority to promise you half of all my country's treasure, which is in my keeping, if you will take my people-"

The hard metallic voice cut her short. "Take them where? Where would I drop them, on what world that never heard of them and doesn't want them? They would be massacred; and if the Galactic Union caught me, I'd lose my license, my ship and twenty years of my life, along with that half of your country's treasure. The GU frowns on the smuggling of people. Besides . . ." The man took a long breath. When he spoke again, it was with the clenched-teeth distinctness of exasperation. "As I have tried repeatedly to explain, one ship could accommodate only a fraction of your population. Removing any number would require several ships and several landings, and on the second one I have no doubt that the Wandsmen would be waiting for us with a reception party. Two of your five minutes are up."

Sanghalain, flushed with anger, leaned closer to the 158

black box. "But surely you could come to some arrangement, if you wanted-"

"Your pardon, my lady," Stark said, and moved her firmly aside. "Penkawr-Che."

"Who is that?"

"Tell him, Pedrallon."

Pedrallon told him, each phrase as flat and cracking as a pistol shot.

"The off-worlder Stark, the Dark Man of the prophesy, come back from the north. He pulled down the Citadel. He pulled down Yurunna. He drove the Lords Protector into hiding at Ged Darod. He has been at Tregad with an army, Tregad has revolted and sent a force to Irnan to break the siege." Penkawr-Che laughed. "So much, friend Pedrallon? Yet I hear no joy in your voice. Why is that, I wonder? Old loyalties still twining in the heartstrings?"

"I point out to you," said Pedrallon coldly, "that the situation has changed."

"It has indeed. Skeg is going up in flames, every off-worlder in the enclave has had to run for his Me, and we're told that if we ever come back to Skaith, we'll be killed on sight. So?"

"So," said Stark, "I brought Simon Ashton back from the Citadel."

"Ashton?" He could picture the man in the corn-room of the ship sitting bolt upright. "Ashton's alive?"

"He is. Take him to Pax, and the Galactic Union will hail you as a hero. Take as many leaders of Irnan and Tregad as you can manage, and be hailed as a humanitarian. As delegates, they can go to Pax with Ashton, and the bureaucrats will deal with all those problems you find so insoluble. They may even reward you. I can guarantee that the Irnanese will pay you well."

"And I," said Pedrallon. "I've already given you one fortune. I'm willing to give another."

"Now," said Penkawr-Che, "I'm interested. Where is Ashton?"

"On the way to Irnan."

"There'll be a battle there. I'll not risk my ship-" 159

"We'll win it."

"You can't guarantee that, Stark."

"No. But you can."

A new note in the man's voice, a poised withdrawal. "How?"

"You must have some planet-hoppers aboard." The voice loosened somewhat. "I've got four."

"Armed?"

"Considering the places I set into, they have to be."

"That's what I thought. Do they have, or can you rig, loud-hailers?"

"Yes."

"Then all I need is four good pilots. How many passengers can you take?"

"Not above twenty this trio. My pressurized cargo space is pretty full, and cabins I have none."

"What about your colleagues? Would any of them be interested?"

"I'll ask."

The transceiver clicked and was silent.

Sanghalain had been looking at Stark. Bars of color burned on her cheekbones, and her eyes had gone all wintry, stormy gray with no sunlight. Mora loomed over her, the massive trident cradled in his hands.

"What of me, Stark? What of my people?"

He could see why she was angry with him; his action must have appeared both high-handed and ungrateful.

"Go with Ashton and the others," he said. "Plead your case at Pax. The more of you there are to ask for help, the more likely it is that the Union will grant it."

She continued to stare at him steadily. "I do not understand Pax. I do not understand the Union."

Pedrallon broke in, his voice vibrant with excitement. "There is much we cannot understand. But I propose to go, and I-"

Morn shook his head and motioned Pedrallon to silence. My way is best for Sanghalain, he said in Stark's mind. Think.

Sanghalain gave Mom a little startled glance, and then stood quietly, in an attitude of listening.

Stark thought.

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He thought of Pax, the city that had swallowed up a planet: high, deep, broad, complex, teeming with its billions from all across the galaxy, frightening, beautiful, without compare.

He thought of Power, which was another name for Union. He thought of far-ranging law. He thought of freedom and peace and prosperity. He thought of ships that flashed between the suns.

As well as a man could, he thought of the Galaxy.

Infinitely swifter and more powerful than words, these thoughts passed from his mind to Sanghalain's, with Morn acting as the bridge, and he saw her expression change.

Morn said, Enough.

Sanghalain, wide-eyed, whispered, "Indeed, I did not understand."

"Ashton has some importance in that society. He will do all he can to help your people."

She nodded uncertainly and became immersed hi her own thoughts. The transceiver crackled. Penkawr-Che's voice came on again.

