The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 29

"Good," said Hal, in his turn. He moved to the cot and began propping Liu's head up on the pillow beneath it, so that his throat was visible. The body was beginning to cool further, but still had not stiffened. He took the officer's pistol belt from its perch over the back of the bedside chair that held the rest of the man's clothes, and laid it on the seat of the chair, so that the power pistol in its holster was lying, flat, with the pistol butt next to the bed.

He stretched out the man's arm and curled the dead fingers around the butt of the weapon, half drawing it from its holster. He chuckled, with a rueful edge to the chuckle. "What's the joke, Friend?" Calas's voice asked behind him "Only," said Hal - turning to face the former soldier "the fact I'd just been thinking earlier that our plans for all this had gone off perfectly this time, exactly as we made them, up on the ledge. That was before I found Liu and the Urk had been killed - and everything had to be changed." "You've got a different idea now?" asked Calas.

There was no doubt in the smaller man's voice. Clearly, he had complete confidence that whatever might have come up, Hal could adjust their plans to take care of it. "I had it in mind to arrange things so that the two of them would take their troops home. Their report would be that both Artur and Cee had died under questioning. But that it was pretty clear from what they said that there was no one else living up here. They would have reported that they'd buried the bodies, the way they buried the soldiers that Artur'd have been blamed for killing earlier, then simply gave up and went back to the garrison. "

And now?" prompted Calas. The stretcher bearers came in with the dressed and armed body of the Urk. "Put him down just inside the entrance flap to the left," Hal told them. "As I was just telling Calas, we've had to change plans. Now when I hypnotize those soldiers out there I'm going to have to convince them that everybody killed everybody else. A taller story by quite a bit. Two dead soldiers, even a dead underofficer's one thing. A dead commissioned officer's something else - at least as far as paperwork is concerned. Their headquarters is going to be grilling these soldiers for details - that's right, take the Urk off the stretcher and pull him up so he's not quite alongside Artur. Now turn him nearly all the way over on his face, so that you can't see the front part of his body."

They did as he said. "All right," said Hal, when they were finished. "Now, roll the stretcher up around its poles and lay it along the wall of the hutment, behind the cot, so it can't be seen. In a moment I want the rest of you to go out and join the others guarding the soldiers. Send someone to me at once if any of them show signs Of coming out of their drugged state."

He knelt beside the unconscious form of Artur. "Oh. Also," he said, raising his head to look back over his shoulder at the stretcher bearers, "one of you go out and get me a length of the rope they had him tied up with. About a meter's length'II do."

The bearers looked at each other, and the one nearest the door went out. When he came back with the rope, Hal took it, tied Artur's hands gently together behind his back with one end of the rope. "Anyone got a knife?" he asked, still kneeling beside Artur.

Calas and one of the stretcher bearers were the only ones with such items, Hal opened each of them in turn and tried the edge of the blade on his thumb. He chose Calas's. With it, he made various cuts all around the rope in an irregular circle, severing only the top strands. He pulled these cuts apart and cut deeper, pulling on the rope as he did so, so that when at last it parted, it showed a ragged end. "There," he said, winding the rest of the rope around the central pole that upheld the hutment and had been mechanically driven deep into the packed earth under it. He left protruding about as much rope as would make one turn around the pole, with the ragged-looking end projecting into the air. "There," he said. "That should look more like someone broke the rope with sheer strength, rather than its being cut. I think, under hypnosis, I can make them believe someone as big as Artur could do that." "He probably could have," said Calas, accepting his knife back.

Hal shook his head. "Have someone tie you with your hands behind you using ordinary string, sometime, and see if you can break it to get loose," he said. "if you've a length of it between you and what you are tied to, so you can snap the cord with a sudden jerk, you might be able to break it. If there's no play in it, I think you'll probably find you can't break even that. But it doesn't matter. I think under hypnotic suggestion we can make the soldiers believe Artur did it with this rope."

He stood up. "Now," he said, "everybody out, except for Calas and one of you. Calas can use whoever stays with him as a messenger, if he needs to send me word of something. Come on."

He led them back out into the night and the bright overhead lights of the camp. A slow, damp breeze-a herald of dawn -had begun to blow. They had probably less than an hour before they would be able to see each other's faces without the artificial lights.