"No takers. Most of them have refugees aboard." Apparently Penkawr-Che did not. "Some have full cargoes or won't risk an open landing. You'll have to be satisfied with me. Where do we rendezvous?"

The arrangements were made.

"Keep them out from under, Stark, when I come down. They don't seem to understand things very well." Noises in the background told of another ship lifting off. "Really my turn now. Gods, you're missing something, though. A burning city is a lovely sight. I hope some of Gelmar's little Farers roast their arses in it."

A click, and silence.

Stark said, "How well do you know this man, Ped-rallon? Can he be trusted?"

"No more than any off-worlder."

Pedrallon faced Stark squarely, and Stark realized that he was older than he had seemed at first glance, the smooth unlined skin masking maturity and power.

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"No one of you has come here out of any love for Skaith. You come for your own reasons, which are selfish. And you above all have done incalculable injury to the only system of stable government my sad world possesses. You have endeavored to wrench the foundation from under an ancient building to make it topple, not for the good of Skaith, but for the good of yourself and Ashton. The good of Irnan and Tregad and Iubar is merely an accidental factor that you use for your own advantage. For this I hate you, Stark. Also, I must admit that I cannot gracefully accept the fact that men do live on other planets. I feel in my soul that we of Skaith are the only trueborn men, and all others must be less than human. But my world is ill, and like any physician I must use whatever physic is at hand to heal the patient, and so I work with you and with Penkawr-Che and his kind, who are here only to pick Skaith's bones. Be satisfied that I work with you. Do not ask for more." He turned his back on Stark and spoke to Llandric.

"We have much to do."

Most of that "much" concerned notifying Pedral-lon's network, which seemed to reach into some surprising places in spite of its thinness. Pedrallon was not disposed to give Stark any details. The Dark Man was taken to an adjoining reed house, out of earshot. Sanghalain and Morn went to another. Food was brought to Stark by one of the men, who refused to answer any of Stark's questions except to say that he was not a Wandsman. Without knowing it, he answered one question; Pedrallon was a charismatic leader who held his people as much by the force of his personality as by his clear-thinking mind. He would be valuable at Pax.

It was warm and still on the island, as Old Sun rose and made his daily journey across the sky. There was a feeling of immense peace and isolation. It was difficult for Stark to realize that he was almost at the end of his long journey, almost at the fulfillment of both his goals. Almost,

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Speculation at this point was futile. Events would bring their own solutions or lack of them. Deliberately he cleared his mind and slept, with the small sounds of the swamp in his ears, until he was called to join the others. In the golden afternoon the, dark little men led them through the watery ways, under the pale branches. They were seven when they started. Two of Pedral-lon's men had already left on their separate journeys. At intervals the other two, and then Llandric, diverged and vanished among the ghostly trees, leaving troubled wakes to lap against upthrust roots. Llandric would take Sanghalain's instructions to her escort and drivers and then slip back into Ged Darod. Morn would go with Sanghalain. The bond between the sea-dwelling Ssuss-minh and the ruling house of Iubar was apparently both ancient and very strong.

They reached the place where they were to wait, and Pedrallon bade good-bye to his swamp-dwellers with much touching of foreheads and clasping of wrists. The little men took the beasts and melted quietly back into their private wilderness.

Morn thrust the tines of his trident into the mud, stripped off the leather garment and immersed himself in a shallow pool, lying with his eyes half covered by filmy membranes.

His voice groaned in Stark's mind like waves among hollow rocks. I long for the cold sea.

"At Pax you may have any environment you wish," Stark told him. A large part of the city was devoted to the comfort of nonhumans of all descriptions, some so alien that the quarters had to be sealed in with air locks and all communication done in glass-walled isolation rooms.

They settled themselves on dry ground at the edge of the pool, in a screen of rank vegetation. Beyond them was the plain, empty and peaceful in the sunlight. They were farther from Ged Darod than they had been when they entered the swamp the night before, and there was no sight of anything living. For a long while no one spoke. Each was oppressed 163

with his own thoughts. Pedrallon still wore his native garment, a robe of patterned silk, but he had a red Wandsman's tunic with him in a bundle, and he carried his wand of office. Sanghalain's misty draperies were somewhat limp, her face pale and drawn. She was afraid, Stark thought, and small wonder. She was taking a tremendous step into the unknown. "You can still change your mind," he said. She glanced at him and shook her head. "No." The fairy lady of the Pleasure Garden was gone. A woman was left, still beautiful, vulnerably human. Stark smiled.

"I wish you well."

"Wish us all well," said Pedrallon with unexpected vehemence.

"Doubts?" said Stark. "Surely not." "Doubts every step of the road. I live with doubts. If this could have been done in any other way ... I said I hated you, Stark. Can you understand me when I say that I hate myself even more?" "I think so."