The prisoners were still either sitting or lying motionless, still under the effect of the drugged arrows. "Set them up," Hal told the Guild members. "Including the two who were on watch and sitting at the table. Add those two to the back line of the others. I want them all sitting up with their backs to the hutments. "

The Chantry Guild people went about setting up the resistless soldiers. Most of those they handled stayed put in an upright position, once placed in it, with their legs crossed. A few were overweight enough or tight-jointed enough that they needed support to hold that position. In such cases, a Guild member sat down with his or her back against the soldier who could not balance himself.

Meanwhile, Hal had been going down the line of men. There were two lines, since that was the way the sleeping sacks had been laid out on the ground. He squatted in front of each one in turn and spoke to the relaxed, apparently unhearing, man before him for a few minutes until he evoked an answer to the question "Do you hear me?"

At a "yes," he moved on to the next one in line. It took him nearly half an hour to get all of them to answer him. When, however, he had gotten a response from the last one in the front line, he turned to the closest Chantry Guild member, a slim, almost fragile-looking girl of eighteen, with a sudden dazzling smile that came without warning and invariably seemed to change her completely. Her name was Kady and she was one of Onete's picked group of expert night foragers. "I'd like you to go to Calas now, in the hutment over there," Hal said to her. Her smile flashed in agreement. "Tell him that when you pass the signal to him, he's to call out in his best imitation of Liu's voice. What he's supposed to shout is "Shoot, Urk! Now! Shoot him!"

Hal repeated the words to be shouted, slowly. "Now," he said to Kady, "you repeat them back to me." "Shoot, Urk!" said Kady, in a thin, clear voice. "Now! Shoot him!' "Good,': said Hal. "You make Calas repeat it back to you, that same way, to make sure he's got it correctly. Then step outside and keep your eyes on me. When I wave, you stick your head back inside and tell him to shout. You've got all that?" "When I see you wave at me I make Calas repeat 'Shoot, Urk! Now! Shoot him!' " said Kady. "Then, what do we do?" "I'll take care of the rest of it," said Hal. "You two leave the hutment and back off. Repeat that for me." "Calas and I leave the hutment after he shouts and we leave the rest to you," she said. "Right," Hal replied, "you're perfect."

She smiled again, and went toward the hutment. Hal himself turned back and walked around to face the two lines of seated soldiers, who now all sat facing the still dark jungle beyond the clearing lights.

His eyes picked out the man named Harvey, who was one of those able to sit upright, cross-legged, without any support at his back. He had a strong-boned face, softened by fat, and the bulge of his stomach was enough to reach between his crooked legs almost to the ground in front of him, leaning forward as he was, and probably helped counterbalance any tendency he had to fall backward. He would have looked pleasant and ineffective if it had not been for the hardness of feature under his facial fat.

On Hal's first pass along the seated lines, asking the individual soldiers if they could hear him, Harvey had been the single individual to whom Hal had said anything more. He had suggested then that Harvey might have to take on a position of decision for all the rest. With the others, he had merely made sure that he had fixed their attention hypnotically upon him and upon what he was going to tell them. "Listen to me, all of you, now," he said, raising his voice. "You've all been asleep until just now,"

He paused to remember something. He had asked the two men who had been on watch duty what their names were, and for a moment he had misplaced those names among the thousands of others tucked into his memory. "All of you have been asleep," he went on, almost immediately, "even Bill Jarvis and Stocky Weems, who were on watch. That drink they had earlier tonight must have gotten to them. In any case, you were all asleep until just now. Isn't that right? Answer - yes! " "Yes," muttered the two lines of men. "You knew when you went to sleep that your force-leader, Liu, and the Urk were still at work in Liu's hutment questioning both the little girl and the big man you all took prisoner," Hal went on. "But you paid no attention to that until just now, when something woke you all. What woke you?"

He waited for a long moment of silence. "I'll tell you what woke you," he said. "You heard a yell from the Urk, as if he was hurt or frightened. You don't remember what he said, but you do remember what you heard after that yell had woken you. You all remember that, don't you? Say 'yes' if you remember."

"Yes," said the seated men, again. "That's right," said Hal. "From that moment on, you all remember everything, just as it happened, or as it was told to you. That's so, isn't it? Say 'yes,' if you remember." "Yes. " "You won't remember me or any of these other unfamiliar men and women you've seen here tonight. You'll forget that anyone was here but your own fellow soldiers and officers. Say 'yes.' " "Yes," intoned the soldiers like a ragged, impromptu choir.