"I could not make them listen! Yet it's all there for them to see. North and south, the cold closing in, driving the outlying peoples ahead of it. The land shrinking, with ever more people to be fed from what is left. They know what must come, if they persist in forbidding any part of the population to leave."

"They stay with what they know. They can bear the slaughter. They'll still rule at the end of it, as they did after the Wandering."

"We did much good then," said Pedrallon fiercely. "We were the stabilizing force. We kept sanity alive." Stark did not dispute him.

"My own people," Pedrallon said, "also do not understand. They think Old Sun will never desert them as he has the others. They think their temples and their sacred groves and their ivory cities will stand forever, unchanged. They think the wolves will never come down on them, sharp-toothed and starving. I am angry with them. But I love them, too." A sound came into the quiet air. 164

Sanghalain looked upward, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. The sunset sky roared and thundered and bloomed pale fire. The ground trembled. The limber trees were shaken by a sudden wind. Penkawr-Che's ship came down onto the plain.

When the first of the Three Ladies rose, Stark was in a throaty-voiced planet-hopper on his way to pick up Tuchvar and the hounds. 26

There was something to be said for modern technology. Stark was glad enough to sit and watch the miles roll away far below him in the cluster light. He had toiled over a sufficient number of those miles in less comfortable ways. The hopper was far from new, and apparently Penkawr-Che did not go in for spit and polish; nothing shone, not even the laser cannon on its forward mount. But the engines made a healthy rumble, and the rotors chewed a workmanlike path through old Skaith's relatively virgin sky. Hoppers had been banned by the Wandsmen almost from the first, partly to keep the off-worlders from spreading too wide, partly because two or three parties had been lost through unlucky landings. The Little Sisters of the Sun had caught one group on their mountain and sacrificed the lot, singing the Hymn of Life. Wild bands had eaten another group, and a third, going down to investigate some promising ruins on an island sixty miles southwest of Skeg, had been shared by the Children of the Sea. Most off-worlders were content to do their trafficking at Skeg. The pilot was a tough-looking, stringy-muscled man 165

with the blue-tinted skin and elongated features of a star-race with which Stark was not familiar. He wore a gold stud shaped like an insect in his right nostril. He was a good pilot. He spoke Universal, the lingua franca, very badly and very little, which was all right. Stark was never in a chatty mood. The fellow kept glancing at him now and again, as though he thought that Stark, unshaven and still wearing the rumpled tunic he had borrowed at Tregad, was a pretty poor sort of hero.

Stark thought the blue man's skipper was a pretty poor sort of merchant captain. He had not fallen in love at first sight with Penkawr-Che, who had too much the capable look of a shark, especially when he smiled, which was too often and with his teeth only. He would not have chosen Penkawr-Che to bear shield beside him in any fight where the odds were doubtful. The man's motives were plainly mercenary, and that Stark did not hold against him as long as he kept faith. But Penkawr-the Che part only meant Captain-gave him the impression of a man whose first and only consideration would always be himself.

From these things and from his ship, the Arkeshti, and some of her arrangements, Stark guessed that Penkawr was one of those traders whose ventures are often indistinguishable from piracy. Still, he was Ped-rallon's contact and the best there was. Like Pedrallon, Stark would have to make do. The hopper covered the distance in a surprisingly short time. Stark saw the pilgrim roads, almost deserted this night, and the glow of Ged Darod far off in the midst of the plain. He pointed, and the pilot swung away to make a long curve over the wooded hills to the west, dropping down almost to treetop level.

There were tracks through the woods. Some led to the mountain passes, and Stark could make out straggling bands of Farers still on them, heading for Irnan. They were going to be late for the battle. Whenever the hopper went over, they rushed frantically for the imagined shelter of the trees. 166

The hopper swept out over an edge of low cliff and turned to hover, dancing like a dragonfly.

The blue man said, "Where?"

Stark studied the cliff, turning repeatedly to look off toward Ged Darod and the roads. The shining of the Three Ladies was soft and beautiful, and deceptive.

"Farther on."

The blue man nudged the craft on a quarter of a mile.

"Farther."

The pilgrims on the nearest road, tiny scattered figures, were stopping, drawn by the unfamiliar sound of thrumming motors.

Stark said, "There."

The hopper settled down.

"Take it up again," said Stark. "Keep the area clear any way you have to." He pushed the hatch open and jumped, running through a pounding downwash as the craft rose above him.

It was a few minutes before he located the path by which he had come down the cliff. He went up along it, reckoning that the hollow where he had left Tuchvar was a couple of hundred yards off to his right. The insistent sound of the motors stayed with him, an intrusion on the silence. At the top of the cliff the dappled shadows lay thick under the trees.

Gerd's voice shouted in Stark's mind. Danger, N'Chaka!

Under the motor noise he heard a sound, felt movement, quick and purposeful. He gave a great leap sideways.