Hal walked forward among them until he stood before Harvey, in the second rank. He turned to the man on Harvey's right. "You can't see me, or hear what I say to Harvey. You won't remember me at all, either from earlier or now. Say 'yes., "Yes," said the soldier.

Hal turned to the man on Harvey's left, repeated his words and got another "yes" for answer. Hal turned his attention back to Harvey, squatting down so that he was almost face to face with the fat man wearing the corporal's tabs on the gray collar of his uniform. He spoke to Harvey, using a voice pitched so low that the two soldiers on either side would have had trouble hearing him even if they had been listening. "Harvey," Hal said, "you hear me, don't you?" "Yes," answered Harvey. "You won't remember about this conversation, any more than you'll remember seeing me or anyone but your own people and the two prisoners," said Hal. "You'll do this because I tell you to, but also because it'll be in your own best interests to forget. If you forget you'll get all the credit for getting these soldiers back to headquarters, yourself."

Harvey smiled, but the expression of the rest of his face did not change. "In just a minute or two," Hal said quietly, "something is going to happen. None of the rest of the soldiers out here know it's going to happen, but you've been expecting some trouble of this kind to crop up from the moment you saw Liu and the Urk planned to question that very large, strong man, all by themselves, in one of the hutments, without a couple of the armed soldiers standing guard. You knew he was dangerous because he killed two men with his bare hands while he was being captured. But of course, it wasn't your place to say anything to the Urk or the force-leader, so you didn't. But that's why you've been ready to take charge of things if some kind of trouble does crop up. Isn't that right?"

" Yes. "

Hal paused. "That's why, not like the rest, you've been sleeping lightly, and so you woke up the first moment you heard anything out of the ordinary. Now, you're just about to hear it. I'll leave you for a moment, and then I'll be back beside you when you hear it, to tell you what to do, and I'll stay beside you until everything's under control. Understood?" "Understood," said Harvey.

Hal got to his feet and moved swiftly and silently to Liu's hutment. He stepped inside to meet the inquiring gazes of Calas, Kady and the one Guild member who had stayed with Calas as a messenger. "All set," he said to Calas. "Now, when Kady passes you the signal you've got two things to do. One is shout what Kady told you to shout. The other is to take the power pistol from the Urk's holster, and use it to blow the throat out of Liu. Can you do that, or have you got some hesitations about shooting a corpse?" " I wouldn't shoot Iive people today - I hope, " said Calas. " I felt like killing Liu after what he'd ordered them to do to Artur. But I don't think maybe I'd kill, anymore, except someone like him, now I'm a Chantry member. It's not going to bother me, though, to blow the dead bastard's throat out. I suppose you want to hide the fact of how he was killed?" "That's right," said Hal. "If you hadn't wanted to be the one who used the power pistol, I'd have to, and I'd do the shout and the shot from here, before I go back to the soldiers. After you're done put the pistol into the Urk's hand."

"Right,"- said Calas. "Good," said Hal. He turned to Kady. "Come with me and stand just outside the door, so you can see me. I'll be waving soon after I get back to one particular soldier. When I do, you tell Calas, and run away from the hutments - fast. Orban, you come away now and get out of sight with the rest of the Guild members. "

"Orban was a slight man in his forties with very light-colored blond hair flat on his skull. He nodded.

Hal left the hutment, went back to the soldiers, and squatted down once more in front of Harvey. He looked about. All Guild members, as instructed earlier, were out of the line of sight of the hypnotized soldiers. "Whatever happens, " he said, looking back at Harvey, "it'll be up to you to lead all the rest of the men out of here and back to headquarters. You've got rank on everybody else, and the others'll follow you. All you have to do is take charge. I'll be right beside you all the time until you leave here, even though you won't remember that afterward, and the rest won't see or hear me when I talk to you."

He paused. Harvey watched him, listening with an attention that was so profound it was almost innocent. "Now, in a moment, what woke you all up is going to go on with more noise and trouble," Hal said. "You'll need to take charge of things at once, Order all the rest of them to stay put here while you go and investigate. Remind them you're the one in command, Corporal."

He watched Harvey's eyes closely on the last word, but they did not change. The ranks of groupman, force-leader, and team-leader, which Cletus Grahame had proposed in his massive work on tactics and strategy, had come into being as the jealously guarded property of the actual fighting troops. The older ranks of corporal, sergeant, warrant officer and lieutenant had been kept only for those in support positions. Some who bore the older ranks were ashamed of them, some secretly pleased by the special access to privileges that went along with them. Harvey, it seemed, was one of the latter.

Nonetheless, most noncommissioned officers in his position secretly yearned for the authority to directly order and command combat troops. What Hal was suggesting hypnotically to Harvey now would give him not only that, but the approval of his superiors back at headquarters, when he took control of a situation in which his officers were dead.

Some men in his position might have found the prospect either forbidding or unpleasant. Harvey, however, gave no sign that this was the case with him.

Hal stood up.

"Now," he said to all the soldiers, "lie down. Sleep." They all, including Harvey, obeyed. Hal turned to face the hutment that had been Liu's and the slim figure of Kady standing just outside the entrance flaps. He lifted his arm over his head and waved it back and forth, slowly, twice. He saw her arm go up to wave back and she turned to speak in through the flaps.

Turning back, she went off at a run toward one side of the hutments, where at the edge of the darkness, Onete stood with Cee. The girl had wrapped around herself another vine having a split-open pod, and the pod sagged down, heavy once more with what were probably more rocks of a size to fit the girl's closed fist. Her eyes were steady on the hutment in which were not only the dead Liu and Urk, but the still living Artur.

A shout, almost high-pitched enough to be called a scream, came from the structure, with the words Hal had directed Kady to pass on to Calas. They were followed almost immediately by the coughing roar of the power pistol, and almost as quickly after that, the figure of Calas slipped out through the flaps and headed off in the direction Kady and Orban had taken.

Hal clapped his hands together loudly. "Sit up!" he shouted. "All of You men! Listen! What's happening? What's going on in there?"

They were sitting up, most of them looking around, bewildered.

Hal leaned down swiftly and spoke in the ear of Harvey, who was also now sitting up, but looking toward Liu's hutment. "Now!" Hal said softly. "Now, you take control of them, or it'll he too late. Tell them to stay where they are. You'll look into it!" "Hold it! Stay put!" shouted Harvey, scrambling to his feet. "That's an order - from me! I'll find out what's happening."

A few of the soldiers who had already fumblingly started to rise, sat back down. Still groggy from the remainder of the drugs still in their bloodstream, but released from the deeper stages of hypnosis by the clapping of Hal's hands, they swore and muttered to each other, staring at the hutment-but they stayed put.

Harvey stumbled toward the hutment. His cross-legged position had evidently cut off the circulation of blood to his legs, and they were just now reawakening to normal flow. He was walking more normally by the time he reached the flaps of the hutment. "Corporal Magson, sir. May I come in?" he called, and waited. When after a moment, there was no answer, he pushed his way inside, closely followed by Hal.

Under the silent interior lights of the hutment, the bodies of the obviously dead Urk and Liu Hu Shen and the unconscious figure of Artur lay still. "They're all dead," said Hal quickly, standing behind the corporal. He spoke in a low voice, directly into Harvey's ear, as the fat man stopped, checked by the sight before him. "You can see what's happened. The prisoner must have been strong enough to break loose and start for the force-leader. Liu must have reached for his pistol, but since he'd been watching from his bed and the sidearm was in its holster on the chair beside the bed, he must have seen he couldn't get to it in time. So he shouted - we all heard him, just now - for the Urk to shoot. And the Urk must have - but not fast enough to save his own life. Look at that, his head's all crushed in. That big man must have been as strong as a giant! But the Urk did manage to kill him with that one shot." "Yes... " said Harvey, still staring, still under the influence of the hypnosis to the point where he heard Hal's words as if they were his own thoughts. "And when the Urk shot the big man," Hal went on in a soft, persuasive voice, "the charge went right through him and killed the force-leader, too. They're all dead." "Yes, that's it," said Harvey. "You'll really have to take charge now," said Hal. "They'll think a lot of you at headquarters for handling this properly. You'll want to bring the officers' bodies back for burial, of course, but you can have some of the men scrape a hole and roll the body of the big man in it, next to where they buried the child, after she died from the questioning. As Liu himself said just an hour ago - remember? Liu said that there was pretty surely no one else up here to find, or either the child or the man would have talked by this time. But he said, remember, they might as well make sure by working on the man until he died?" "Yes," said Harvey, "yes, I remember just how it was."