The screaming began almost at once. But the dagger had already flown. Stark felt the blow and the numbing pain in his right shoulder. So much he had accomplished, that it struck there instead of at his heart or his throat. He saw the jeweled haft glinting dully, grasped it and pulled it free. Blood came welling after it, a hot wetness under his sleeve. There was a great amount of noise, bodies thrashing, sobs, cries, crashings in the undergrowth, the 167

baying of hounds. He went back onto the path, holding the dagger in his left hand.

There were two men, groveling in the extremity of terror. They wore black cloaks, and when Stark pulled the hoods back, the white unhuman faces of Fenn and Ferdic stared up at him, their night-seeing eyes stretched and agonized with fear.

Not kill! said Stark to the hounds. And aloud, "You will die if you move." The proud white courtiers lay in the dust. They did not move except to breathe.

The hounds came crashing out into the path. Tuch-var followed, a long way behind.

"Take their weapons," Stark said. Blood dripped slowly from his fingers onto the ground. Gerd sniffed at it and growled, and the hair went up stiffly along his spine.

"The flying thing frightened the hounds," Tuchvar said, bending over the two.

"Then they said you were there, and we started, and then-" He looked at Gerd, and then up at Stark, and forgot what he was doing.

"Take their weapons!"

He took them.

"Get up," Stark said.

Fenn and Ferdic rose, still trembling, staring at the thronging houndshapes in the gloom.

"Were you alone?"

"No. We had hired six assassins to help us, when we had made certain you were not among the men taken at Ged Darod. It was said that you would be found at Irnan or on the way there. We left Ged Darod, in the hope-" Fenn's breath caught raggedly in his throat. "When the flying thing went over the woods, our men fled, but we stayed to see. It is an off-world thing-yet we were told that all the ships had gone from Skaith."

"Not quite all," Stark said. He was in a fever to be rid of them. "Tell Kell á

Marg that I gave you two your lives to pay for the two I was forced to take at the north gate. Tell her I will not do it another time. Now go, before I set the hounds on you."

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They turned and rushed away. The dark wood swallowed them quickly. Tuchvar said uncertainly, "Stark ..."

Grith thrust her shoulder against the boy, forcing him back. The hounds padded restlessly, forming a fluid circle, whining in a curiously savage way. Gerd's growling rose and fell and never stopped. His eyes burned in the patches of light from the Three Ladies.

Without looking away from Gerd, Stark said to Tuchvar, "Go down to the plain."

"But I can help-"

"No one can help me. Go."

Tuchvar knew that that was true, and he went, his feet dragging. Stark stood with his weight forward over his bent knees, his feet wide apart, the dagger in his left hand. He cared no more than a tiger which paw he used. The blood dripped steadily from his fingers. He did not dare to try and staunch it; Gerd would not give him time.

His eyes had become fully adjusted to the dim light, eyes almost as good as those of the Children. He could see the circling hounds, their jaws open, hot and eager, ready to tear him as the wounded Flay had been torn on the Plain of Worldheart. "Your flesh is vulnerable," Gelmar had said. "One day it will bleed...."

It was bleeding now. The hounds had accepted him as one of themselves, not as an overlord like the Houndmaster, and he must face the inevitable consequence of his position. The pack followed the strongest, and according to law and custom, when a leader showed weakness, the next in line would try to pull him down. Stark had known from the beginning that this day would come, and he bore the hounds no ill-will because of it. It was their nature. He could see Gerd in the pathway, huge and pale, and he thought an alien wind blew across him, bringing the chill breath of snow.

He spoke a warning. N'Chaka still the strongest. But that would not be true for very long.

Gerd's thoughts were incoherent. The smell of 169

blood had roused an immense and blind excitement in him. Whatever dim affection he might have conceived for Stark was drowned in that hot redness. He ripped at the ground with his claws, shifting his hindquarters back and forth with dainty movements, going through the whole ritual of challenge. Stark, feeling weakness beginning to creep along his veins, said, All the hounds of Yurunna not kill N'Chaka. How can Gerd?

The bolt of fear hit Stark. The charge would follow.

Stark threw the dagger.

The blade pierced Gerd's nigh forepaw. It went on into the ground, pinning it. The hound screamed. He tried to wrench the blade loose and screamed the more. Stark managed to unsheathe his sword. Wild send-ings of terror battered him. He forced himself to think of nothing but Gerd; Gerd's head tossing, Gerd's mouth agape, horrible with fangs. He forced himself to go forward with all the strength and quickness he could muster and touch the swordpoint to Gerd's throat, where it swelled with corded muscle above his breast. He thrust the sharp point in, through tough hide into yielding flesh, and Gerd stiffened and looked up at him. The hound stood very still. Stark held the blade rigid. And now Gerd's blood ran and puddled the dry dust, mingling with Stark's.

The hellhound gaze wavered, slid aside. The huge head dropped. The hindquarters sank in submission.

N'Chaka ... strongest.

Stark withdrew the sword and sheathed it. Leaning down, he plucked the dagger from Gerd's paw. Gerd cried.

A wave of giddiness went over Stark. He put his hand on Gerd's shoulder to steady himself.

Come on, old dog, he said. We both want our hurts tended. He went along the path, and Gerd came on three legs beside him. The rest of the pack slunk after.

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Tuchvar, who had not gone all the way, ran to meet them, busily tearing strips from his smock.

The blue man had had no trouble keeping the area clear. He had made one lazy circle toward the road and the pilgrims had fled. When he saw Stark and the boy and the pack of hounds coming down the path, he landed to take them aboard.

He did not enjoy the flight from that point on.

27

The valley of Irnan was a desolation in what should have been the fullness of approaching harvest. Besieging armies had ruined and devoured, trampled and destroyed. Not one blade of grass remained. The fields were dust, the orchards long vanished into the smoke of campfires. Only the city remained outwardly unchanged, gray and old upon its height, the walls battered by siege engines but still unbreached. Above the gate the mythic beast still reared its time-worn head, jaws open to bite the world.

Inside the walls the people of Irnan were starving. Each day voices grew more insistent, calling for surrender. Jerann and his council of elders knew that they could not hold out much longer against those voices. People died. There was no more room to bury them within the walls. There was no more wood wherewith to burn them. The bodies were thrown over the walls now for the carrion birds, and Jerann was afraid of pestilence.

On a dark still morning, between the setting of the Three Ladies and the rising of Old Sun, a wind came out of the east. It struck the encampments of the besiegers with sudden violence, scattering the bivouac fires, tearing down tents. Flames sprang up. A herd of

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cattle stampeded through the outlying rabble of Farers. Dust whirled in choking clouds.

Behind their stone walls the people of Irnan watched and wondered. It was a strange wind, and there was no other sign of storm under the clear stars. For three hours the wind screamed and battered, striking now here, now there. At times it subsided entirely, as though it rested and gathered strength to strike again. When Old Sun rose, the encampments were a shambles of wrecked tents, of clothing and equipment tossed about and trampled. Men coughed and shielded their eyes from the dust. And then those in the farthest lines, looking toward the sunrise, cried out and reached for the war-horns. A legion was there, poised and ready. They saw the leather-clad troops with their heavy spears, and the banner of Tregad leading them. They saw a company of villagers armed with bills and reaping hooks. They saw hooded men in cloaks of dusty purple, red and brown, green and white and yellow, with their lances and their many-colored pennants, and their strange long-legged beasts. They saw, off to one side, an assembly of small dark winged folk all glittering with glints of gold, their wings outstretched. All about them, standing guard, were ranks of unhuman shapes striped in green and gold and armed with tall four-handed swords.

The hollow-eyed watchers on the wall saw all this, too, though they did not at first believe it.

The small folk folded their wings, and a sound they had made, as of chanting, stopped.

The wind fell. The dust cleared. War-horns sounded, deep and snarling. The legion charged.

The Farers, always disorganized, ran away. The mercenaries, taken as they were by surprise, were not so easily overrun. Horns and shrill-voiced pipes mustered them. Officers shouted them into line. They caught up what weapons they could find and ran through the rubbish of their encampments to meet the attackers.

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Foremost among the mercenaries was a company of Izvandians, tall lint-haired warriors from the Inner Barrens with the faces of wolves. They had been quartered at Irnan at the time of the revolt, in the service of the Wandsmen, and their leader was the same Kazimni who had taken Stark and his party north. Kazimni recognized the two who rode at the forefront of the Tregadians, beside the fierce old man who captained them, and he laughed. The man, what was Ms name, something short and aggressive . . . Halk. Halk was shouting the war cry that had been born that day at Irnan.

"Yarrod! Yarrod! Yarrod!"

The watchers on the city walls heard it. They too recognized the big man with the long sword. They knew the woman who rode by him armed for battle, her hair falling loose from under her cap, the color of bronze new from the forges.

"Gerrith! The wise woman has returned! Gerrith and Halk!" Jerann, not alone, wondered about the Dark Man.

Men and women took up that war cry. Irnan became, in a matter of moments, a city of the hopeful instead of the doomed. "Yarrod! Yarrod!" they cried, and the mustering horns began to call.

The two forces joined battle.

The first charge bore the mercenaries back and scattered them. But they greatly outnumbered their attackers; and they were tough, seasoned fighting men. They rallied. A force of them drove against the left of the Tregadian line, to put a wedge between it and the tribesmen. The Fallarin, idling in reserve, shot a whirlwind against them, and in its wake the century of Tarf loosed a storm of arrows and followed that with swinging steel. The mercenaries were thrown back.