Hal paused. "Actually, you know," he said in a lower, more confidential tone in Harvey's ear, "those two just wanted an excuse to have their fun with what they had left." "Right. They would," muttered Harvey. "Now, the first thing," Hal went on, "is to get a couple of the soldiers you can trust to remember what you say and do what you want. Get them in here with you to see what's happened, and then they can take the big man out and bury him. Also, you better record some pictures of how things were, here, while you're at it, to show back at headquarters." "Now!" he said, clapping his hands softly together behind Harvey's right ear. "Remember. None of you've seen anyone but the big man and the girl. Now, get things moving!"

Harvey started, turned, and went out of the hutment. Hal followed. The fat man walked slowly back to the seated soldiers, an went around to stand in front of them. " All right, listen to me now... " he began... and paused. Hal whispered in his ear and he spoke up again. "We've had a blowup. Both the Force and the Group are dead. That leaves me in command, so all of you snap to and do what I tell you! We've got to bury that prisoner, strike camp, and get the officers' bodies back to headquarters, right away. Ranj, Wilson and Morui, you three come with me. Bring a recorder. I want you for witnesses and to make some recordings of what's happened inside the Force's hutment. The rest of you get busy striking camp and making ready to move out. Come on, come on now! Move!"

Time was also moving, Hal noted. Dawn was very close. Both moons were long down, and the utter blackness just before day, at the ground level, denied the lightening of the sky beyond the lamps of the camp, when he looked straight up.

Back on the ledge, Hal had warned the Guild people to start getting back out of sight the moment he first clapped his hands, to begin the process of bringing the soldiers partially out of their hypnosis. They had faithfully faded back beyond the lights into the jungle dark, and, as the morning lightened further, they would move farther and farther off, until even under daylight, the forest itself would hide them from the view of anyone in the camp.

In the meantime Hal, continuing to remind the three soldiers Harvey had chosen and any others he dealt with, that he was not there as far as their perceptions were concerned, had supervised the picture-taking of the interior of Liu's hutment. Then, at his prompting, Harvey had picked up entrenching tools and taken the same men out into the darkness with a single handlight, to dig a grave for the supposedly dead Artur. While they were involved in this task, he had the Guild bearers carry Artur, once more on the stretcher, with the straps securing him in place, to the edge of the excavation. The soldiers, digging and swearing at the hand labor, paid no attention to the bringers of the body they were to dispose of, and, having set Artur down, the Guild people melted back out of sight into the darkness.

Harvey had been supervising the grave-digging under Hal's instructions. When the diggers had gone deep enough into the soft forest floor, half mold, half earth, Hal had Harvey call them out for a break in their labors and take them aside. There, by the limited light of the single source of illumination they had brought with them, he brought them momentarily back into a more profound state of hypnosis, and gave them a false memory of having tumbled Artur themselves from the graveside into the grave, then begun to cover him up, before Harvey had called them out for a rest. Then he signaled the stretcher bearers to start back to the ledge with Artur.

As soon as they had faded into the darkness with their load, at Hal's prompting, Harvey sent the grave-diggers back to finish shoveling into the open excavation all that they had taken out. They did so, and Harvey took them back to camp. By now, all of the hutments and erected lights were down and packed, ready to move, and most of the soldiers themselves were in full kit, with their weapons, and ready to move out as well -

At the edge of the camp, Hal left the soldiery to complete the job of returning to their headquarters under Harvey's command -

He had little doubt that from this point on, military habit would take them back there without further prompting. The hypnotic command he had given them would eventually wear off, but their memories of what had actually happened would remain confused, and there would be nothing for any of them to gain later by changing their version of what had happened, as they would have originally given it to their superiors.

He dropped into a lope over the now clearly visible ground, to catch up with the party from the Guild, who by this time would be halfway back to the entrance of the trail up the mountainside.

The day was rapidly brightening around him and his steady jog felt good. The ledge was small enough, and he had been deeply enough immersed in his other concerns, so that he had not deliberately walked, let alone covered ground at a run except for that one day, since he had left his exercise room at the Final Encyclopedia.

He was reminded again of what he had thought during that last run, a few days ago - even his running treadmill at the Final Encyclopedia, surrounded with the images and scents of an imaginary outdoors, had not been like this. This was real, and it brought back old memories of his runs through the forest near the estate in the Rocky Mountains where he had spent his second childhood, before the coming of the Others had sent him scuttling for a hiding place on the Younger Worlds.

For a moment, the image of the young gunmen with their long, slim-barreled void pistols, and Bleys Ahrens, as they had suddenly appeared at the estate, came back to him. Particularly Bleys, slimmer then than he was now - wherever on the Younger Worlds he might be at this moment, eleven years later. Slimmer, and seeming much taller, both because then, in that first sight, Hal had not himself reached his full adult height, which was to be the equal of Bleys', and because of the last ten years of slight but noticeable aging and thickening of the other man's body.

A cold feeling like a breath of some stray breeze seemed to pass through him. He had let Amanda bring him here to Kultis and the Chantry Guild with no real faith that here he might be helped to find the Creative Universe. The impasse keeping him from that goal these last two years had been like some great, impossibly wide, impossibly thick wall of glass, holding him out. But now, over the past few weeks, he had come out of the despondency that his failure had built in him. Hope had stirred in him once again - but with hope, now, also came fear.

Time was passing. Tam's days were numbered. Even if they had not been, the force that Bleys was building to overwhelm even the phase-shielded Earth was moving to its inevitable completion. Time was on the march, and while he had refound hope - great hope, somehow, with this successful rescue of Artur - he had still not found a way past that impassable, glasslike barrier to his lifetime goal-

He glimpsed the figures of some of the Guild members through the farther trees before him and realized he had finally caught up with them. He checked his jog to a walk. It might worry them to see him running, might make them think that there was more urgency than there actually was now, to getting Artur up the mountainside to the ledge and proper care. Actually, it was only Artur's physical condition that still urged that time not be wasted. The soldiers of the Occupation Forces should not bother them for some little time to come.

He walked, but stretched his stride to cover ground swiftly without appearing to race. In a moment or two he was up with them. Artur, on the stretcher, was at the head of the traveling group, with a man on each of the four handles of the stretcher. As Hal had foreseen, Artur was proving a heavy load for his carriers, even across this level, if somewhat cluttered, forest floor. The extra people beyond the rock would be very much needed to get him safety up the steep trail of the mountainside to the ledge. "How is he?" Hal asked Onete, who was walking beside the head of the stretcher, keeping an eye on Artur's face. "He came to," answered Onete, without taking her eyes off Artur's face. "Tannaheh gave me several loaded syringes to use if he did that. I used one, and he went back to sleep. I wish Tannaheh had told me what I was supposed to be giving him. I don't like doing things like that without knowing." "It probably didn't occur to Tannaheh," said Hal. "It occurred to me," Onete said, "but he shoved them into my hand just as we left the ledge, after running after us to give them to me. I didn't have a chance to ask him, in the dark and all. Anyway, Artur's back unconscious or sleeping again, one of the two, and that's a blessing-"

She lowered her voice almost to a whisper, speaking out of the corner of her mouth, still without taking her gaze off Artur's face. "Check to my right, about four meters off," she said, barely using her lips, "but don't turn your head to look."

He leaned over the stretcher as if to gaze more closely into the face of Artur, using the movement to disguise a tilt of his head to the right, so that out of the corner of his eyes, he could see into the forest on that side of them. His view picked up Cee, prowling along level with the stretcher and himself.

The vine with its pod no longer was around her waist. It hung by its vine-ends from one fist, with the weight of what was probably a single rock only pulling it down. Cee's other fist held a second rock ready. Her eyes were on him with the same steadiness they had held back at the camp when she had looked both at him and at Liu. "She still doesn't trust us completely," Onete said, still in a barely audible voice, still with her lips hardly moving. "But particularly, she doesn't trust you. Liu gave orders to the soldiers and they did what they did to Artur. You give orders to us, as far as she can see, so you must be another like him. If she starts to rotate or to raise either arm, hit the ground, or get something between you and her." "Thanks," said Hal, "I will. But don't worry about me. I know about slings - I can even use one myself. I'll be able to tell if she starts to use that."

What he said was true enough. His knowledge of slings as well as a number of other primitive weapons dated back to the early training of his first childhood on Dorsai. What he did not tell her was that it was going to be impossible for him to keep an eye on Cee at all times and meanwhile do whatever he might do to make sure they all got up to the ledge safely.

It was full daylight now, and they came at last to the large outcropping of rock under which it was possible for them to make their way to the boulder that had been set up to block the path beyond it on to the trail leading up the side of the mountain to the ledge.