They formed again. This time they went against the Tregadians, feeling that the alien troops would desert the battle if they were beaten. The men from Tregad reeled and gave back. Old Delvor roared at them, cursing them in a voice like a trumpet. They fought furi173

ously, but still they were borne back by superior numbers. Sabak rallied the tribesmen and came down at a run on the Izvandian flank. The Izvandians wheeled to meet them, forming a square bristling with lancepoints, archers in the rear ranks firing steadily. The charge of the Hooded Men faltered in a tumbling of men and mounts like a wave shattered on a sudden reef.

For the first time in months, the gates of Irnan opened and every man and woman who could still bear arms issued out to fall upon the mercenaries' rear. To the south and east, a ragged multitude had come swarming out of the passes from the direction of Ged Darod. Old Sun knew how many thousand had left the temple city to pour across the mountains. Probably no more than half of those had finished the journey, driven by an all-consuming fever of holiness to accomplish the downfall of Iman and the traitors who had come to her assistance. The Wandsmen who were scattered throughout the mass judged that twenty thousand would hardly tell their sum.

When Stark saw them from the air, they looked like one of the moving carpets one sees when an ant colony is on the move. Disorganized, untrained, slatternly, they were still a formidable weight of flesh to be dumped on the wrong side of the balance.

He nodded to the blue man and spoke into the microphone, to the pilots of the three hoppers flying with him.

"Let's build them a fence."

Out of the naked sky, four shapes came rushing toward the mob of Farers. Swift as dragonfiies, they roared back and forth across the astounded and terrified front of the mob, striking the ground with lightnings that blinded the eye and deafened the ear, and each crack shattered rocks and trees and made the ground smoke.

A god's voice spoke from the leading shape.

"Turn back! Turn back or you will all die!" The flying shapes began to quarter across the depth and width of the mob. God-voices spoke from all of

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them in huge tones. "Turn back. Turn back." At the edges of the mob the ground was tortured by more lightnings.

A frenzy of cries went up. Farers knelt and lay on the ground. They milled and swirled. Even the Wands-men did not know what to say to them in the face of this stunning power.

The flying things drew off and hung motionless in the sky, in a line across the Farer front, where the smoke and dust still rose. They waited for a time. Then they began to move slowly forward, and the licking tongues of fire cracked over the heads of the mob.

"Turnback!"

The Farers turned and streamed away in panic toward the mountains, leaving behind scores of dead, trampled underfoot.

The hoppers flew on to Irnan, where the battle swayed back and forth in dust and blood and weariness.

They flew in formation, a diamond pattern with Stark's craft at the leading point. They flew slowly and not very high because there was no weapon on the ground that could harm them. They flew over the knots and clots and ranks of struggling men, and faces turned upward to stare at them, petrified. Stark could pick out the colored cloaks of the tribesmen and the distinctive dress of some of the mercenary bands, but most of them were clad in indistinguishable leather, and in any case they were too closely engaged to pick out friend from foe.

"Anywhere you can, hit the ground," he said, "without hitting anything else. No good killing our own people."

The hoppers peeled off, each pilot pleasing himself. Laser bolts cracked and smoked around the broad perimeters of the battle, and in the open places where there were only the dead, beyond hurt. It was strange to watch how the fighting quieted and men stood still with their weapons half raised, looking upward. No one of them had ever seen a machine that flew in the air, nor any weapon that made lightning brighter than that of the sky god, and more deadly. 175

The four craft took up formation again, and Stark spoke into the pickup of the loud-hailer. His voice, magnified, echoing, tremendous, rang out across the field of battle.

"I am the Dark Man. I have come back from the Citadel and the prophecy of Irnan is fulfilled. You who fight against us, lay down your arms, or the lightning will strike you dead."

And he began to give orders, the hopper now darting swiftly here and there as he pointed. Orders to the captains of Irnan and Tregad and the leaders of the tribesmen to disengage and draw back.

This they did, leaving the enemy isolated.

Once more in formation, the hoppers quartered the field and voices said, "Lay down your arms or die."

On the ground Kazimni shrugged and said to his Izvandians: "We were paid to fight men, and we have done that." He sheathed his sword and tossed away his spear.

All over the field men were doing the same.

To the three pilots Stark said, "Bring them together and hold them. If any try to break out, stop them." He turned to the blue man. "Set down there by those hooded riders. Then join the others."

The hopper settled down.

Tuchvar and the hounds scrambled out. Stark followed. The blue man had given him first aid, and his wound had been cared for by Arkeshti's surgeon, while he waited for the three hoppers to be rigged and serviced. Penkawr-Che had given him a tunic of foreign cut that showed the color of spilled blood in the sunlight.

With Tuchvar and the hounds behind him, Stark walked toward the tribesmen, and Sabak brought him one of the tall desert beasts. He mounted. The troop formed into line: purple Hann, brown Marag, yellow Qard, green Thorn, white Thuran, red Kref.

Fallarin and trotting Tarf fell in in their accustomed place, but this time Alderyk remained with them, leaving Stark alone with his hounds at the head of the line.

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Ashton was with the Fallarin, where he had been throughout the battle; he, too, stayed.

They passed the ranks of the Tregadians, who were forming raggedly, and old Delvor shouted, "Let them go first, they've marched a long way for it!" Halk and Gerrith left the standard of Tregad and rode beside Stark. They rode toward the city, and the Irnanese in the field lifted weapons and cried out their names, hailing them.

Stark passed through the massive gate, beneath the dim heraldic beast. The tunnelway through the thickness of the wall was as he remembered it, dark and close. Beyond was the wide square with the gray stone buildings around it, and in the center was the platform where he had stood bound and awaiting death those months ago. Then he remembered the voice of the mob, remembered the spear that pierced Yarrod's heart, remembered Gerrith stripped of the Robe and Crown, standing naked in the sunlight. He remembered how the arrows had flighted from the windows around the square, a shining rain of death that struck down the Wandsman and signaled the beginning of the revolt. Jerann and the elders, in threadbare gowns, their starveling faces overfilled with joy, stood waiting, and all about them crowds of tattered scarecrows wept and cheered.

So the Dark Man came back to Irnan.

28

Stark still had work to do. He left Jerann and the elders, with Gerrith and Ashton, in the council hall. He had told them about Penkawr-Che and the ship. Ashton and

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the wise woman could tell them all what had happened in the north. He returned to the field.

Halk rode beside him, through the filthy streets where scarecrows danced and cried and caught at them as they passed.

"I see that I must still stay my hand, Dark Man," Halk said. "If I were to kill you after this, my own people would tear me to pieces. And so I lose my revenge."

"You ought to have tried taking it before."

"The Fallarin would not have given me windfavor," he said bitterly. "The tribesmen would not have followed me after Yurunna. Because of Irnan I let you live. But I tell you this, Dark Man. I will be glad to see you gone." And he spurred away to join the Irnanese warriors.

Pensive, Stark rode out to where the mercenary bands waited under the watchful hoppers.

He had seen the distinctive dress and the lint-white hair of the Izvandians from the air, and he was not surprised to find Kazimni leading them. He had come to like that man on the cold journey across the Barrens. And he bore him no grudge for having sold the little party from Irnan into captivity with the trader Amnir, in the hope of sharing a great profit when they were delivered to the Lords Protector. Kazimni had not taken any oath of loyalty to them, and Stark had known perfectly well what he was doing. Force of circumstance, not Kazimni, had entrapped them.

"You had poor return on your trading venture," he said, "and here you are again, leaving Irnan empty-handed. The place seems unlucky for you." Kazimni smiled. He had slanting yellow-gray eyes and pointed cheekbones, and he wore the torque and armband of a chieftain.

"Perhaps the third time will be better, Dark Man."

"There will be a third time?"

"As certainly as there will be winter. The Wandsmen are not so easily beaten. They'll gather new forces, stronger and better organized. They have learned now

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that their precious Farers are of little use. There will be war, Stark."

"If things go well out there among the stars, power will pass from the hands of the Wandsmen."

"There will still be war."

"Perhaps." Stark thought that Kazimni was right. But he said, "For the present, go in peace."

They struck hands, and the Izvandians marched away. One by one the other bands of mercenaries followed. The hoppers escorted them out of the valley. Stark rode the battlefield.

The Imanese troops and the men of Tregad were working together, carrying supplies into the starving city from the abandoned stores, gathering the dead and wounded, rounding up livestock. The tribesmen had come out to look after their fallen and to loot the ravaged encampments. Stark did not begrudge them what they found. There were enough dusty cloaks strewn about the field, a long way from home.

When he was satisfied, Stark returned to the city in search of Ashton. He found him in one of the chambers in the great stone pile that contained the council hall. Ashton, thin and windburned but still fit, looked at him a moment and then said:

"You've decided to stay, haven't you?"

"Until the ships come. Kazimni believes there will be war again as soon as the Wandsmen can gather up new forces. I think he's right, and I don't like leaving a job half done."

"Well," said Ashton, "I won't argue with you, Eric; and I suppose you might as well be risking your, neck here for a while longer as on some other godforsaken planet."

Then he added, "I don't suppose you knew it, but Jerann asked Gerrith to go with the delegation to Pax, and she refused."

"I didn't know it," Stark said, "but I won't pretend I'm not glad to hear it." He went to the hall to speak with Jerann and the elders. There was great activity, people coming and

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going, tending to the needs of the city. Jerann, in the midst of it, seemed to have shed ten years since Stark saw him in the square.

"I am grateful," the old man said, when Stark had told him his decision. "We shall all feel safer with you here at Irnan."

"Very well, then," Stark said. "I can handle one of the flying things. When you bargain with Penkawr-Che for the price of your passage, bargain for that also. Then Irnan will have a powerful weapon, and far-seeing eyes, and a radio to speak with the ships when they come."

The council agreed. Only Halk was not pleased, looking at Stark in a certain way, so that limping Gerd began to growl.

Stark's thoughts were elsewhere. "Where is the wise woman?" No one knew.

The tribesmen and the Fallarin, not wishing to be housed in the noisome city, had made their separate encampments away from it. Stark visited them. The tribesmen were well satisfied. They had considerable loot left by the mercenaries, and the elders had promised them much besides. They were content to remain with Stark.

The Fallarin would not commit themselves. Only Alderyk said:

"I will stay with you, Dark Man. Two of my people will go to this world you call Pax to see and observe and bring back news to me. We shall make our decisions when it pleases us. For the moment, at least we are secure in the north. As for Irnan, we shall see. I promise nothing, and my folk are free to return to the Place of Winds at any time they wish."

"But you yourself will stay."

Alderyk smiled his edged and mocking smile.

"I told you, Stark. Mine to control the whirlwind." Three of the hoppers flew off to Tregad with Delvor and his aides. They would carry the news of the victory and fetch back with them such of the leaders of Tregad as wished to make the trip to Pax. The fourth hopper 180

was maintaining radio contact with Penkawr-Che's Arkeshti, orbiting just outside the atmosphere. Not he to risk his ship until the area chosen for landing was completely cleared.

It was night when Arkeshti came in, dropping down through the glow of the Three Ladies, and all of Irnan was on the walls to watch. Penkawr-Che, a long lean Antarean with skin like burnished gold and a crest of stiff-curling hair, came to the hall with Pedrallon and did his talking with Ashton and the elders. He made no difficulty about the hopper, and the spare power pack Stark requested.

Stark still did not like him.

Next day Stark went aboard the ship with Ashton to inspect the quarters the crew had been busy jury-rigging in an empty hold.

"This will do," said Ashton. "Anything will do that gets me away from Skaith." He took Stark's hand. They had already held their post mortems on all that had happened and said their farewells in the privacy of Ashton's room, sitting very late over a jug of captured wine. Now all Ashton said was, "We'll be as fast as we can. Have you seen Gerrith?"

"No. But I think I know where she is."

"Go find her, Eric."

The others were coming aboard. Stark spoke briefly to Sanghalain and Mom, and Pedrallon, and left the ship. He sent Ashton's mount back to the city with Tuchvar and Sabak, who had ridden out with them to stare wide-eyed at the ship. Then he rode away up the valley.

He had come this way only once before, at the start of the long journey, but it was not difficult to follow the road or to note the place where he must leave it to find the grotto. The wanton armies had ravaged even here, stripping the land for forage and firewood. He left his mount below the grotto and climbed the steep path.

Inside it was dark and cool, with the tomb-smell of places that never see the sun. The grotto had served generations of Gerriths, wise women of Irnan. When Stark had seen it before, there had been rugs and hang181

ings, lamps, braziers, furniture, the great bowl that held the Water of Vision. Now the place was empty, naked, gutted.

He called her name. It echoed in the vaulted rooms. She came from an inner chamber where one candle burned.

"Why did you run away?"

"I did not wish to see you go. And I did not wish in any way to persuade you not to go." She waited, and he told her his decision. "Then you see, I was right to come here." She came close and touched him. "I'm glad."

"So am I. But why did you decide not to go to Pax, when Jerann asked you?"

"I don't really know. Except that when I saw myself walking toward the ship, a barrier came between and I could not pass it. My trip will be made another time. There is something more I must do here, first." She smiled, but he could not see her eyes in the shadowed cave.

"What is this thing you must do?" "I don't know that, either. And I'm not going to think about it now."

He took her into his arms, and then in a little while they went out into the light of Old Sun and heard the thunder and watched the distant flame as Arkeshti lifted off, outward bound for Pax.

"We must send word north," Stark said, "to Hargoth and the People of the Towers, to tell them that the star-roads will soon be open." 182

About the Author

Leigh Brackett began her outstanding career in science fiction in 1940 when her "Martian Quest" was published in Astounding. She was best known for her heroic adventures, featuring larger-than-life swashbucklers such as Eric John Stark-her most famous character and hero of The Book of Skaith. In addition to sf, Leigh Brackett acquired a long list of screenplay credits at major Hollywood studios. Her first screen assignment was a collaboration with William Faulkner on the screen adaptation of The Big Sleep. Just before her untimely death in 1978, she completed the first draft for the screenplay of The Empire Strikes Back, the sequel to Star Wars.